FOR TEN YEARS after the fiasco of The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche embraced philosophy — truth became his goal, and thought was exalted above emotion. But he found he couldn’t keep this up for long. In 1882’s The Gay Science he declared himself disgusted with the ‘will-to-truth’ of the philosophers. From this moment on, he said, he would embrace life, not thought. ‘I wish to be at all times hereafter only a yea-sayer,’ he wrote.1
By being determined to say ‘yes’ to life, Nietzsche became the natural enemy of Christianity with its seven deadly sins and its thou-shalt-nots. For him, what Christians call ‘good’ behaviour is perverse. In 1883’s Also Sprach Zarathustra, Nietzsche’s wild-eyed prophet drops this reversal of morals on the unsuspecting townspeople. ‘It is not your sin, but your moderation that cries to heaven,’ Zarathustra tells his baffled audience.2 This news has turned their world upside down, but it’s all in a day’s work for the prophet. It’s a sin! the people say. So what? says Zarathustra. Sin more! ‘Your very meanness in sinning cries to heaven!’3 Zarathustra sets himself as a Christ-in-reverse: ‘It may have been good for that preacher of the petty people to bear and suffer the sin of man. I, however, rejoice in sin as my great consolation.’4
Zarathustra’s reversal of morals is almost incomprehensible to his audience — but quite familiar to us after fifty years of rock and roll. The rock star knows instinctively that one must say ‘yes’ to life, and his career serves to demonstrate Nietzsche’s philosophy in practice. In 1989 Depeche Mode singer Dave Gahan — the lapsed church-goer whose faith had been shattered five years earlier by the experiences described in Blasphemous Rumours — decided that Christian morality was something he could do without. He decided, as he put it, ‘to become a monster… I wanted to live that very selfish life without being judged’.5
Depeche Mode’s 1990 album, Violator, had cemented his anti-religious stance with searing indictments of the confessional (‘Policy of Truth’) and of Catholic guilt (‘Halo’). And on the previous year’s ‘Strangelove’, Gahan had hinted that he might try being a sinner — if only to stave off the boredom of a meaningless existence:
I give in to sin
Because you have to make this life liveable.6
After the extraordinary success of Violator and the Music for the Masses tour, Gahan suddenly found himself with the means to find out just how much sinning he could do. Accordingly, on the band’s next tour, Gahan drank, snorted and shagged his way around the world, alienated everyone who ever cared for him, became addicted to heroin, destroyed hotel rooms, broke up his marriage and nearly got kicked out of his own band. And it all felt…fantastic. ‘I’d be lying if I said it didn’t make me feel…like I’d never felt before. Like I belonged. To what, I’ve no idea.’7
Thanks to Nietzsche, we are in a position to fill in the blanks in Gahan’s account. The singer felt like he belonged because he was living authentically, according to his desires. He had said yes to life, and this, as Nietzsche discovered on that day when he watched the storm break, feels incredible. This is romantic optimism in a nutshell. In his History of Western Philosophy, Bertrand Russell says that the individual who throws off social bonds and indulges his instincts gets ‘a new sense of power from the resolution of inner conflict’.8 He already sees himself as actively inspired, rather than passively ‘getting along’. Now he wonders if he hasn’t become some new kind of human being — outside convention, social bonds and even morality. Nietzsche would say that he has; he called these exceptional individuals ‘artist-tyrants’, and insisted that we could not expect them to operate according to society’s laws. ‘Morality,’ Nietzsche declared, ‘is the herd instinct in the individual.’9
To live in society while demanding the right to ignore its rules makes no sense — and the romantic individualist knows it. That’s why he tends to justify his irrational philosophy by claiming the authority of a mystic, or a prophet. The ‘fire inside’ from which romantic poets and philosophers draw their inspiration is not unlike the voice that speaks to the prophet or the saint, which is why romantics — from Goethe to Nietzsche, Springsteen to Gerard Way — slip so easily into those roles. To do what they do, these individuals believe they must obey the true voice of feeling in their hearts, which inevitably means they must, to a large extent, renounce the practical, material world. When the strain of keeping this up becomes too much, they quickly make the transition from saint to martyr — which is why Bowie describes Ziggy as a ‘leper messiah’, and Billy Corgan imagines ‘secret destroyers’ roasting him over flames in ‘Bullet with Butterfly Wings’. Gahan, who ascended to megastardom on the back of a spooky glam-rock stomp called ‘Personal Jesus’ saw his way clearly marked out for him. In ‘Personal Jesus’ he’d proposed himself as a secular messiah: first in the intimate context of the song, as one to another; and then, inevitably, in the stadium, where he’d invited his fans to reach out and touch faith. Now, Gahan began to grow his hair long and to cultivate a beard. He took to appearing onstage shirtless, with his arms spread in a crucifixion pose. The follow-up to Violator was full of gospel choirs and lyrics about repentance and salvation, and the band named it Songs of Faith and Devotion. In ‘Walking in My Shoes’ the singer’s stance is Byronic — he’s done bad, bad things, he tells us. But don’t think for a second that he was just having a good time. He also suffered terribly for his reversal of traditional values, and his belief that moral laws should be destroyed:
I’m not looking for a clearer conscience
Forgiveness for the things I do
but before you come to any conclusions
try walking in my shoes.10
Gahan’s story — like all rock and roll tragedies, had a spiritual rather than a moral purpose. The singer was not a moral example; he was a martyr to a new, anti-Christian faith. And like the Nazarene preacher he not-so-subtly evoked on stage, he inspired followers. Both Marilyn Manson and Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor were as much inspired by Gahan’s gloomy nihilism and Dionysiac excess as they were by his band’s industrial-strength synth-pop. Both deliberately set out to explore the limits of morality by identifying with anti-social monsters like Charles Manson and flirting with images of evil — Nazism and Satanism. Marilyn Manson’s reversal of good and evil inevitably lead him to Nietzsche, whose aphorisms he paraphrased in interviews, and who could have written the lyrics to ‘Beautiful People’ himself:
It’s not your fault you’re always wrong
The weak ones are there to justify the strong.11
Like Gahan, Manson practised what he preached, embracing hedonism with a vengeance, and going so far as to style himself as ‘The God of Fuck’. But by 2004 he was feeling like a martyr to his own revolt. In an interview for Kerrang! entitled ‘Twilight of the Gods’ (a reference to Wagner’s opera of the same name), he claimed that his new greatest hits collection represented ‘ten years of fighting to get where I am’, and that he’d decided to cover ‘Personal Jesus’ because, ‘“Personal Jesus” says more than anything I could say myself right now’.12
Nietzsche — who spent many years in exile, driven by neglect into a state of acute paranoia, reached the end of his life in a similar state. In 1889, just before he went completely insane, he began signing his letters ‘The Crucified One’. It was no great leap for Nietzsche to imagine himself as a martyr, because he had always seen himself more as a prophet than a philosopher. Philosophers sit down with the works of other great philosophers and subject their methods to empirical tests to see if they hold true — if they don’t, they reason their way to new truths. For Nietzsche, such people were ‘blockheads’. His insights came from his direct experience of the world, visions that descended upon him as he contemplated nature and his own soul. ‘I have seen thoughts rising on my horizon the like of which I have never seen before,’ he wrote in a letter, around the time he was working on The Gay Science. He went on:
The intensity of my emotion makes me tremble and burst out laughing. Several times I have been unable to leave my room for the ridi
culous reason that my eyes were swollen — and why? Each time I have wept too much on my walks of the day before — not sentimental tears, but actual tears of joy. I sang and cried out foolish things. I was full of a new vision in which I forestalled all other men.13
Nietzsche’s temperament was religious, but it was also artistic. His insights came from intuition rather than intellect, and this put him much closer to the poets, painters and composers than to most philosophers. Because of this, he understood instinctively that the artist is always amoral. This, as you can imagine, was a quality he admired a great deal. In The Gay Science he asks: ‘Do you suppose that Tristan and Isolde are preaching against adultery when they both perish by it?’14 Nietzsche saw that for the great artist, the pursuit of beauty outweighed all other considerations, including moral ones. Furthermore, he knew that this approach was fundamentally right — that is, that it was desirable to take an aesthetic attitude to life. That’s why, to him, the artist was a ‘higher man’. Artists have no use for morality, because their only allegiance is to beauty. And since beauty redeems us from suffering, no-one could say that their attitude is wrong.
The only problem for the ‘higher man’ is that of the masses — the little party of regular folk from Don Giovanni who seek to impose their standards of normalcy on the fearless artist-hero. This is what finally defeated Nietzsche — his books were full of earth-shattering revelations, but the critics and academics saw only the ravings of a lunatic. This, too, was the snag Dave Gahan ran into as he tried to live his life artistically.
In ‘Condemnation’, the artist–martyr shakes his fist at the heavens and demands to know why he is made to suffer. Of course, he already knows the answer: ‘My duty was always to beauty,’ he confesses. ‘That was my crime.’15
Kanye West: Power increases, resistance is overcome.
Stronger
WHILE HE ADMIRED Napoleon a great deal, Nietzsche had nothing but contempt for the French Revolution, with its Liberty, Equality and Fraternity. Democracy to Nietzsche is a travesty. In a democracy, or any other variation of ‘rule by the people’, the vision of a great artist-tyrant can be compromised and undone by the petty wants of the bungled and the botched — the masses. Nietzsche says the suffering of one great man is more important than the suffering of millions of ordinary people. ‘What do the rest matter?’ he asks. ‘The rest are merely mankind — one must be superior to mankind.’1 Nietzsche always sides with the individual genius against the world that doesn’t understand his vision.
This is exactly the point of view expressed by Kanye West in his 2007 hit, ‘Stronger’. ‘There’s a thousand yous there’s only one of me,’ raps the artist-tyrant.2 Accordingly, when it came time to give his song a chorus, Kanye fused the musical mood of Daft Punk’s ‘Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger’ with one of Nietzsche’s best-known aphorisms: ‘What does not kill me makes me stronger.’3
The song’s action takes place at a nightclub. We fade in on Kanye West tuning the ‘black Kate Moss’. Like all romantics, Kanye takes a dim view of convention and the artificial refinements of modern life — looking around, all he sees is fake shit. ‘Does anybody make real shit anymore?’ he asks, rhetorically.4 For Kanye — as for Nietzsche and Dostoyevsky — authenticity is a big deal. But while he knows he’s more authentic than everybody else, he’s also become lonely as a result. He believes he can still be redeemed by love, and yet it seems that the perfect union of souls he imagines is constantly under threat from the world, with all its worn-out morality. Before he and the black Kate Moss have even swapped digits, he’s already lost in narcissistic fantasies in which he and his soul mate fly away to another world:
Let’s get lost tonight
You can be my black Kate Moss tonight…
Y’all don’t give a fuck what they all say, right?
Awesome, the Christian and Christian Dior.5
Kanye, as is fairly well known, is a Christian. But at this same party, barely thirty seconds into the same song, we find him standing on a table with a few Cristals under his belt, espousing some very un-Christian sentiments:
Bow in the presence of greatness,
’Cause right now thou hast forsaken us
You should be honoured by my lateness6
Kanye’s philosophy as presented in ‘Stronger’ is clearly much closer to Nietzsche’s than to any flavour of Christianity. As a student of philology, Nietzsche was always fascinated by the Titans — the monstrous race of super-beings who spawned the Greek deities. He was, as Rüdiger Safranski observes in Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography, far more impressed by those who make gods than by the gods themselves. In The Birth of Tragedy he relates how the Titans became the first tragic heroes of the Greek stage. Oedipus and Prometheus pushed against all natural laws, and when they died, they died heroically, for the sake of their ambition. Nietzsche warns his readers at the start of the book that if they approach the world of the Greeks looking for the type of morality found in the New Testament — or in the sickly productions of the nineteenth-century stage — they will be sorely disappointed. In stark opposition to the myths of Christianity — in which humankind is always punished for its sins — Nietzsche places the myth of Prometheus, who is heroic in his determination to push against the limitations placed on him by Zeus, who sees him as a threat. Hence Nietzsche’s admiration for strength, and the importance he places on the testing of will: ‘What does not kill me, makes me stronger.’
In this, the tragedy of Kanye West is exactly the type Nietzsche would admire. In ‘Stronger’, Kanye’s will is constantly being tested by haters. But the rapper insists that he will prevail: he will continue, in the face of ridicule and indifference, to preach ‘the new gospel’, and he will impose his forms on the world.7 This applies to his public life as much as his art. At 2007’s Video Music Awards, Kanye — having learned that he’d lost the best video award to Justice vs Simian’s ‘We Are Your Friends’ — crashed the stage. ‘Oh, hell no!’ he exclaimed, interrupting Justice’s acceptance speech and angrily protesting that his video for ‘Touch the Sky’ should have got the gong. He started out listing its merits, ‘This video cost a million dollars! I got Pam Anderson! I got ’em jumpin’ across canyons and shit!’8
But this was not really the point. Kanye knew his video should have won because he knew it was the best video. Even as he was apologising to the bemused members of Justice whose acceptance speech he’d hijacked, he was insisting that his video was better than theirs, even though he’d never seen it. ‘It’s nothin’ against you man, I’ve never seen your video.’
Kanye then went on to suggest that the show’s judges were effectively sabotaging the credibility of their own show by not giving him the award, after which he suggested that the whole show might as well go fuck itself. Couldn’t he be more polite and gracious? Wouldn’t that be good? What do you think Nietzsche would say to that?
What is good? All that heightens the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself in man
What is bad? All that proceeds from weakness
What is happiness? The feeling that power increases — that resistance is overcome.10
By his determination to impose his forms on the world, regardless of the petty complaints of the bungled and the botched, Kanye has become one of Nietzsche’s ‘Higher Men’. Nietzsche first encountered the higher man in the person of Lord Byron. In his youth Nietzsche had an intense admiration (as all gloomy young men of the nineteenth century tended to do) for the author of Childe Harold and Manfred. Nietzsche admired Byron’s energy and drive, and the way he seemed to live the exploits described in his poetry and to embody the characters he described — as though his life and his art were one.11 It could be argued that Byron was playing a role. But it was a role he could only play because he knew it. ‘One cannot guess at these things.’ Nietzsche wrote, ‘One simply is it or is not.’12 To Nietzsche, Byron seemed superior to other men because he was active, immoral and free from restraint.
Later in l
ife, after shifting from his initial ultimate yes, to a brief dalliance with ultimate no, and then back to yes again, Nietzsche started to dream into existence his ultimate yea-sayer — a man who could say yes to all of life, for whom there were no limitations, no restraints. Would such a man, he wondered, be something a little more than human? In coming up with a name for this new creature, Nietzsche revived a word he’d first used to describe Byron in his student days — Ubermensch — Superman.13
Richard Strauss: The dance that everybody forgot.
Also Sprach Zarathustra
IN THE SUMMER of 1972 Elvis Presley played a record-breaking run of dates at the Sahara Tahoe hotel in Nevada. Elvis was in high spirits, the band was on fire, and the set-list — including ‘You’ve Lost that Loving Feeling’ and ‘The Impossible Dream’ — was generally regarded as topnotch.1 But what really set the tone for the show was a number Elvis didn’t sing on at all. It was his walk-on music, a majestic theme beginning with a simple but tremendously powerful sequence of three notes — C, G, C. This little fanfare was written not by bandleader Joe Guercio or any one of the dozens of songsmiths-for-hire in Freddy Bienstock’s little black book but by a Munich-born romantic composer named Richard Strauss.
Like every other German-speaking composer of the late nineteenth century, Strauss grew up in the enormous shadow of Richard Wagner, and his operas and symphonies sometimes sound like they’re trying to out-Wagner Wagner for sheer emotional drama and intensity of sound. Sometimes, he comes close — as in the piece Elvis included in his show at the Sahara Tahoe. The King’s walk-on music began life as the opening theme for a symphonic tone poem Strauss wrote in 1896 called Also Sprach Zarathustra — inspired by Nietzsche’s book of the same name. Strauss had first read Nietzsche four years earlier while on a holiday in Greece, and it had transformed him — and his music — immediately. After reading Nietzsche’s denunciations of Christianity, Strauss tore up the last act of his (very Wagnerian) opera, Guntram, and re-wrote it so that it ended with the hero turning his back on society and organised religion and going it alone. Friends were horrified, and advised him to go back to his Bible — but Strauss, ever the romantic individualist and now a confirmed Nietzschean, refused to budge.2 Three years later he started work on his homage to Also Sprach Zarathustra. Strauss later explained his aims in composing the piece:
Hey, Nietzsche! Leave them kids alone Page 25