Reflections on Kool Keith's 'Matthew'

            We are nearing on fifteen years since this landmark album was released by the greatest poet in the history of the English language. Although, in true chameleon style, Keith’s image was suddenly harder, in line with the times, the meditations he developed in verse form were as untimely as Nietzsche’s reflections amid academic impotence and rampant German Nationalism. Moreover, the musical substance of most of these tracks signifies a potential new genre of music, something the people of this country (and the world) are in desperate need of right now, whether they know it or not, and something which, if history has any say in the matter, can only be developed by the African American community.

            Well then! A brief sketch, by way of background. Keith grew up in the Bronx, at the inception of Hip-Hop, the last American art form, whose roots were imported from Jamaica by Kool Herc, but whose initial musical form drew from popular records of the day, incorporating funk, soul, rock, jazz and other genres in a truly American, truly democratic innovation. Apparently Keith’s early involvement in the hip-hop culture consisted primarily of breakdancing, a skill he must have excelled at, ultimately performing on television as a youth in front of Ronald Reagan. But Keith’s initial foray into the rap market would be with Bronx-based Ultramagnetic MC’s, one of the most talented groups of that time and space, along with Boogie Down Productions and Eric B & Rakim. With the timbre of puberty still in his voice, Keith dropped lyrics that were already leagues ahead of most other rappers.

                 They use a simple back-and-forth, the same old rhythm

                 that a baby can pick up, and join right with ‘em

                 but their rhymes are pathetic, they think they copacetic,

                 using nursery terms, at least not poetic

                 on an educated base, intelligent, wise;

                 as the record just turn, you learn, plus burn

                 by the flame of the lyrics, which cooks the human brain

                 providing overheating knowledge, by means causing pain

                                                              -‘Ego Trippin’, 1986

            Keith rose to stardom briefly in the 90’s under the Dr. Octagon moniker, and then, as Kool Keith, with Sex Style and Black Elvis/Lost in Space; all three albums landed videos on MTV, showcasing Keith’s bizarre personas which somewhat shadowed his lyrical deftness. Much of his greatest work, including Sex Style, has been in collaboration with producer Kutmasta Kurt; on Lost in Space Keith produces his own music, playing guitar, bass and keyboards with a deep funk influence. The music is going in a new direction, stylistically; it is both funky and psychedelic and would serve as a blueprint for Outkast when ‘Andre 3000’ (a name derived from a song on the Dr. Octagon album) proceeded to plagiarize just one of Keith’s many personalities. It had been almost three decades since the influence of LSD was so prominent in the work of a major artist, and by bringing the sounds of black reality along for the trip, rather than just “sitting in an English garden, waiting for the sun,”  Keith did indeed seem to be on to something new. Keith was a huge Zapp fan and even got Roger Troutman to sing on ‘Master of the Game’ before his tragic and untimely death. It is a shame this development was not taken further, as commercial rap music was already being used to portray certain stereotypes of black culture, and was at the time becoming sickeningly materialistic, contributing to a total collapse of the music industry at the beginning of the millennium. Keith, however, is not one to be bound by fashions, even if they be fashions of his own devise. He was ready almost instantaneously to move on, in a radical departure from anything that had been heard in the history of commercially recorded music.

            Kool Keith was under tremendous internal pressure to create this record, dealing with the recordings being leaked as he made them. This, along with the standard ignorance of how to handle an artist of this caliber by his record-label, led to a great deal of frustration, which may have influenced the final results (listen to the hidden track White Label Test Press.) In any case, the album itself is incredibly aggressive, opening with the intro, “F-U M.F.”, an easily decipherable acronym directed plainly at other rappers in the industry who inevitably could never stack up to Keith. This flows seamlessly into the street-hard “27 Shots,” in which Keith’s anger, now seething, will not be satiated except by his ingenious lyrics.

            After a brief skit (“Errand Boy”,) the album, with all its musical and lyrical ingenuity, begins in earnest. The track “Operation Extortion” features a haunting keyboard melody that sounds like a synthesized approximation of somebody plucking the higher strings of a piano with their teeth. Underneath is a hard drum beat, harder than anything he’d done aside from Sex Style. “Baddest M.C.”, an epithet that honestly can’t be denied, has Keith displaying the validity of his claim over a funky, futuristic beat with lines like:

Other rappers standin around, jealous lookin broke
Need to be in double dutch, jumpin rope

…..

Fascinatin with the quickness
I make models come to public housing and visit
That's how technical I get exquisite
Bangin on pipes
Lookin at cops walkin up the stairs with flashlights
Most MC's wearin leg-warmers and tights

….

Jump around you gonna need a napkin and a tissue

When I gross up the max you count the issue
Buy The Source cover for twelve months
And send other rappers over to pose
And take pictures for some potato chips and Cap'n Crunch
That's how I take suckers out to lunch
Forget the internet, the website, that's no way to step right
I ain't sittin by no computer, I'm goin to Bermuda

                                                -genius.com

            …and then, my personal favorite, “Extravagant Traveller.” The synth-bass-line comes on, in what I can only describe as “percussively staccato”; it is a futuristic update on the tribal rhythms brought here from Africa, the way rhythm can speak, not merely keeping tempo but actually communicating, telling a story, interweaving with the programmed drums and Keith’s casual, laid-back flow so perfectly that I am at a loss to describe, so go do yourself a favor and listen to it!

            Another skit follows, the hilarious “Recoupment”, in which Keith, portraying a record-label executive, lets some would-be rappers know that, although his company had spent a lot of money marketing and promoting them, and had “rented a lot of anorexic girls to grab you guys and make you look very macho,” they were unable to pay the group, and suggested they keep their jobs at 7-11. Obviously this is how Keith felt about most rappers in the business, whether they were making money or not. The skit segues into “I Don’t Believe You”, in which Keith develops the theme of a broke-ass wannabe rapper employed by the convenience store chain and idly boasting of his numerous exploits, which range from “you got mad guns” to “you got your kids a gift”, all of which are met by Keith’s response, the track’s title, “I don’t believe you.” This song is also noteworthy lyrically in that Keith exploits a novel poetic device, rather than adhering to the standard “AABB” rhyme scheme that most rap confines itself to. Of course, when Keith rhymes, he is often using cross-rhymes, or sustaining a sonance, then seemingly dropping it, only to bring it back at the end of a complicated clause. But in this case, Keith displays his true avant-garde poeticism in a hymn of contempt for all who would feign greatness without honing their skills or possessing any substance of which to speak.

            Side One closes with “Lived in the Projects,” another diatribe against the false claims of weak rappers, so prevalent at the time. Along with the impulse to fake riches and wealth, there was a strong trend to exaggerate or invent stories of poverty and violence, to make the rapper’s image appear more authentic. In fact, Keith actually grew up in the projects, and took offence to the ridiculous posturing of soft, middle-class rhymers who attempted to project a more hard-core image to their middle-class audience on MTV, and garner undeserved credibility on the streets.

            Next up is “Keith N Bumpy,” which features a relaxed beat, counterpoised by aggressively violent and threatening lyrics on Keith’s part, and the refrain, “Ya’ll do your shit in the studio, we bring our shit to your face.” Bumpy Knuckles jumps on for the second verse, and although the cadence of his flow keeps the groove moving forward, with eerie synth basslines creeping occasionally underneath, as usual Keith’s generous spirit in allowing his friends and colleagues to share the mic leads to some of the weakest lyrics on the whole album. There are a few great rappers who have added depth and brilliance to Keith’s songs when they joined him, namely Motion Man and Sir Menelik. Some, like Jacky Jasper, have even spun off as satellites of Keith and attempted to develop a career of their own by attacking Keith’s brilliance and biting the hand that taught them how to eat.

            “Shoes N Suits” is another beat of paranoid, conspiratorial ambience that shows a development from what Keith was doing on the title tracks of his Black Elvis and Dr. Dooom records. Amidst tales of violence and FBI probes, Keith’s proverbial court defendant keeps it real:

          
    Narrator of a true story; to write something fake would bore me.

    I baby-sit three kids, you guys acts like ya’ll never saw me.

and further shows his development as a poet, beyond the early-day toasting of “my name is Jay and I’m here to say” by rhyming ‘bore me’ and ‘saw me’.

            One of the most unique beats is that of “Diamonds.” If “Extravagant Traveller” was percussively staccato, “Diamonds” is perhaps the funkiest legato of any riff I’ve ever heard. Although Keith sought for hip-hop to move beyond the musical confines (and cultural regurgitation) of old jazz loops, his musical innovation, on this album specifically, can truly be seen as a development of jazz; and although he forsakes the sound of a big-band or its modern equivalent of heavily orchestrated rap tracks, and, on this album as he achieves his maturity and apotheosis, extemporaneous expression (“I don’t rap freestyle no more, stopped smoking angel dust,”) both characteristic of jazz music, he nonetheless has taken modalism, which Miles Davis incorporated from the inspiration of watching an African dance performance into the fabric of the most successful jazz of the middle-twentieth-century, to its logical conclusion; on “Extravagant Traveller,” for example, stripping the minor blues scale to its bare minimum in a sub-modal riff focusing on the root, octave, and fifth-descending-to-diminished-fifth (like Black Sabbath on their eponymous song.) The beat on “Diamonds,” specifically, suggests the sound of the vibraphone. How Keith achieved the timbres on these tunes, presumably through commercial-use analog oscillators, remains a mystery to me.

            “Sweet Unique Pete” features Black Silver, whose verse, while not breathtaking, especially in contrast to Keith’s timeless rhymes on this album, is much better than Bumpy’s lyrics on the earlier track. The beat itself keeps up the dark, funky mood that permeates this record overall, and has Keith dropping contemptuous taunts to any would-be challenger, such as:

            My temperature’s 1003, look at these 
            big-head kids on labels tryin’ to MC…

            ….I saw you on the Greyhound bus station floor,

            Layin’ down with a do-rag on like a circus clown.

           

            The final skit of the album segues into “Backstage Passes,” with an aura of mystery in the beat that emphasizes Keith’s own mystique to star-struck fans, in this case an amateur female journalist who wants to get in bed with Keith so she can have something to share with her lame friends. The song deals with the absurdity of fame in general, in a much more real way than perhaps any rock star (and this is what Keith is) hitherto.

            The album’s outro, “Mad Man Departure,” is perhaps the hardest, most vitriolic track of all time. The musical devices and theme persist in their assault on the rap industry, and Keith lets ‘em know that,

                 You been rappin’ for 20,000 years and you ain’t

                 got your fuckin’ deal yet…the fuck, don’t take

                 your problems out on me…

                 motherfucker I’ll pull your face off your body,               
                 show you what the fuck you look like,

                ‘cause you keep it real, too real, motherfuckin’ broke,

                 2001, nobody was sayin’ that shit when I was payin’

                 for them fuckin’ hot wings…
                 hope you burn your fuckin’ lips.

It has been exactly 14 years since I was rockin’ this cassette tape on my Walkman on the wildest New Year’s Eve of my life…I sincerely hope I can steer at least one new fan onto this, perhaps the highest achievement of Western musical poetry to have been ever produced.

12/31/14

@dGabeEvau 

Jim Morrison: Philosopher-King

Styles change, rockstars come and go. Values parade down the runway of society, flattering the puppetmasters as the people stare transfixed at shadows on the wall of some dim cave, flickering televised images which burn their propaganda into weary eyes. American Idolatry has replaced the once mighty cult of personality that inspired a rebel generation and turned the world on for three decades. Right in the middle of it all, James Douglas Morrison appeared and stood out briefly, a piece of cosmic fire burning through our thinning atmosphere in the darkening twilight, casting shadows of silence upon the echoing green. No longer were sung the songs of innocence.

“You see, the birth of rock and roll coincided with my adolescence, my coming into awareness.”

Young people all over the English-speaking world were becoming intoxicated by the wild panpipes of this Black American music, as the Bacchants in ancient Greece were carried away by the Dionysian frenzy spreading out of Asia Minor.  Film stars like James Dean and Marlon Brando offered a new aesthetic of cool, no longer the stoic professionalism of Humphrey Bogart but instead a hot-headed and righteous martyrdom of the individual for whatever pathos or political stance presented itself in the swirling milieu of a society whose tide, for a moment at least, seemed to be turning. It was the medium of cinema that brought the late Jim Morrison and Ray Manczarek together in the mid-60’s, while studying film at UCLA.

This past Monday would have been Jim’s 71^st birthday, yet the singer has been gone for over 43 years, leaving a yawning chasm in his wake for all of us. What might have been is not a subject we philosophers take seriously, as reality gives us every cause to be filled with a sense of wonder. What he left us, at the price of his own sanity and blood, is a legacy whose surface has merely been scratched. The higher man’s very existence justifies itself, but still there is much we can learn from him, which may prove to be of benefit, and pave the way for the future of culture. Jim wanted for us, above all, to be free. Freedom is not a bourgeois luxury but a terrible burden. And yet, as the teleological arrogance of Man would have it, freedom is the goal to which all of evolution has been driving, ever since some singularity in the fabric of space exhaled the Heraclitean fire of which we all are composed.

As the father of three sons myself, I know how difficult it is to deal with this raw masculine energy, the impulse to freedom which has not learned measure or restraint and knows of no bounds save the direction of its own superabundance. Being the son of a Navy Admiral during a time when American values were seemingly etched in tablets of stone, the tension pulled Morrison taut as a bowstring ready to release its arrow at the mark. Luckily, his keen eye had taken aim, guided and reassured by his incessant consumption of literature, poetry and philosophy. The model of Arthur Rimbaud resonated in the young poet’s fragile, eggshell mind, as it was still incubating and waiting to hatch. As he came of age, Jim would take up Rimbaud’s challenge to undergo “a prolonged derangement of the senses to achieve the unknown.” This was becoming more commonplace, as young people were imbibing marijuana and ingesting lysergic acids like the latest spring fashion. Jim went further, also smoking jimson weed and, according to myth, searching the desert for peyote, only to get beat up by a Mexican gang.

After graduation, Jim’s use of LSD picked up, inspiring the poet to compose his first rock songs, some of which would be on The Doors’ early records. The band was formed shortly thereafter when Jim ran into his fellow graduate Ray Manczarek on the sands of Venice Beach. After an early incarnation that included Manczarek’s brothers, the band’s lineup solidified with the addition of flamenco guitarist Robby Krieger and jazz drummer John Densmore. These two shared an interest in transcendental meditation with Ray, attending classes by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Jim, meanwhile, maintained his interest in transcendental medication as his acid use continued, not having much use for the Eastern esoterism that was sweeping the counterculture, although he did attend one class and composed the song ‘Take it as it Comes’ for Maharishi. This was all before The Beatles first took acid or studied under Maharishi.

The group put in two years of hard work, practicing daily at the beachfront house Ray shared with his wife Dorothy (and, for a time, Jim,) building their repertoire on the club scene in LA and promoting their demos to record executives until finally, due not only to Morrison’s poetry but also Krieger’s incredible songwriting (which Jim encouraged,) they all of a sudden found themselves on top of the world during the Summer of Love. Already along the way Jim had broken virtually every rule a popular singer was supposed to follow, culminating in an extended performance of ‘The End’ during which the singer, high on the equivalent of 100 modern-day doses of acid, gave visceral expression to the Freudian ‘Oedipal Complex’ and lost the band a job, thereby gaining a career.

Well then! What more to say on the band’s legacy; let us instead explore the deeper implications of what Jim was trying to say, and what he was saying to try. We have said that freedom is the highest goal of the philosopher, for wisdom is freedom not merely from material constraints (a prerequisite nonetheless for extended intellectual pursuit) but also from all fetters of the mind, all societal conventions which seem put in place to simplify and unify man’s existence, yet serve actually to squander our spiritual reserve on a thousand petty concerns which are of no true relevance to our inner selves. The Apollonian illusions of white society through the 50’s, transcribed in the popular songs of the time, were ill-prepared against the sudden onslaught of maenadic revelry and political protest; how much more dangerous was the wisdom of wild Silenus to the avaricious monarchs of our age? For at worst, early rock and roll had questioned the solidity of sexual mores and race relations, and the first half of the sixties only offered a protest against militarism and oppression, voicing the agenda of a political party. The true philosopher, rather, is party to none, and when it becomes evident that he holds as great disdain for bleeding-heart liberalism as he does for tight-fisted conservatism, he surely has no value to the Corporate States of America, for he has no use to which to be put. If all the young people had burned their draft cards, if all had joined in some such march, or voted for a certain bill, it would have only proved how easily they could be led, and the rulers, if wise, would have found a way to co-opt and subvert such dissidence into a new conformity; which in fact has occurred, a plain fact to the open-eyed. In Friedrich Nietzsche’s “Arthur Schopenhauer as Educator” the true philosopher is painted as being antagonistic to the interests of the state; for this purpose, the state has elected false philosophers to instruct the youth with false wisdom, programming their eager minds with doctrine beneficial to her interests. It will take another piece of writing to examine, at length, how the powers-that-be have indeed reduced the fearsome powers of rock music, and all popular music, to a feeble, anorexic seductress of mass consciousness in order to curtail the possibility of true intellectual freedom, and above all, to “Sell, sell, sell!” For two decades, however, Jim’s model was an example to punk, hard rock, heavy metal, and perhaps even hip-hop, as dangerous minds were able to gain wide popularity and use their voice to utter forbidden truths and question established values. All this, of course, has its downside, and the corporate state has learned to profit from what threatened to do it harm, throwing out the baby while retaining the tepid bathwater.

But no one did it like Jim. In “The Pre-Platonic Philosophers,” originally a lecture series by then-university-professor Friedrich Nietzsche, the great philosophers of ancient Greece through Socrates are painted as ‘pure’ philosophical types, whereas Plato and all who follow him are ‘mixed types,’ meaning that they present nothing essentially new in their thought or character but merely build upon and synthesize the ideas of the older, pure philosophers. Nietzsche would remain ambiguous throughout his literary career as to his own philosophical ‘type’’; certainly he boasts of many advancements that he proudly claims to be of himself and no-one else, above all a panoramic perspective of morality as something not fixed but constantly shifting in mankind’s ceaseless exercise of its will to power, with words and values pasted over each other as rulers and thinkers see fit. At the same time, many of Nietzsche’s ideas can be traced back to these same pre-Platonic philosophers, whom he admired so greatly, especially Heraclitus, while Nietzsche’s own philosophical attitude of questioning can be compared to the skeptical Socrates, whom the philosopher frequently derided. We are left with the same uncertainty in defining Jim Morrison, and certainly nothing is more difficult than giving definition to a man whose brief life was so sharply kinetic and transformative, despite (or rather because of) his deeply contemplative nature. Now that we have set out, however, let us not stray from our task.

Examining the record: Jim Morrison left us various writings, in the form of poems, notebooks, brief screenplay-sketches and philosophical musings. From his writings and interviews we have a rich catalogue of quotes, many of them self-contained aphorisms in the tradition of Proverbs, Heraclitus, Lao-Tzu and Jim’s own favorite aphorist, William Blake. (There are also several quotes attributed falsely to Jim, concocted by Oliver Stone for his cinematic version of Morrison, portrayed by Val Kilmer in the film. As with virtually all of Stone’s work, these reflect the filmmaker’s own philosophy more than the film’s subject, although this is not necessarily to the director’s discredit.)

Of course, what Jim is known best for are his songs (as well as Robbie’s songs, which he sang himself and therefore is probably assumed by most listeners to have written.) ‘Break on Through (to the Other Side)’ is a tour-de-force of Heraclitean fragments set against a bossa-nova/Ray Charles fusion groove. This world is, for us as mortal beings, a seeming contradiction of opposites: day and night, pleasure and sorrow, accumulation and dissipation; yet these seeming opposites spring from the same source, and we have no recourse but to pass constantly from one state to another, as water from the sea turns to vapor and clouds, which then become water again and causes plants to grow, eaten by animals who will die and return to the Earth.

This song opens The Doors’ first, eponymous album; the record concludes with ‘The End.’ We have already touched on the introduction of the Oedipal theme in performance of this song, which developed from an embryonic break-up, an ode and lament, perhaps to a high-school girlfriend of Jim’s who broke his heart, questioned his manhood for expressing his pain in tears and led to his destruction of all his written poetry up to that point (as Plato had destroyed his own poems in order to become the philosopher that Socrates wanted him to be. Perhaps this is why Plato was not himself a pure type, as he allowed his mentor to dictate his early beliefs to a too-great extent; perhaps this is also what led a highly impressionable Nietzsche astray in the form of Schopenhauer and Wagner.) (A great many perhapses.) By the time of these recordings, ‘The End’ had become a forum for Jim’s poetic improvisation, and on the album version focused on the overall confusion and violence of our times, reflecting the eternal human condition, whose loftiest and most noble ideas and institutions have evolved from a substratum of cruelty and vigorous suppression. The climax comes when Jim confronts Man’s archetypal parents, threatening parricide and incest, and chants the word ‘fuck’ as a percussive instrument while Robbie performs the most impassioned use of Indian raga within the context of rock music up to that point. (In the originally issued recording, Jim’s profanity is turned way down in the mix, but Francis Ford Coppola, in his own Heraclitean/Nietzschean epic exploration of ethics and philosophy in the context of the Vietnam conflict, ‘Apocalypse Now,’ brings the word back up to audibility and reclaims the powerful statement Jim was making, that this world of suffering and futility of which the Ecclesiast despaired is ultimately redeemed by sex and death.) After recording this masterpiece of a song, perhaps the most chilling performance in a recording studio ever made, Jim continued to repeat, “Kill the father, fuck the mother,” obsessively, offering the explanation that ‘the father’ represented those repressive institutions of society which must be successively overturned by the new generation, and ‘the mother’ represented our own nature as children of the Earth, and the necessity of our commitment to passionately pursue our own biological and emotional selves, rather than follow the strict patriarchal authority that his own father embodied as a military officer, at a time when global conflict and militarization were deeply disconcerting to many young people in the counterculture, as well as a growing tide within the mainstream liberal community itself. To Jim, there was no separation between the internal and the external aside from the thin veil of consciousness and our own epidermis; there was no performance, only reality. He would often sit in despondent contemplation long after the music was over, lamenting the fact that probably no one really got what he was trying to say, what same pessimism I try to suppress as I develop this exposition.

“I like any reaction I can get with my music. Just anything to get people to think. I mean if you can get a whole room full of drunk, stoned people to actually wake up and think, you’re doing something.”

 

Afterword Jim, high on acid, typically, returned to the empty recording studio, which he believed to be on fire, and ‘rescued’ the facilities from the blazing inferno which surrounded him. The fire turned out to be a small red light from a recording console or perhaps an ‘EXIT’ sign, and rather than prevent, he actually caused irreparable damage to the instruments and recording equipment, although the masters were safe and have since found their way into our hearts and livingrooms. Jim’s responsibility for the incident could perhaps have been denied had the singer’s shoe not gotten stuck while scaling a fence to flee the scene of his heroic deed.

Just as Jim reminds us that we cannot have day without night, it is wrong to attempt to separate the man and his work from his supposed ‘shortcomings’ in order to redeem his image in our own eyes, as if modern man has the right to judge something so alien to itself as genius. Jim Morrison is probably known best of all for his drug use and erratic behavior. While experimentation with psychoactive substances and rebellion against authority were both commonplace during the 1960’s, we cannot write off Jim’s enthusiastic prodigality as a mere sign-o’-the-times. A psychologist would point to his childhood, and, following Freud and Jim’s own extrapolation, trace all this ‘misbehavior’ to a resentment against parental authority. Oliver Stone certainly attempted to do so (which should only give signs as to his own childhood.)

“When you make peace with authority, you become an authority.”

Clearly Jim was fascinated by ideas of control and revolt. He provoked the police, he provoked his audience, experimenting with calculated incitement to riot. He provoked his band; he provoked his lovers. Before the band had broken big, drummer John Densmore came to pick Jim up from a girl’s house one day…and found him standing in front of the young woman, with a knife to her throat. “That’s when,” John recounted years later in his memoir, ‘Riders on the Storm’, “I realized our lead singer was psychotic.” We might now say ‘manic-depressive’ in place of ‘psychotic’, but this too is a misunderstanding of a certain psychological predisposition to extreme heights and depths of emotion which seep into daily life, sharpening and altering behavior in a way that is not safe and predictable to a civilized society, which must above all tame and domesticate the human animal as a puppy is housebroken. ‘Mania’ is a false term for power, misdirected by societal restrictions against the individual and his own interest, rather than allowing its fruit to blossom as it sometimes does, to produce among the most profound artistic accomplishments of human history, as well as advancing the individual or his cause with seemingly boundless energy in the military, political sphere, or even just his day-to-day activities such as work and feeding his family, doing the dishes, and writing long paragraphs with the desperate desire that they find readers who may be excited to an equivalent level of vibrational energy in order to grasp the rushing waters of his thought.

Jim’s drug use was an extension of the same impulse that stirred him to create. There has been much speculation as to whether creativity necessitates ‘mental illness’ and ‘substance abuse’ (as they are known to the vulgar) or vice versa, but the truth is that they both flow from an overabundance of energy, something which is condemned in our society unless it can be put to some highly specialized (and therefore innocuous) use. Now, there is great variation in the species of drug used, the methodology, dosing, and all other particulars involved, especially when we are discussing an inspired genius. For drugs themselves do inspire, as has been the case since before recorded history, and according to a few 20^th century scholars, is responsible for the development of much of our religious institutions (and, by the late Terrence McKenna, human consciousness itself.) They can both expand and collapse our sense of ego, which is of prime significance to the poet and dramatist, as has been sketched out by Nietzsche in ‘The Birth of Tragedy’. Jim’s downfall, however, came in large part from his growing reliance on alcohol, which mitigated his anxiety over excessive fame, being misunderstood by the world, and the looming charges for obscenity at the infamous Miami concert. Ultimately, however, by its toxic nature alcohol only contributed to anxiety and, in the end, his death.

What have we, in the final analysis, to learn from all this? That freedom is a two-edged sword; that we don’t really want freedom, but a shiny new prison. The liberties we embrace are in fact arbitrary and extravagant, and Jim himself was not immune to these indulgences. The paradox is one that must confront us, at the deepest level of our being. The freedom in sexual politics, for example, proved to be misgiven, as it led to an increase in sexually transmitted infection, including later the HIV virus, which has devastated the lives of countless individuals and families across the country and indeed the world; it has led, furthermore, to a self-indulgent zeitgeist where pornography is proliferated and women are bound to a social restraint unprecedented in the history of the so-called patriarchy over which the same liberal forces have won so much ground for women’s supposed liberation. In fact, we are all quite less free, to think and be our true selves, correspondingly as we see an increase in our right to arbitrary acts prescribed by a spectral elite of mind-control doctors, all of whom are well aware of the implications that have been raised by such freedom fighters as Jim Morrison and have done a commendable job at co-opting and subverting the truths unearthed to more dubious ends than could previously have been imagined.

“The most important kind of freedom is to be what you really are. You trade in your reality for a role. You trade in your sense for an act. You give up your ability to feel, and in exchange, put on a mask. There can't be any large-scale revolution until there's a personal revolution, on an individual level. It's got to happen inside first. You can take away a man's political freedom and you won't hurt him- unless you take away his freedom to feel. That can destroy him. That kind of freedom can't be granted. Nobody can win it for you.”

Suggested reading:

Friedrich Nietzsche-

            The Birth of Tragedy

            The Pre-Platonic Philosophers

            The Untimely Meditations (specifically, ‘Schopenhauer as Educator’)

Ray Manzarek- (I have retained the original spelling of his name in the body of this essay; Ray dropped the ‘c’ when he became an entertainer to distance himself from his Polish heritage, as many celebrities of various background have been forced to do by our Anglophiliac society, and kept this spelling for this autobiographical publication)

            Light My Fire

Heraclitus-

            Fragments

Jim Morrison-

            The Lords

            Wilderness

and by the author (dGabe Evau)-

             Opening the Doors to the New Aesthetic in Music