The media like their Hamlets impotent and enervated, but Dylan has come out roaring like a bull intent on avenging his dead president.
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.
In an interview in the 1980s, he said:
This life is a testing ground....I believe in the resurrection.
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