Here’s the thing. Bob Dylan NEVER ANSWERS HIS CRITICS. He never writes on blogs, or releases personal statements, or even shows any awareness there is an Internet. The 69-year-old rock legend rarely even gives interviews, and when he does you’re left none the wiser as to what he really thinks about anything. So today’s official open letter to his fans, addressing criticism of his recent gigs in China is absolutely unprecedented. It’s like the Queen going on Facebook to tell everyone to piss off.

Basically Bob played some gigs in China and the world’s press went several different shades of apeshit, calling him a traitor to the protest movement (even though he hasn’t been a protest singer since 1963) and claiming tickets were unfairly distributed and his songs were censored by Chinese authorities and that this was basically a terrible, terrible thing that Dylan did.

But he hasn’t taken it lying down. In a long statement on his official website, Bob Dylan has refuted all of the allegations against him, naming Britain’s Mojo magazine (who feature him on the cover approximately once every three months) as one of the sources of great untruths.

“According to Mojo magazine the concerts were attended mostly by ex-pats and there were a lot of empty seats. Not true. If anybody wants to check with any of the concert-goers they will see that it was mostly Chinese young people that came. Very few ex-pats if any.”

“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.”

We’re not sure what to make of his final cryptic dig at wannabe Dylan scribes, but we like the new angry, outspoken Bob. Now please join Twitter. That would be amazing.

Read Bob Dylan's full statement here