Hey, Nietzsche! Leave them kids alone

by Craig Schuftan

  There is, it has to be said, something ghoulish about this. Cuomo’s fans didn’t care in the least about his wellbeing, they wanted him to suffer so that their appetite for intense emotion could be satisfied. This Cuomo steadfastly refused to do.

  Weezer could have cashed in on the cult of Pinkerton many times over — they could have, at the very least, included the occasional Pinkerton song in their shows to keep the fans happy. But as Pete Wentz from Fall Out Boy recently admitted to Rolling Stone, ‘it’s really a fine line between being an inspiration to your fans, and creating an industry out of misery.’11 Wentz, being a bass player in an emo band, would know all about it.

  Billy Corgan: Misery Industry.

  Anatomy of Mellon Collie

  THIS ‘MISERY INDUSTRY’ is a tough gig. Entertainers have it easy with their pantomime of emotion. All they have to do is turn it on at the start of the show, then turn it off when they get backstage. For them, it’s just a job. But for the romantic poets, with their commitment to emotional truth, the pain has got to be real, the tragedy drawn straight up from the well of their unique sensibility, their ability to feel.

  Smashing Pumpkins’ Billy Corgan is one of these fearless explorers of inner space. Like Keats, Corgan learned to make use of his moods — but in a more dramatic fashion that seems closer to German poet Heinrich Heine’s secret formula for sturm und drang poetry;

  Aus meinen groszen Schmerzen

  Mach’ ich die kleinen Lieder.

  [From my great pain

  I make little songs.]1

  Corgan would accept no other method for his art — every song came from real emotional experience. But not just any old emotional experience. ‘A good song, a smiling face, a true feeling, doesn’t do it.’ He said in 1994, ‘People want to see things smashed to bits. They want to see you rip your heart out’.2 Corgan had just done more or less exactly that with the Smashing Pumpkins ‘Disarm’. The song is an aching ode to childhood innocence. Corgan surveys the wreckage of his teens and twenties, and wonders how everything went so wrong. ‘I used to be a little boy,’ he screams. Of course, his parents and teachers couldn’t let him stay that way, they ‘cut that little child’ out in order to prepare him for the so-called real world.3 But something went wrong with Corgan’s de-programming. He’s like one of those science fiction secret agents whose memory was supposed to have been erased, and who then finds he starts remembering things — things responsible grown-ups aren’t supposed to remember. A world of sunlight, ice-cream and daydreams; a world where it was okay to be emotional. He knows too much, and this knowledge has made him lonely; and prolonged exposure to loneliness has made him angry and vengeful. But because he’s a poet, Corgan, instead of taking up arms against his oppressors, took up his diary and wrote a song. And as the song took shape, Corgan realised he had to turn bitterness into beauty. Later, he said:

  The reason I wrote “Disarm” was because I didn’t have the guts to kill my parents, so I thought I’d get back at them through song. And rather than have an angry, angry, angry, violent song I thought I’d write something beautiful and make them realise what tender feelings I have inside my heart.4

  This kind of bold personal confession, Corgan felt, was the future of music. Speaking to Richard Kingsmill in 1998, he insisted that extreme personal emotion was ‘the only place left to go in rock and roll’.5 But this had already taken its toll on the singer. Remember, Heine says that from great pain you only get little songs, and Smashing Pumpkins’ fans wanted to hear little songs like ‘Disarm’ over and over again, which, for Corgan, meant several emotional apocalypses a night for a six-month stretch. The singer found that, while his sadness was infinite, his ability to keep exploiting it was not. At 1994’s Lollapalooza festival, Corgan found himself confronted with an impossible choice — to keep giving his audience the ‘real thing’ and risk bleeding himself dry; or to ‘fake it’ for the sake of his sanity. Unfortunately, this second option was something his romantic commitment to emotional truth would never allow. ‘I do feel a responsibility to best articulate what I feel,’ he said.6 So, he couldn’t just walk away or do the show on autopilot, he saw it as his job to express suffering, and the suffering had to be real.

  He was furious at finding himself trapped like this, and decided to channel the rage into his performance. But what good does that do? He can snap and snarl all he wants on stage, but in the end he’s just a performing bear — worse, a rat in a cage, running hopelessly on his little wheel so as to satisfy his audience’s taste for extreme emotion. Hey, rat in a cage, that’s pretty good. He explores this image and the angry, bitter feelings associated with it, and pretty soon he has…another song — that people like! That his fans want him to perform onstage every night of the week for the rest of the year! When, he wonders, will his torment end?

  On one level, Smashing Pumpkins’ ‘Bullet with Butterfly Wings’ reflects fairly standard rock-star anxieties about Corgan’s relationship with his audience and the music industry that pushes him in front of them. ‘Secret destroyers,’ he sings, ‘hold you up to the flames.’ But here, already, the imagery has become somewhat biblical, and when Corgan screams that he cannot be saved and starts comparing himself to an Old Testament prophet, it becomes clear there is more at stake than just the perils of show business. ‘Bullet with Butterfly Wings’ was, as Corgan later admitted, written about his experience at Lollapalooza. Nirvana was meant to headline the festival, but when lead singer Kurt Cobain, similarly trapped between his own anxieties and his audience’s expectations, took his own life, Smashing Pumpkins was invited to fill the void. The grisly implications of this were not lost on Billy Corgan. When, in ‘Bullet with Butterfly Wings,’ he accused the whole world of trying to kill him, and then made a simile between himself and Jesus, it’s because he was all too aware of the way Cobain had become a martyr to his audience’s expectations, and had a terrible feeling he might be next.7

  In the early ’80s Corgan’s hero Robert Smith had felt himself being pushed toward the edge of a similar precipice. He too had become a pressure valve for his audience’s anxieties by writing with unflinching honesty about the horrors of life. But writing about horror meant living with horror while you recorded it, and then touring the horror for another twelve months. Smith began to wonder just how much horror he could take. And looming over it all was the spectre of Joy Division’s Ian Curtis, who’d hanged himself in 1980. Curtis had collapsed under the same pressure Smith was now feeling. In fact, Smith had a feeling he’d only arrived at this point because Curtis was gone, and that he was next in line. Later he said:

  I hate the idea that you’d die for your audience, but I was rapidly becoming enmeshed in that around the time of Pornography; the idea that Ian Curtis had gone first and I was soon to follow.8

  With the news of Kurt Cobain’s death still fresh in his mind, Corgan couldn’t help feeling that history was repeating itself. The story of Billy Corgan and the Smashing Pumpkins was starting to take on the characteristics of a modern tragedy, in which he, as the hero, must perish. This might seem absurd — after all, they’re just songs, and he’s just a singer, right? Wrong! For Corgan, his life was his art and his art was his life. To an eighteenth-century spectator, the idea that a singer would die for his audience would be absurd. But in a post-romantic world, it’s entirely plausible.

  Ziggy Stardust: The rake’s reward.

  Rock and Roll Suicide

  IN 1971 DAVID Bowie was dreaming of re-inventing musical theatre with a story about an alien rock star. But time got away from him, and before he got the chance to write the story out properly, his rock musical had become a rock album. ‘There was no time to wait,’ he later told Mojo’s Paul du Noyer. ‘I couldn’t afford to sit around for six months and write a proper stage piece, I was too impatient.’1

  Still, as Bowie admits, the resulting album, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, does retain a rough dramatic structure. The first act deals with the arrival o
f a man from the stars who picks up a guitar and decides to become a star of the more worldly variety. As the album plays on we watch as Ziggy ascends to the heights of fame, and enjoys all the rarefied pleasures it has to offer. Everybody loves him, everybody wants him — and all of this is going to Ziggy’s head. So by the time the third act rolls around, and we hear that he’s been ‘making love with his ego’, we know our hero is headed for a fall. He dies, spectacularly, at the end of his theme song ‘Ziggy Stardust’. ‘He took it all too far,’ Bowie reminds us.2

  To an eighteenth-century audience the tale of Ziggy Stardust, despite confusing references to twentieth-century phenomena like radios, ray guns and vaseline, would be instantly familiar. Ziggy is clearly a gross libertine, who indulges his every appetite. His exploits are disgraceful, but since the story advances a useful moral theme, these can be overlooked (and not-so-secretly enjoyed). The useful moral theme is this: that a dissolute rake like Ziggy will eventually get his just desserts.

  On 29 October 1787 Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart conducted at the premiere of a new opera — whose premise was exactly the one described above — at The National Theatre in the old city of Prague. The title on the program that evening was ‘Il dissoluto punito’, or ‘The Rake’s Reward’, but the opera later came to be known by the name of its protagonist — the rake of the title — Don Giovanni. The opera was a hit, but that was virtually a foregone conclusion, since Don Giovanni was a retelling of a story that had been playing to packed houses in Europe for almost two hundred years — the seventeenth-century legend of the great seducer, Don Juan.

  Mozart’s opera begins with a scene where Don Giovanni sneaks into the apartments of Donna Anna, the daughter of the Commandant of Seville. He means to make her the latest of his many conquests, but she screams, and her father comes to her rescue. A fight breaks out between Don Giovanni and the furious Commendatore, and the older man is killed. Don Giovanni escapes, his thoughts already turning to his next seduction. A little later, we learn the full extent of Don Giovanni’s debauchery in a scene where his servant, Leporello, recites the history of his amorous adventures in front of a horrified Donna Elvira — six hundred and forty in Italy, two hundred and thirty-one in Germany, a thousand and three in Spain…

  Then, in the second act, after yet another narrow escape, Don Giovanni and Leporello rendezvous in a churchyard near a stone statue erected in the memory of the dead Commendatore. Incredibly, the statue comes to life, and informs Don Giovanni that he will be dead before the sun comes up. Leporello sees that under the statue is written the inscription: ‘Here I await vengeance upon a vile assassin’. Now, the Commendatore’s long wait is over. But Don Giovanni treats this warning the way he treats everything else — as a laugh. His response to the threat of eternal damnation is to invite the statue round for dinner.

  To Leporello’s horror, the statue proves to be as good as his word. Hearing some commotion, he goes outside to investigate, and comes back to his master with terrifying news — he’s so frightened he can barely speak. ‘The stone…man…all white,’ he stammers. The statue pounds on the door, and since Leporello is too scared out of his wits to answer it, Don Giovanni does it himself, while his servant hides under the table. Don Giovanni, still maintaining the light-hearted and cynical attitude that has carried him through life thus far, offers the stone man a seat. But the ghost is not here for dinner: ‘A graver purpose than this, another mission has brought me hither.’ He tells Don Giovanni that he must come with him, and extends his hand. ‘Will you in turn come and sup with me?’ asks the stone guest. Don Giovanni, not one to be called chicken, accepts. As his hand touches the statue’s, he becomes locked in a vice-like grip. ‘Tis colder than the tomb!’ he exclaims. The Commendatore demands three times that the wicked rake repent for his sins, and each time Don Giovanni answers with a defiant, ‘No!’. ‘Your time has come!’ roars the ghost. Right on cue, a crack opens up in the floor, and Don Giovanni feels himself being pulled downward. It starts to get hot. ‘Whence come these hideous bursts of flame?’ he cries. From the unfathomable depths below the earth comes an answer:

  No doom is too great for your sins

  Worse torments await you below!3

  Don Giovanni is dragged down to hell with a blood-curdling scream.

  Mozart seals the villain’s fate with a couple of conclusive chords — and this really sounds like the end of the opera. But it’s not. With Don Giovanni’s final terrified yell still ringing in our ears, Leporello, Donna Elvira, Donna Anna, Massetto and Zerlina come come back out on the stage to let us know what they’re up to now that Don Giovanni is locked out of harm’s way. Donna Elvira says she’s off to enter a convent, Zerlina and Massetto are going home for a nice quiet dinner and Leporello tells us he’s going to the pub. Why are they telling us all this stuff? Because they have a useful moral theme to deliver. Zerlina, Masetto and Leporello:

  Let the scoundrel remain below

  with Proserpine and Pluto;

  and we, good people,

  will gaily sing

  the ancient moral.

  All:

  This is the evil doer’s end!

  The death of sinners

  will always match their life!4

  That’s the end of Don Giovanni — or at least, it was when Mozart wrote it. But if you’d gone to see the opera in, say, 1816 — you’d find this ending had vanished. For most of the nineteenth century, Don Giovanni concluded with the no-good rake being consumed by the flames of hell — Leporello, Zerlina, Masetto and their useful moral theme were nowhere to be seen.

  In the twenty years since Don Giovanni made its debut in Prague, the world had changed dramatically, and popular taste had changed with it. Nineteenth-century music-lovers still wanted Don Giovanni — but they didn’t want a moral enforcing the importance of moderation in all things. What they wanted was a story about a man who did whatever he liked, in defiance of society’s rules, and died heroically as a result. The German writer E T A Hoffman (the ‘A’ stands for ‘Amadeus’) defined the role of this new Don Giovanni in his 1813 story Don Juan. Here, a concertgoer watching Mozart’s opera is treated to a special director’s commentary by the ghost of Donna Anna. She reveals that Don Giovanni was not a bad man who got his just desserts, but a hero. He lived a life of passion and inspiration while everyone else just went to work and paid their taxes. In this version of the tale, Don Giovanni is preferred to the society whose limits he refused to accept. As a result, he becomes the very definition of the tragic romantic hero — the inspired individual who picks a fight with society, a fight which he can’t possibly win. The romantic hero is always outnumbered, because he is always alone.

  Like Don Giovanni, Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust comes with an epilogue. The hero takes it all too far and is destroyed — not by demons from hell, but by the mass of grabbing hands just below the stage. In his live shows, Bowie illustrated Ziggy’s demise even more dramatically with a cover of the Velvet Underground’s ‘White Light/White Heat’, in which the rock star hero is burned to a crisp by the sheer velocity of his lifestyle. But just when you think he’s gone forever — his threat to the status quo safely locked away in the depths of the earth or burned away into space — he’s back. He sits on the side of the stage, smoking a cigarette and snapping his fingers to the beat. He sings a song called ‘Rock and Roll Suicide’. Ziggy didn’t actually take his own life — but then he also knew (or should have known) what he was signing up for when he decided to become ‘the special man’, to live among humans while reserving the right to ignore all of their moral laws and social conventions As he tells his story, the song builds and builds — and then comes to a halt. He waits a beat, leans in to the audience, and delivers his message to the kids:

  You’re not alone!

  Just turn on with me,

  and you’re not alone!5

  Here is a great paradox, but one that Bowie, and the artists he inspired — Robert Smith, Billy Corgan and Gerard Way — would attempt to resolve.
The singer tells us that he was a solitary rebel who died tragically in his one-man war against society. But he didn’t do it so he could end up as an illustration for a moral principle — he did it for everybody else who ever felt like they didn’t fit in. He died for us, and for the idea that someday, some way, we might find a way to be alone — together. But in the meantime, Ziggy reminds the faithful, though the world is cruel and will rob the young romantic hell raiser of his dreams, one must carry on regardless.

  This is the one part of Ziggy’s story that would have been deeply confusing and disturbing to our imaginary eighteenth-century audience. In ‘Ziggy Stardust’, it’s the libertine — and not the shopkeeper or the nun — who has the last laugh. This, to an eighteenth-century spectator, would seem shockingly immoral. But sometime around the first decade of the nineteenth century, things changed — permanently, it would seem. Because in 1973 David Bowie could virtually guarantee that everyone in his audience would be rooting for the dissolute rake in his story, and not for the society whose rules he refused to accept. He took it all too far — but the moral of ‘Ziggy Stardust’ is not ‘pride comes before a fall’ or ‘fiery doom is the rake’s reward’. After the curtain comes down on Bowie’s low-budget rock opera, there’s no little party of regular folk to deliver a lesson about the virtues of hard work, abstinence and commonsense. In rock and roll, this rarely happens — in glam rock (which Bowie more or less invented with ‘Ziggy’) it never does. The rock star is not a moral scarecrow — he’s a hero in death, because his non-stop sinning is a protest against the limits of ordinary life.