the hardcore continuum

+ I suppose it relates to this Doors thing in the sense that like I said above, they are done no favors by the last half-century of post-Morrison legacy

if he'd lived + they'd kept on making shitty records they'd possibly be just another irritating boomer icon, not the peak of insufferability, shorthand for the dark side f the Summer of Love

teenagers visiting the grave -> posters on the dorm room walls of college bros -> etc

luka said:

jim morrison is centre stage but the poetry isnt

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lol come off it man

you know we're not talking about his singing loverwhelming the songs. his dumb lyrics are The Doors. They're the mystique. They're the cult. They're the essence.

feel like we've touched a nerve here where luka just can't admit he's defending a terrible, terrible poet

tbh I kinda think maybe we should just move on

tbf to Jim Morrison, it's very hard to make art so bad that people are still discussing it half a century after your death. that's an achievement (I'm dead serious).

but the lyrics arent the thing though. theyre just a layer. it's the way the songs are structured for the most part. have a listen, check em out man.

great keyboard parts too.

I know the meta/trolling/irony line is always kinda hazy - one of the reasons I like you man - but surely we've crossed it here

say something interesting about hardcore then lol

version said:

Varg did it best

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sure, sometimes the misunderstanding of misunderstanding ultra-serious 3rd+ generation version is the best version. it varies thing by thing.

goth, knowing camp is a necessary element. black metal, the kvlt trv grimness somehow tapped into some vast power. guitar music with all the black elements stripped out.

shame about the racism etc, but much like Jim Morrison, it is an inseparable element of the whole vibe

luka said:

say something interesting about hardcore then lol

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did u know Arthur Baker once produced an awesome stompy warehouse rave techno record? discuss

also just tbc on that other thing, A Blaze In the Northern Sky/Under a Funeral Moon/Transilvanian Hunger is a great trilogy of records

it's good that Fenriz is a cool guy who has since repudiated the dumb Norsk Arisk thing, but it's not surprising Darkthrone did their best work when they were the most trv kvlt seroius

luka said:

say something interesting about hardcore then lol

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we've just reached an impasse where you're telling me to go listen to Doors records that I have heard 1000 times since childhood

I'd probably agree to listen to the whole Doors discography for idk, $2000? I'd have to work it out what it come to hourly

the lyrics to "LA Woman" are great!

what's not to like?

"I see your hair is burning"

He's driving around, and one of the hills here has got a brush fire. That actually happens. I've driven on a freeway past an area of wilderness right near downtown - the bits with the skyscrapers and spaghetti junction style freeway intersections - and there's been helicopters dropping water on a blaze that the steady stream of traffic is going right past. it's part of the everyday strangeness of LA - the fact that a metropolis was built in this unsuitable desert location. Fires, mudslides, droughts, etc

most of his lyrics are pretty direct, easily comprehensible even when waxing mystical - "learn to forget" , "write in secret alphabets", etc etc

a rock vernacular translation of basic attitudes out of Romanticism, Beats etc

re. rock lyrics as poetry thing - it's a fairly basic idea that most rock lyrics are meant to signify in the context of vocal delivery and the music - you put them on the printed page, they don't look as impressive as when sounded and when in the whirl and drive of the music. you can do that to almost any rock group - from the Stones, Lennon, Led Zep to well nearly of them really - Costello, Morrissey for sure. When you take it away from the voice it was written for, put it on the paper page, it's depleted significantly.

(Rap is the ultimate example of that, it almost always looks dead laid on the page (or online) without the stresses and intonation and barely describable nuances of inflection, the words are inseparable from the flow and the vocal personality)

i'm not a poetry buff - love a few things like Gerard Manley Hopkins to distraction, Emily Dickinson if i have a critic to hold my hand and patiently guide me through a poem, the obvious middlebrow classics, etc - so rock lyrics's shortfall c.f state of art versification is not really an issue for me. I'm sure it's doggerel in comparison. But it's an irrelevant standard by which to judge. I don't know why people publish books of 'collected lyrics', who on earth would actually sit there reading them?

That said I am SUCH a Doors fan that I even love the posthumous poetry LP An American Prayer that was done 40 years ago as it happens - Morrison's pomes + slick, funk-Muzak backings from Manzarek / Krieger / Densmore

not my favorite rock group but definitely in the Top 10

"if only Jim Morrison had been more like Andrew Eldritch"

Always a little amazed when people seem to suggest that Jim Morrison was unaware of his own ridiculousness. i think he reveled in it, plunged into it - pushed right through it.

All performance is an absurd exhibition.

What a grotesque, unseemly thing to do - go onstage and mime out emotions, desire, sexuality, for strangers's eyes. (It's why historically actors and all performers have been linked in the puritan imagination with prostitutes).

Nick Cave (early on very Jim-indebted) wrote a great song about this in the Birthday Party - "Nick the Stripper"

There's a cool Iggy Pop quote about the stage that I've never been able to source - "who can account for facial expressions made in a mirror of people?"

hardcore is good.
hardcore has keyboards.
the doors have keyboards.
ergo
the door are great.
🔥🔥🔥

blissblogger said:

you can do that almost any rock group

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that is a fair point. otoh tho my point stands. plenty of dumb rock lyrics either work, or are inoffensive. The Doors' sound just as terrible in the actual songs.

also, Morrison actively pursued poetry in a way most rock lyricists don't, so it's fair to judge him on those grounds in a way it isn't Jagger or whoever.

I lived in California for 4 years. been to L.A. plenty of times. also read Ecology of Fear etc. plenty familiar w/the weirdness. Jim Morrison was no Nathaniel West.

I stand by my belief that the deeply American terribleness of The Doors loses something in crossing the Atlantic.

blissblogger said:

i think he reveled in it, plunged into it - pushed right through it

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the great weight of evidence suggests otherwise, tho obv as he's dead none of us will ever know for certain

it's silly to expect people in 1968 to have been self-aware the way they are in 2018, but even if you judge him by his peers he's an overrated mess

if you read Please Kill Me you'll know he was mostly an ultraboring lush/barbiturates zombie crossed with a selfish overgrown child. not that that precludes good art tbf.

feel like people here keep trying to drag him into respectability by bringing in accepted cool people, Iggy Pop, Nick Cave, etc