This is art, not theory, and art of a special kind since Dylan is an artist at war with his art. His songs demand that the listener's mind and spirit be moving as the spirit of creative inspiration moved Dylan. A close listening will force one to jump from line to line, verse to verse to shoot the gulf - since there are no bridges to cross, no connecting links. The sound carries you over and keeps you moving forward. If you're not moving, you'll miss the meaning.
I have no wish to explicate the poet's brilliant work. It speaks for itself. It says far more than it actually says about a system rotten to the core, a country where everything went wrong since "The day the killers blew out the brains of the king/Thousands were watching, no one saw a thing."
If you listen to Dylan's piercing voice and follow the lyrics closely, you might be startled to be told, not from someone who can be dismissed as some sort of disgruntled "conspiracy nut," but by the most famous musician in the world, that there was a government conspiracy to kill JFK, that Oswald didn't do it, and that the killers then went for the president's brothers.
"Your brothers are comin', there'll be hell to pay
Brothers? What brothers? What's this about hell?
Tell them, "We're waiting, keep coming," we'll get them as well"
This is an in-your-face tale, set to music with a barely tinkling piano, a violin, and a soupà §on of percussion, whose lightest words, as Hamlet's father's ghost said to him:
"Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood,
Make thy two eyes like stars start from their spheres,
Thy knotty and combinà ¨d locks to part,
And each particular hair to stand on end
Like quills upon the fretful porcupine."
"Murder Most Foul" truly startles. It is a redemptive song. Dylan holds the mirror up for us. He unlocks the door to the painful and sickening truth. He shoves the listener in, and, as he writes in Chronicles, "your head has to go into a different place. Sometimes it takes a certain somebody to make you realize it."
Bob is our certain somebody. In these dark times he has offered us his voice.
You believe in redemption, don't you?
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