Dylan's Murder Most Foul

I didn't think about November 22, 1963 much yesterday, as I usually do on one of the worst anniversaries of my and maybe your lifetime, because I was busy with all kinds of other things, including doing a little virtual concert at Philcon (a science fiction convention) of songs from my new album, Welcome Up: Songs of Space and Time, my first new album in almost 50 years.

But I was on my son Simon's Tumblr page today, scrolling back through his posts, and came upon this one from back in March. The world has been so crazy since then and now, with Covid and the election, and I've been so immersed teaching online classes, writing, doing podcasts, and the like, that I didn't get a chance to listen to Dylan's "Murder Most Foul" until today.

It's the best Dylan lyric -- as in emotive power, tear up the street and your soul -- since, I don't know, "Hurricane"? -- and, no, actually, "Murder Most Foul" is better and more than that. Because of its subject. It's almost a couplet with Dylan's 2012 Roll On John, about another unfathomably unacceptable assassination, but a much shorter song, and almost a warm-up for "Murder Most Foul," which joins Phil Ochs' masterpiece, The Crucifiction, as an extraordinarily insightful song about the event which in a single moment changed the course of history, inextricably and unalterably, for the worst. Extinguishing the joy and innocence and optimism for the future that surged through the early 1960s is something the world has manifestly still not recovered from. I think about it often. Even write about it in my fiction. "Murder Most Foul" captures all of this and more with a lyric which, if you want to know where I'd place it, it would be among the best lyrics Dylan, the greatest lyricist of the 20th century, ever wrote. And here in the 21st century, with a fifth of it almost gone, the song could well be one of the greatest of this century, too.

On a lesser but still significant note -- at least to me -- Dylan's song also scratches an itch I have had about songs about DJs that also goes back to the 1960s. I even wrote a short story about that -- Sam's Requests -- and just a month or two ago created a Spotify songs-about-DJs playlist with that theme. Dylan's song eminently belongs there, containing a superbly chosen series of requests to Wolfman Jack, whom I actually worked with. I just added Dylan's song to the playlist. Yeah it belongs there, and in a permanent place in the thoughts of those of us who lived through that more-than-tragic day.