{"id":38,"date":"2007-03-28T20:24:30","date_gmt":"2007-03-28T19:24:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/?p=38"},"modified":"2024-07-04T09:33:09","modified_gmt":"2024-07-04T15:33:09","slug":"when-the-musics-overlyrics-aint-poems","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/when-the-musics-overlyrics-aint-poems\/","title":{"rendered":"When The Music’s Over…lyrics ain’t poems"},"content":{"rendered":"

I just finished reading Danny Sugarman’s biography of Jim Morrisson, No-One Here Gets Out Alive<\/em>.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s quite a few years old, but Jim’s been dead since before the book was written (even so, this is the second edition), so I reasoned that I probably wasn’t missing much.<\/p>\n

I enjoy reading biographies and autobiographies of the artists I like – I find it gives me a better insight into their work, and I enjoy the music more as a result.\u00c2\u00a0 But with this book, although I still enjoyed reading it, I wish I hadn’t read it at all, because I came away from it with a new opinion of one of the World’s first ‘rock stars’:\u00c2\u00a0 What a wanker<\/em>!<\/p>\n

Sure, the Doors were an excellent band.\u00c2\u00a0 Certainly the music was incendiary, and undoubtedly Morrisson\u00c2\u00a0was a perfect front-man.\u00c2\u00a0 But his ego was simply unbelievable.\u00c2\u00a0 Off the scale.<\/p>\n

He was also a complete bastard to women, treating them with either brutal contempt, or withering indifference.\u00c2\u00a0 This is pretty unacceptable in any sphere of life,\u00c2\u00a0 but from someone who posited themselves as being more sensitive and artistic than most, it is unforgivable.<\/p>\n

My main beef, though, is with his ‘poetry’.\u00c2\u00a0 As a lyricist he was\u00c2\u00a0OK – he had a nice eye for symbolism and imagery, and could certainly string words together quite impressively.\u00c2\u00a0 But lyrics and poems aren’t the same thing, as his truly amateur books The Lords<\/em> and The New Creatures<\/em> illustrate perfectly.\u00c2\u00a0 \u00c2\u00a0Much of his poetry was little better than the average sixth-form homework assignment, and some\u00c2\u00a0of it is cringingly bad.\u00c2\u00a0 Yet he still had the front to\u00c2\u00a0have them (originally) privately published [Warning!\u00c2\u00a0if you have to pay to get your own work published, it’s probably not really that good], <\/em>lavishly bound in silk, and then presented to his ‘friends’ as gifts.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 Pretentious, moi<\/em>?<\/p>\n

Unfortunately this re-examination of his poetry, and a deeper understanding of his motivation and mindset, has colored my jusgement of his lyrics.\u00c2\u00a0 Where I used to see them as powerful verbalizations of his thoughts, now I can’t see them as anything but pretentious attempts at ‘meaningful’ poetry.\u00c2\u00a0 Consequently, I haven’t listened to anything by the Doors since I put down Sugerman’s book.\u00c2\u00a0 Which is a shame, as all of their albums have just been re-mastered and re-released (again), and are also available on iTunes for the first time, making them prime for reinvestigation.<\/p>\n

I’m just about to embark on another Dylan biog.\u00c2\u00a0 I just hope that doesn’t hit me the same way.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I just finished reading Danny Sugarman’s biography of Jim Morrisson, No-One Here Gets Out Alive.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s quite a few years old, but Jim’s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[43,42],"class_list":["post-38","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-music","tag-books","tag-music-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1747,"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38\/revisions\/1747"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=38"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=38"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}