Murder Most Foul - the "greatest Bob Dylan song in decades"

Cafe Society
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I’ve loved Dylan for decades. I saw a couple of links to this on Facebook, finally got around to clicking on the one below. Was excited for a 16 minutue song.

LMAO. This sounds like a parody of a Dylan song. Here are some of the lyrics -

Hush, little children, you’ll understand/The Beatles are comin’, they’re gonna hold your hand
Wolfman Jack, he’s speaking in tongues/He’s going on and on at the top of his lungs

Play John Lee Hooker, play “Scratch My Back”/ Play it for that strip club owner named Jack

I’m goin’ to Woodstock, it’s the Aquarian Age/Then I’ll go to Altamont and sit near the stage

about Kennedy - Being led to the slaughter like a sacrificial lamb/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

I have to give him credit for the general sentiment of the song, and he references an amazing number of songs. But the writing is just so awkward.

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Moderator Action

Moving thread to Cafe Society.

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So it’s We Didn’t Start The Dylan, basically? Huh.

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With a hefty dose of Kennedy assassination conspiracy theory.

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Listened to a bit of it, but it didn’t hold my interest (I do like a number of other Dylan songs). I think it’s very much one of those songs by* and for Baby Boomers - it’s a lot of talk about a bad event that happened sixty years ago and a bunch of cultural references that are clearly aimed at people of that age. I don’t know about other people my age (mid-40s) and younger, but for me the Kennedy assassination brings up more feelings of ‘get over it already’ than anything else, it doesn’t resonate as a marker of something especially sad. In my lifetime we’ve had the Challenger disaster, OKC bombing, 9/11, Great Recession, election of Trump, and now a global pandemic, so going back to a president getting killed before I was born just seems irrelevant.

*(I know Dylan is about 5 years older than the Baby Boomer cutoff so is technically not one, but his music and life is very much more tied in with that generation than the previous one).

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Sounds a little more like American Pie to me. (i.e. from the descriptions in this thread. I haven’t heard the song itself yet.)

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Well, go do it, then come back and post.

You’re just reading about going through an amateur root canal in a dumpster full of expired guacamole.

You need to experience it.

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I haven’t heard it either, and won’t judge it until I do. My favorite long Dlan song is “Highlands”, and if you looked at a few snippets of those lyrics out of context, they’d look silly too.

“I’m listening to Neil Young, I gotta turn up the sound
Someone’s always yelling turn it down”
Simple, huh? But in the book “Why Bob Dylan Matters” by Richard F. Thomas, the author uses almost 11 pages analyzing the lyrics to “Highlands”. Starting with a comparison to Robert Burns’ poem “My Heart’s In The Hightlands”.

And in the end: What does it sound like? That matters.

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Is it a good song? No.

Is it Dylan’s best song in decades? Possibly. At least since “Mississippi,” which is now almost two decades old.

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OK, so is there an analysis of “Murder Most Foul,” just to make sure we did not miss anything? There sure are a lot of references.

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That book was published in 2017. My point was that song lyrics, even Dylan lyrics can look quite simple when printed. Music, too. You ever look at printed music on a staff, or whatever they call those lines? Doesn’t look like anything. Take something shitty, and something good. Print them out and look at them. Try to tell the difference. It’s pointless. There is only one question: What does it sound like?

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There are other questions beyond what it sounds like. For instance, who is the man with the telepathic mind? What are numbers six and nine? Why has the Moonlight Sonata been transposed to F-sharp and who did it? I could go on… You can really ask a lot about the lyrics without even touching upon the arrangement of the song.