What I don't understand is how the song is designed to work like a siren on a firetruck. I don't find Sommer's argument about the litany in the song convincing for the reasons I've already given. I do understand the song as a lament over the "long decay" that the assassination marks according to the singer. Call to action? Ironic request to play pop music that distracts from action? --not so much. L.
You hear it. You listen. You use your knowledge, information, and sensory input to help decide what to do next.
This is the best explanation that I've read that actually reflects my thoughts. I don't find it as extremely moving as he does and if I had to rate it would give it a 3/5 at this time, but otherwise it's spot on from my perspective.
Just dropped the kids off at their mothers and decided to finally listen to this song in its entirety. It’s an amazing soundtrack to hear while driving through town. Empty roads, empty stores. People walking on the sidewalk with masks and gloves on. Grey sky about to rain. I am absolutely stunned. A totally transcendent piece of art. Bob is a treasure.
I firetruck siren is a conventional cue. You hear it, and if you live in a society with firetruck sirens and laws and customs that tell you what you're supposed to do when you're driving and you hear one, you do it (pull over, etc....)--or you don't if you decide to flout the laws and customs, possibly endangering people and risking penalties of various kinds for yourself . How exactly does the song signal to us that we are supposed to take action of a particular kind? I suppose that if you think, as Sommer seems to think, that the songs and other things that the singer refers to are distractions from the action we should take (or should have taken) in the face of events like the assassination, that I guess hearing the song is going to make feel that way. But I think that this is a reaction to things the song refers to, not a reaction to the song itself (using the song as little more than a cue). It's like my own eye-rolling reaction to the song's handling of the assassination. Just because I don't think the assassination is an event that can carry the symbolic weight that the song gives it doesn't mean that the song isn't designed to give it that weight. It doesn't make me feel that weight, but it's clearly designed to make listeners feel it (a version of "it doesn't work for me," which is different from claiming that the singer must be expressing himself ironically). What I don't see is why Sommer attributes to the song what he feels about pop culture, when the song, with a couple of key and interesting exceptions (pointed moments of irony, like the reference to "I Wanna Hold Your Hand" and the Woodstock/Altamont juxtaposition, seems to me to be calling out for music (a lot of different kinds) in a very different key. L.
Louis you will get in return one more gnomic sentence suggested in some weird way but never outright stating or arguing that we are getting Sommer all wrong in some way that a dozen gems comments have not made any clearer.
For me the musical allusions are too much intermingled with flashbacks of the assassination and other sinister references to be considered celebratory , could it be a case of America as the Titanic and the musical references as the orchestra? A little too drastic , I suppose.
I listened to about half of Murder Most Foul last night and it wasn't bad. I'll have to hear it in its entirety to make a final analysis of it. And even then, because of its length, I would still have to let it sink in for some time. I liked what I heard, at least.
I highly recommend the Pod Dylan episode on MMF. The guest made an interesting point about the wince-inducing clunkiness of many of the rhymes that was sort of a defense (she said several critics have called his lyrics here “doggerel” lol). In my opinion the almost universally recognized greatest lyricist of the rock era and a Nobel Prize winner knows when he is dishing out wince-inducing rhymes and so is imo doing it deliberately. I haven’t heard Tempest yet but the guest said that Dylan went through a rigorous process of paring down his lyrics to an absolute rock bottom simplicity. I think that the heavy presence of folk lore going back centuries and nursery rhymes in MMF is Dylan deliberately talking to the listener as if they are a child, or “dog without a master.” Like they are lost and not able to see. Nursery rhymes are constructed for the child’s mind to be able to remember. And the dwindling possibility of mnemonic recollection is a theme for me in MMF (“If you want to remember, you better write down the names”) Anyway that’s my way of justifying the clunkers throughout lol ✌️
Whatever Dylan thinks about what action should have been taken in response to the assassination, from the Beatles on Ed Sullivan and beyond, the 60s pop culture explosion pretty clearly served as an outlet for energies that could have been channeled in other directions. Richard Nixon famously hated the counter-culture, but, if I’m Nixon, I’d rather have young people grooving to the music at Woodstock and Altamont or getting high while listening to Sgt. Pepper than marching against the war, picking up the phone and calling their congressman, or voting.
Before Twitter: The “counter culture “ helped get Nixon to resign. - I’ll say it for the last time - Music was NOT a distraction. Massive crowds protested against the war. Getty Images
Kudos to he young people who got engaged. But for every young person carrying a placard in the streets, there were probably ten or twenty or fifty getting high on the couch while spinning Abraxas. And the counter culture had nothing whatsoever to do with getting Nixon to resign. The counter culture got its candidate in McGovern and Nixon crushed him in 1972. If not for Nixon’s own stupidity, he would have remained in the White House until January 20, 1977.
Sure. But lots of them marched and called while also grooving to music. I agree with the historical argument that the revolutionary energies of the time were ultimately coopted and that there was no real revolution despite some key cultural changes that are still with us, and I can feel some of that being expressed in the lines about the Beatles, Woodstock, and Altamont, but the issue we're trying to sort out here is what the long litany of imperatives means. I agree with @unfunkterrible's comment about them not being "celebratory:" I also agree with him that the idea that they are like the orchestra playing on the Titanic is a little too drastic, although it's an interesting comparison. My own sense, as I've said before, is that they are consolatory, and that they are meant to make us sense that a deep connecting undercurrent flows underneath the things that float on the obvious surface of cultural and political life. If you take the song's invitation to immerse yourself, dive deep, and see/hear those connections you will see/hear terrible truths and consoling beauty, all meshed together. I think that's what the song is about--questions of its success aside. L.
Something strange is happening - MMF is top of a Billboard digital sales chart https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&sou...Vaw3ly4K4xcb_cEdHTT48oKFm&cshid=1586375977632
No doubt there was a lot of interplay between popular culture and political activism in the the 1960s. Part of why some people shouted “Judas” at Bob in 1966 was not just that he had plugged in an electric guitar, but also because he had abandoned what they saw as his role as a leader of the protest movement. But it’s also pretty clear that the general consensus that the activism of the 60s rather quickly transformed in the “me decade” solipsism of the 70s is correct. “Hurricane” notwithstanding, the concerns of Blood on the Tracks are far more private and personal than those of “Hattie Carroll” or “The Times They Are A-Changin’.” But even before the 70s singer-songwriters began singing about their feelings instead of singing about the revolution, countless young people nominally in favor of the revolution dissipated their energies with drugs and the passive consumerism of the counter-culture: sitting in front of the stereo all day listening to Cream and Janis Joplin and not doing anything about Nixon isn’t much different than Mom sitting in front of the TV all day watching Days Of Our Lives or The Price Is Right and not doing anything about Nixon.
Even if you are right , what you have made above is an historical analysis not an analysis of the song .Some pages ago in this thread I was of the same opinion as you about its meaning but then realized that, not all , but many of the musical references are incongruous with that theory ,predating many of them the assassination of Kennedy : all those jazzmen and references to standards , nothing to do with the " decadence " of the counterculture , so they need their own explanation but it´s hard when you got Thelonious Monk mixed with The Eagles . Frankly I´m about to give up
Never saw that calculation- that one placard holder = “ten or twenty or fifty getting high on the couch” calculation before. LOL The counter culture / voters got Congress to investigate, along with a vigorous Press. Nixon did stupid things because the protests increased his paranoia, i.e. doing things like secretly taping conversions. So enough of the “red herrings “ - you avoided the two things I did say. Nixon resigned and music was not a distraction.
The jazz could just be that Bob has developed a love and appreciation for instrumental jazz he hasn't stressed much. In the context of the song, it could be an attempt to bring in an African-American art-music stream along with the white American and British rock (tho MOST of the references besides Beatles and Who are American, I think.....) I also have to think "try to shoot the invisible man" is meant to have echoes of the condition of Black Americans at the time, what with the Ralph Ellison novel, tho the invisible man and man with telepathic mind references also have that appealing-to-me hint of grimy American boy horror-sci-fi and movie culture. This song is big, encyclopedic, Joycean, nearly everything in it likely has at least two vibrations of potential meaning.
I like the theory that the naff-to-some rhymes are deliberately keeping it to super memorable nursery rhyme level, Wiggle Wiggle-esque. It likely has some merit, that theory. I also love it when CERTAIN lines definitely DO sound tossed off, even in the vocal delivery, like he's a battle rapper spitting it live and on the fly---I find the Charlie Parker-junk-jazz--Birdman of Alcatraz has that feel, the delight of hearing the voice and mind scramble, while ALSO resonating with important meaning. Bob Dylan is a very talented man, I gotta say, as singer and writer.
