"Bob Dylan has always been a stubborn contrarian, so maybe it's fitting that, after five decades of evading any and all responsibility as a 'voice of a generation,' he is finally embracing it, kind of, at the height of the 'OK Boomer' backlash."
Bob Dylan. (photo: Harry Scott/Getty Images)
29 March 20
“The soul of a nation’s been torn away,” he sings in his first new song in nearly a decade. It’s about Kennedy—and a lot more.
ob Dylan has always been a stubborn contrarian, so maybe it’s fitting that, after five decades of evading any and all responsibility as a “voice of a generation,” he is finally embracing it, kind of, at the height of the “OK Boomer” backlash. His new song, “Murder Most Foul,” which he says in a statement was “recorded a while back,” is an epic, 16-plus-minutes-long murder ballad about the assassination of John F. Kennedy that feels like an otherworldly hybrid of such earlier songs as “Hurricane,” “Idiot Wind,” and “Not Dark Yet.” Listen below.
Before you object to the “OK Boomer” thing, yes, I know that Dylan, born in 1941, is technically a Silent Generation guy. But teen and preteen baby boomers were heavily represented among the generation that felt inspired and galvanized by his politically charged folk music of the early- and mid-1960s. Even at the time, though, he couldn’t resist undercutting a rousing anthem like “The Times They Are A-Changin’” with a cranky blow-off like “It Ain’t Me, Babe.” (“Go away from my window / Leave at your own chosen speed…”)
Much later, in his quasi-memoir, Chronicles: Volume One, Dylan suggested, not entirely believably, that his “voice of a generation” reputation was based on a colossal misunderstanding. Listeners thought he was writing passionately about current events but actually he was writing about stuff he read in the library about…the 1850s and 1860s. His songs weren’t about Civil Rights—they were about the Civil War!
It’s important to remember that nothing Dylan says can ever be taken at face value. This is a man who most recently collaborated with Martin Scorsese on a “documentary” whose infidelity to the truth was so extreme that it included fictionalized characters. But whether or not Dylan really was in a 19th-century state of mind when he wrote “Blowin’ in the Wind,” two things are clear: The song had a huge impact on the living, breathing young people of the 1960s, and that made Dylan deeply uncomfortable.
So what are we to make of this new song? With the world experiencing a global pandemic on a scale not seen since 1918, and with a young generation seething with rage over the fallout from the perceived narcissism and selfishness of the baby boomers who launched him to global fame, Dylan has chosen this moment to release an extremely long song—his first original song in almost a decade, I might add—about the single most chewed-over trauma in the boomer historical hall of fame: the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
One possibility is that, just as he preferred to process the upheavals of the ’60s through the lens of an earlier century, Dylan is only now ready to look squarely at the defining historical tragedy of his own young life. When JFK was killed, on November 22, 1963, Dylan was 22 years old. His second album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, had come out six months earlier. He had finished recording his third, The Times They Are a-Changin’, which would be released two months later.
In fact, the assassination marks a delineation point in Dylan’s career. Before JFK was killed, Dylan mostly recorded the sincere-sounding folk music that made him famous. After JFK was killed, he got into Rimbaud and LSD and embarked on what would become a lifelong effort to complicate and maybe even kill off the work-shirt-wearin’, protest-song-singin’ Dylan of the popular imagination. When Another Side of Bob Dylan came out, in 1964, the Communist publisher and folk purist Irwin Silber cited it as evidence that Dylan had “somehow lost touch with the people.” A year later, Dylan’s electric set at the Newport Folk Festival would cause enough consternation to spark rumors that the folk icon Pete Seeger took a fire ax to the power cords backstage.
So what’s Dylan’s take on the assassination now? Well, it ain’t Don McLean’s “American Pie,” that’s for sure. The track starts with a low cello drone and some tinkling piano. Then comes Dylan’s voice, sounding less croaky than it often has in recent years, singing rhyming couplets:
’Twas a dark day in Dallas, November ’63,
A day that will live on in infamy.
President Kennedy was a-ridin’ high.
Good day to be livin’ and a good day to die,
Bein’ led to the slaughter like a sacrificial lamb.
He said, “Wait a minute, boys, you know who I am.”
They said, “Course we do, we know who you are.”
Then they blew off his head while he was still in the car.
This is not exactly high modern poetry. If anything, it reads like the kind of workaday poems that newspapers used to publish last century. I imagine Dylan wrote it all down in advance, but I wouldn’t rule out the possibility that he improvised some or even all of it. He is unquestionably one of our era’s most gifted and accomplished writers, but he’s never been afraid to deploy a cliché or an awkward phrase to fill a verse or match a rhyme.
Like most honest chroniclers of the assassination, Dylan invokes the conspiracies without attempting to either confirm or deny their validity:
The day they blew out the brains of the king
Thousands were watching; no one saw a thing.
It happened so quick and so quick by surprise,
Right there in front of everyone’s eyes.
Greatest magic trick under the sun:
Perfectly executed, skillfully done.
After setting the scene, he starts to wax more adventurously poetic. For a brief moment, he gets personal, even autobiographical: “I’m goin’ to Woodstock, it’s the Aquarian Age. Then I’ll go to Altamont and sit near the stage.” As every fan knows, Dylan’s most exciting and creatively fruitful period—the run of immortal albums from Bringing It All Back Home through Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde—ended when he crashed his motorcycle in July 1966 and had to convalesce in Woodstock, New York. Arguably, that was the end of his 1960s. But Woodstock has another meaning, of course: The Woodstock music festival in August 1969, with its throngs of scantily clad hippies, was the culmination of the 1960s ethos of peace and free love. That ethos died later that year, at the disastrous Altamont Free Concert, which ended when a Hells Angel “security guard” killed an African American concertgoer who was brandishing a gun during the Rolling Stones’ set.
That’s a lot of innocence-ending packed into two short lines.
Don’t worry, I won’t close-read the whole song. Before too long, it becomes fairly clear anyway what he’s up to. He laments, at great length, the terrible crime of the Kennedy assassination in a style worthy of the chorus from a Greek tragedy. How many ways are there to say that this was an extremely evil act? Very many, as it turns out!
And then, what begins as a sprinkling of pop-cultural references that feel a bit out of place (“Up in the red-light district like a cop on the beat / Livin’ in a Nightmare on Elm Street”) mushrooms into a serial invocation of important art that, for better or worse, calls to mind Woody Allen’s list in Manhattan of things that make life worth living. “Groucho Marx, to name one thing,” Allen begins. “And Willie Mays. And the second movement of the Jupiter Symphony. And, um, Louis Armstrong, recording of ‘Potato Head Blues.’ Swedish movies, naturally.” Etc.
So what is Dylan up to here? What does the JFK assassination have to do with John Lee Hooker and Thelonious Monk and Patsy Cline and Harold Lloyd and Pretty Boy Floyd?
Maybe he is doing the same thing Allen was doing: trying to use his favorite songs and movies as shields against the idea that life is absurd and meaningless. And maybe—I have no idea but maybe?—Dylan is trying to break the chain of political evil by building a chain of artistic goodness. Several of the lyrics suggest that the JFK assassination was the beginning of something very bad. Something that is still plaguing us today:
The day that they killed him, someone said to me, “Son,
the age of the Antichrist has just only begun.”
And:
What’s new, pussycat? What’d I say?
I said, “The soul of a nation’s been torn away
and it’s beginning to go into a slow decay
and that it’s 36 hours past judgment day.”
Maybe this explains why Dylan is releasing this song now. The escalating shittiness of these times has become a running joke, with 2020 making 2019 look like a cakewalk, 2019 making 2018 look like a breeze, and on and on back to 2016, when the election of Donald Trump kicked off a series of events culminating in our collective present: a time when the United States has arguably bungled its response to a global pandemic worse than any other nation in the world.
Can we learn something about our predicament from looking back at the Kennedy assassination? Is that where things really started to go wrong? Maybe. Maybe that’s why Dylan has finally decided to wrestle in public with the legacy of the decade he helped define.
It’s 36 hours past judgment day? You can say that again, Bob.
