It had to be you, Bob

por Oscar Cuervo *

No one will ever know whether the release of “Murder Most Foul” last March 20th, his first in eight years, encloses Bob Dylan’s encripted message on the political present of the United States. The launch came just when a global pandemic that is sinking the world into anguish hits the most powerful nation on earth in particular. The pandemic seems to be pushing a paradigm over the cliff: the political, social and cultural paradigm embodied in the U.S. throughout the 20th century. Simply put, the country that hegemonized the last century, today shamelessly displays its vulnerability. Not only did the healthcare system collapse. Corpses are loaded into refrigerated trucks outside New York hospitals; the streets desolate beyond recall. Neither world wars nor the attack on the Twin Towers could stop the American Establishment in its tracks as the virus did. The pandemic took them by surprise with the worst leadership possible.  Trump’s first trivial reaction had the support of his political and economic backbone. In a country with democratic institutions properly in place, Trump´s worse-than-poor management of the sanitary crisis would have cost him his dismissal. But the fascist side of the flamboyant showman turned political leader that used to inspire caustic humor, timid criticism, and even admiration for his dreadful personality up until the pandemic, now turned Trump into an irresponsible criminal empowered to pile up the dead in common graves. Hard to imagine how a nation might restore its supremacy in the eyes of the world after revealing the reckless frivolity that drove this human catastrophe to unprecedented proportions. The humanitarian disaster questions any claim of superiority the United States might ascribe to as “model of social organization”. No one knows what the world will be like when the pandemic recedes. Hard to imagine how the U.S. could rebuild its symbolic supremacy. What voice in that society would have the right to rise up against such a shame? Bob Dylan’s perhaps. 

I started out by saying that it will be difficult to know if Dylan released this song about the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy in 1963, over half a century ago, precisely now because it elliptically alludes to the present. Difficult because Dylan has always been the master of indirect communication, the singer with the smudged face that a few months ago appeared saying that he only told the truth while wearing a mask, at the beginning of the Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese, the documentary that depicts his tour in the mid 70s, one of the peak moments in his career, with plenty of references to the Watergate crisis and Richard Nixon’s removal from office. This documentary seemed to approach political issues with an eloquence that Dylan had not practiced in decades. His troupe is shown in the film as a countercultural gesture deliberately opposed to the decadence of American politics happening at that very moment. There is a playful lightness about the film that brings back that brilliant time in his career and also evokes a glare lost by the counterculture of which Dylan ended up being its most beautiful flower. That ironic lightness can now be seen as the direct antecedent of the song just disclosed. Only that the world portrayed in the movie and the spirit behind it are no longer from that era. Rolling Thunder Revue is a grand and joyous goodbye to the 20th Century. In it, Dylan appears singing songs that intervened directly against the systemic violence of his society, like in “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Caroll”, or the famous “Hurricane”. Back then, Dylan was to the American society an author whose work conferred an authority capable of influencing the civil life of the time. “Hurricane” became Dylan’s determination in denouncing a flagrant injustice against a black boxer who, as the song details with the grip of a thriller, is accused of a crime he did not commit. The Dylan of today appears in the film saying that all that happened such a long time ago that he completely forgot. That’s an indirect communication strategy: it brings back the memory of a time in his society that he himself manifests to have forgotten. Neither is it possible for me to know if, with Scorsese’s complicity, when they made this movie they were elliptically referring to the degradation of politics in the Donald Trump era. But Dylan always has an agenda. When he wanted to be a politician, he did it as no other popular artist in his country. When that role became too much of a burden on him, he did everything he could to destroy his own icon. If in 2019 the octogenarian songwriter who for the last seven years dedicated himself to recording Sinatra’s repertoire now feels like recovering a particularly intense peak of his artistic inspiration and his social committment, it’s because he can still afford to cross from one shore to the other of his apparently irreducible duality. “When you think I’m here, I’m already there” and viceversa.   

The recently published “Murder Most Foul” was not necessarily composed in the last months. There are those who say it was a take discarded from his last record with his own songs, Tempest (2012). I wouldn’t be surprised. Part of the Dylan legend draws from his inexplicable will to exclude some of his best songs from his records. Is Dylan not able to appreciate the value of his own work? Does he understand the value of a song like this one only long after? Or does the smudged-face singer withhold them deliberately because he always wants to keep a card up his sleeve? More questions: Is this new song the anticipation of a new record with his own songs, after five reversion volumes of a repertoire notably distant from the kind of songs he did in his Rolling Thunder tour? The first song known after winning the Nobel Prize in Literature brings the artist that made the concept of song in popular music mutate. This was impossible to recognize in his previous records, in which he was determined to show himself as a high-standard crooner exposed to awkward comparisons. As a crooner, Dylan is a controversial artist. As an inventor of a format in modern song, Dylan is miles away from the rest: the greatest, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Jimmie Hendrix bowed to his supremacy. “Murder Most Foul” is that kind of song. We don’t know whether Dylan will ever release a record with his own songs again or if he already has one or if he chooses “Murder Most Foul” to be the last of his authorship. At this point, maybe he cannot even assure it himself. If this were actually his parting, it’s a great finale.  **

Dylan’s “Murder Most Foul” is a 17-minute song, beating his own record. Its harmonic structure consists of two chords. Each verse repeats with minimal variations to the previous one, as if while telling a well-known story he wanted to show us that he is capable of keeping us on edge for an unusually long time with just a handful of notes. If such minimalism of harmonic and melodic resources not only sustains but dazzles us, it’s because there are two things that reveal him as a genius: 1) the narrative structure he unfolds is absolutely unpredictable, unconventional. 2) His way of saying each verse, of arranging each alliteration, of playing even with unexpected rhymes makes the same melodic line sound different each time when repeated dozens of times throughout the song. “It’s not what he says – Lennon once explained about Dylan’s songwriting genius -: it’s how he says it”. Lennon is partly right: only partly: it’s how he says it and also what he says. The musical accompaniment, in the background like never before, lets you appreciate the grain of his cracked voice with remarkable sharpness. Behind his words, a kind of funerary rap...barely sung, a piano, some strings, certain very discreet percussion beats seem to act like a sound cloud that enhances the prominence of the voice. As soon as it begins, everything seems to be said in the first verses: 

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

Being led to the slaughter like a sacrificial lamb...

The whole narrative content is presented in those five lines: Dylan is finally going to tell us the most traumatic episode of the 20th century for American society: the assassination of a president whose authorship seems to have had the consent of de facto powers, with the institutional routine not stopping for even a minute. (“We’ve already got someone here to take your place/...Johnson sworn in at 2:38”). Dylan was already professionally active when it happened and now, with a 57-year delay, he finally takes it as the theme for a song. The narrative form is similar to that he excelled in, with “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll” or “Hurricane”, both relevant in the recent film he made with Scorsese. The small detail is that Dylan tells a story that has been told a thousand times, unlike those songs that denounced little-known acts of injustice: no one is going to find out about the assassination of Kennedy by this song. The other difference is the ostensibly anachronistic game of “Murder Most Foul”. While in those songs Dylan talked directly about the present in the context of a civil rights movement that boosted their effect, Dylan now evokes a story not only very well known, but also preterite: “For the last fifty years they’ve been searchin’ for that”, says halfway through the song, whose title quotes some of Shakespeare’s famous verses: in The Tragedy of Hamlet it refers to the murder of the king, Hamlet’s father. Here, it relates to president Kennedy, who in some other verse is also referred to as the king. The three words in the title are the only ones that are recurrently repeated at the end of each stanza, in a structure that is recognizably a Dylanian hallmark. They are also the first of many quotes that the song will display. In the first minutes, the narrator refers to the murder that will take place just a few months before the arrival of The Beatles in the United States: “The Beatles are comin’, they’re gonna hold your hand” is the first of many references to pop culture intertwined in the song. Many quotes appear throughout the 17 minutes and are most varied, sometimes unexpected in a Dylan song. Case in point, “Another one bites the dust” (quoting Queen), or “Tommy, can you hear me?/I’m the Acid Queen” (Rock opera by The Who). This intertextual fabric does not respect any chronological order: phrases, texts, events, songs, names, and movie titles not necessarily close to the Kennedy assassination are cited; some are earlier (Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, Dizzi Miss Lizzy), others obviously later (Woodstock, Altamont, Lindsey Buckingham’s couple and Stevie Nicks from Fleetwood Mc, All that Jazz, Queen’s hit previously cited). This collage doesn’t seem to present any evident link with the Kennedy assassination, but rather responds to Dylan’s freedom of association, even a playful and humorous will: some of the quotes work more for their value to rhyme comically with the succession of the verses and only in some occasions they express the sense of the historical episode. Case in point, “Another one bites the dust”: an all too-well known phrase of the most danceable and least prestigious pop coexists in the Dylanian enunciation with another one by Shakespeare because both are elliptical ways of referring to political crime. In this anarquic freedom to quote, Dylan resembles Godard, who in films, especially since Histoire (s) du cinema, plays with similar arbitrariness and comicality with numerous cinephile, literary and philosophical references that respond exclusively to some sort of free association.  

That underlying comicality is a discordant element in a song that sustains for so many minutes a tone of litany. To a listener caught off guard, the intertextual heterogeneity may go unnoticed. The verses at the beginning flow like a screenplay or a suspense story. In Dylan’s words, the disparity of this reference system is never bumpy. The voice pauses at the central and side details of the murder, as if a film went from wide-angle shots to close-ups and alternate montages, with lead and supporting characters. If “Murder Most Foul” sounds so magnetic despite its length and anticipated ending, it’s because of its constant deviations from the main axis. 

Something organizes the arrangement of the verses and the tension of the story and is the key to the originality of the song: the changing identity of the narrator. If in the first verses an omniscient narrator warns us that he is going to tell us a story we already know, suddenly the enunciator’s position changes: at times it’s Kennedy himself who tells us his death, sometimes it’s those who planned his murder; sometimes it seems to be a direct witness to the events, in others someone evokes what happened half a century ago. 

One of the persistent axes of the song is Dylan’s own dialogue with radio DJ Wolfman Jack, contemporary of the events narrated and invoked from the first stanza. Dylan steps in and asks Wolfman to set the music to the story: “Wolfman, oh Wolfman, oh Wolfman, howl/Rub-a-dub-dub, it’s murder most foul”. Wolfman was the stage name of Robert Weston Smith, an announcer with a wolfish voice that referred to that of Howlin’ Wolf. In that first invocation, Dylan’s voice stretches to emulate the howl of a wolf. Halfway through the song, when everything seems to have been told, comes a succession of stanzas with Dylan asking Wolfman to keep playing songs. The setting seems to shift from the murder scene to a radio environment that Dylan is no stranger to: he himself had a radio show a few years ago. Here, the one speaking is the musician who recalls the tradition he wants to belong to. 

Play “Misty” for me and “That Old Devil Moon”

Play “Anything Goes” and “Memphis in June”

Play “Lonely at the Top” and “Lonely Are the Brave”

Play it for Houdini spinning around his grave

Play Jelly Roll Morton, play “Lucille”

Play “Deep in a Dream”, and play “Driving Wheel”

Play “Moonlight Sonata” in F-sharp

And “A Key to the Highway” for the king on the harp

Play “Marching Through Georgia” and “Dumbarton’s Drums”

Play “Darkness” and death will come when it comes

Play “Love Me or Leave Me” by the great Bud Powell

Play “The Blood-Stained Banner”

The series of requests end up in a curious loop, when Dylan asks Wolfman to play his own song: “play Murder Most Foul”, a self-contained song. 

Back to the question from the beginning: the underlying humor that Dylan usually plays with is overshadowed here by a funeral tone that no longer seems limited to Kennedy’s death. Sounds more like the elegy for a nation.

“Good bye, Charlie, good bye Uncle Sam

(...) The day that they killed him, someone said to me, “

Son, the Age of the Antichrist has just only begun” (...)

What’d say?

I said the soul of a nation been torn away

And it’s beginning to go into a slow decay.

Then it takes on the serious tone of a prayer for the dead that Dylan utters amid these infamous times. The United States commanded today by a sinister clown, with thousands of wooden coffins lined up in Central Park. Artists are called on to save the dignity of a nation in terminal state.

* Publicada en castellano originalmente el 12 de abril del corriente año en el blog La otra, esta nota fue traducida al inglés por Perla Neiman.

** Después de algunas semanas, otras dos nuevas canciones lanzadas en diversas platafomas -"I contain multitudes" y "False Prophet" la duda se disipó: Dylan está adelantando de a poco algunas canciones de su nuevo álbum, Rough and Rowdy Ways, el primero con canciones propias desde Tempest (2012), que se publicará el próximo 19 de junio.