Jim Morrison, genius or a madman?

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OrgoneConclusion
Blue Fish Group

Registered: 04/01/07
Posts: 45,441
Loc: Under the C

Jim Morrison, genius or a madman?

#8577423 - 06/29/08 01:57 PM (18 years, 1 month ago)

by Louis McCormick

Jim Morrison was neither a genius nor a madman; He was perfectly sane and perfectly mediocre, just like the rest of us. He was also an icon, which means he was worshiped despite his limitations.

We remember Jim Morrison not because of his music or his poetry, but because he was the perfect cartoon rock star at a seminal moment in the history of rock music. Jim Morrison quite simply had the image to beguile his generation: The good looks (briefly), the surly sneer, the leather pants and the faux-poetic turn of phrase. The girls wanted him (and so, probably, did some of the boys) and the effortlessly shallow Music-Press and Sixties movers and shakers were entranced by the poet, the Lizard King, the tragi-comic sacrificer of self.

But Jim Morrison was a phony; HE knew it and soon WE knew it too. When the outer layer of the Morrison image was peeled away nothing lay underneath. Yet he was lucky, for a while. In the Sixties all that was required to be worshiped as a poet and visionary was a persecution complex and an ability to feed enough fatuous profundity into the teenage mind to ensure some worship in return. The girls lapped it up and Morrison quickly convinced himself he was Percy Shelley in leather. He wasn't, of course; He was a middle-class boy who'd had a comfortable, middle-class upbringing, a boy with no real axe to grind other than the old stock favorite: My parents screwed me up. When Morrison grew bored with his 'teen-idol with attitude' routine he didn't do what any self-respecting poet and visionary would do: Retire to a (comfortable) wilderness in order to commit his genius to print. No, he drank himself into oblivion and got fat. He knew all along he had nothing to give and so he resorted to playing the martyr to disguise his inadequacies. Jim Morrison's ultimate gesture of counter-culture defiance was to expose himself in public. His sole gesture towards Art was to die in a bath. It was a sad demise but hardly a radical one.

To be fair to The Doors, their first two albums were good without being remarkable. Their sound was pleasant, though it was little different from the typical Pop orientated Garage-Psychedelia of the period. 'Light my Fire' was certainly a classic pop song but 'The End' could have been written by any self-obsessed teen contemplating suicide but deciding to go shopping with her pals instead. Morrison's allusion to Bertolt Brecht in the first album is no more than an attempt to impress, much in the same way that young girls habitually drop the name of Jean-Paul Sartre despite (wisely) never having read a word he wrote. Jim Morrison never could be bothered to find his own voice, and that betrays a stunning lack of imagination for someone who considered himself a poet and who had an audience ready and willing to listen to him.

When we think now of Jim Morrison we cannot help but see a man haunted by his own mediocrity. He wanted to be significant but he was too lazy and self-pitying to make anything of himself. For a while he bathed in adulation but then he sank into himself; He became a man content to wallow in bullshit. Perhaps he secretly held the whole business of fame and adulation in contempt; He wouldn't have been the first. Whatever his problem or his torment he was predictable in his final movements. Where do artists go to die? Paris of course. And where do artists who go to Paris to die get buried? Pere Lachaise Cemetery of course... the last resting place of Delacroix, Balzac, Chopin, Moliere, Oscar Wilde and... and who? Jim Morrison, that's who. No doubt the Lizard King was having the last laugh.

My question would be why do we worship someone simply for becoming famous. Do we worship the world's best electrician? No, because we never heard of him and are not moved emotionally by his precise and very necessary work. But a musician, in the right place and time is somehow extra special.

Put someone's name in the press and repeat if often enough, and he or she acquires demi-god status.

If they die young enough: Dean, Monroe, Kennedy, Morrison, Joplin, Elvis, Colbain, etc., then they are elevated to near-mythical status. The younger they go, the more powerful is their legend. It could be put in a mathematical formula.

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