Introduction
On the interpretation given here the narrator is looking back from half a century after the assassination of President Kennedy, apparently attempting to understand how it could happen. (For an alternative interpretation see the appendix.) As the song progresses, so his response develops from one of excessive emotion to a calm acceptance of the universality of suffering and death. The song can be seen as having the qualities of both a stream of consciousness and a dramatic monologue – the former in that it comprises his thoughts throughout, and the latter at least in so far as what he says unintentionally betrays faults in his own character.
The song has a surreal feel. It moves seamlessly between the thoughts of a number of people. These include the narrator’s own about the assassination as well as thoughts he attributes to imagined assassins and to the president, both around the time of his death and, curiously, at his funeral. A feature of the song is how song titles as well as allusions to singers, films and plays all contribute to the meaning. The occurrence of ‘Play’ around forty-three times in the second half introduces a number of these.1
If the narrator is taken as representing society generally, then the song is essentially about the reaction of people generally to evil and their responsibility for it. A further consideration is the social conditions which lead to evil.
The post continues in nine main sections prior to a conclusion:
- The Assassination Imagined
- The Narrator’s View of Kennedy
- The Narrator’s Development
a) Animal and sacrifice imagery
b Attitude towards death
c) Hope
d) Souls
e) Moonlight Sonata
f) Kings - Shared Guilt
- Nothing New under the Sun
- Lady Macbeth
- The Narrator’s Flawed Character
- ‘Three’ Imagery
- Underlying Causes of the Assassination
a) Drug abuse
b) Poverty
c) Racial hatred
d) Sexual licentiousness
1. The Assassination Imagined
The purpose of this section is to show how the narrator’s thoughts about the assassination are the work of his imagination and how he seems to blame the political right. He seems to be assuming that the Warren Commission was wrong to conclude that Oswald was the sole assassin. While there is good reason to think that others were involved, in particular the mafia and some on the political right, this has never been established. Nevertheless the song takes the possibility of a political conspiracy seriously. Commentators have noted, for example, that two possible conspirators – David Ferrie and Guy Banister – seem to be alluded to in:
‘Slide down the banister, go get your coat
Ferry ‘cross the Mersey and go for the throat’
Ferrie and Banister were associates. Ferrie had spoken against Kennedy’s handling of the Bay of Pigs episode and Banister was a right-wing activist.
The narrator not only creates a plurality of assassins but, in role as ‘the man with the telepathic mind’, attributes to them thoughts which in reality he could have no way of knowing they had, and speeches which they’d have been in no position to make. There’s no hard evidence, for example, that the president was killed:
‘… with hatred’
– although the claim reflects the fact that some on the political right did hate him, including some suspected of involvement in the murder. It’s quite plausible that the assassination was motivated by hate.
The line:
‘We’ll mock you and shock you, we’ll grin in your face’
also seems pure invention. The president wasn’t mocked by even the one assassin we can be sure about, and nobody grinned in his face. Nevertheless the narrator needn’t be worried about any factual inaccuracy. His concern can be taken to be how we should react if what he imagines were the case.
Towards the end of the song the same imaginary assassins are made to seem a threat to Kennedy’s brothers – which implies the narrator sees them as being responsible for the later assassination of Robert Kennedy:
‘Tell ‘em we’re waitin’ – keep comin’ – we’ll get ‘em as well’
While much is surmise, there can nevertheless be a strong factual basis to the narrator’s thought – for example when the ‘wise old owl’ replies:
‘Shut your mouth’
to the suggestion that Oswald and Ruby know the truth. The response seems based on Jack Ruby’s advice to Deputy Sheriff Maddox, namely that if he wanted to learn what really happened, he should ‘keep his eyes open and his mouth shut’.2
The thought that the political right might have been behind the assassination is reflected in the left/right imagery which occurs at various places. Kennedy is associated with the left, as in:
‘Dealey Plaza, make a left hand turn’
The regretful, or perhaps resigned, tone in which this is sung suggests that the narrator sees Kennedy as having doubts about the wisdom of a political ‘left-hand turn’.
A little later he says:
‘I’m leaning to the left, got my head in her lap’
The assassins, by contrast, are associated with right, as in:
‘‘Twas a matter of timing and the timing was right’,
‘Right there in front of everyone’s eyes’
and
‘We’re right down the street from the street where you live’
Much of what follows will be concerned with showing how the narrator’s imaginative account of the assassination forms the basis of an attempt to come to understand it.
2. The Narrator’s View of Kennedy
At the outset the narrator’s initial attitude to the murder is one of horror. There’s no explicit assessment of Kennedy but there seems to be implicit adulation. On another level there’s implicit – and probably unconscious – criticism. Both are apparent in the question Kennedy is imagined asking the assassins:
‘Say wait a minute boys, do you know who I am?’
The narrator is intending the question to imply that the assassins could have made a mistake. However, the way the question is expressed implies two possible opposed judgments of Kennedy. On the one hand the expression ‘I am’ associates him with God who gives his name to Moses as ‘I am’ (Exodus 3).
On the other hand, the question could sound pompous, as if Kennedy is demanding special treatment simply because of who he is. While it’s not clear to what extent the narrator is consciously aware that he’s putting Kennedy in both a good and a bad light, towards the end of the song there are hints that he has become fully aware of the president’s faults. This will be discussed further below.
The early adulation is continued when the narrator, perhaps more consciously, identifies the president with Christ – describing him as:
‘Being led to the slaughter like a sacrificial lamb’
Christ is treated as a sacrificial lamb in John 1.29.
The assassins are also imagined taunting Kennedy much as Christ was actually taunted:
‘We’ll mock you and shock you, we’ll grin in your face’
This association of Kennedy with Christ is implicitly reinforced by the narrator when he associates the assassins with the anti-Christ:
‘The age of the anti-Christ has just only begun’
It’s noticeable that the narrator’s predilection for associating Kennedy with God or Christ is a feature only of the first half or so of the song. Later he adopts a more restrained view in keeping with his no longer finding the assassination uniquely horrific.
3. The Narrator’s Development
By the end of the song the narrator’s outlook has changed. In the early stages it’s characterised by religious imagery, as just shown, and also gives rein to violently emotive expressions as a way of conveying his horror at the assassination – ‘blew off his head’, ‘blew out the brains’, ‘mutilated his body’ (the repetition of ‘blew’ suggesting he’s so overcome he’s at a loss for words). By the end of the song he is reconciled to it. His original pessimism has gone.
There are at least six different areas in which the narrator’s development towards a more optimistic outlook can be traced.
a) Animal and sacrifice imagery
The development of the narrator’s thought is exemplified by the way he varies his use of animal and sacrifice imagery. To begin with, he exaggerates the horror of the assassination in the use of excessively emotional language. Kennedy is:
‘Being led to the slaughter like a sacrificial lamb’
Almost immediately he has second thoughts, however. Perhaps the lamb comparison seemed over emotive. Or perhaps to compare the murder to a sacrifice – particularly one with Christian overtones – seemed absurd. For whatever reason, the simile changes – the lamb becomes a dog:
‘Shot down like a dog in broad daylight’
This is an improvement in that ‘shot down like a dog’ brings out the callousness of the murder. But the unwanted emotive content seems simply to have been shifted from the type of animal to the time of day. Does the murder’s having occurred in ‘broad daylight’ make it any the worse? Would we have felt more tolerant of the killers if it had happened at night? The phrase ‘in broad daylight’ seems irrelevant and there purely to reinforce the view that the murder was uniquely horrendous. The similarly irrelevant phrase ‘when he was still in the car’, which completes the line beginning ‘Then they blew off his head’, doubtless had a similar purpose.
There’s another problem with the dog comparison. While it’s less pointlessly emotive than the sacrificial lamb image, it still lacks accuracy. This becomes apparent with the reappearance of dog imagery later on in:
‘Play it for the dog that’s got no master’
In a musical context the dog most obviously fitting the description is the one in the HMV painting of a dog staring into a gramophone on its master’s coffin. The allusion to the painting casts doubt on the appropriateness of the original comparison with ‘a dog shot down in broad daylight’ – a comparison which treats dogs as worthless. The painting of a dog listening to ‘his master’s voice’ implies that dogs are sentient beings capable of grief.
Perhaps for that reason the narrator changes the comparison once again. No longer deemed to be like a sacrificial lamb or a dog, the president is killed:
‘… like a human sacrifice’,
one performed:
‘… on the altar of the rising sun’
The cost is the return of the sacrifice analogy. This is still an improvement, though, in that human sacrifices are obviously worse than animal sacrifices, and there are no unwanted Christian overtones. Furthermore, invoking the idea of a particular pagan god has replaced the vacuousness of the phrase ‘in broad daylight’.
b) Attitude towards death
By the end of the song the narrator has become reconciled to the existence of violent death:
‘Darkness and death will come when it comes’
The words are supposedly Kennedy’s as he lies in the hearse but they presumably express the narrator’s outlook too.
They are based on those of Julius Caesar – also a victim of assassination:
‘… death, a necessary end,
Will come when it will come’ (Julius Caesar 2.2.36-37).
It’s because Caesar was also assassinated that it’s appropriate for the narrator to attribute Caesar’s outlook to Kennedy. But it’s because it’s the narrator who is attributing it that we can assume he is in sympathy with it. The narrator has developed in that a more philosophical attitude towards death has replaced his original aggressively emotional one. It’s notable too that in the later stages there’s no longer what might be seen as an out-of-place admiration for the assassins’ skill – ‘perfectly executed, skillfully done’.
The request for ‘Only the Good Die Young’ suggests that the narrator initially holds a naively romantic view of premature death such as Kennedy’s. However, further requests provide overwhelming reason for him to abandon such a view. Mentioned are Patsy Cline (aged 31), Guitar Slim (32), Carl Wilson (51), Art Pepper (56), Charlie Parker (34), Bud Powell (41), Bugsy Siegel (41) and Pretty Boy Floyd (30). All died comparatively young, yet it would be absurd to cast all of them as good, particularly the final two who were criminals. Accordingly, the narrator would be guilty of gross inconsistency were he to hang on to the absurdity of applying moral significance to Kennedy’s premature death.
c) Hope
‘Hope’ is a word with two meanings. Which of them is intended can be indicated by whether or not it has a capital ‘H’. In the everyday sense it means a wish that something will happen, while in a religious context it refers to the expectation that God will keep his promises. The narrator sees the loss of the one as amounting to the loss of the other.
Initially, in the immediate aftermath of the killing, there was hope that the president would survive:
‘Cross the Trinity River, let’s keep hope alive
…
Parkland Hospital only six more miles’
Since this hope was not fulfilled, the narrator later sees the site of the assassination as:
‘… the place where Faith, Hope and Charity died’
The interpretation is pessimistic but it’s possible to cast doubt on it. The two quotations appear in the opposite order in the song to the (temporally correct) order in which I’ve just presented them. In other words, fifty years after the assassination, the narrator can be seen as replacing a pessimistic thought about Faith, Hope and Charity dying, with a more optimistic thought about keeping ‘hope alive’. The presentation of the thoughts in the order he has them in the song suggests that the narrator has developed his understanding. Whereas initially it seemed that hope had died, it now seems as if there still might be hope.
d) Souls
The narrator’s changing view about hope is reinforced by remarks he makes about souls. By observing three separate occasions on which the narrator uses the word ‘soul’ we’re again able to see how his outlook develops. The first concerns Kennedy’s own soul:
‘But his soul was not there where it was supposed to be at
For the last fifty years they’ve been searching for that’
The reason it’s not been found is because with Kennedy’s death the nation’s soul has been destroyed:
‘I said the soul of a nation been torn away’
The nation’s soul and his own are one and the same. The assassination has destroyed both.
Nevertheless the narrator’s final view is not so pessimistic. He implicitly reverses his negative view about the soul of the nation when he remarks about a radio programme:
‘There’s twelve million souls that are listening in’
Those souls, the souls of the ordinary listeners, have not been destroyed. If there’s hope, it’s with them that it lies.
e) Moonlight Sonata
The whole song, and especially the second half, contains a huge number of references to songs, plays and films which the narrator imagines a fictionalised version of Kennedy, somehow not yet dead in his coffin, asking Wolfman Jack to play. Some of these choices attributed to Kennedy represent developments in the narrator’s outlook.
One, bizarrely for a pop music show, is for the ‘Moonlight Sonata in F sharp’. Just as bizarrely, the key is wrong. The actual key – the one it was written in – is C sharp minor. There are two points to be made about the narrator’s changing this to F sharp. The first concerns tone. While C sharp minor can be characterised as appropriate for providing ‘a passionate expression of sorrow and deep grief’, F sharp is more to be associated with overcoming difficulties and with triumph over evil.3
The change would represent an attempt by the narrator to express a new-found optimism.
The second point is that it would probably ruin the piece to play it in F sharp. And that in turn suggests that simply for the narrator to replace the distress he originally felt about the assassination with crude optimism is too simple a solution.4
f) Kings
A further possible development in the narrator’s understanding comes with the mention towards the end of the song of various’ kings’ – ‘King James’, ‘Nat King Cole’, Little Walter ‘the king of the harp’. The effect is to neutralise the hyperbolic reference to Kennedy as ‘king’ in:
‘The day that they blew out the brains of the king’
If other people now dead can be called ‘king’, then Kennedy is not so special. The inclusion of these other ‘kings’ could represent the narrator’s gradually coming to realise – at least subconsciously – that he’s exaggerated the disastrous nature of the assassination.
4. Shared Guilt
The narrator’s apparent siding with the conspiracy theory over the official single-assassin theory can also be seen as the first stage of a development in his understanding. This move from there being one guilty person to several then gives rise to a further move, this time from several guilty persons to universal guilt.
The two lines from Hamlet from which the song’s title is taken sum up the narrator’s early position:
‘Murder most foul as in the best it is
But this most foul, strange and unnatural’
It seems that the narrator comes to recognise that his earlier view of the assassination:
‘It is what it is and it’s murder most foul’
is too simplistic. By the last line of the song the refrain has changed from saying:
‘… it’s murder most foul’
Instead we have:
‘… play Murder Most Foul’
– a request to play a song – this song. He rightly no longer sees the assassination as ‘most foul’, for there have been many worse murders. Playing the song will presumably be to make others aware of how his outlook has developed.
***
The change seems to represent a move towards a belief in universal guilt. The first evidence of this move is in the sinister warning the narrator imagines being issued by an assassin:
‘We’re right down the street from the street where you live’
In other words, the claim is that the assassins are everywhere. It’s unlikely that the addressee is Kennedy; it would be unnatural to refer to Pennsylvania Avenue in such vague terms. The obvious alternative is that the addressee is the listener. Since listeners are everywhere, and for every listener there will be assassins ‘down the street’, it follows that assassins are everywhere.
The point isn’t that ordinary people are literally assassins but that whatever faults of character motivated the actual assassins are ones likely to be found among the rest of us.
In the light of that we can see the significance of the narrator’s advice:
‘Black face singer –white face clown
Better not show your faces after the sun goes down’
Utterly innocent people who had nothing to do with the assassination are in danger from the Kennedy-supporting mob out for revenge. A similar, and historically true, incident occurs in Julius Caesar after Caesar’s assassination. An utterly innocent poet, Cinna, is set on by mistake because he has the same name as one of the assassins. The mob still kill him even when they’ve been informed of the mistake. In a sense, the mob too are assassins.
***
There’s a further example:
‘They mutilated his body and took out his brain’
The ‘They’ who mutilated Kennedy’s body and took out his brain could refer equally to the assassins and to the medical staff in the hospital who literally removed his brain. In a sense, that makes them equally guilty. The assassins are guilty of the actual murder, but ordinary individuals are in some way involved.
It’s ordinary people, too, who just:
‘Stand there and wait for his head to explode’5
– the unnecessarily gruesome final phrase implying their perverse delight – while contradictorily claiming:
‘It happened so quickly – so quick by surprise’.6
5. Nothing New Under the Sun
‘What’s New Pussycat?’ the narrator is asked. According to Ecclesiastes ‘there is nothing new under the sun’. In that case, when the narrator refers to the assassination as the:
‘Greatest magic trick ever under the sun’
the final clause alone – ‘under the sun’ – is enough to suggest that the narrator is wrong in thinking there’s anything exceptional (let alone exceptionally great) about Kennedy’s assassination. There isn’t. There have been unexpected assassinations throughout history – and there are veiled references to a number of these in the song. For example, Kennedy is in a ‘Lincoln limousine’ – the car being named after a previous president who was assassinated. Julius Caesar, another victim of assassination, is quoted. Lady Macbeth, herself an assassin, is mentioned too. Hamlet’s response to his father’s assassination forms the song’s title. There’s also a prediction of Bobby Kennedy’s assassination:
‘Your brothers are comin’ …
Tell ‘em we’re waitin’ – keep comin’ – we’ll get ‘em as well’.
The idea that wherever the sun is there will be murder – a sacrificial killing – is in the line:
‘They killed him on the Altar of the Rising Sun’
The overall point is that Kennedy was no more killed like a sacrificial lamb than the many other victims of assassination. This gives the lie to the narrator’s original view that Kennedy’s assassination was a special act of darkness – hinted at in the song’s opening line:
‘It was a dark day in Dallas …’
and in the warning:
‘Better not show your faces after the sun goes down’
Murder happens all the time, day and night. There’s nothing new under the sun and Kennedy’s assassination – which actually took place in broad daylight’ – was no exception. The person who declared on the day of the assassination that:
‘The age of the anti-Christ has just only begun’
was wrong. As the above examples demonstrate, the ‘age of the anti-Christ’ has been with us for a long time.
***
That the murder of Kennedy is to be seen as just one of many murders is supported by copious other references to killing including in the warlike song titles ‘Another One Bites the Dust’, ‘Marchin’ through Georgia’ and ‘Dumbarton’s Drums’. That evil associated with the latter is reinforced by its reminding us of a drum reference on the first appearance of Macbeth:
‘A drum, a drum
Macbeth doth come’ (Macbeth 1.3.140).
There’s a further indication that murder and bloodthirsty revenge are rife in the request to:
‘Take me to the place Tom Dooley was hung’
Films and plays seem to make a similar point. Kennedy’s murder was not the only ‘Nightmare on Elm Street’. And, while the ‘Birdman of Alcatraz’ was a successful ornithologist, he had also been a murderer. In ‘the Merchant of Venice’ Shylock insists on his murderous revenge in the form of a pound of Antonio’s flesh.
The ubiquity of horror is also indicated by the narrator’s intention, a few years after the assassination, to:
‘… go over to Altamont and sit near the stage’
Near the stage was where a Hell’s Angel killed an out of control spectator.
6. Lady Macbeth
As noted above, an example of an assassin which helps demonstrate that assassination is ‘nothing new’ is Lady Macbeth. Just as Kennedy’s assassins conspired to ‘blow out the brains of a king’, so too did Lady Macbeth conspire to murder a ‘king’ – in her case Duncan, the king of Scotland. There is, however, a further significance to her inclusion. It seems to represent the narrator’s willingness to allow that even assassins can be redeemed. While he is scathing about Kennedy’s assassination, and by implication the attitudes he ascribes to the assassins, he nowhere condemns the assassins. That they are open to redemption is indicated in his allusions to Lady Macbeth.
The first allusion to her comes by way of a phrase from a nursery rhyme in the line:
‘Rub a dub dub – it’s murder most foul’
‘Rub’ echoes its use in a description of Lady Macbeth a while after Duncan’s murder:
‘Look how she rubs her hands’ (Macbeth 5.1.24)
says a servant on seeing her going through the motions of hand washing in an attempt to get rid of her guilt. The significance of this only becomes apparent, though, with the explicit reference to her in the line:
‘Play Stella by Starlight for Lady Macbeth’
The line takes up the theme of darkness and light introduced early in Macbeth. Macbeth says:
‘… Stars, hide your fires,
Let not light see my black and deep desires’ (Macbeth 1.4.51-52)
Following the assassination, and overcome by a need to dispel her guilt, Lady Macbeth is desperate to have light by her constantly. Giving her starlight would be a kindness for it implies acceptance that she can be redeemed. And since ‘Stella’ means star, the title ‘Stella by Starlight’ doubles the kindness while symbolically counteracting Macbeth’s guilty desire for the stars to be extinguished.
If Lady Macbeth can be an object of compassion, then so too, presumably, can Kennedy’s assassins. In not condemning them the narrator is making a move against intolerance.
7. The Narrator’s Flawed Character
There are faults in the narrator’s character which he unintentionally gives away.
On more than one occasion we seem not to be getting the truth. This is when the narrator characterises the brief Zapruder film of the assassination as ‘vile’, ‘deceitful’, ‘cruel’, ‘mean’ and as the:
‘Ugliest thing that you ever have seen’
It might seem bizarre that the film, as distinct from the assassination, should be characterised in this way. Furthermore, if this does give the narrator’s view, it’s difficult to see why he should watch it:
‘… thirty-three times, maybe more’
It’s possible that he’s getting a perverse pleasure from it. Either way it seems an overreaction to the assassination.
***
On another occasion, when he remembers being:
‘… in the red light district like a cop on the beat’,
the question arises why he needs to mention this. While it’s true that the assassination occurred near the Dallas red light district, this alone wouldn’t seem to answer it.
It could be that he is trying to present himself in a favourable light. He’s the good guy – the cop – who is not to be associated with pimps and prostitutes. He has no conception at this early stage about evil being everywhere and therefore that it will necessarily characterise him. In his own mind he associates red with bad – the demise of the country, as a result of the assassination. This is apparent when he replaces ‘my dear’ with ‘ Miss Scarlet’ in ‘Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn’ so that it becomes:
‘Frankly, Miss Scarlet, I don’t give a damn’
One wonders, though, if in referring to the red light district the narrator isn’t trying to cover something up – perhaps that he was there as a client, or as a pimp.
There’s also a more sinister possibility. In the line:
‘They killed him on the altar of the rising sun’
it’s possible that ‘rising sun’ should remind us of the brothel of that name in ‘The House of the Rising Sun’. If so we should perhaps take it that Kennedy‘s death was associated with vice and that the ‘unpaid debts’ referred to a failed attempt at blackmail. He was killed for refusing to pay up:
‘Business is business’
If this is so, the narrator’s association with vice by way of the red light district suggests an involvement in the assassination. This needn’t be literal involvement which would conflict with his expressed horror at it, but it supports a view that ordinary people, like him, have their share of guilt. How this is so will be discussed in the section ‘Underlying causes of the assassination’ below.
8. ‘Three’ Imagery
The number of times the narrator watched the Zapruder film, thirty-three, is just one of many allusions in the song to the number three and its multiples.
The next line of the rhyme ‘Rub a dub dub’, already discussed in connection with Lady Macbeth, is ‘Three men in a tub’. This takes up the narrator’s despairing triple cry of:
‘Wolfman, oh wolfman, oh wolfman howl’,7
– three wolfmen – perhaps indicating the involvement of multiple assassins.
And when the narrator’s observes:
‘… three bums comin’ all dressed in rags’8
we’re again likely to be reminded of Macbeth – in this case the three witches who are:
‘So wither’d and so wild in their attire’ (Macbeth 1.3.140).
From the start the witches’ are associated with the number three and its multiple nine by way of a chant:
‘Thrice to thine and thrice to mine
And thrice again, to make up nine’ (Macbeth 1.3.135-138).
Three and its multiples can thereby by association with the witches be taken as representing evil.
There’s a further significance. If, by way of the number three, we associate the ‘three bums’ with the three wolfmen, and the wolfmen are the assassins, then the three bums are the assassins. Their hallmark is poverty – ‘rags’ – and that in turn suggests that in some way the cause of the assassination was poverty. This point too will be discussed further in the next section, ‘Underlying Causes of the Assassination’.
To some extent the association of three with evil continues to be the case. The opening line refers to the year of the assassination as:
‘’63’
A later memory occurs:
‘… thirty-six hours past judgment day’
– judgment day being when crimes are punished. In this case the allusion is to the judgment of society implied by the assassination.
Throughout the song there are other occurrences of three or its multiples which aren’t associated with evil. Thus the prospect of immediate safety is represented by:
‘… the triple underpass’
and hope is to be kept alive by crossing:
‘… the Trinity River …’
the name itself suggesting anything but evil.
Likewise:
‘… Faith, Hope and Charity …’
are a triple with obviously good associations.
Another good association occurs with the three ‘freedoms’ in:
‘Freedom, oh freedom, freedom over me’
– a line from a gospel song about obtaining freedom from slavery and which has its converse in the despairing ‘Wolfman, oh wolfman, oh wolfman howl’.9
Other benign occurrences are the request to Wolfman Jack to:
‘Play number nine, play number six’,
and the claim that:
‘There’s twelve million souls that are listening in’
The number three, then, seems to be associated with both good and evil. It might suggest that, far from the assassination’s being an exceptional evil, the world is made up of both good and evil or that acts cannot be accurately characterised as one or the other. Even Lady Macbeth is in theory open to redemption.
9. Underlying Causes of the Assassination
An implication of the song in its later stages seems increasingly to be that the guilt for the assassination shouldn’t just rest with the assassins. The blame lies with society as a whole – and presumably, therefore, the individuals who make it up. This would be the sense in which the day of the assassination is ‘judgment day’.
a) Drug abuse
One underlying cause of the assassination is the abuse of drugs:
‘Tommy can you hear me, I’m the Acid Queen’
Like the other queen in the song, Lady Macbeth, the Who’s Acid Queen does evil. She represents reliance on drugs. The relevance of this reliance to the assassination is made apparent in the lines:
‘You got me dizzy Miss Lizzy, you filled me with lead
That magic bullet of yours has gone to my head’
The dizziness caused by drugs has had the effect of the so-called ‘magic bullet’ that may have killed Kennedy and wounded Governor Connelly. An association between the assassination and drugs is further indicated when one remembers that the phrase ‘greatest magic trick’ has already been used to describe the assassination. The implication is that drugs – the magic bullet – somehow caused, or contributed to, the assassination.
How? One possibility might be that drug running is the basis of much organised crime. And organised crime often involves murder. It might even have been responsible for the murder of Kennedy.
Apart from the evil caused by drugs alluded to here, the song deals with three other causes of violent crime – poverty, racial hatred and sexual licentiousness.
b) Poverty
One of the causes of crime is poverty and poverty is in evidence on the day of the assassination:
‘There’s three bums comin’ …’
we’re told,
‘… all dressed in rags’
The narrator recalls being:
‘… in the red-light district …’
and, whether or not the narrator is innocent, the area is one in which people are forced into selling sex which is itself associated with organised crime.
Other types of crime too, such as theft, are rife as indicated in the advice:
‘If you’re down on Deep Ellum put your money in your shoe’
The narrator goes on to slightly misquote a line from Kennedy’s inaugural address:
‘Don’t ask what your country can do for you’
which was originally followed by ‘ask what you can do for your country’. By omitting this continuation, the narrator seems to be toying with the idea that the impoverished should simply accept their lot. He ignores the responsibility, which Kennedy saw a need for, to make improvements.
The result, it would seem, is a continuing gulf between rich and poor– those with:
‘… money to burn’
and those who are required to make immediate payments:
‘Cash on the barrel head …’
The point is that poverty could have been an indirect, though probably not a direct, cause of the assassination.
The negative effect of poverty is also suggested by the allusion to the song ‘Down in the Boondocks’ which shows its destructive effect on a relationship.
c) Racial hatred
The section of the song on poverty leads into another one on race:
‘Shoot ‘em while he runs, boy, shoot ‘em while you can
See if you can shoot the Invisible Man’
The first line is adapted from the Junior Walker song Shotgun about gun violence used by police against black protesters. Invisible Man is a novel by Ralph Ellison about black people going unnoticed. The implication is that with respect to race relations America is in a sad state and needs to change. This is implied by the line:
‘Frankly, Miss Scarlet, I don’t give a damn’
adapted from the famous ending to Gone with the Wind’ where Rhett Butler claims not to care about the disappearance of a way of life. The addition of ‘Miss Scarlet’, as being a possible allusion to vice considered above, can be taken as hinting that colour, i.e. race relations, is an issue which needs attention.
There’s another possible reference to racial hatred in the line:
‘Take me back to Tulsa to the scene of the crime’
The ‘crime’ here could be the appalling 1921 Tulsa race massacre. Since we’re likely to associate the phrase ‘the crime’ with the assassination of Kennedy, its presence here serves to relate the two events.
Finally, there’s the reference in ‘Freedom, oh freedom, freedom over me’ to the song ‘Oh Freedom’ which is about death as an escape from slavery.
The overall effect is to suggest that where there’s racial hatred there’s violent crime.
d) Sexual licentiousness
Various songs mentioned also concern disharmony in relationships including ‘Love Me or Leave Me’, ‘I’d Rather Go Blind’ and ‘Blue Sky’.
A link between promiscuity and violent crime is also perhaps alluded to in the reference to Marilyn Monroe:
‘… Going Down Slow
Play it for me and Marilyn Monroe’
According to unsubstantiated rumour Monroe may have been murdered by Kennedy’s brother Robert. Both he and Kennedy himself are rumoured to have had an affair with her. Since this puts Monroe and Kennedy in the same category, it would seem to explain why Kennedy is requesting a song for them both. It would be appropriate in that it’s about someone’s impending violent death which may have been in some way their own fault.
Likewise, in the light of such infidelity on Kennedy’s part, ‘Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood’ is appropriate as a request for Kennedy’s wife. Her not ‘feeling that good’ may be a result of that infidelity as much as because he’s been murdered. The hope not to be misunderstood is ambiguous. It might mean either that Kennedy did want an end to the marriage, or equally that he didn’t.
Conclusion
The song is not about Kennedy, and nor is it primarily about the narrator. What I’ve tried to show is that it’s essentially about two other related things. The first is a propensity we have for being horrified and outraged at a particular incident – in the present case an assassination – while failing to be impressed by the huge number of comparable incidents which have occurred throughout history and are widespread today. That there is such a propensity is reflected in the narrator’s treatment of Kennedy’s assassination as a unique horror. That the horror of the assassination is not unique or especially foul is made apparent through the many singers, films, plays, characters, musicians and other songs which are referred to. A considerable number of these allude to past assassinations or present day violence and early death
The second concern of the song is the underlying causes of violent crime. The narrator himself can be seen as representing society so that his own faults represent society’s faults. While he modifies his early, over-the-top hatred of the assassination, late in the song he’s still focusing on the assassins as if they hold full responsibility. There’s no indication that he is prepared to acknowledge his own faults, take responsibility, or do anything to abolish the ills of society – drug abuse, poverty, racial hatred and sexual betrayal. All of these he shows he’s aware of and, in so doing, implicitly recognises as possible underlying causes of crime. To accept that ‘darkness and death will come when it comes’ may show an admirable philosophical detachment in contrast to his early over-emotional reaction to the assassination, but it does nothing to put matters right.
Despite this all is not lost. His response to the assassination is shown to develop in a number of ways as the song progresses. And whereas he originally lost all hope, he later saw that hope could be ‘kept alive’. His acceptance that this might happen is contained in his implicit suggestion that that even Lady Macbeth is open to redemption. if she is, then so are Kennedy’s assassins. It’s also contained in Kennedy’s final request to play ‘Murder Most Foul’. If the request is heeded, there’s a chance that people generally, whom the narrator represents, will not only come to recognise their own underlying responsibility for violent crime, but will do something about it.
Appendix: An alternative view of the narrator
I have assumed that while the narrator has faults, we’re to take his horror at the assassination at face value. It is possible to question whether the apparent horror is genuine, though.
First, the words he gives to the assassins need not be interpreted as being expressive of contempt for them. One can imagine them being said with delight. On this account:
‘We’ll mock you and shock you, we’ll grin in your face’
would express how the narrator would treat Kennedy given the chance. Also, the ‘hatred’ with which the murder was carried out would meet with his approval.
This view would also help explain how the narrator is able to praise the assassination as:
‘The greatest magic trick under the sun’
– something which seems odd for someone genuinely appalled by it – and why the day was:
‘A good day to be living …’
If the narrator does sympathise with the assassins, this could explain his having seen the Zapruder film at least thirty-three times. He could well be delighting in having seen it over and over again because what’s captured on it meets with his approval. Hitler, by comparison, is reported to have seen Gone with the Wind three times because it so chimed with his racist prejudices.
If the narrator does approve of the assassination, this could also explain why he moves away from comparing Kennedy with a sacrificial lamb to comparing him to a dog. And his subsequent statement that he was:
‘… killed on the altar of the rising sun’
would appropriately present him as in sympathy with primitive, non-Christian views.
In quoting Kennedy’s ‘Don’t ask what your country can do for you’, the narrator could be implying contempt for what he takes to be Kennedy’s betrayal of the poor. That would provide the narrator with a motive for approving of the assassination.
Whereas the words ‘left’ and ‘right’ can be seen as indicating political affiliations, the narrator’s use of ‘right’ in:
‘… the timing was right’,
might suggest he’s in favour of the assassination. Likewise
‘Right there in front of everyone’s eyes
can be taken as expressing the view that what happened in front of everyone’s eyes was right.
Whether or not this alternative view of the narrator can be sustained throughout the song, it is consistent with the view that the assassins are everywhere:
‘… right down the street from the street where you live’
This is so in that in representing people generally, the narrator would be representing a widespread hostility to Kennedy. People generally would, in heart if not in action, be assassins.
Notes
- The technique is a feature of Whitman’s ‘Song Of Myself’. See, for example section 33.
- Ruby suggested to Dallas Deputy Sheriff Al Maddox that it would be wise to keep quiet. Maddox: ‘Ruby shook hands with me and I could feel a piece of paper in his palm… he said it was a conspiracy and he said … if you will keep your eyes open and your mouth shut, you’re gonna learn a lot.’ Irish Mirror 6.1.2017 online.
- C# Minor: Despair, Wailing, Weeping. A passionate expression of sorrow and deep grief. Full of penance and self-punishment. An intimate conversation with God about recognition of wrongdoing and atonement. *F# Major: Conquering Difficulties, Sighs of Relief. Triumph over evil, obstacles, hurdles. Surmounting foes and finally finding rest in victory. Brilliant clarity of thought and feeling. (Ledgernote: Musical Key Characteristics & Emotions)
- The request for the Moonlight Sonata might be seen as identifying the narrator, and perhaps the view of Kennedy he presents, with the narrator of ‘I Contain Multitudes’.
- ‘After having a nightmare in which he saw a sign in Times Square, New York City, with the phrase “See the President’s head explode!”, Zapruder insisted that frame 313 [showing the effect of the bullet striking] be excluded from publication’. (Wikipedia ‘Zapruder film’)
- There’s perhaps a further indication that the narrator unconsciously recognises that evil is to be found everywhere in his use of the word ‘down’. It occurs fourteen times in the song in various contexts including the assassins being ‘down the street from the street where you live’ and children sliding down the banister. ‘Down’ might remind us of hell, but either way the use of the word associates the children with the assassins
- ‘Wolfman Howl’ is a 1982 song by The Vibrators.
- ‘There’s three bums comin’ all dressed in rags’ – three tramps were in fact arrested in the vicinity of the Kennedy assassination.
- The song is by Pete Seeger.
Bob Dylan song analysis 