‘Murder Most Foul’: Dylan culture on a silver platter

By Omer Zalmanowitz

Omer Zalmonowitz

SAN DIEGO — If Bob Dylan is a modern-day lesser prophet then his retelling of the murder of JFK in ‘Murder Most Foul’ could serve as a forewarning to a moment that signifies a depature from the norm.

The timing of Dylan’s single release via Twitter, on March 27th, is somewhat shrouded in mystery, not least as the song was “recorded a while back,” according to Dylan’s tweet. Dylan’s message to fans is that they are to stay safe, vigilant, and have trust in the almighty, and that they may find the song “interesting.” While Dylan wants the general population to remain safe, the song itself is a far cry from any sense of safety. Instead there is upheaval and turmoil, a dark force that is in motion behind the scenes, or as Dylan sings it, “Greatest magic trick ever under the sun.”

The magic is the covert nature of the assassination, a sleight of hand, where “Thousand were watching, no one saw a thing.” Listeners tune in to Dylan’s distilled America, and in the process are asked to reimagine what change has meant for their own version of homeland, whether symbolic or material, as icons, people, traditions, and ways of life take a backseat to dark forces that are at play–viral or institutional.

Along with JFK’s last journey, Dylan revives a volatile America, one that is unrecognizable due to the internal seismic shifts caused by the President’s death. An America in the midst of a war on an invisible microscopic enemy is also unrecognizable, and Dylan leaves it up to the listener to decide how stable is the state of the country, and of its people. There is, however, a clue as the timing of the song’s release hints at the razor-thin differences of the fallout from JFK’s death, and the fallout from a global pandemic.

‘Murder Most Foul’ is a song stuck in time in more ways than one. Bob Dylan’s new single topping the charts as of April 10th, 2020, is his longest song ever released, and also his first to reach the No. 1 spot on a Billboard chart. It also reflects Dylan’s stylistic synthesis, and a cultural commentary that serves as a momentary landbridge between the iconic times of the 1960’s counterculture and American folk music revival, and Dylan’s own image as an icon of the times, and the popular culture of our day.

The song, released on Dylan’s official YouTube channel on March 27th, was linked on a major online newspaper website in Israel, where Dylan is a household name, and as I haven’t heard new music by Dylan in a while (the previous single he released was ‘Wigwam,’ in 2013) I was elated to find that I could listen to the entire song for free. Musically the song is a rock ballad, sustained over the span of seventeen minutes by a pulsating, droning piano, and a rich, reverberant violin tone, with a subtle percussive rhythmic drive that lends itself more to a chant or incantation rather than to rock.

There is no quickening of tempo, nor a compounding layering of musical texture, instead the song remains in many ways in skeletal form, a bare bones kind of approach to music making.

The style on the whole can be termed as minimalist, achieving a sense of stasis, or a feeling of coming to a standstill. In that sense, an absence of a musical arc is most pronounced, there are no high or low points in the musical landscape, and as the song rambles on in an apparent lack of movement it can at times feel pedestrian. The overall effect of the song is much more generous with the listener than pedestrian. Just as repetitive crashing of waves can have a hypnotic effect, so too can Dylan’s incessant, recursive cadences, which reel the listener into a catatonic trance-like state. It is then, once giving in to the recursivity of rhyme, tonality, and sonic atmosphere, and when letting go of preconceived expectations, that there is a final acceptance that the music is to serve as a vehicle for storytelling, subservient to what the poet/lyricist is about to recite.

Tradition is on Dylan’s side in ‘Murder Most Foul,’ and his time-honored approach to musical storytelling is at once familiar and homey. We get the sense that we have been here before with Dylan, as if in some way we are revisiting a musical landscape preserved in a time capsule. It is a beautiful reminder that certain musical truths do not need heavy processing or elaborate production in order to reinforce what for decades has been ever-present in the resonating chambers of musical consciousnesses. Thematically the song is in honor of a bygone era in American culture, the American folk music revival of the 1960’s, and reminiscent of the counterculture of the 1960’s, referencing jazz and blues musics, while also challenging the status quo and painting a picture that hearkens back to an America that for all intents and purposes could have come to, and may still arrive at, a point of no return.

This is Dylan at his storytelling best, both narrating and distilling American popular culture and history. The success of Dylan’s first and only No. 1 Billboard chart hit song is not in the form of a broad cultural survey. Instead it is rooted in Dylan’s unapologetic association to a musical and cultural currents that he helped establish, and that he can now project with authority against the background of the present, and of the interim time that has elapsed between now and then.

The listener may find a mature and wise Dylan on top of his storytelling game, as he signals to his heroes of American popular (and less popular) culture, some of whom are by now forgotten, or at the very least in danger of being neglected from memory. Dylan goes on a victory lap with the lot of them, and in the process gives the listener a tour de force rendition of his bird’s eye view of an America that is, in many ways, lost and inaccessible. Dylan’s songtelling provides us a general boost to help retrieve from our collective consciousness cultural remnants that are still legible despite this loss of legibility with the passage of time, wherein he weaves a who’s who of personas who are, as of now, in need of revival.

Dylan is intimately familiar with cultural revivals, and his position within the epicenter of the American folk music revival should clue us in to what he is projecting onto us with his epic song ‘Murder Most Foul.’ It is a call to attention to fleeting kernels of cultural life that are perilously near the critical mass of passing out of mind in our shared public spaces, and Dylan, the last one to ever try to put out the dying embers of cultural significance, is busy with revival. If at first listen ‘Murder Most Foul’ sounds familiar to you it is because it is all too familiar, you’ve heard Dylan the revivalist before. Do take a listen though, behind the long-drawn cadences, the bluesy persistence and invocations, the storytelling approach, there is a revival that is long overdue, and it finds a suitable home, if not a perfect one, in Dylan’s latest attempt to retrieve, for all of us, what is inherently ours in the form of a cultural heritage, albeit by now suffering from major disuse and neglect.

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Omer Zalmonowitz is a writer, musician, and teacher living in Southern California. An enthusiast of all things woodsy and montane.  He says his greatest achievement to date is having fallen in love with the world over and over again.

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