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Example research essay topic: Psychology Of Jim Morrison And 1960 Rock Music - 2,523 words

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Psychology of Jim Morrison and 1960 's rock music With their mix of music, poetry, theater, and daring, the Doors emerged as America's most darkly innovative, eerily mesmerizing musical group of the 1960 s. Founded concurrently with the English invasion, the college-educated, Los Angeles-based group stood apart from the folk-rock movement of Southern California and the peace and flower power bands of San Francisco. In exploring death, doom, fear, and sex, their music reflected the hedonistic side of the era. Writing for the Saturday Evening Post in 1967, Joan Didion called them "the Norman Mailers of the Top 40, missionaries of apocalyptic sex. " The group's flamboyant lead singer, Jim Morrison, said, "Think of us as erotic politicians. " (Prochnicky 46) A seminal rock figure, Morrison's dark good looks and overt sexuality catapulted him to sex symbol status, akin to that of Elvis Presley.

Morrison's provocative stage presence, combined with the group's mournfully textured, blues-rooted music, suggested the musical theater of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht, and the edginess of the avant-garde troupe, The Living Theater. But the complicated, clearly troubled Morrison could not overcome personal demons, which he sated with drugs and alcohol. By late 1968, his frequently "stoned" demeanor became off-putting, his on-stage rants pretentious. His behavior at a Miami concert in March 1969, and his resulting arrest on charges including indecent exposure, represented not only his downfall but also the Doors' looming disintegration. But if the group's rise and fall was fast and furious, encompassing just four years, their anarchist influence is undeniable. Their hard-driving music bridged the heavy-metal 1970 s; their murky, cerebral lyrics spanned the new wave 1980 s, and the alternative 1990 s, and Jim Morrison remains the undisputed forerunner of the sexy, leather-clad, on-the-edge rock martyr. (Kuwahara 58) The Doors's aga began in the summer of 1965 on the beach at Venice, California, where singer-musician Ray Manzarek ran into his former UCLA classmate, Jim Morrison.

After listening to Morrison sing the haunting lyrics to a song he had written called "Moonlight Drive, " Manzarek proposed they start a band, and "make a million dollars. " Manzarek then approached two other musicians who were studying with him at a Maharishi meditation center. Thus, with Manzarek on piano and organ, songwriter Robbie Krieger on guitar, John Densmore on drums, and Morrison before the microphone, the group was in place. It was Morrison who came up with their moniker, derived from a William Blake passage, which had inspired the title of Aldous Huxley's book about his mescaline experiences, The Doors of Perception. As paraphrased by Morrison: "There are things that are known and things that are unknown, in between [are] the doors. " Working their way through the Los Angeles club scene, the Doors initially performed blues and rock 'n' roll standards, in addition to material written by Morrison. They were playing the London Fog on the Sunset Strip, making five dollars apiece on weeknights, ten dollars apiece weekends, when they were spotted by a female talent booker who was especially struck by the star quality of the lead singer. (Prochnicky 48) Hired to work the Strip's popular Whiskey a Go Go, the Doors became the club's unofficial house band, second-billed to groups including the Turtles, Them, and Love. During sets, the group was an anomaly; the four members appeared disparate, as if each were on a plane all his own, but their sound had a synchronicity.

And there was no denying the allure of the group's pretty-boy singer. In his earliest performances, Morrison was so introverted that he performed with his back to the audience. Some nights, his baritone was barely audible. However, his confidence grew with the group's reputation and, certainly, his stage presence was unique.

He had languid body movements, tended to throttle the microphone, and often emoted with closed eyes as if in a spectral trance. Also, he could be counted on to be unpredictable. Sometimes he dropped to the floor to sob out his lyrics; other times he danced with abandon as if possessed. Jerry Hopkins tells of Jim Morrison, of The Doors, inciting riots during their shows. In Chicago, Morrison wanted to conduct an experiment with the crowd, he wanted to see if he could invoke them to riot.

The Doors performed all of their violent music at the show, playing songs such as Unknown Soldier, The End, Five to One and others. Morrisons experiment was a success, he had caused a riot in Chicago. In the lyrics to Five to One, released in 1968, the message of rebellion is clear, Five to one, baby/ One in five/ No one here/ gets out alive/ Now You get yours baby/ I'll get mine/ Gonna make it, baby/ If we try. The old get old and the young get stronger/ May take a week and it may take longer/ They got the guns but / We got the numbers/ Gonna win/ Yeah, we " re takin' over/Come on. This song demonstrates the idea behind the youth movement, it clearly states that while the establishment has the power to oppress the youth, the youth have the sheer numbers to overcome. Morrison also uses this song in The Doors infamous Miami concert of 1969, where Morrison is arrested for inciting a riot among other things.

The Doors Box Set has a recording of this performance where Morrison egged the crowd on, he mixes statements like this with in the already militant song, Your all a bunch of slaves! Youre a bunch of fuckin idiots! (Prochnicky) 58 Letting people tell you what to do! What are you gonna do about it? ! What are you gonna do about it? !

What are you gonna do about it? ! . Morrison is calling for the people to rebel, he wants them to become violent in their ways, and that is just what they did. While most music was a social commentary, a few songs were inciting. It is these few inciting songs that the radicals in the New Left adopt as their themes. One night at the Whiskey in late 1966, he delivered an improvised rendition of his oedipal song, "The End. " The eleven-and-a-half minute song climaxed with a young man's screaming threat to kill his father and rape his mother, but Morrison used a word other than "rape, " bringing the entire club, including the go-go girls in hanging cages, to a stunned silence. (Kuwahara 61) That very night the Doors were fired. They would, however, ultimately have left on their own accord, for they already had a contract with Elektra Records.

Released in January 1967, their debut album The Doors included "Light My Fire, " which, at six minutes and 50 seconds, was considered too long for Top 40 airplay. As the group toured nationally, a shorter version began climbing the AM charts; meanwhile, the full-length version became a favorite of FM. Eschewing the matching costumes that were then in vogue among music groups, the Doors also had no official leader, but in interviews, as well as on the stage, it was invariably Morrison who took the spotlight. Shrewdly, the photogenic singer-songwriter exploited his rapport with the camera, as well as his appeal to journalists, who found him sensual, mystical, and eminently quotable. For the erudite rock star was also a poet, who read and quoted the nineteenth-century French poets Arthur Rimbaud and Charles Baudelaire, and German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. Moreover, when not waxing metaphysical or apocalyptic, Morrison could be surprisingly playful.

When asked how he had prepared for stardom, he once quipped, "I stopped getting haircuts. " In his Elektra Records publicity biography, he claimed to have no family; in fact, he was the son of a Navy rear admiral, and from a family of career militarists. As a performer, Morrison assumed various alter egos. For a while, he called himself the "King of Orgasmic Rock, " and as the "Lizard King" he donned tight-fitting snakeskin pants. He also claimed to be possessed by the spirit of a dead Indian, the result of a childhood trip across the desert. He and his family had once passed an overturned truck, which had resulted in fatalities, and Morrison claimed that the spirit of one of the dead Indians somehow entered him. He accessorized that persona by donning a concho belt, leather pants, and dancing in a ritualistic style.

But the role he played to the hilt was that of the rebel. When the Doors appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show in September 1967, Morrison defied the famed host's request that a particular line, with possible drug connotations, be deleted from "Light My Fire. " Three months later, the singer made headlines when he was arrested on stage in New Haven, Connecticut, on charges including "breach of the peace" and indecent and immoral exhibition. In August 1968 he was again arrested, this time for disorderly conduct on board a flight to Phoenix. Increasingly, Doors concerts became known for their dangerous atmosphere, as an incorrigible and no-longer-slender Morrison staggered across the stage, taunting the audience, inciting them to riot, screaming at them to "Wake up!" He also clutched at his crotch and tugged threateningly at his pants. The Doors were in a slump when they embarked on a 21 -city tour in March 1969 and, following the arrest of the bloated, bearded Morrison in Miami, the rest of the tour was canceled. The group's symbiosis was on the wane when they recorded their blues-oriented collection, L.

A. Woman. Afterward, it was a burned-out Morrison who headed for Paris to concentrate on his poetry. He was just 27 when he died on July 3, 1971, reportedly of a heart attack suffered while in the bathtub. (Kuwahara 62) Because of Morrison's penchant for substance abuse, and the curious handling of his death and burial by several close friends, questions persist over how he actually died. Since his body was found by his common-law wife, who died in 1974 of a heroin overdose, there have long been allegations that drugs were a factor. Whatever the cause, his death was yet another reminder of the perils of the dark side of rock 'n' roll.

It was also the third untimely passing of a rock star in less than a year, following those of heavy metal guitarist Jimi Hendrix and rock-blues queen Janis Joplin, both of whom died of overdoses. Following Morrison's death, the surviving Doors recorded two additional albums. Manzarek also sought to reinvent the group, with Iggy Pop as lead singer, but it was clear that the magic had died with Morrison. It was Morrison's mystique that led to a Doors rediscovery that has enshrined the rock star as a modern-day Dionysus, the Greek god of revelry and wine who was dismembered, and later resurrected. The 1980 rock biography, No One Here Gets Out Alive, by rock journalist Jerry Hopkins and Doors associate Danny Superman, spurred on the revival, and sent other biographers in search of similarly debauched rock subjects.

And the 1980 reissue of the Doors' Greatest Hits album, which entered Billboard's Top 10 Chart, proved that defunct groups can sell as well as those still active. Rolling Stone acknowledged the power of dead celebrity with its September 1981 Morrison cover story, proclaiming "He's hot, he's sexy and he's dead. " Hollywood heralded Morrison in 1990 when a decade-long quest to make a feature film was realized by controversial filmmaker Oliver Stone, with the movie The Doors, starring Val Kilmer. In the era of incarnations that dawned in the 1990 s, Morrison was depicted as a poet trapped in a self-created rock star image. He is, after all, buried in Pere La Chaise Cemetery, the famous final resting-place in Paris of such notables as Edith Piaf, Oscar Wilde, Honore de Balzac, and Frederic Chopin. Moreover, the poetry he self-published in 1970 was republished in the late 1980 s and during the 1990 s. His writings have also been the subject of scholarly studies, including one in which he is compared to his idol, the French symbolist, Rimbaud.

Yet if the Doors's pot light remains on Morrison, his musical legacy came from his collaborative work with Manzarek, Krieger, and Densmore. Benchmarks of the 1960 s Doors songs -- among them "Light My Fire, "Hello, I Love You, "Touch Me, "Love Her Madly, "People Are Strange, " and "Riders on the Storm" -- have remained accessible. Staples of the airwaves, they attest to the power of provocative music, and to the seemingly-enduring interest wrought by the potent combination of sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll. Word Count: 2050 Bibliography: Diggins, John P. The American Left in the Twentieth Century. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovic h, Inc. , 1973.

Dowling, Claudia. Kent State, Life (May 1990): 137 - 143. Farrell, James. Spirit of the Sixties: Making Postwar Radicalism. New York: Routledge, 1997. For, Philip S.

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The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage. New York: Bantam Books, 1987. Harrison, Benjamin T. Roots of the Anti-Vietnam War Movement, Studies in Conflict and Terrorism (April-June 1993): 99 - 110.

Hayden, Tom. Trial. New York: Holt, Rinehart, Winston, 1970. Hopkins, Jerry. No One Here Gets Out Alive. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1997.

Horowitz, David. Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey. New York: Free Press, 1997. Kimball, The Project of Rejuvenilization, New Criterion (May 1998): 4 - 12.

Kuwahara, Yasue. Apocalypse Now! : Jim Morrisons Vision of America, Popular Music and Society (Summer 1992): 55 - 67. Martha, Pete. Counter Culture. New York: Topper Books, 1989.

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Recorded 1969, Released 1998. Pratt, Ray. Rhythm and Resistance: Explorations in the Political Uses of Popular Music. New York: Praeger, 1990. Prochnicky, Jerry and Riordan, James.

Break on Through: The Life and Death of Jim Morrison. New York: Quill, 1991. Roszak, Theodor. The Making of a Counterculture: Reflections of the Technocratic Society and its Youthful Opposition. New York: Double Day, 1969. Rubin, Jerry.

Do It; Scenarios of the Revolution. New York: Schocken Books, 1970. Sargent, Lyman T. New Left Thought: An Introduction.

Homewood, Illinois: Dorsey Press, 1972. Stern, Jane and Stern Michael. Sixties People. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990.

Stoper, Emily. The Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee: The Growth of Radicalism in the Civil Rights Organization. Brooklyn, New York: Carlson, 1989. Szatmary, David P. Rockin in Time: A Social History of Rock and Roll. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1991 Thompson, Hunter S.

Hells Angels: A strange and Terrible Saga. New York, New York: Random House, 1966. Tillinghast, Richard. The Grateful Dead: Questions of Survival, Michigan Quarterly Review (Fall 1991): 686 - 700.

Voirst, Milton. Fire in the Streets: America in the 1960 's. New York, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1980.


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Research essay sample on Psychology Of Jim Morrison And 1960 Rock Music

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