Hey, Nietzsche! Leave them kids alone

by Craig Schuftan

  Well now I’m no hero that’s understood,

  All the redemption I can offer girl is beneath this dirty hood…8

  Springsteen is not just talking dirty when he suggests that salvation is right there under the hood of his car, and that heaven’s in the back seat. He’s saying: you don’t have to wait, and you don’t need God. He’s going out tonight, he tells her, ‘to case the promised land’.9 He’s more or less made up a new religion on the spot — and armed with this new faith, he assures her, the threat of death will become no threat at all. Their faith in each other, he insists, will allow them to transcend the material world.

  Freddie Mercury: Compagnon de miseres.

  Pressure

  FOR DAVID BOWIE, ‘Heroes’ marked the beginning of a new, bravura-style of singing which record producer Tony Visconti dubbed ‘The Bowie Histrionics’.1 Though there wasn’t much room for it on his next album, the surprisingly low-key Lodger, the new style did make a few appearances on 1980’s Scary Monsters — especially on the first track, ‘It’s No Game’. But here, Bowie sounded more demented than heroic, as though the world he thought he could face on ‘Heroes’ had beaten him down again.

  The Bowie Histrionics proper didn’t really come out of its case again until 1981, and the occasion was not a David Bowie recording session per se, but a visit to fellow rock royalty that unexpectedly turned into a collaboration. In July of that year, the members of Queen were recording at Mountain Studios in Montreux. Bowie dropped by to say hello, and finding themselves with some time to spare, the five musicians started messing around with an idea. Before he knew it, Bowie found they were writing a song together. The music started to cook, the atmosphere in the studio grew heated, egos clashed. ‘It was, er…peculiar,’ said Bowie later.2

  ‘Peculiar’ is one way to describe the result of this unlikely collaboration. At first listen, ‘Under Pressure’ sounds like what it is — the sound of the two greatest hams in rock trying to out-ham each other. But it’s not all empty posturing — the lyric is a little vague, but that’s just because the scope of the song is so enormous that it’s hard for the singers to stay focused. ‘Under Pressure’ is about all the trouble in the world, and what we, as mere human beings, can hope to do about it. It struck a chord — the single went to number 1 in the UK at the end of 1981. It also topped the charts in Argentina — and stayed there for the entire duration of the Falklands War. This had the leader of Argentina’s military junta worried — he attacked ‘Under Pressure’ as a piece of British propaganda.3

  But while it’s full of rage and hope, ‘Under Pressure’ is not a protest song — or if it is, it’s more in the vein of My Chemical Romance’s ‘Welcome to the Black Parade’ than Bright Eyes’ ‘When the President Talks to God’. The singers’ adversary is not a demagogue or a dictator or a corrupt bureaucracy — it’s the world itself. The world, Bowie and Mercury tell us:

  Breaks a building down

  Splits a family in two

  Puts people on streets.4

  As the song goes on, the pressure builds and builds. The guitars brood like thunderclouds as Bowie, in his best Hammer Horror voice, sings about facing ‘the terror of knowing what this world is about’, as though he’s finally come to understand the mysterious source of all this global chaos. Then the pressure drops, the song quietens down, and the singers ask themselves how they can live with the horror. They can’t turn away and pretend it’s not there, and they can’t go on insisting that this is the best of all possible worlds when so many people are miserable. Then the music starts to build again, Freddie Mercury makes a vocal noise that approximates the sun breaking through clouds, and a solution comes rocketing out of the heavens — compassionate love! ‘Love! Love! Love!’, cries Bowie, heralding our salvation. When people understand that they need to change their way of life and start caring about one another, we will finally experience some relief from this terrible pressure. Freddie goes scatting off into the distance and the band leave the white-boy funk riff that started this whole thing lying on the floor — where Vanilla Ice would find it ten years later.

  Bowie and Queen didn’t stick around long enough to explain how this doctrine of compassionate love would work out in practice. But the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer had some ideas, which he set out in his essay, ‘On the Suffering of the World’, published in 1851. He was sixty-one years old, and had spent at least forty of these living with ‘the terror of knowing what this world is about’. He did not believe things were about to get any better.

  If you imagine, in so far as it is approximately possible, the sum total of distress, pain and suffering of every kind which the sun shines upon in its course, you will have to admit it would have been much better if the sun had been able to call up the phenomenon of life as little on the earth as on the moon…5

  Life, Schopenhauer insisted, is so bad that it can only be a mistake, and given that this is the case, and that we are all in the same unhappy boat, we owe it to one another to show a little kindness. Instead of going about calling one another ‘sir’ or ‘monsieur’ (or ‘dude’), we ought to address strangers as ‘fellow sufferer’ or ‘compagnon de miseres’.6

  Schopenhauer: The terror of knowing what this world is about.

  Schopenhauer

  SCHOPENHAUER HADN’T LIVED very long in 1805, but he’d already seen enough to convince him that Newton’s clockwork universe proceeding according to some grand design was a crock. He had a clerical job in a commercial house in Hamburg, and a few weeks of this provided all the proof he needed that life was not an elegant machine, but a constant lurch between pain and boredom.

  His father, whom he loved, had been found dead in a canal earlier that year, having taken his own life. His relationship with his mother was uneasy at best, bitterly competitive at worst. He’d taken a tour of the Continent, but with the Revolutionary wars still underway, had seen nothing but cruelty and unhappiness wherever he went. He hated his job, he hated his life.

  Schopenhauer’s Hamburg days formed his mature philosophy, a thorough-going pessimism which — as R J Hollingdale has observed in his introduction to Schopenhauer’s essays — remained virtually unchanged until his death fifty-five years later.1 He acquired more knowledge, but nothing altered his basic feeling about our existence. ‘Life,’ he wrote later, ‘is a disagreeable thing — and I have determined to spend it in reflecting on it.’2 This is exactly what he did. Back in 1776, the young Goethe, sitting on top of Strasbourg Cathedral, had a vision of the universe as ‘convulsed with desires knotted like snakes, from which it tries to escape only to entangle itself again’. This bleak view of life is perfectly understandable as a natural outcome of Goethe’s youthful angst, but, as Barker Fairley points out, it would be ‘hard to sustain as a piece of philosophy’.3 Amazingly, Schopenhauer would not only sustain it, but perfect it.

  He started writing his first book in 1814. Four years later it was published — to no reviews and no sales — and this, considering the book’s content, was entirely appropriate. In the two volumes of The World as Will and Representation Schopenhauer laid out his vision of life as a constant struggle for which there is no reward. The source of this struggle and the reason why our desires can never be satisfied is for Schopenhauer something very similar to the thing David Bowie and Freddie Mercury sang about in 1981. They call it ‘pressure’, but Schopenhauer called it ‘Will’ — the blind, striving, unstoppable force behind all perceptible phenomena. All things in our world, including ourselves, are manifestations of this Will, which means that no matter how hard we try, we can never become masters of our own destiny.

  Schopenhauer replaced the Philosophes’ infinite perfectibility with infinite struggle, the promise of utopia with an insistence that life is hell. German philosophy in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century was, as the Australian author Robert Spillane has pointed out in his book, An Eye for an I, a form of revenge on the French, who had dominated philosophy as they had all other walks of
cultural life in the 1700s.4 So the Germans decided that if the French were going to be rational, they would be irrational. Immanuel Kant (who died the same year Schopenhauer went to work in his father’s office) began to dismantle the apparatus of the Enlightenment by insisting, like his hero Rousseau, that the discoveries of science could have no positive effect on the lives of human beings. Johann Gottlieb Fichte, a little younger than Kant and a lot more hot-headed, proposed a philosophy of action, not knowledge, and replaced the Enlightenment’s mechanical universe with a chaotic, meaningless one in which we must freely exercise our will.5

  Schopenhauer, who admired Kant but despised Fichte, inherited the idea of a world without meaning. But where Fichte saw Will as positive — a way of imposing one’s forms on reality — for Schopenhauer Will was entirely negative and destructive. The thing behind all appearances, the force that animates all of nature is, in his view, evil. That’s why he was a pessimist. Optimists, like Fichte (or Nietzsche or Napoleon), believed they could impose their will on the world, that they could make a difference. But Schopenhauer looked at the actions of the optimists and concluded that their actions were usually harmful in the short term, and didn’t amount to a hill of beans in the long term. For Schopenhauer, action was always subject to Will and could therefore lead to no good. So in place of action, he advocated renunciation and compassion: hence his preferred form of address.

  In 1854 Schopenhauer received a letter from Richard Wagner — enclosed within was a copy of the composer’s Tristan poem. Wagner never got a reply — but this, as Robert Gutman observes in his biography of the composer, is not too surprising:

  Not only must its diction have offended the great stylist, but, when proudly sending off this paean to love, Wagner was obviously unaware that his idol was a confirmed misogynist whose soul had found its mate in a white poodle.6

  Schopenhauer was an enormous influence on Wagner at the time he was writing Tristan — and in many ways, Wagner’s hero is much more Schopenhauerish than he is medieval. Tristan has seen behind the veil of illusion that disguises the true nature of the world. He knows life is a sham and cannot provide him with happiness, so he renounces the world and all its willing by allowing himself to die. His beloved soon follows suit, and they achieve redemption in death. No more willing, no more problem.

  But the truth is, in welding Schopenhauer’s philosophy to his tale of tragic love, Wagner took some liberties with the great pessimist’s ideas. For starters, suicide for Schopenhauer ‘substitutes for a true redemption from this world of misery a merely apparent one’.7 He didn’t think suicide was wrong or immoral — he just didn’t think it worked. Secondly, Schopenhauer would have absolutely no time for Wagner’s Passion of Passion. Tristan and Isolde reject the world’s illusory values, but replace these with something Schopenhauer would see as even less helpful — a transcendent ideal based on sexual love.

  The music video for Queen and David Bowie’s ‘Under Pressure’ makes the same philosophical blunder — which is a shame, since the song itself is far more faithful to Schopenhauer’s ideas than anything Wagner ever wrote. Since Bowie and Mercury barely managed to work together in the studio for the six hours it took to do the song, getting them to commit to a day of shooting together was out of the question. So the director went for the Ed Wood-style solution of assembling a clip out of stock footage, classic films and TV news images. The video shows people rushing through cities and crowding onto trains. We see riots, a burning car, a woman screaming and a building collapsing — the perceptible phenomena of the world as will. (Vampires, for some reason, also make an appearance.) But for the last section, where the singers herald compassionate love as the means to redemption, the video shows a montage of great screen kisses. As the lovers lose themselves in their ecstatic union, the world fixes itself back up again — buildings un-explode on cue. But here, compassion has been replaced with passion. And passion, as far as Schopenhauer was concerned, is the problem — not the solution.

  Pinkerton

  IN 1900, SEVENTEEN years after Wagner’s death, Tristan und Isolde was scheduled to be performed for the first time at Milan’s famous opera theatre, La Scala. Unfortunately, the great Wagnerian tenor, Giuseppe Borgatti fell ill, so Tristan was postponed, and Giacomo Puccini’s La Boheme was substituted in its place.1 This was fitting, since Puccini was an admirer of Wagner, and strove to match the emotional intensity of Tristan in his own operas. This placed him on one side of a very firm line in turn-of-the-century Italy, where many saw Wagner’s influence on opera as a bad one.

  La Boheme did not go well at La Scala — the cast was in a bad mood to start with, and the ‘fatal silence’ of the audience didn’t make them feel any better.2 La Boheme limped through nine more performances, after which Puccini tried to put the whole miserable experience behind him. Little did he know there was more misery in store.

  Shortly before the fiasco at La Scala, Puccini had been struck with a new idea for an opera based on a play he’d seen in London called Madame Butterfly. The subject — an unhappy love affair between an American naval lieutenant named Pinkerton and his Japanese bride, Cio-Cio-San — was well timed to ride the wave of interest in all things Japanese that was sweeping Europe at the time. Puccini had a good feeling about Madama Butterfly. ‘I am completely taken with it!’ he wrote in March 1901.3

  But Madama Butterfly was plagued with problems, and two years later Puccini was still struggling with it. Then things got worse. On 21 February 1903 the composer was on his way to dinner at a friend’s house when his car drove off the road and plunged down an embankment. Puccini was trapped underneath the car with a fractured leg — a nearby doctor patched him up, but it later turned out that the leg had not been properly set and had to be re-broken. He was immobilised for almost three months, and the inertia made his bad mood worse. He despaired of Butterfly ever seeing the light of day, and wondered if anyone would care if he and his unfinished opera just disappeared off the face of the earth. Later that year, he wrote to his colleague Luigi Illica:

  I am here alone and sad! If you could know my sufferings! I have much need of a friend, and I don’t have any, or if there is someone who loves me, he doesn’t understand me. I am of a temperament very different from most! Only I understand myself and I grieve; but my sorrow is continuous, it does not give me peace… My life is a sea of sadness and I am stuck in it!4

  Somehow the shattered composer managed to finish his opera, and Madama Butterfly premiered on the night of 17 February 1904. It was an even worse disaster than the performance of La Boheme four years earlier. Puccini, leaning on a cane, could hardly hear the music for the laughter, catcalls and boos. The singers could barely hear themselves. The reviews, when they appeared the next morning, were terrible. ‘Butterfly,’ they wrote, ‘the diabetic opera, the result of an automobile accident.’ In years to come, Madama Butterfly would come to be seen, along with La Boheme, as one of Puccini’s masterpieces. While the version performed at the premiere was marred by structural problems which would later be ironed out, even in this raw state Madama Butterfly was already full of daring formal innovations and sincere personal emotion. But in 1904 it was regarded as a bitter disappointment from the man who had been hailed, only five years earlier, as the successor to Verdi. The critics roasted him for the opera’s sentimentality, the smallness of its themes, and for Puccini’s failure to grow as an artist.5

  Ninety years later, history repeated itself. Rivers Cuomo, like Puccini, was an admirer of the German romantic composers — though he preferred Mahler to Wagner. He and his band, Weezer, were hailed as the saviours of bubblegum rock in 1994. But Cuomo broke his leg at the height of their success — not in an accident like Puccini, but on purpose, to have it lengthened. He wore a painful brace for almost a year, and entered a period of deep doubt and depression. Under these circumstances, he began writing the songs that would become Weezer’s second album — a rock opera called The Black Hole. But the opera idea was scrapped in favour of a concep
t album loosely based on Puccini’s Madama Butterfly. In years to come Pinkerton would come to be seen as Weezer’s masterpiece — full of daring formal innovations and sincere personal emotion — but in 1997 it was regarded as a bitter disappointment from the band who had been hailed, only three years earlier, as the successor to The Cars. The critics roasted Cuomo for Pinkerton’s sentimentality, and for his failure to grow as an artist.

  Rivers Cuomo: My life is a sea of sadness.

  Butterfly

  IN Madama Butterfly, Pinkerton travels across the sea and finds himself a beautiful creature. He captures her, and immediately loses interest — he’s drinking a toast to finding ‘a real American wife’ before he’s even left Japan. He sails back to America and forgets Cio-Cio-San, and she is left staring out to sea, clinging to the promise he made that he would return ‘when the robin makes his nest again’.1 The opera ends when Cio-Cio-San, having remained faithful to Pinkerton throughout, learns that he has an American wife. Having no hope left in the world, she takes her own life.

  One of the greatest challenges Puccini had faced in bringing Madama Butterfly to the stage was the percieved lop-sidedness of the story’s plot. Puccini’s collaborator Illica complained that Pinkerton virtually disappeared for most of the story, ‘and his is the drama!’ he wrote to Puccini, exasperated.2Weezer’s second album would, in a curious way, make amends for this. Here, the drama is all Pinkerton — tellingly, his name has replaced hers on the marquee. There is still the unfathomable distance of the Atlantic Ocean between the young American and his Japanese love. But we never see her — while his emotional crises form the entire plot of the album. Butterfly writes adoring letters on cute stationery to her young man, he sits alone in his room and rationalises their relationship out of existence before it’s begun — all the while wishing for it to come true. But it’s on the album’s last song, ‘Butterfly’, that Cuomo’s feeling for Puccini’s opera becomes clearest. The singer tells us he keeps going out to catch butterflies — and they keep dying on him. ‘Every time I pin down what I think I want it slips away,’3 he sings. It seems as though there’s something wrong with him, as though his wants and his needs are fundamentally opposed. He wants something, he chases it and often catches it. But the object of his desire melts away as he grasps it. Understandably, he’s starting to wonder if there’s any point doing anything at all.