Dylan’s ‘Murder Most Foul’ brings passions together
Screen Capture / Twitter
It’s his first new, original song in eight years. During that time, Bob Dylan has been busy recording standards — and there have been a LOT of them.
But if, like me, you think of Dylan as “Dylan, the revolutionary,” you’re going to be very happy with his latest song, “Murder Most Foul,” — a slow-moving, meandering, 17-minute opus on the assassination of John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Texas.
This, for me, represented a collision of two worlds.
I was in middle school when my father decided to accept a job as high-school guidance counselor. He’d previously been a middle-school teacher, and this required that he return to college — at Eastern New Mexico University in Portales — to begin work on a master’s degree in Psychology.
As often as I could during these years, I’d visit the campus with him. While he attended class, I’d camp out in Golden Library, lost in the stacks of magazines and microfilm. There, I researched the Kennedy assassination — its historical and cultural impacts, the countless conspiracy theories. This was shortly before Oliver Stone released “JFK” — which I might have watched a hundred times.
I’d load copy cards with spending cash and would haul out photocopied articles by the reams to take home and read later.
And so, when Dylan announced the release of “Murder Most Foul” late Thursday night, I was eager to check it out. And, I have to be honest. Despite its length, it really requires two or three listens to really begin getting your head around it.
It starts off slowly. And, as Kevin Dettmar noted in The New Yorker, it basically remains that way for the first seven minutes or so. While self-proclaimed assassination “scholars” (like me) might find it interesting, the song really hits a stride around the halfway mark.
And — as long as we’re being perfectly honest — it almost feels strange calling to call it a “song.” I mean, it is, in a technical sense. But — with its sparse instrumentation “set to a brooding viola drone, meandering piano and plaintive violins,” as described by the music site NME — it feels more akin to a Dylan poem, reminiscent, in many ways, of “Last Thoughts on Woody Guthrie.”
It’s also been noted that, late in the song, it evolves into something quite different. While still sprinkled with references to Jack Ruby, for instance, it really becomes a litany of relatively obscure musical references. (Only hardcore Dylan fans — like me — will remember his Theme Time Radio Hour on Sirius/XM, which aired from 2006-2009. But many of these obscure references hearken back to those eclectic, Dylan-hosted radio shows.)
At times — insomuch as it is a catalog of American cultural and history — it’s reminiscent of Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire.” Not musically, but contextually.
Critics, so far, seem a little confounded by “Murder Most Foul,” though the overall reception has been generally positive. It certainly hasn’t gone unnoticed that Dylan chose to release the 17-minute track during our nation’s Great COVID-19 shut-in of 2020. The track, which Dylan says was recorded “a while back,” takes time to digest — time that has been afforded to us, or imposed upon us, by the ongoing shutdown.
I hope you’ll check it out.
Damien Willis writes for the Las Cruces Sun-News. This column focuses primarily on entertainment and pop culture. He may be reached at dwillis@lcsun-news.com or @DamienWillis on Twitter.
