Bob Dylan Blasts Claims That He Was Censored by Chinese Government

Bob Dylan rarely speaks publicly about his intentions on any particular subject. But the bard must have been in an ornery mood, as he recently took to the Web to respond to allegations that he complied the Chinese goverment's censorship for a string of shows in the communist-ruled country.

"As far as censorship goes, the Chinese government had asked for the names of the songs that I would be playing," Dylan wrote on his website. "There's no logical answer to that, so we sent them the set lists from the previous three months. If there were any songs, verses or lines censored, nobody ever told me about it and we played all the songs that we intended to play."

The soon-to-be 70-year-old was criticized for his lack of protest-era material present at the shows throughout China and Vietnam. Dylan continued by saying that Chinese state media "did tout me as a '60s icon, however, and posted my picture all over the place with Joan Baez, Che Guevara, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg ... The concert attendees probably wouldn't have known about any of those people. Regardless, they responded enthusiastically to the songs on my last four or five records. Ask anyone who was there. They were young and my feeling was that they wouldn't have known my early songs anyway."

Over the years, Dylan has been known to do whatever he wants at shows, often creating set lists on the spot, and sometimes avoiding playing guitar. He ended the post by saying, "Everybody knows by now that there's a gazillion books on me either out or coming out in the near future. So I'm encouraging anybody who's ever met me, heard me or even seen me, to get in on the action and scribble their own book. You never know, somebody might have a great book in them."

Yep. Even Dylan has an opinion on Dylan.

Watch Bob Dylan's Video for 'Ballad of a Thin Man'