Post by TheWallsScreamedPoetry on Feb 8, 2005 19:57:58 GMT
Jim Morrison: The Anatomy Of Madness
This year's superstar is a bloated, bearded would-be poet who died 20 years ago. SIMON REYNOLDS investigates the dark influence and deep fascination JIM MORRISON still exercises over rock music today.
It’s almost impossible to have a natural, unforced response to The Doors' music, to hear it clearly through the encrustation of platitudes left by the 20 year criss-cross of mythologisation and debunking. In recent years, the only pop figure to suffer a similar fate of over-analysis is Prince. This probably explains why, in cooler-than-thou circles, it's hip to argue that both Purple Imp and Lizard King are absurdly overrated; nobody likes the taste that clichés leave in the mouth.
Unlike Prince or other over-explicated phenomenons (The Beatles, Stones, Hendrix, Presley), Jim Morrison gave the critics a headstart by providing his own, extremely lucid commentary on what he was trying to do. In The Doors' very first press release, Morrison declared, "I am interested in anything to do with revolt, disorder, chaos, and especially activity that seems to have no meaning". Morrison was remarkably conscious about his quest for unconsciousness, supremely self-possessed in his pursuit of self-loss. Perhaps that's why he drank so much – a crash course in how to ‘learn to forget’, an escape route from self-built cage of having it all worked out in advance.
*
JIM MORRISON WAS the first pop deity to stage-manage his own self-mythologisation, to have a critical understanding of the mythical dimensions of rock 'n' roll. While that newly born species, the rock critic, was making its first stumbling comparisons between pop and Greek tragedy (Richard Meltzer), and its first paeans to the Dionysian madness of pop (Nik Cohn, Lester Bangs), Morrison was already articulating all that in his songs, in his performance, in his life. He was the prototype of the critically-minded rock deviant (Iggy Pop, Nick Cave, Perry Farrell, et al).
Morrison had a voracious appetite for what Meltzer calls "edge substances" (LSD, peyote, amyl nitrate, dope, alcohol). But more important were the cultural edge substances: Artaud's Theatre Of Cruelty; Blake's "doors of perception"; Celine's "journey to the end of the night"; Rimbaud's "sacred disorder of the mind"; Baudelaire's "perpetual drunkenness". From these Romantic and decadent influences Morrison derived the idea of the artist as a "broker in madness", an explorer of the frontier territories of the human condition.
But the most lethal intoxicant that Jim Morrison ever imbibed was the febrile writings of poet-philosopher Friedrich Nietzche. In his memoir Riders On The Storm, Doors drummer John Densmore goes so far as to say "Nietzche killed Morrison". Nietzche's Birth Of Tragedy has been described as "a philosophical road map to The Doors"; from it, Morrison drew the opposition between Apollonian art versus Dionysian art. Apollonian art promotes contemplation, calms the soul and ultimately serves social stability. Dionysian art, named after the god of drunkenness, incites pagan delirium, derangement of the senses, and the volcanic eruption within man of the untamed forces of Nature.
For Morrison, Dionysian music meant pre-castration Presley, the Stones, the blues. Apollonian pop? Well, he died before he could suffer the socially conscientious pop of The Style Council or Sting. But there was a distinctly Apollonian tenor to the counter culture: a longing to return to the garden of paradise, to a lost tranquility and order. As a Dionysian, Morrison believed that nature wasn't benign but the enemy without and within – a wilderness that was both threatening and alluring, offering an "eclipse of the self". As Densmore puts it: "Jim's message was endarkenment", not the enlightenment sought by the Love Generation. The Doors lay somewhere between the black leather nihilism of the Velvet Underground and the kaleidoscopic bliss-out of West Coast psychedelia. It was fitting that their base was Los Angeles, the city whose vibe lay somewhere between San Francisco (idyllic, temperate, perpetual spring) and New York (vibrant, uptempo, nerve-edged). L.A. is as divorced from nature as New York, but less characterful, more phantasmic: city-as-wilderness, whose endless freeways offered a soulless version of the Beatnik dream of travelling but never arriving.
"Our music is like someone not quite at home," Morrison said. The Doors' version of psychedelic experience was one of the estrangement and disorientation (‘Strange Days’), not blissful communion with the cosmos. The Doors' songs did not sound trippy so much as uncanny. The root meaning of ‘uncanny’ is a feeling of not being at home in the world. Freud used "the uncanny" to refer to when an object or person seems to have an abnormal, ominous aura (literally, a shadow cast by the unconscious). Morrison actively sought out this feeling of disorientation, driven by Baudelaire's ‘Great Malady’ ("horror of one's own home"). As with most rebels, he equated domesticity with domestication, and thus castration. Morrison owned nothing and lived nowhere; he lived like a bum and by all accounts stank like one too.
*
MORRISON TOOK THE PHALLIC MODEL of rebellion (transgression, penetration into the unknown) to the limit. But the ultimate outcome of that stance (the refusal to accept and affirm limits) ultimately leads nowhere. As Albert Goldman put it: "The flipside of breakthrough is estrangement. Once you've broken away, it's pretty bleak out there. The rebel cuts himself off." Morrison himself expressed regrets that The Doors had never done "a song that's a pure expression of pure unbounded joy... like the coming of spring, or a celebration of existence – a feeling of being totally at home." Instead, he stuck with the ‘dark side’. But as Densmore says: "Look where darkness gets ya!" – the gloom of the tomb.
The Oedipal psychodrama of ‘The End’ still divides opinion, but whether you reckon it an epic or embarrassingly contrived method melodrama, it takes us to the core of Morrison's rebellion. "Kill the father, f*** the mother" was Morrison's catechism. Basically it meant: reject all lawgivers (from the conscience to the State right up to God), accept no limits to desire. But according to Freud, it's the Oedipal complex that makes us human; if you do not go through the Oedipal trauma ie abandon the infant's delusions of omnipotence, you become psychotic. What the edge substances offered Morrison (the extremist art or deranging intoxicants that he indulged in) was a temporary trip into psychosis. And this connected with his ideas about the rock idol as shaman. "Shamans," said Morrison, "are professional hysterics, chosen precisely for their psychotic leaning... heroes who live for us and whom we punish."
*
WHETHER HE GENUINELY HAD such a psychotic leaning, or merely aspired to it, Morrison's behaviour was an amalgam of asshole and visionary. His press officer, Danny Fields, described him as an "adorable monster." His lust to transcend the human condition necessarily meant that he also left behind such prosaic human decencies as punctuality, hygiene, consideration, moderation-in-all-things, and eventually bladder control. All these were the casualties of Morrison's drive to be a poet, rather than simply produce poems.
As for the status-as-poetry of his work, the jury's still out. Some reckon the Doors were best as a pop band – concise, punchy, sexy (‘Hello I Love You’, ‘Light My Fire’). I personally favour the more outrageously pretentious and over-reaching stuff: ‘The Soft Parade’ (nine minutes long, five different sections, intentionally hilarious lyrics like "cobra on my left, leopard on my right") or ‘The Celebration Of The Lizard’ (17-minute song-cycle of mystico-Freudian tosh that still prickles my flesh as it did when I was an impressionable 16-year-old). I can even find some merit in An American Prayer, the poetry album released posthumously, against Jimbo's wishes, with backing supplied by the surviving Doors; an album that is generally regarded as either a calamitous exposure of the singer's poetic pretensions, or as a rape of the poet's original vision.
*
WHICH BRINGS US ROUND to the matter of the current necrophiliac frenzy surrounding the dead Door: what would he have make of it? Yet more of the ghoulish voyeurism that drove him in later years to abuse his audiences and test their passivity to the limit? Vicarious living through someone else's exploits is the name of the game in pop; filtered through the lens of nostalgia, the prospect of real liberation seems remoter than ever. But who knows? Nietzche wrote that the effect of great music should be that "the future digs like a spur into the flesh of every present". Despite all the overkill of the present resurrection, maybe something of Jim Morrison's impossible dreams will abide unscathed and spur us to seize the time, not "waste the dawn".
Simon Reynolds, Melody Maker, 13th April 1991
This year's superstar is a bloated, bearded would-be poet who died 20 years ago. SIMON REYNOLDS investigates the dark influence and deep fascination JIM MORRISON still exercises over rock music today.
It’s almost impossible to have a natural, unforced response to The Doors' music, to hear it clearly through the encrustation of platitudes left by the 20 year criss-cross of mythologisation and debunking. In recent years, the only pop figure to suffer a similar fate of over-analysis is Prince. This probably explains why, in cooler-than-thou circles, it's hip to argue that both Purple Imp and Lizard King are absurdly overrated; nobody likes the taste that clichés leave in the mouth.
Unlike Prince or other over-explicated phenomenons (The Beatles, Stones, Hendrix, Presley), Jim Morrison gave the critics a headstart by providing his own, extremely lucid commentary on what he was trying to do. In The Doors' very first press release, Morrison declared, "I am interested in anything to do with revolt, disorder, chaos, and especially activity that seems to have no meaning". Morrison was remarkably conscious about his quest for unconsciousness, supremely self-possessed in his pursuit of self-loss. Perhaps that's why he drank so much – a crash course in how to ‘learn to forget’, an escape route from self-built cage of having it all worked out in advance.
*
JIM MORRISON WAS the first pop deity to stage-manage his own self-mythologisation, to have a critical understanding of the mythical dimensions of rock 'n' roll. While that newly born species, the rock critic, was making its first stumbling comparisons between pop and Greek tragedy (Richard Meltzer), and its first paeans to the Dionysian madness of pop (Nik Cohn, Lester Bangs), Morrison was already articulating all that in his songs, in his performance, in his life. He was the prototype of the critically-minded rock deviant (Iggy Pop, Nick Cave, Perry Farrell, et al).
Morrison had a voracious appetite for what Meltzer calls "edge substances" (LSD, peyote, amyl nitrate, dope, alcohol). But more important were the cultural edge substances: Artaud's Theatre Of Cruelty; Blake's "doors of perception"; Celine's "journey to the end of the night"; Rimbaud's "sacred disorder of the mind"; Baudelaire's "perpetual drunkenness". From these Romantic and decadent influences Morrison derived the idea of the artist as a "broker in madness", an explorer of the frontier territories of the human condition.
But the most lethal intoxicant that Jim Morrison ever imbibed was the febrile writings of poet-philosopher Friedrich Nietzche. In his memoir Riders On The Storm, Doors drummer John Densmore goes so far as to say "Nietzche killed Morrison". Nietzche's Birth Of Tragedy has been described as "a philosophical road map to The Doors"; from it, Morrison drew the opposition between Apollonian art versus Dionysian art. Apollonian art promotes contemplation, calms the soul and ultimately serves social stability. Dionysian art, named after the god of drunkenness, incites pagan delirium, derangement of the senses, and the volcanic eruption within man of the untamed forces of Nature.
For Morrison, Dionysian music meant pre-castration Presley, the Stones, the blues. Apollonian pop? Well, he died before he could suffer the socially conscientious pop of The Style Council or Sting. But there was a distinctly Apollonian tenor to the counter culture: a longing to return to the garden of paradise, to a lost tranquility and order. As a Dionysian, Morrison believed that nature wasn't benign but the enemy without and within – a wilderness that was both threatening and alluring, offering an "eclipse of the self". As Densmore puts it: "Jim's message was endarkenment", not the enlightenment sought by the Love Generation. The Doors lay somewhere between the black leather nihilism of the Velvet Underground and the kaleidoscopic bliss-out of West Coast psychedelia. It was fitting that their base was Los Angeles, the city whose vibe lay somewhere between San Francisco (idyllic, temperate, perpetual spring) and New York (vibrant, uptempo, nerve-edged). L.A. is as divorced from nature as New York, but less characterful, more phantasmic: city-as-wilderness, whose endless freeways offered a soulless version of the Beatnik dream of travelling but never arriving.
"Our music is like someone not quite at home," Morrison said. The Doors' version of psychedelic experience was one of the estrangement and disorientation (‘Strange Days’), not blissful communion with the cosmos. The Doors' songs did not sound trippy so much as uncanny. The root meaning of ‘uncanny’ is a feeling of not being at home in the world. Freud used "the uncanny" to refer to when an object or person seems to have an abnormal, ominous aura (literally, a shadow cast by the unconscious). Morrison actively sought out this feeling of disorientation, driven by Baudelaire's ‘Great Malady’ ("horror of one's own home"). As with most rebels, he equated domesticity with domestication, and thus castration. Morrison owned nothing and lived nowhere; he lived like a bum and by all accounts stank like one too.
*
MORRISON TOOK THE PHALLIC MODEL of rebellion (transgression, penetration into the unknown) to the limit. But the ultimate outcome of that stance (the refusal to accept and affirm limits) ultimately leads nowhere. As Albert Goldman put it: "The flipside of breakthrough is estrangement. Once you've broken away, it's pretty bleak out there. The rebel cuts himself off." Morrison himself expressed regrets that The Doors had never done "a song that's a pure expression of pure unbounded joy... like the coming of spring, or a celebration of existence – a feeling of being totally at home." Instead, he stuck with the ‘dark side’. But as Densmore says: "Look where darkness gets ya!" – the gloom of the tomb.
The Oedipal psychodrama of ‘The End’ still divides opinion, but whether you reckon it an epic or embarrassingly contrived method melodrama, it takes us to the core of Morrison's rebellion. "Kill the father, f*** the mother" was Morrison's catechism. Basically it meant: reject all lawgivers (from the conscience to the State right up to God), accept no limits to desire. But according to Freud, it's the Oedipal complex that makes us human; if you do not go through the Oedipal trauma ie abandon the infant's delusions of omnipotence, you become psychotic. What the edge substances offered Morrison (the extremist art or deranging intoxicants that he indulged in) was a temporary trip into psychosis. And this connected with his ideas about the rock idol as shaman. "Shamans," said Morrison, "are professional hysterics, chosen precisely for their psychotic leaning... heroes who live for us and whom we punish."
*
WHETHER HE GENUINELY HAD such a psychotic leaning, or merely aspired to it, Morrison's behaviour was an amalgam of asshole and visionary. His press officer, Danny Fields, described him as an "adorable monster." His lust to transcend the human condition necessarily meant that he also left behind such prosaic human decencies as punctuality, hygiene, consideration, moderation-in-all-things, and eventually bladder control. All these were the casualties of Morrison's drive to be a poet, rather than simply produce poems.
As for the status-as-poetry of his work, the jury's still out. Some reckon the Doors were best as a pop band – concise, punchy, sexy (‘Hello I Love You’, ‘Light My Fire’). I personally favour the more outrageously pretentious and over-reaching stuff: ‘The Soft Parade’ (nine minutes long, five different sections, intentionally hilarious lyrics like "cobra on my left, leopard on my right") or ‘The Celebration Of The Lizard’ (17-minute song-cycle of mystico-Freudian tosh that still prickles my flesh as it did when I was an impressionable 16-year-old). I can even find some merit in An American Prayer, the poetry album released posthumously, against Jimbo's wishes, with backing supplied by the surviving Doors; an album that is generally regarded as either a calamitous exposure of the singer's poetic pretensions, or as a rape of the poet's original vision.
*
WHICH BRINGS US ROUND to the matter of the current necrophiliac frenzy surrounding the dead Door: what would he have make of it? Yet more of the ghoulish voyeurism that drove him in later years to abuse his audiences and test their passivity to the limit? Vicarious living through someone else's exploits is the name of the game in pop; filtered through the lens of nostalgia, the prospect of real liberation seems remoter than ever. But who knows? Nietzche wrote that the effect of great music should be that "the future digs like a spur into the flesh of every present". Despite all the overkill of the present resurrection, maybe something of Jim Morrison's impossible dreams will abide unscathed and spur us to seize the time, not "waste the dawn".
Simon Reynolds, Melody Maker, 13th April 1991