“Murder Most Foul,” Bob Dylan, 2020

What good are pop artist in a pandemic?

1.

Bono offered a piano ballad, which eventually became something called “Sing for Life” with a bunch of other pop artists, and the accompanying video can only be described as akin to Flight of the Concords. Meanwhile, over in Madonna’s bathtub, we find out that the virus is “the great equalizer”—as much like her opinions on music, the virus will unmake the bourgeoise and the rebel. And let’s not forgot, through not strictly a gaggle of pop artists, the montage of famous people singing John Lennon’s “Imagine,” telling a world full of soon-to-be unemployed and evicted people to “imagine no possessions.” So, yeah, it would be easy to see the utter failure of pop music to say anything about this moment as symptom of its decades of aspirational economics: pop stars want to be taken as seriously as tech gurus and health ministers during this difficult time. Not merely to gratify their own egos, but, especially in the case of Bono, as an additional revenue stream from the New York Times opinion page if the streams of the latest U2 album don’t meet expectations.

I would be remiss if I left this catalogue of pop star failure and didn’t mention the counterexample of the leftist transformation of Brittney Spears, who started the week offering to go shopping for fans who couldn’t leave their homes, and ended the week by sharing a poem by Mimi Zhu arguing that we seize the means of production and redistribute. It surprises me not in the least that the pop stars who came closest to seeing how the sausage was made by starting out as pure product would be the first to call for redistribution.

In the midst of all this, Bob Dylan released his first song of new material in 8 years! Imagine being a songwriter stuck inside knowing that you’re going to write your very meaningful song about this difficult time and Bob fucking Dylan dusts off a song from seven or eight years ago about something that happened in 1963 and bests you before you even begin.

Writing about Bob Dylan now is like what writing about the Bible must have been like for people during the Black Plague: Everyone knows it. Everyone has an opinion about it. And whatever angle you think you can get at it that no one has ever gotten at it before, you’re wrong. I keep going back to Leonard Cohen (may his memory be a blessing) who, upon hearing Dylan had won the Nobel Prize, said that such honor was like pinning a biggest mountain metal on Everest—not merely a redundant gesture, but a gesture that says more about humans than mountains.  I had forgotten that Cohen had more to say about Dylan during that particular interview:

“I think that Bob Dylan knows this more than all of us: you don’t write the songs anyhow,” he said. “So if you’re lucky, you can keep the vehicle healthy and responsive over the years. If you’re lucky, your own intentions have very little to do with this. You can keep the body as well-oiled and receptive as possible, but whether you’re actually going to be able to go for the long haul is really not your own choice.”

Bob Dylan writing a song about a nearly sixty year old presidential assassination in the middle of a pandemic sounds like something that would have been on Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music. On that collection, Smith collected recordings of musicians from the late 1920s and early 1930s describing historical calamities of all types. The influence of Smith’s Anthology on Dylan is well documented. Greil Marcus, who has, in many ways, spent a sizable part of his career chasing this particular nexus, sums it up:

“In 1960, John Pankake and others who were part of the folk milieu at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis initiated a nineteen-year-old Bob Dylan into what Pankake would later call 'the brotherhood of the Anthology’; the presence of Smith’s music in Dylan’s has been a template for the presence of that music in the country, and the world, at large. From then to now verses, melodies, images and choruses from the Anthology, and most deeply the Anthology’s insistence on an occult, Gothic America of terror and deliverance inside the official America of anxiety and success-as Smith placed murder ballads, explosions of religious ecstasy, moral warnings and hedonistic revels on the same plane of value and meaning-have been one step behind Dylan’s own music, and one step ahead.”

And Dylan himself said during an interview in 1965:

"Folk music," he said, "is the only music where it isn't simple. It's weird, full of legend, myth, Bible and ghosts... chaos, watermelons, clocks, everything…"

At this point, the years between the “legends” in the songs of Smith’s Anthology are as distant to those singers as Kennedy’s assassination is to Dylan. It feels like the last survivor of a shipwreck or the last man to see John Henry or Casey Jones alive giving you his best recollection of an eyewitness report. It’s a ghost story for sure.

But Dylan isn’t a folk singer, and his songs aren’t reportage, rather Dylan is the one who brought modernism into pop songwriting. Ginsberg and his poetic tradition inheres in Dylan as well. Again Dylan:

“I came out of the wilderness and just naturally fell in with the Beat scene, the bohemian, Be Bop crowd, it was all pretty much connected,” Dylan said in 1985. “It was Jack Kerouac, Ginsberg, Corso, Ferlinghetti … I got in at the tail end of that and it was magic … it had just as big an impact on me as Elvis Presley.”

As I write this, “Murder Most Foul” is the highest viewed page at the song lyric site genuis.com. The analysis of the lyrics, this time, have little to do with Dylan’s hermeticism and far more to do with fact checking Dylan’s account of the assassination. I can’t help but think of “American Pie,” with its allegory by numbers history of the 1960s, a song that I have always imagined as the antithesis to what Dylan has been doing for so long.

But as with so much that Dylan writes and performs, it’s not what can be easily glossed that holds the meaning. The historical events that often become the central focus of Dylan’s lyrics become, to paraphrase Walter Benjamin, the inaccurate transmission of an inessential content. So in reading over the genius page for “Murder Most Foul,” its the lines that lack a current gloss that draw my attention:

He said, "Wait a minute, boys, you know who I am?"
"Of course we do, we know who you are!"
Then they blew off his head while he was still in the car
Shot down like a dog in broad daylight
Was a matter of timing and the timing was right
You got unpaid debts, we've come to collect

The “wait a minute, boys” should immediately direct the listener to another long topical Dylan song, “Hurricane” (“Cops said, “Wait a minute, boys, this one’s not dead!”). Though separated by race, power and time, in the face of some nameless “boys,” “cops,” etc the protagonist of both songs become nothing but disposable bodies (one rotting in a cell, the other dying like a dog) to men in power with guns. Again, this has little to do with the historical “truth” of JFK’s assassination, or the truth of the power differential between a black boxer and the president of the United States, rather it has something to do with a cosmic truth, to which Dylan is receptive.  “Shot down like a dog” recalls the final sentence of Franz Kafka’s unfinished novel the Trial: “‘Like a dog!’he said; it seemed as though the shame was to outlive him.” Kafka’s novel points out the lack of humanity in Joseph K.’s death. Dylan’s lyrics point out the lack of humanity in JKF’s assassination. Such nameless, faceless killing is the essence of death. As Reverend Gary Davis sang, and Dylan’s friend Jerry Garcia would sing many decades later, “death don’t have no mercy in this land.”


2.

I hate to tell you, mister, but only dead men are free […]

The man who fell down dead like a rootless tree […]

Play darkness and death will come when it comes [….]

All of these lines are currently without annotation. All of these lines, including the previous lines about JFK dying like a dog, strip the title and elevation from the office of the president. The first line is a response to the spiritual “Oh Freedom,” which Dylan would have learned from Odetta’s albums, and would have sung himself as an ally (or opportunist depending on whom you believe) in the civil rights movement. It’s answered by the old Dylan seemingly foreclosing the possibility of freedom as something that can be achieved in this world. One has no greater control over real or imagined freedom in this life than any other, even the president of the United States (who Dylan told us already in 1965 sometimes has to stand naked). Again, this is antithetical to everyone’s understanding of freedom, to the actual power inhering in the presidency,  but in the middle of this crisis in which we find ourselves, wherein even the President of the United States stands “perfectly” naked, maybe more naked than any leader in modern history, the fleshiness of this world and all the people in it lays low our received understanding. Elsewhere, well glossed by the geniuses, Dylan brings up “Merchant of Venice.” At the end of the day, we’re all just somebody’s pound of flesh that either does, or does not, get repaid ("You got unpaid debts, we've come to collect"). Even Shylock’s famous speech of tolerance and liberation reminds us that we’re all just meat puppets trying not to die:

“Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian is?”

Dylan brings up Shakespeare’s play (elsewhere it’s the more obvious Macbeth) to remind us that we’re all subject to the same diseases. It’s worth remembering that Shakespeare lived through an outbreak of the black plague in Venice that saw 50,000 people dead.

The final line here finds us now. Dylan is playing darkness with “Murder Most Foul,” just like the poet Paul Celan played “death more sweetly” to bring the darkness in his poem “Deathfuge.” Max von Sydow lost his chess game with death, recently. Dylan knows it comes for all of us, ultimately, president, Shylock and Bob Dylan alike. A song about a sixty year old presidential assassination in the middle of a global pandemic seems to make very little sense, much like death itself. Dylan knows that in order to truly reflect on the time you live in, you must understand that you are not the subject, just the recipient of the catastrophe.