I listened to Dylan's new song twice now — that's 34 minutes of listening — and I'm almost ready to talk about the lyrics.

I need to hear things about 5 times to have a decent feeling of understanding, but I'm going to try anyway, with the help of the written text, here (at Genius, where there are some annotations, but they're not at all time-tested and I see inaccuracies at the first glance).

The song begins with JFK in Dallas, "led to the slaughter like a sacrificial lamb" and asking those who are leading him if they know who he is. They sure do, and "they blew off his head while he was still in the car." So, an unnamed group of men are responsible, but we're never told who they are. The motive was "unpaid debts" which they'd "come to collect." The killing was with "hatred" and mocking, and they've "already got someone here to take your place."

There are 4 verses (in my opinion) and they all end with the song title, "Murder most foul" (which is a phrase from "Hamlet"). Verse 1 ends: "Wolfman, oh wolfman, oh wolfman howl/Rub-a-dub-dub, it's a murder most foul." Why wolfman? I'm thinking Wolfman Jack, who shows up in verse 4. He's the deejay, and there's a lot more about American radio pop songs coming up. As for "Rub-a-dub-dub," why does a childish nursery rhyme phrase pop up amid all the dark seriousness?

Verse 2 answers my question. It begins by addressing us as children: "Hush, little children, you'll understand/The Beatles are comin', they're gonna hold your hand." There's the British invasion period, then Woodstock, then Altamont: "Put your head out the window, let the good times roll/There's a party going on behind the Grassy Knoll." We're being soothed by pop culture, but we're still reminded of the assassination: "What is the truth, and where did it go?/Ask Oswald and Ruby, they oughta know/'Shut your mouth,' said a wise old owl/Business is business, and it's a murder most foul."

Time is passing but the assassination is still described in the present tense. Verse 3 begins with JFK (who died in 1963) using lines from The Who's "Tommy" (which came out in 1969):  "Tommy, can you hear me? I'm the Acid Queen/I'm riding in a long, black Lincoln limousine/Ridin' in the backseat next to my wife/Headed straight on into the afterlife." This verse has the line that felt to me like the key to understanding the song. Describing the autopsy — "they took out his brain" — Bob sings, "But his soul was not there where it was supposed to be at." Now, if he went straight into the afterlife, why was his soul "supposed" to be inside his skull? We're told that ever since Kennedy died, we've been searching for his soul. This seemed to me to mean that the soul is in all the other things about America that Dylan catalogues in the song: "Wake up, little Susie... You got me dizzy, Miss Lizzy... I'm just a patsy like Patsy Cline..."

The catalogue continues, profusely, into the last long verse that I call verse 4 (but Genius separates into 4 and 5, creating an extra verse that doesn't end with "murder most foul”). I won't list all the references, but they go backwards and forwards into American pop culture. There are old things like "St. James Infirmary" and Buster Keaton, and there are things that post-date the assassination like Don Henley and Glenn Frey, along with continuing talk of the assassination. I particularly liked:

Play Art Pepper, Thelonious Monk
Charlie Parker and all that junk
All that junk and "All That Jazz"
Play something for the Birdman of Alcatraz

And it must be important that the list ends like this:

Play darkness and death will come when it comes
Play "Love Me Or Leave Me" by the great Bud Powell
Play "The Blood-stained Banner," play "Murder Most Foul"

According to Rolling Stone:

Bud Powell was a wildly innovative jazz pianist of the Fifties and Sixties who died of tuberculosis in 1966, when he was just 41. “Love Me or Leave Me” is a 1928 Walter Davidson/Gus Kahn song from the Broadway play Whoopee! It was covered by everyone from Ruth Etting to Nina Simone to Ella Fitzgerald. It’s unclear, however, if there’s a version by Bud Powell. He certainly didn’t write it.

As for "The Blood-Stained Banner," if it's something that can be played — as opposed to one of the flags of the confederate states in the Civil War — it might be this:



Dylan's song ends with "play 'Murder Most Foul,'" which is telling us to play the very song that we are in fact listening to. I think we're being told that while we're sorting through the inscrutable complexities of painful historical events, we need to remember that the soul of America can be found in our endlessly beautiful popular culture that Bob Dylan feels honored to be part of.