Hey, Nietzsche! Leave them kids alone
Page 11
In AFI’s ‘Miss Murder’, the singer contemplates his own rock and roll suicide. The song weds the melody of Depeche Mode’s ‘Strangelove’ to the sound and rhythm of Gary Glitter’s glam classic, ‘Rock and Roll Part 1’. Havok’s lyrics tell the tale of a beautiful, otherworldly rock star. ‘How they all adored him,’ he sighs. As the chorus kicks in and the band ‘whoah-ohs’ like they’re Bon Jovi, Havok poses the mother of all romantic dilemmas:
Hey, Miss Murder can I
make beauty stay if I
take my life?6
Two hundred years of the romantic tradition says: yes you can. It’s not just about dying young and leaving a good-looking corpse. The existential dilemma of a Don Giovanni or a Ziggy Stardust comes from the fact that society wants him to be useful, whereas he respects only beauty. As both of these romantic ur-myths show, there is only one way out of this dilemma, but by taking it, the hero becomes a martyr to the principle by which he lived his life, which is the pursuit of strange beauty at all costs.
In ‘Miss Murder’, death, once again, takes female form. The full-length version of the song’s video incorporates a prelude. We see, in a series of cuts, a beautiful woman seated at an ornate writing desk where she writes a letter, as Davey Havok stalks the marble floors of a cathedral. The singer has been betrayed — by the woman, by love, by the world in general — we don’t know, but he’s mad as hell, and as he walks, he sings a poisoned lullaby. He’s decided to quit this world — but before he does, he has one more thing to ask of his beloved:
…you may forget me
I promise to depart just promise one thing
Kiss my eyes and lay me to sleep7
As the last notes of his lullaby die away, and the glam rock goose-step of ‘Miss Murder’ fills the cathedral, we see that the singer has been granted his wish. The ‘Miss Murder’ of the title, we now realise, is the woman sitting at the writing desk. She folds a piece of paper, swallows it — and it instantly appears in the singer’s mouth. He pulls it out, unfolds it, and sees an image of three black rabbits arranged in a circle — a symbol of death in AFI lore.
Havok doesn’t break down in tears at the news of his imminent demise, and he doesn’t scream like Don Giovanni. He adopts an air of melancholy resignation, as though he knew, all along, that this is where his flaunting of society’s rules would lead him (which of course he did). This is the ‘tortured poet charisma’, which Matt Diehl, in his book My So-Called Punk, insists is key to AFI’s appeal.8 Havok most likely copped the pose from careful study of the posters of Bowie, Morrissey and Robert Smith that line the walls of his vocal booth during recording sessions. But this ‘tortured poet charisma’, while being fairly familiar in the world of rock and roll, is something relatively new in the world of poetry. It would have been completely alien to the poetry-lover of the eighteenth century — in the days of Pope and Johnson, poets were not tortured. Poets were sharp-eyed observers of society, but they always knew they belonged in society — what could they have to be tortured about? Wordsworth undermined this assumption in 1798, but it was completely overturned in 1812 by a much younger poet — a man much admired by such literary heavyweights as Goethe and Nietzsche — but also by a large reading public, who enshrined him as the archetypal romantic hero of the eighteen-hundreds. Thanks to George Gordon Byron, ‘tortured poet charisma’ quickly became the only kind the nineteenth century cared about.
Screamin’ Lord Byron
IN THE DECADE following the success of ‘Ziggy Stardust’, Bowie killed Ziggy off twice, reinvented himself as a blue-eyed soul singer, then a Teutonic robot, and then a tragic Pierrot. Finally, he transformed himself into the only thing that could really surprise his fans — an ordinary bloke. In Julian Temple’s extended video for his 1984 single ‘Blue Jean’, Bowie plays Vic — an ordinary bloke — who, while working up a ladder one day, falls in love with a girl. Trouble is, she looks straight past him — right over the top of his scruffy head in fact — to the huge poster of exotic pop singer Screamin’ Lord Byron across the street. So the resourceful Vic blags his way into a date with the girl by making up a cock-and-bull story about being a relative of Screamin’s’, and promises to use his influence to get some free tickets to the show. Because he’s in no position to do any such thing, he eventually resorts to breaking into the club where Screamin’ is doing his show. Vic crashes through the ceiling into the horrified singer’s dressing room in a hail of plaster and a shower of dust.
Screamin’ Lord Byron is the opposite of Vic in every way. The singer is not so much a human being as an assemblage of affectations and complications — heavily made-up, even more heavily medicated, terrified of human contact and absolutely scared stiff of Vic with his cheery cockney brusqueness. But this cringing mess is also a superhuman god. Later, we see him on stage at the Bosphorous Rooms where he holds the audience in thrall with his deep voice and hypnotic gestures. The rapt fans raise their hands up as if to worship him — he clicks his fingers to the beat and they all do the same, never taking their eyes off him for a moment.
They worship him, but he barely notices them. He leaves the stage without so much as a wink or a smile. He waits in his dressing room until almost everyone has left before venturing back into the room, where Vic and his date are waiting, hoping for an audience. Vic leaps to his feet on seeing Screamin’ — but the singer doesn’t see him at all. He goes straight for the girl, sweeps her off her feet, and stalks out of the club — leaving the furious Vic hurling insults at the star’s flashy car as it disappears down the street. ‘Your record sleeves are better than your songs!’1
The joke is that Screamin’ Lord Byron is also played by David Bowie. This is a great bit of casting, because we all know that before he was a regular bloke, Bowie was a narcissistic, antisocial rock and roll superman. And just as the superman’s name was a dream amalgam representing Bowie’s rock and roll ideal — in which the glam fantasy of the Original Stardust Cowboy met the Dionysiac excess of Iggy and the Stooges — so ‘Screamin’ Lord Byron’ weds the show-business flash of early British rock ’n’ roll (‘Screamin’ Lord Sutch’) to the name of the nineteenth-century poet who most resembles a rock star before the fact — Lord Byron.
Byron: ‘melancholy and sullen detachment’.
Lord Byron
IN THE MONTHS before he wrote ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’, John Keats had been in a terrible mood. His friend Benjamin Robert Haydon, the painter, remembers that around this time Keats became ‘morbid and silent’, though he was also prone to outbursts. When a family friend made a comment on Keats’s growing reputation, saying to Mrs Brawne, ‘O, he is quite the little poet,’ Keats angrily exclaimed, ‘You see what it is to be under six foot and not a Lord!’1
Time has been kinder to Keats’s poetry than Byron’s. But in 1818 Keats had good reason to be jealous. It wasn’t just that Byron was tall (he was not quite six foot in fact) or that he was of noble birth. The real reason why Keats was feeling so sensitive was that he’d just learned that Byron had sold over four thousand copies of the last canto of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. This poem, the first two parts of which had been published six years earlier, had already made him incredibly famous.
Byron had written Childe Harold while travelling in Spain, Malta, Turkey and Greece between 1810 and 1812. While abroad he’d lived the life of a libertine: frolicking with olive-skinned youths on the beach, being courted by Turkish warlords and enjoying ‘fooleries with the females of Athens’, as Byron put it.2 As he returned home to England to claim the estate that came with his title, with all the responsibilities that entailed, those two carefree years in the south started to seem more and more like the best years of his life. The future, on the other hand, was almost too grim for the twenty-three-year old Byron to contemplate. He felt done with life. He’d seen the world, and was now looking, he told a friend, for ‘the most eligible way out of it’.3 In this gloomy frame of mind he moved into his dilapidated gothic abbey at Newstead.
W
hile travelling, Byron had been working on a poem. He’d recently changed the name of the protagonist from Childe Burun to Childe Harold, but there was no mistaking him for anyone but his creator — he stands to inherit a title and a ‘venerable pile’, and his travelogue, as described in the poem, is similar to Byron’s.4 This worried Robert Dallas — a family friend of Byron’s who was arranging for the poem’s publication. Dallas loved the poem, but was concerned about the state of its author’s soul. If Byron had done half the things his literary alter ego claimed to have done, he was going straight to hell.
Ah me! In sooth he was a shameless wight,
Sore given to revel and ungodly glee;
Few earthly things found favour in his sight
Save concubines and carnal company,
And flaunting wassailers of high and low degree.5
Byron told him he was right to be worried. ‘My whole life has been at variance with propriety, not to say decency’, he admitted, with melancholy resignation.6 This last was the real trick up Byron’s sleeve. The poet Samuel Rogers, who read the proofs of Childe Harold, predicted that it would be a flop because the hero was both an unrepentant sinner and a misery guts. Who would want to read about the doings of a man like that? But this double whammy of debauchery and despondency, as Colin Wilson insists in his book, The Misfits, is exactly what caught the public’s imagination.7 Childe Harold was not a ‘cheerful voluptuary’ in the mode of Mozart’s Don Giovanni. He sinned, but he did so with an air of sorrow and detachment, as though there were some terrible sadness in his past that he could never quite escape. This drove the ladies wild. When Childe Harold was published on Saturday 7 March 1812 Byron was a nobody. By the following Monday, he was famous.8 Childe Harold was well on the way to selling out its first print run, and its author was presented in his rooms with a salver full of visiting cards. ‘Women,’ as Wilson writes, ‘begged for introductions.’9
Dallas had guessed that the close identification of Byron with Harold would increase the poem’s appeal, and he was right. He was correct, too, in believing that the poem was something new under the sun. To Dallas, as Byron’s biographer Peter Quennell writes, Childe Harold ‘seem[ed] to catch and concentrate an unresolved element in the life of the period, something to which no novelist or versifier had yet been able to give a literary shape…’10 This was probably the same ‘unresolved element’ that Goethe had isolated thirty-five years earlier — or at least a very similar one. But where the celebrity hunters would later look in vain for Werther in Goethe, they found Childe Harold in Byron. There was, as Goethe himself observed, an unconscious quality to Byron and his work, as though the one simply sprang fully formed from the other, unmediated by any normal artistic process. This makes his poetry a little unsatisfying when compared with Keats’s or Wordsworth’s. But neither of those two achieved, in their lifetime, anything like the fame and notoriety of Byron. Byron was a star, courted by society, endlessly propositioned by female admirers, and studiously imitated by young men.
In the London of 1812, the Werther face had been replaced by the Byronic limper. Byron had been born with a club foot that gave him a curious and distinctive dragging gait. That his young admirers should start imitating this, his least attractive physical feature, might seem strange. But Byron’s deformity, his ‘mark of Cain’ as he called it, was actually the key to his whole ‘look’ — and much more besides. The club foot had been a source of endless torment for Byron in his childhood. Doctors had prescribed various cures involving braces and harnesses, all of which were physically painful and — much worse — socially crippling. His unlovable mother did nothing to help matters by calling him a ‘lame brat’.11 All of this left him with a desperate need for approval on the one hand, and a deep-seated conviction that he was doomed to be lonely and unhappy on the other. So it made no difference to him how famous he became, how many books he sold, how many times his portrait was painted, or how many girls — or boys — he slept with. He pursued all these things vigorously, but none of them, not fame, money or pleasure, could compensate for the blow he’d been dealt at birth. As Quennell writes, ‘The admiration he might arouse while stationary must vanish, he felt sure, when he crossed the room.’12 His solution to this was to stand still — and here was the origin of the famous Byronic look — the pose people still imagine when they hear the words ‘romantic poet’. Peter Quennell describes it vividly in Byron: The Years of Fame:
As he leant on one elbow, his small white hand clenched beneath his cheek, meditative, immobile…in the anteroom of some brilliant London party — melancholy and sullen detachment pervaded his attitude…13
This stance communicated volumes. As Quennell points out, a young, healthy-looking man like Byron must, it would be assumed, have a good reason for standing still. But since there was nothing obviously wrong with him, his audience was forced to assume that he was paralysed by existential boredom — which was not too far from the truth. This pose, combined with his extremely pale complexion — a side-effect of his brutal skin care regime — created the impression that Byron was a creature from another world. In his heart of hearts, Byron longed to be in the world, to relate to others as an equal. But since he knew this would never happen (because of the terrible curse), he further entrenched himself as an outcast by creating mythologised versions of his suffering self in his poems. These reinforced the impression his insecurities had created until it was impossible to tell where the myth ended and the man began. Tortured poet charisma starts here.
There was in him a vital scorn of all:
As if the worst had fall’n which could befall,
He stood a stranger in this breathing world,
An erring spirit from another hurl’d;14
By portraying himself as a solitary, inspired individual, forever cut off from society, Byron was simply acting out the dilemma of all poets and artists since the revolution. But Byron, with his flair for publicity and his gift for self-mythologising, was the first to make this idea popular with a middle-class public.
So much he soar’d beyond or sunk beneath,
The men with whom he felt condemned to breathe,
And long’d by good or ill to separate
Himself from all who shared his mortal state;15
The source of his estrangement, as he explains in ‘Lara’, lay in his childhood. He was born with a double handicap — a deformed leg and an oversized heart.
his early dreams of good outstripped the truth
and troubled manhood followed baffled youth16
The world had already broken Byron’s heart when he was only twenty-three. From there, things could only get worse, and sure enough, they did. His insatiable appetite for kicks conspired with his desperate need for attention to produce a series of scandals that culminated in an affair with his half-sister Augusta in 1814. After that, he went from society darling to social pariah in record time. He left England for the continent shortly after, and remained in exile for the rest of his life. This, of course, only confirmed his belief that he was a man apart.
Like Werther, Byron ascribed almost cosmic significance to his emotions, and the feelings stirred up by the Augusta affair led him to his most spectacular conclusion. He loved Augusta, and for that society denounced him as a sinner. Since his feelings couldn’t be wrong, he must be a sinner, and since, as the philosopher Bertrand Russell says, ‘he must be remarkable, he would be remarkable as a sinner, and would dare transgressions beyond the courage of the fashionable libertines whom he wished to despise’.17 He would become a super-sinner. Byron had seen his way marked out for him even before a furious Madam de Staël told him he was ‘un demon’ — he had already compared himself in verse to a fallen angel.18 Like Don Giovanni, Byron was hell-bound. But unlike the light-hearted seventeenth-century rake, Byron knew in advance where he was headed, and would get there on his own terms.
For the hero of the modern tragedy, there’s no question of survival — he’s doomed before the lights go down. But he can
decide how he wants to go out. Werther and the emo singers simply take the path of least resistance and let the world roll right over them. They’re paralysed by the sheer pointlessness of everything, and by the world’s refusal to live up to their expectations. So they wait until life has them boxed into a corner, and slip quietly into oblivion with a heavy sigh. Werther can barely bring himself to commit suicide; he prefers to think that he’s allowed Charlotte to kill him. Byron started out this way: returning from his pilgrimage in 1812 he asked nothing more of the world than a way of walking out of it, and wondered if, somewhere in London, he might find someone who’d be willing to save him the trouble.19
But after the Augusta scandal his position had changed. He’d become a ‘strong’ romantic, the kind who sees that society cannot accommodate him, and so sets out to oppose everything that society stands for. If he’s already doomed, he’s going to do whatever he likes and make as much trouble as possible along the way. What’s more, he’ll have the last laugh. Life might be impossible for the romantic outsider, but he can still go out in a blaze of glory — or hellfire, as the case may be.
Give Them Blood
THERE IS A twist in the tragedy of Ziggy Stardust: when he finally goes down, he doesn’t overdose on smack or choke on his own vomit. Even the threat of his jealous band mates turns out to be a red herring. In the end it’s the kids — Ziggy’s own fans — who finish him off. This is what Bowie means when he sings about Ziggy being ‘a leper Messiah’. His fans, no longer satisfied with admiring his ‘snow-white tan’ from afar, took him up on the offer he seemed to be making of his body. They all wanted him, so they each grabbed a piece and ripped him apart.1 And in ‘Rock ’n’ Roll Suicide’ he explains that he gave himself willingly, gave up his body as a sacrament so that the fans might finally achieve the communion they craved.