In an interview with the Los Angeles Times last year, Lana Del Rey was asked of her fans’ eerie obsession with everything she does, “Do you feel that your fans shouldn’t care about your personal life?” Without missing a beat, Del Rey replied, “Hell no. I care about what Bob Dylan is doing right now. I’m curious to know if he’s wearing a hoodie or a blazer. I get it.” Considering that Dylan is one of the few still living idols of the 60s that Del Rey has blatantly culled the vast majority of her inspiration from, it’s understandable that this would be her “celebrity” obsession of choice.
Yet like Del Rey, Dylan has never fallen into the category of celebrity in the basest sense of the word. Instead, he has long been heralded as a man of the people, a twentieth century poet and voice of a generation. If it sounds exactly the same way that Del Rey has been described by most critiquing pop culture, that’s because so much of her oeuvre has been influenced by this man. The one who compelled her to specifically choose to play the Jones Beach Theater instead of a more mainstream venue in the New York area last summer as she kicked off the first date of her Norman Fucking Rockwell Tour. For it was this venue that Del Rey saw her first concert in 1999, starring none other than Bobby D and Paul Simon. Sowing the seeds of her own artistic style, Del Rey would come to adopt the “bard” persona most fully on Norman Fucking Rockwell, manifested on singles that included “Mariners Apartment Complex” and “Venice Bitch.” It is this latter track that Dylan unwittingly seems to be schooling Del Rey on with an impromptu release of a sixteen minute and fifty-six second song called “Murder Most Foul” (“Venice Bitch” is a mere nine minutes and forty-one seconds–paltry now in comparison).
The epic track, like Del Rey’s predilections, favors a grim nostalgia (an almost anti-nostalgia, if you will) rife with what will be, to many, “esoteric” 1960s allusions. Discussing a matter that happened many decades ago but the effects of which still reverberate even now. Though ageist types might chock Dylan’s discussion of a seemingly out of place and immaterial topic to “classic boomer selfishness,” there can be no denying this subject matter’s persistent significance.
And while, to some, “Murder Most Foul” might seem to have come “out of nowhere” and apropos of nothing, Dylan’s calculatedness in releasing something he had already completed “a while back” cannot be underestimated. That this song is his first release of new content since 2012, when Del Rey herself was launched into the spotlight spurred by internet virality, adds a layer of extra poignancy. For there was clearly a reason Dylan picked right now–this moment in 2020–to reveal what amounts to a raconteur’s account of American (and worldwide) decay.
What’s more, even if the theme–the assassination of JFK–comes across as ostensibly “irrelevant” in the present, the legend clearly saw that this time of Trump, pandemic-fueled uncertainty, climate change, economic recession and a world of closed borders was the perfect one in which to unleash this opus. This clear-cut rumination that proves it’s all just a little bit of history repeating (except with an even stronger sense of fatalism and demoralization). That the Nobel Laureate has often shied away from being pigeonholed as the “voice of a generation,” maintaining that those songs on his first record that became the war cry of beatniks, hippies and the civil rights movement were actually based on the Civil War era he was reading about in the library, can only mean this particular reflection on the past is, in fact, one on the present. Mercurial and arcane, Dylan has always had that caterpillar in Alice in Wonderland quality, but all of this aside, lyrics like, “You got unpaid debts, we’ve come to collect/We’re gonna kill you with hatred, without any respect/We’ll mock you and shock you and we’ll put it in your face,” read like an account of the entire twenty-first century so far.
Del Rey, too, claims to have no real intent on “making a statement” in her songs, instead noting that she merely “trusts the muse.” Perhaps her real “daddy,” then, isn’t Elvis, but Dylan. The real 60s king among American kings, riffing on JFK’s famous speech with his own lyric, “Don’t ask what your country can do for you/Cash on the ballot, money to burn.” A reference not just to the corruption of the 1960 election–puppeteered by the mafia–but of how this sowed the seeds for crookedness in the entire American system of the “election” process–the entire American system as a whole.
Indeed, much about the song seems to undercuttingly wield this historic moment in time–particularly to the baby boomers so often maligned right now–as a grand metaphor for tracing the very source of the United States’ entire decay. The decay that Del Rey would discuss with resigned ennui on such staples as “National Anthem” and “Money Power Glory” and, later, try to better romanticize with a more hopeful air on most of the tracks that comprised 2017’s Lust For Life. Yet even LDR couldn’t maintain too much positivity about America’s current status and likely future on Norman Fucking Rockwell (though she did her best to provide hope on a post-mass shooting-inspired track called “Looking For America”). Because even Del Rey has trouble holding the American flag up high (as she did most famously in the video for “Ride”) these days, sardonic “wink wink” or not.
With her frequent comparisons to Joni Mitchell and Joan Baez (whom, yes, Dylan had a dalliance with) of late, it has always been Dylan she’s truly tried to emulate. And now, he’s offered her a fresh track to study under, to emulate in the near future when he’s no longer around. Because, like David Bowie with Blackstar and Leonard Cohen with You Want It Darker, something about this song seems to foretell Dylan acknowledging his own imminent death, in addition to America’s that already happened long ago. To that end, he remarks, “I hate to tell you mister, but only dead men are free.” So yes, while we’re all still trapped in this hell, it’s Dylan who will be liberated. And don’t you dare fucking retort to this: OK Boomer. Potentially the title of one of Del Rey’s next releases.
