I've resisted writing about Murder Most Foul since its release despite feeling a strong desire to do so, because it felt too daunting a prospect. As a song, I find it overwhelming every time I hear it, and I've now heard it many, many times. I'm reminded of James Baldwin's words - as framed in the wonderful documentary, I Am Not Your Negro, of the importance of bearing witness to the part of the world one has been called to observe. I feel in a sense that this is what Dylan is doing in this song, too; bearing witness to fifty years of America; an America he's drawn from, painted, critiqued, refracted, and ultimately, shaped. In writing about it, I feel I'm bowing my head in its shadow. It feels a bit like a duty. If that sound pompous or arrogant - that I'm assigning myself a kind of status or worthiness - I don't mean it to.
To me, this song demands reverence. It's a monolithic elegy of a scope that's barely tangible. I can only grasp it in threads - those lines and phrases that reach out to me with their devastating power and pull. When I listen to this song, I feel like I'm being given a window into the soul of more than half a century; primarily an American experience of it, but one that's reverberated around the world, and which continues to do so.
The choice of title is immediately striking, anchoring the assassination of Kennedy in bold Shakespearean language. It's telling that for all of Shakespeare's incomparable position in Western Culture (and beyond), that Dylan's chosen an iconic line associated with the hideous murder of a right and just king. But more than that, rather than draw from fact, he's drawn from fiction; but fiction of a status that's effectively crossed over from story to myth. Kennedy has done, this, too, albeit from the other side. King Hamlet's ghost still walks the earth. Are we to infer that Kennedy's does, too?
Dylan varies his language markedly throughout the song, shifting from gangster-patter to language that strikes sharp and hard with the organic precision of Robert Burns or Walt Whitman. This song is a churning monument to history and narrative, and the endless cycling of understanding that comprises the human experience itself.
The sense than we live experiences through recreating them in our minds with imaginative candour is particularly evident in the shifts in narrative perspective throughout the song, from observing the assassination, eulogising it, documenting it, analysing it, to finally, standing in the shoes of the king heading 'straight on into the afterlife'. It is a kaleidoscopic act of ingenious story-telling, rendered with a degree of audacity that's a high-water mark even for the man who's made a career out of doing so. But unlike some of Dylan's wilder early work, there is no madness in this, of any kind. For all of the associative imagery that abounds in this song, this is a work in oil. It's not a free-form sketch. If it's an abstract, it's on the scale of Picasso's Guernica.
As I said at the outset, it's particular phrases that hit me every time I hear them. The 'perfectly executed, skilfully done' line is chillingly precise. It almost conveys a sense of respect for the daring precision of Kennedy's murder. And the notion that people were watching and did not see is striking; in that they did not ’ see’ act - so quickly did it happen - or really perceive just how much of America was gunned down in that moment. An bold observation of indelible power.
The introduction of the Beatles via the 'hold your hand' line is astute, in that it suggests the Beatles were both an exciting passion and welcome distraction for a nation - particularly its younger generations - lost in mourning. Dylan himself communed with the Beatles, and both artists were richer for it. Ought we read this as a positive wrought from a tragedy? It's a comforting thought, albeit a tenuous one.
And as the song unfolds, it slowly becomes clear that music is who and what we are. We live in the space between notes, in the inflection of sung words, in the contortions of magicians.
Reclaiming 'Elm Street' from its horror-film caricature feels bold and necessary, as though Dylan is actually uncovering history from its cultural layers as much as he is adding to them. It's like he's digging through layers of earth, mud and ash to reveal Pompeii, adding the cold reality of mutilation to the indifference of distance that time can smear over events and acts of tremendous humanity, in order for the two to exist symbiotically, creating a deeper sense of the connection between what was, and what is.
'What is the truth? Where did it go?' The tone of Dylan's voice when he delivers these lines is both cryptic and curious. Not quite conspiratorial, not winking, but there's something that leads me to believe that Dylan wants us to hear these as trick questions. Perhaps he wants us to remember that truth is an illusion that we all create individually, and project around us with a comforting, generally-unquestioning assumption; that it's something we share, even though it is exclusively our own, and that for all of our voices, stories, physical imprints and acts of emotion, is as intensely, unalterably personal as the experiences of pain and love.
And it feels like the culmination of songs that Dylan's played with for quite some time. It has the gravitas of 'Cross the Green Mountain, but without its sombre pulse, it plays out like a lament or an elegy of a far more personal nature (even though it isn't, really). And it's a story song, in the style of Tempest or Roll On, John, but it's far more expansive than either and, in my opinion, far more successful. It also benefits greatly from Dylan's hushed, almost reverent phrasing. He sings this as carefully and touchingly as I've heard him sing anything. This feels like a testimony; something purposely set down, to be recorded and revisited.
I can't help but be moved by the clinical pathos in the line 'Johnson sworn in at two thirty-eight'. It's the most 'real' line in the song for me. It genuinely hurts, conveying a desperate sense of stoicism and trying to stand strong as the hurricane roars. And it links - on a conceptual level that flows through the incredible list of artists that need to be 'played' - to the song’s most important line; 'If you want to remember, you better write down the names'. Dylan has been doing this for most of his career. I cannot think of an artist who has included the names of so many poets, painters, singers, songwriters, authors and cultural figures in their work. He a is curator as much as he is a creator, and his creations are all the richer for it.
Like Shakespeare, Dylan is a hunter and a gatherer, pulling threads from everywhere, making a Cohen-esque Tower of Song that few can climb, let alone build. And he's filled it with figures from all corners, all ages, all genres. Heroes, villains, icons and neglected obscurities. It's a song like a forest; breathing in all that we expel, and giving us life in return.
Dylan's entire body of work is on the scale of Balzac's human comedy. It's not the great American novel; it's the great American achievement. This song is but a snapshot of Dylan's body of work, and it's been circling in my mind for months. I'm 43. I will not live long enough to fully appreciate what Dylan has created, and I plan on living to 120. In fact, I'll probably be still working my way through Murder Most Foul. And for that, I feel incredibly grateful. Dylan's works - his gift to humanity itself - will outlast us all.
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