Music Break: Bob Dylan – Murder Most Foul
March 28, 2020
Bob Dylan, who hasn’t released an original song since 2012’s Tempest,unexpectedly dropped a previously unheard, nearly 17-minute-long new track, “Murder Most Foul,” late Thursday night.
Dylan didn’t say exactly when the song was recorded, but his delicate vocal delivery resembles the way he’s been singing in his live shows in the past couple of years. “Greetings to my fans and followers with gratitude for all your support and loyalty over the years,” Dylan said in a statement. “This is an unreleased song we recorded a while back that you might find interesting. Stay safe, stay observant, and may God be with you.”
This dizzying, utterly extraordinary song — as allusive as it is elusive — starts off seeming like it might be a straightforward recounting of the assassination of John F. Kennedy, but expands into an impressionistic, elegiac, increasingly apocalyptic journey through what feels like the entire Sixties (complete with references to the Who’s Tommy, Woodstock, and Altamont) and then perhaps all of 20th-century America, especially its music.
March 28, 2020 at 5:14 am
Only Dylan could pull this wonder out at this moment in time – what a masterpiece.
March 28, 2020 at 9:06 pm
The best book, bar none, on the assassination is Gerald Posner’s Case Closed. Something that might be of interest to climate geeks is that one of the biggest mysteries was solved by computer modeling. The single bullet theory has been utterly vindicated by the computer graphic simulations done by Failure Analysis Inc. But I still don’t think climate data is as clear and precise as the Zapruder film.