'Murder Most Foul': Unpacking Bob Dylan's new epic -- from Dallas 1963 to the pandemic of 2020 [View all]

[LiberalArkie]

Bob Dylan’s new song, “Murder Most Foul,” arrives in the mailbox like a postcard from the apocalypse. In an effectively restrained voice, America’s most important songwriter delivers an act of mourning for John F. Kennedy that enlarges into political prophecy, almost as if he is auditioning for authorship of a follow chapter to the book of Revelation.

The music is slow, almost appropriately like a dirge, and when a delicate touch of the piano bleeds into tearful string accompaniment, a space emerges for the singer’s voice. He transports our mind’s eye back to the vantage point of Dallas in November of 1963, promising that — no matter our age or ideology — we can also find the debris of our damaged souls at that same blood stained locale. As Dylan declares midway into “Murder Most Foul,” we are riding to the “place where faith, hope, and charity died.”

As America grew more commercially dominant and technologically powerful throughout the 20th century, it also transformed from a republic into an empire, accumulating during its metamorphosis a collection of characteristics that would usher in an era of political darkness. The seemingly disconnected acts of organized violence — in the jungles of Vietnam where America waged an unjust war, the inner cities where leadership exploited and abused the poor, the skies and rivers choking on the contamination of countless pollutants — all coalesced into a deep spiritual disease. It is a disease that reveals its gruesome symptoms yet again in this moment, as COVID-19 demonstrates the horrific fallout that results from separating citizens according to race and class, and deliberately neglecting the public good in the name of profit.

“Murder Most Foul” begins at the literal and figurative scene of the crime. Its opening lines communicate exactly where Dylan believes the country’s “soul was torn away.” It was not due to an accident, or even the unfortunate luck of Lee Harvey Oswald’s aim, that JFK died, taking something essential in the American spirit with him in his last breath. According to Dylan, it was a planned execution by an unnamed “they.”

More

https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/murder-most-foul-unpacking-bob-dylans-new-epic-from-dallas-1963-to-the-pandemic-of-2020/