From Chris Willman‘s 6.16 Variety review of Bob Dylan‘s “Rough and Rowdy Ways”: “As a conspiracy-minded trip through every stray detail of the JFK assassination, but also a lyrical pastiche of references to half the pop culture and hep culture of the past six decades, ‘Murder Most Foul’ is the reason a website like Genius was invented, to have clickable explications of every phrase and the multiple allusions that can be packed into one deceptively mundane line.

“It’s a song that, all by itself, contains multitudes within multitudes within multitudes.

“In one musical work, Dylan distills a vast and lifelong sense of exploration, as somebody who’s discovering not just the links between Kennedy and his assassins but between King James and Etta James, Beethoven and Warren Zevon, and finally, in the last line, his two favorite sources, Shakespeare and the Gospel. By the end, you can almost imagine Dylan coming into focus after all, against all odds: as our greatest dot-connector.”