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Celebration of the Lizard Kings
I find it oddly appropriate that the music of The Doors has been a constant companion for me during the COVID-19 epidemic and lockdown. Their music certainly isn’t a cheery respite from the anxiety of sheltering during a raging pandemic that has claimed just short of 160,000 American lives, most of which could have been spared had the powers that be actually did their jobs. It’s not a distraction from the novel coronavirus: it’s an expression of the chthonic forces that drive it.
There is nothing particularly cheery about the music of The Doors: it is consistently dark. But there is nothing supernatural or preternatural about their underworldly darkness — nothing Ozzy-ish about it, not the stuff of horror or fantasy. The darkness of The Doors points to the ordinary shadows cast by sex, death, and violence. It is dramatic darkness, revealing a kind of everyday dread deep under the facades of ordinary folk living mundane lives. It reveals the skull beneath the skin rather than the disembodied skeletons of gothic fiction. Its ancestors aren’t Lovecraft or Poe, but Sophocles and Freud.
This is not to elevate Jim Morrison to the status of a literary genius. He was an adequate baritone vocalist, and a mediocre poet-lyricist at best (and cringeworthy at worst). But in the context of The Door’s oeuvre, from The Doors to L.A. Woman, it works magnificently. This is due, in…
