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March 27, 2020 7:18 AM   Subscribe

Murder Most Foul is a new 17 minute song by Bob Dylan about the JFK assassination. Alex Petridis of the Guardian puts it in context here.
posted by Kattullus (52 comments total) 11 users marked this as a favorite
 
I spent about 30 seconds listening to this, and decided I'd much rather just read the lyrics. If you're in the same boat: here are the lyrics.
posted by Ike_Arumba at 8:04 AM on March 27, 2020 [5 favorites]


I listened to the whole thing.
posted by chavenet at 8:10 AM on March 27, 2020 [2 favorites]


Cool. Sounds to me like it may be from a Modern Times session.
posted by bonobothegreat at 8:17 AM on March 27, 2020 [1 favorite]


I think Dylan, like myself, being cooped up indoors has been listening to The Last Podcast on the Left and their (so far) five-part deep dive into the JFK assassination.

A world-defining event, wild at the time and even wilder in retrospect.

We're living in a time where that holds a certain relevance.
posted by slimepuppy at 8:19 AM on March 27, 2020 [4 favorites]


I don't know. I grew up loving Bob Dylan, but this just ain't it. Many of Dylan's songs are written in stream-of-consciousness -- full of references -- but everything always fit in to an underlying metaphor. This is so literal. It reads like an inventory; like he's mashed up every PBS documentary on The Sixties!; like he's writing about something he didn't actually experience himself; like he's Millennial interpreting that age from the pictures on a TV with the sound off. It hurts me to say it, but he's become like the Dennis Miller of folk.
posted by klanawa at 8:47 AM on March 27, 2020 [9 favorites]


JFK, blown away
Here's seventeen minutes of what I have to say
posted by tonycpsu at 8:59 AM on March 27, 2020 [26 favorites]


Dylan is a genius but this song sounds like a Dylan parody. It's also like, Peak Boomer-- an event that in retrospect has less and less impact on the following half century but is so key to a certain demographic that they can't stop retelling the story over and over again.
posted by gwint at 8:59 AM on March 27, 2020 [13 favorites]


I'm not so sure about the Peak Boomer thing.. not a US citizen, but the more I think back to that period it seems like there was a concerted effort to shut down any chance of a decent nation emerging. The assassination fits into that.. Not because JKF was the paragon of decency but the total bastards decided he was in the way. And looking around today it feels like the total bastards are having a heyday.
posted by elkevelvet at 9:29 AM on March 27, 2020 [9 favorites]


As Dylan's Nobel Prize acceptance speech shows, his mind has grown mediocre and random. I say this with all love for the man's incredible career that has challenged me and given me so much pleasure. But I think his brain has gone soft, and that alcohol is the culprit. After all, he has his own brand of whiskey. He sounds here like an old, rambling drunk who calls you in the middle of the night, desperately thinking of something to say to keep you on the phone.

And yes, as kiawana brilliantly observes, "like he's writing about something he didn't actually experience himself'.
posted by Modest House at 9:33 AM on March 27, 2020


This is the chronological equivalent of Elton John completing his magnum opus about the death of Princess Di in 2054.
posted by phooky at 10:06 AM on March 27, 2020 [7 favorites]


The chronological equivalent is if Dylan wrote a song about the death of William McKinley just a couple years before he moved to NYC.
posted by tclark at 10:14 AM on March 27, 2020 [6 favorites]


..except that the song sounds like it's from about 2005.
posted by bonobothegreat at 10:17 AM on March 27, 2020


I prefer to assume Tim Heidecker is responsible for this.
posted by badbobbycase at 10:49 AM on March 27, 2020 [3 favorites]


sure, ok. why not, i guess.
posted by Bwentman at 11:29 AM on March 27, 2020


Bob Dylan mixes more metaphors than Thomas Friedman. Seriously.
posted by leonard horner at 1:34 PM on March 27, 2020


well, i think the metaphor isn't peak boomer, but peak silent and peak greatest - dylan was born in 1941, kennedy in 1917

there's two sets of musical and cultural references - the pre-rock, early rock era and the 60s and post 60s era - this is about the changing of the guard and the changing of the generations from bob's to the boomers and how it was ushered in by what he is framing as a ritual sacrifice of pres kennedy - it's almost as if he's being framed as baron samedi, but it would be safer to say that he's both victim and psychopomp for an old generation giving way to the new

which is exactly what is going on RIGHT NOW, isn't it?

on a more mundane note, i didn't know guitar slim did going down slow - he's rather defiant - later, of course, he would end up living the song ...
posted by pyramid termite at 1:47 PM on March 27, 2020 [3 favorites]


I love Bob Dylan but this sounds so much like an Adam Sandler song I can't stop laughing.

Also recommended: The Day John Kennedy Died by Lou Reed
posted by Kafkaesque at 1:57 PM on March 27, 2020 [1 favorite]


I am a Dylan completist, with about four and a half days of albums, outtakes, and concert bootlegs on my iTunes. I've seen him live more times than I can remember here during Zoom happy hour, but it might be six or eight.

This is the worst Bob Dylan song I've ever heard. I tried to think a bit of what the second-worst one is (probably something from Under the Red Sky), but I don't have a front-runner at the moment.

It gives me great pain to think about the fact the Joe Biden is one year younger than Bob Dylan, and while the dropoff from peak to present abilities is less steep, man, it's still something.
posted by sy at 2:12 PM on March 27, 2020 [4 favorites]


As always, Anne Margaret Daniel, is great on Dylan and this song.
posted by maupuia at 2:44 PM on March 27, 2020 [2 favorites]


I’ll admit I’m a bit surprised by the response to “Murder Most Foul” in this thread. That said, confounding people has always been Dylan’s lot in life.

I suspect that I’m in the target group for this song, so to speak, as someone whose favorite three-album stretch of Dylan’s career is Time Out of Mind, Love and Theft, and Modern Times.
posted by Kattullus at 3:13 PM on March 27, 2020 [6 favorites]


This is so literal. It reads like an inventory; like he's mashed up every PBS documentary on The Sixties

I think this kind of take is impacting on the surface of the song without interrogating the "why"; the seeming "literalness" or patness of the litany of references gestures so insistently at itself that it becomes a kind of meta-carrier of meaning within the song
posted by anazgnos at 3:19 PM on March 27, 2020 [2 favorites]


I’ll admit I’m a bit surprised by the response to “Murder Most Foul” in this thread.

Dylan is decades past needing to prove himself to anyone. For just as long, he can do whatever the hell he wants. You can come along for the ride, or not -- that's up to you. Bob don't care. He'll just keep doing his thing, keep making the art he needs to. And I love him for it.
posted by Capt. Renault at 4:26 PM on March 27, 2020 [10 favorites]


Just watched Stone's JFK with my kids.

This hits like a ton of bricks, feel sorry for those whose response to this is cynical.

I'm not saying it's a great pop song, not qualified to say whether it's great "spoken word art" whatever or not, but damn if it isn't a powerful something.
posted by goinWhereTheClimateSuitsMyClothes at 5:59 PM on March 27, 2020 [4 favorites]


"Living in a nightmare on Elm Street"

allusion to Freddy in the dal-tex building with a silenced Mauser?
posted by clavdivs at 6:18 PM on March 27, 2020 [1 favorite]


I think this kind of take is impacting on the surface of the song without interrogating the "why"; the seeming "literalness" or patness of the litany of references gestures so insistently at itself that it becomes a kind of meta-carrier of meaning within the song

I'm not by any means a Dylan fanboy, I have a strong dislike for some of "genius worship" around his career that praises almost everything he does just because he did it and therefore it must be brilliant, but I'm also not one to dismiss his work because of that excess or deny that he does make some really interesting songs.

In this case, saying the song is "about" the Kennedy assassination seems to mislead as the song more uses that as the initial conceptual hook of significance then builds on it through a series of echoing statement that go back and forth between violence and entertainment and how they mix, with different elements coming to the fore, banality and beauty, race and how it is read, and how it all flows together into a whole that both is and isn't a "story" about the US. It is because that's the history significant and mundane, indistinguishable as those things are as time goes on, and it isn't because the "story" has no real shape, it is just a reporting of events and feeling, lacking the kind of narrative purpose one sees in fiction for being the collective reality instead of an individual one.

I say that from just reading the lyrics since I'm not up for listening to a 17 minute Dylan song right now, but that isn't to ignore the importance of Dylan's singing in how his songs "work". His inflection and emphasis is as important as the lyrics in many of his songs and shouldn't be ignored as part of the experience since that is often as or more meaningful than the lyrics themselves.
posted by gusottertrout at 6:26 PM on March 27, 2020 [4 favorites]


Gen-Xer here asking for a little sympathy for the devils. The reason Boomers keep telling that same story is that it devastated them. All the myths they were raised on were laid bare as false in a few short years. Many of them died, lost young loved ones, or were permanently damaged in the war years and aftermath. Have pity, we may be entering a similar hell of our own.
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 7:32 PM on March 27, 2020 [9 favorites]




Gen-Xer here asking for a little sympathy for the devils...

Gee, thanks for your generosity.

As I have said elsewhere, I had Campbell's Chicken Noodle soup for lunch on the early afternoon in question, sitting at my kitchen table when I heard the news, watched some black and white TV news and saw Cronkite take off his glasses, then walked a half block back to Payette High School where I heard Art Yokum explaining to Don Kelpin that Kennedy wasn't going to heaven because he was Catholic. And remember thinking 𝘚𝘦𝘳𝘪𝘰𝘶𝘴𝘭𝘺 ? Well, the equivalent for the time...

This was on the way to a memorial assembly in a high school auditorium -- in 1960s Idaho, Kennedy was not at all popular, except among Catholics. Among whom were several girls crying their hearts out. You sit in an auditorium and listen to a score of young women sobbing, see how you feel about the day.

The things you remember when you live through a historic day.

Ask me where I was when I found out Martin Luther King Jr. was killed.

Ask me where I was when I heard Robert Kennedy was killed. That tore my heart out.

See also Malcolm X...

I can tell you exactly where I was and what I was doing every time.

Hell, ask me about September 11th, 2001, for example -- the very day when 𝘓𝘰𝘷𝘦 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘛𝘩𝘦𝘧𝘵 was released, by the way...

There both you and I can supply similar details.

Jesus Fucking H. Christ, how long had it been since a President or major political figures assassinated before that day ? Back to James A. Garfield's time ?

Spare me your twerp insights, kids: 9/11 aside, you really have no idea what your elders have lived through. It was not fun at all.

Not.At.All.
posted by y2karl at 3:26 AM on March 28, 2020 [5 favorites]


My apologies, Abhammerb Lincoln -- I did not mean to harsh out on you. Your comment was thoughtful, especially compared to some that preceded it. I just got riled up in remembering how I felt that day. Plus there is the naked ageism that is so rank and so tolerated here most of the time. I am really sick of it. But I did not mean to single you out.
posted by y2karl at 3:58 AM on March 28, 2020 [4 favorites]


Complains about ageism after telling twerp kids they don't know anything. Ok.
posted by Ferreous at 6:27 AM on March 28, 2020 [2 favorites]


Spare me your twerp insights, kids: 9/11 aside, you really have no idea what your elders have lived through.

we're all getting a crash course right now, aren't we? - kennedy's assassination was not in the same league as world war 2, 9/11, or this damned virus, and i say that as someone who was sent home from school that very day and remembers it well

we got over it

truth is, now that the shit's hit the fan, i'm willing to concede that the boomers didn't have it as bad - yes, the young uns "win" - we are in absolute crisis mode

we might get through it, but we won't get over it

i think that's why bob released this song right now
posted by pyramid termite at 7:28 AM on March 28, 2020 [2 favorites]


Beyond JFK: 20 Historical References in Bob Dylan’s ‘Murder Most Foul


“three bums comin’ all dressed in rags” captured on the Zapruder film that conspiracy theorists have been obsessing over for decades. Cleary, Dylan has spent a lot of time reading books and watching documentaries about this."

Really Rolling Stone/complete unknown, so show me on the zapruder film where the tramps are, they are not. these images were captured by a journalist/ photographer.

and to assert Bob must have studied his Kennedy, ( I'm sure he has) shame for getting the conspiracy wrong.
posted by clavdivs at 8:50 AM on March 28, 2020 [1 favorite]


Well, those are a lot of lines that rhyme.
posted by The corpse in the library at 8:56 AM on March 28, 2020


...i'm willing to concede that the boomers didn't have it as bad - yes, the young uns "win" - we are in absolute crisis mode.

Um, my mother caught the Spanish flu in 1918 at the tender age of 5. Her whole family were sick as dogs for a couple of weeks. And this was on a farm in Kansas, not in a crowded city.

Back then people in their 20s were being mowed down all out of proportion to their demographic slice of the pie instead of people my age. One quarter of the country caught it and 26, 000 died.

See also An Unfinished Lesson: What The 1918 Flu Tells Us About Human Nature

We have been here before and so has absolute crisis mode. And you speak of winning ? What exactly has been won by you ? Bragging rights ? C'mon!
posted by y2karl at 9:31 AM on March 28, 2020 [1 favorite]


Are we not all in this together ?
posted by y2karl at 9:38 AM on March 28, 2020


See also Influenza 1918

...Before it was over, the flu would kill more than 600,000 Americans - more than all the combat deaths of this century combined.

I was quoting Nancy Bristow above as to the 26,000 deaths. If this is true, whoa.
posted by y2karl at 9:56 AM on March 28, 2020


See also American Pandemic by Nancy Bristow. I quoted her while I was listening while typing -- she must have been talking about the first wave of the 1918 flu. She also cites the 600 000 figure.
posted by y2karl at 10:16 AM on March 28, 2020


Kattullus, I want to thank you for posting this, because when I followed the link this morning and listened to the song I wanted to find a place where other people who cared about Dylan were together. To register how disappointed I was.

I love TooM, L&T and MT to death. But I like Together Through Life less than those three, and Tempest less than that. And this is worse.

Listen to the sure-footed wit and range of Shakespearean reference in "Po' Boy," which is one of my all-time favorites. So compressed, so clever. "Murder Most Foul" is so literal, so plodding, so etceterative, so uneconomical.

Dylan has always confounded people. But this isn't Newport 1965. This isn't Slow Train Coming. This is, to stick with the Shakespeare theme, the author of Hamlet writing Pericles.
posted by sy at 11:28 AM on March 28, 2020 [2 favorites]


I agree with you on Po' Boy. As for Murder Most Foul, it is in one word: wretched.
posted by y2karl at 1:20 PM on March 28, 2020


I'm almost afraid now to click on the song link :)
posted by storybored at 1:29 PM on March 28, 2020


Finally listened to it. I'm hearing it not so much about the JFK assassination directly, but as an old man's mediation on memory. The 'murder' is that of memory and of Time, as the impending murder will soon be experienced by the narrator himself. Or something like that, I'll need a few more listens. It's only symptomatically about Jack. I think, anyway.
posted by Capt. Renault at 5:01 PM on March 28, 2020 [4 favorites]


Maybe I should be more sympathetic. My dad is in decline and from the stories he's telling, the most important parts of his life happened before I was born. Shit, before he was born. And those stories do tend to be merely catalogues of things that happened. Should I live long enough to ramble incoherently in the same way, who's to say which events I'll recite, intermittently bursting into tears for no apparent reason. Getting old is one of the great pains of life and people deal with it in whatever way they can.
posted by klanawa at 9:32 AM on March 29, 2020


Reading the lyrics, it seems to me that Bob didn't even try to write proper lyrics for the song.

Has anyone noted that the title comes from Episode 11.08 of the Frasier Crane show?
posted by onesidys at 10:45 AM on March 29, 2020 [1 favorite]


The lyrics kinda remind me of 'Last Thoughts on Woody Guthrie,' for a reason I can't really explain, except not as good.

(My favorite string of three Dylan albums is Blood on the Tracks, The Basement Tapes, and Desire.)
posted by box at 12:17 PM on March 29, 2020


Getting old is one of the great pains of life and people deal with it in whatever way they can.

Poorly, in my experience.
Old age is a tyrant, who forbids, under pain of death, the pleasures of youth.

Francois Duc de La Rochefoucauld
See also

The New Yorker: What Bob Dylan Is Doing in “Murder Most Foul”.
posted by y2karl at 1:42 PM on March 29, 2020 [1 favorite]


See also
Old people are fond of giving good advice; it consoles them for no longer being capable of setting a bad example.

Francois Duc de La Rochefoucauld
*I suppose then that I am Forever Young by that standard
posted by y2karl at 1:50 PM on March 29, 2020 [1 favorite]


I think you had to be there.....
posted by HuronBob at 5:55 PM on March 29, 2020 [1 favorite]


Finally got the chance to listen and relisten, and I really love this. I'm surprised at the low reception here. "Good As I Been To Ya" indeed. :) No need to argue here nor anywhere once again about Dylan, but I'll venture to say that this song will be more and more appreciated as time goes by.
posted by riverlife at 10:11 PM on March 31, 2020 [1 favorite]


Timothy Hampton, the author of 'Bob Dylan's Poetics,' appreciates it:
“Murder Most Foul” is about the assassination of JFK. But it is also about what constitutes an event, and about how an event takes on meaning beyond itself. At still another level, it is about the haunting of America, about the role of spirit in the national life.

....

It tells the story of how the death of Kennedy, possibly a plot by Southerners eager to put Lyndon B. Johnson in power, was also the death of American purpose and direction. It matters not whether Kennedy was a good president or a bad one. His murder was most foul, and that event paved the way, in Dylan’s mind, it would seem, for the process of long decay, the rootlessness and suspicion, that we have lived since then.
posted by box at 2:56 PM on April 3, 2020 [2 favorites]


But his soul was not there where it was supposed to be at
For the last fifty years they've been searchin' for that


...my favourite lines.
posted by bonobothegreat at 9:32 PM on April 3, 2020 [1 favorite]




And another: I Contain Multitudes

Article about the song from The Guardian.
posted by Kattullus at 9:09 AM on April 17, 2020


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