Update (9/19): Apple seems to have fixed the bug. Siri is no longer erroneously claiming that Bob Dylan is dead.
Bob Dylan is very much alive. The 78-year-old singer-songwriter recently announced he’ll be going on a nationwide tour starting in October; on Thursday, he broke the news that he’s putting out a new installment of his Bootleg Series, featuring never-before-heard cuts from his 1969 session with Johnny Cash. But according to Siri, he’s been dead for years.
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Ask Apple’s all-knowing virtual assistant how old Dylan is, and she’ll tell you that he died on April 24, 2008, at age 66.
There are two explanations for this: Either a) Siri is on the fritz, impacted by some weird bug Apple will no doubt repair within a few hours; or b) Bob Dylan has actually been dead this whole time, and we’ve all been fooled for more than a decade.
That would explain a lot! If Bob Dylan were alive, why would he be so reluctant to accept the Nobel Prize in person? Who among us could ever be smug enough to skip a ceremony for the most coveted, esteemed award known to man? A dead guy, that’s who.
Sure, Bob Dylan has toured a lot since April of 2008, and thousands of people have seen “him” play “live” in “person.” But maybe they weren’t actually seeing Dylan at all—maybe they were actually watching a hologram of Dylan strumming his guitar and mumbling through “Just Like a Woman,” while the real Bob Dylan’s bones lay six feet beneath the earth in a secret tomb in the middle of the desert somewhere, hidden away by a secret cabal of record executives and entertainment moguls who stand to make a fortune off of keeping him “alive.” Who knows!
Then again, maybe Siri just royally screwed this up. It wouldn’t be the first time: Apple’s virtual assistant mistakenly claimed that John Travolta was dead in 2017 (he is not), and that Stan Lee had died in July of 2018, five months before his actual death. Somewhat more innocently, Siri also thought Barbara Bush was four feet tall once, when she was actually 5’8″.
We’ve reached out to Apple to ask if Siri’s gone haywire, or if the company is privy to some shady, clandestine conspiracy to cover up Bob Dylan’s death the rest of us have no idea about, and we’ll update this story if we hear back. Until then, trust nothing and no one. UFOs are real, man. Anything is possible.
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