Riders on the Storm

In the copious annals of awful lyrics, few can measure up to Jim Morrison. Ironically, Morrison considered himself a poet, and had books of his poems published separately.

Pretension makes bad poetry worse.

The Doors had three legitimately memorable original songs: “Light My Fire,” “Love Me Two Times,” and “Love Her Madly.” None were written by Morrison. All were by Robby Krieger, the guitarist, whom nobody ever noticed. Yet Morrison is remembered as the dark genius behind the band. It was all hype and self-promotion.

Consider the Morrison classic "Riders on the Storm," the last song he recorded before killing himself in Paris with a heroin overdose:

Riders on the storm
Riders on the storm
Into this house we're born
Into this world we're thrown
Like a dog without a bone
An actor out alone
Riders on the storm

An expression of existential angst: “like a dog without a bone.” Geez, that's deep. We are all here just to have our urges satisfied.

An what does “An actor out alone” mean? Surely it is just a self-evident commonplace?

There's a killer on the road
His brain is squirmin' like a toad
Take a long holiday
Let your children play
If ya give this man a ride
Sweet memory will die
Killer on the road, yeah

Referring to brains or mind in a poem is always pretentious. Cheap fake profundity. Brains do not squirm; he could have made it work easily enough by writing “His brain is like a squirmin' toad.” But he was too stupid or literal-minded to see the difference.

The reference to a “killer on the road” sounds like a cheap B-flick thriller. Pulling up the image of a toad just makes it sillier. Cheap thrills.

Then what does this have to do with the next two lines, about going on holiday? And memories kind of by definition do not die. So what is he talking about?

Girl ya gotta love your man
Girl ya gotta love your man
Take him by the hand
Make him understand
The world on you depends
Our life will never end
Gotta love your man, yeah

And what does avoiding hitchhikers have to do with loving your boyfriend? Just sounds like Morrison is suddenly asking for sex. Using a cheap manipulative trick: “It's a dangerous world out there, according to me, so snuggle up to me and I'll protect you.”

Wanna feel his toad?

Note the awkward phrasing of “the world on you depends.” We see a painful stretch to make a rhyme that was not worth making: it is not as though “Our life will never end” was some great line, some deep sentiment. It means nothing in this context.

An that's as much effort as Morrison is prepared to put in. The rest is repetition.

Yeah! 

Riders on the storm
Riders on the storm
Into this house we're born
Into this world we're thrown
Like a dog without a bone
An actor out alone 

Riders on the storm
Riders on the storm
Riders on the storm
Riders on the storm
Riders on the storm
Riders on the storm

Awful stuff. A lousy little poet coming round trying to sound like Charlie Manson.

Joan of Arc Writes in from the Culture Wars

Typical insipid church art. Anglican.

This article is a mixed bag. On the one hand, it is absolutely correct in pointing out that Catholics and the right must not ignore the culture. That is the one sure way to lose the culture wars. Moreover, while Christian morality is now a hard sell, the appeal to beauty is the ace we hold in the new evangelization that is so desperately needed in Europe and North America.

In any case, the creation of beauty is our religious duty. And we have indeed not been doing it. Judge is spot on to point out that the recent art we have been getting in Church—the new hymns, the words of the vernacular mass, the redesigned altars, the stylized banners—has been insipid.

But if Judge is right that religion cannot do without art, I think he is wrong to believe that art can do without religion. He is wrong to claim that, since the two parted ways, modern and postmodern art has been doing any better than religion. It has not been incredibly “inspired and dynamic” over the last fifty years. Judge may be too young to know better, but it has not. It has been in a dead stall. Even pop music and pop art, after a brief flowering, has been moribund since the 1960s. Art cannot survive with nothing to say.

He is very right about one thing: “We need our own Rolling Stone magazine. We need an online journal devoted to exploring and explaining popular culture.” This is indeed the needful thing today. We need a lifeline for young Catholics of an intellectual and an artistic bent.

Insipid art from "Rainbow Cathedral."

Because right now, they are trapped in hostile territory.

It's a chicken-egg problem. There are surely a large number of artists who are secretly Catholic; but they know that, if they come out publicly, or make this too clear in their art, they are sacrificing their career. All of the money comes from government grants, and these are doled out by bureaucrats who are themselves highly politicized and leftist.