“Murder Most Foul” is a worthy addition to Dylan’s catalogue of songs about murder and justice undone. And if that claim makes you uneasy-if you want to believe the reassuring official story that Kennedy was killed by one man alone for no reason-he has achieved his purpose. Roosevelt who, after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, declared “this is day that will live in infamy.” Now an elder statesman of American culture, Dylan urges us to recognize that November 22, like December 7, was an attack on the American nation. On this, the 58th anniversary of Kennedy’s death, “Murder Most Foul” is a richly imagined reminder of what we do and do not know about the causes of Kennedy’s death-and why we do not know.ĭylan opens with a portentous cliché that packs a presidential punch.ĭylan is channeling President Franklin D. In fact, he doubts the supposed assassin killed anyone on November 22, 1963.
The older and wiser Dylan no longer assumes Oswald was guilty of killing the president. The Nobel Prize laureate has landed, once again, on the wrong side of respectable opinion. What annoyed Kevin Dettmar and other critics is that Dylan has changed his mind about the annoying question of who killed JFK. The young Dylan didn’t doubt the official story of a lone gunman. In early December 1963, Dylan appeared at the banquet of a left-liberal group, the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee, at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel to accept an award for his musical contribution to the civil rights movement, Dylan shocked the respectable crowd by saying he saw something of himself in the man accused of killing Kennedy. The back story of “Murder Most Foul” begins three weeks after the liberal president was shot dead in Dallas under suspicious circumstances. In the course of a quarter of an hour, Dylan retracts his first thoughts on the subject of who killed JFK, which he uttered when he was just 22 years old, a rising star from Minnesota via the coffee houses of Greenwich Village. When I asked Yale literature professor David Bromwich about “Murder Most Foul,” he called it a palinode, a poem of retraction, written against the hopes raised by the 1960s and by Dylan himself. A savvy promoter, Dylan saw “Murder Most Foul” become his first No. For a world contemplating the imminent catastrophe of a global pandemic, Dylan offered a raspy rap about a distant catastrophe that redirected the course of history when most living Americans were unborn. It was counterintuitive marketing to say the least. At nine minutes past midnight on Mathe 78-year-old singer-songwriter released his first piece of original music in nearly eight years: “Murder Most Foul,” a 17-minute long song-poem (it doesn’t really have a melody) about the assassination of President John F. Not long after Covid-19 began its insidious spread, Bob Dylan struck.