Hey, Nietzsche! Leave them kids alone

by Craig Schuftan

  I did not intend to write philosophical music, or to portray in music Nietzsche’s great work. I meant to convey by means of music an idea of the development of the human race from its origin, through the various stages of its development, religious and scientific, up to Nietzsche’s idea of the superman.3

  The human race, Nietzsche explained in Also Sprach Zarathustra, is in a transitional phase. Or rather, the human race is a transitional phase. We are, as Nietzsche puts it, standing on a makeshift rope over a great abyss. As we sway uncertainly over the deep, we look behind us and see our past — the ape — and when we do this we feel pretty proud of ourselves. Zarathustra points us toward the other end of the rope, ahead of us in the distance. That, he says, is where your destiny lies; the new form humanity must take; the means by which man will be superseded — just as man superseded the ape. ‘Behold,’ says Zarathustra. ‘I teach you…the superman!’4 Humankind, in Zarathustra’s opinion, has wasted a lot of time and effort trying to safeguard the future of humankind. What we should really be asking ourselves is: ‘how shall humankind be overcome?’5 The superman is this next stage in human evolution. And it’s this great event that Strauss’s magnificent fanfare is meant to announce.

  Joe Guercio, who would arrange Strauss’s piece for Elvis’s band and lead them through it hundreds of times in the ’70s, first heard Also Sprach Zarathustra the same way most of us did — watching Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.6 The film begins on prehistoric earth, at the moment when man first learns to impose his will on the world (by picking up a bone and using it to smash things), and eventually progresses to impose his will on others (by smashing them in the head with the very same bone). Kubrick marks this as the moment when man takes the first step toward his destiny by scoring the scene with Strauss’s Zarathustra — and then cheekily suggests that we haven’t got much further in the last few hundred thousand years by cutting from a shot of the bone flying through the air to a bone-shaped spaceship tumbling through the void. Kubrick’s vision of humanity in the twenty-first century is a little like Nietzsche’s estimation of the nineteenth. ‘Even now,’ he wrote, ‘man is more of an ape than any ape.’7

  Sitting in the movie theatre watching 2001, Joe Guercio heard Strauss’s massive chords heralding the arrival of humanity’s successor and thought of Elvis. Elvis, watching the film a few days later, thought of himself.8 This is not too surprising. The idea that Elvis might in fact be some completely new kind of human being — or not a human being at all — had been implicit from the moment he first appeared on TV in 1956. (Charles Laughton once introduced him to the audience as ‘that man, Elvis Presley’ as though he didn’t know what he was.)9 Ten seconds later, he’d awakened teenage America’s suppressed longing for Dionysiac revelry, lifted the Judeo-Christian God’s veto on the passions, and signalled a complete reversal of morals that would last, happily, until the present day. ‘Yeah, that was the dance that everybody forgot,’ said country singer Butch Hancock — echoing Wagner. ‘It was the dance so strong it took an entire civilisation to forget it, and ten seconds to remember.’10 An American evangelist famously grumbled that Elvis was ‘morally insane’.11 Zarathustra had warned in 1882 that the superman would be ‘a destroyer of morality’, and that his arrival would be heralded by madness and lightning.

  Ziggy Stardust: Free power, without morality.

  Homo Superior

  IN 1969 RCA records released a single called ‘Space Oddity’ that was perfectly timed to cash in on the popularity of Kubrick’s film. The song was a strange, psychedelic folk number — a meditation on cosmic alienation, sung by a man who lives outside everything in a tin can in space. ‘Space Oddity’ was a hit and David Bowie, who’d been mounting a series of increasingly desperate-looking attempts on the charts since the mid ’60s, finally breathed a sigh of relief. But Bowie was not quite home and dry. Two years later, ‘Space Oddity’ was starting to feel more like a millstone around his neck than a foot in the door to superstardom.1 He was in danger of disappearing into the ‘where-are-they-now?’ file: David Bowie? Oh yeah, the guy with the stylophone! What happened to him?

  In 1971 Bowie released The Man Who Sold the World, and its cover appeared to be yet another attention-grabbing Bowie stunt — the singer wearing a flowing blue dress and reclining on a divan, playing with his hair. The photo was based on a painting by onetime Pre-Raphaelite Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and the mood of medievalism persisted on listening to the album. But this was no exercise in Tolkienesque whimsy — Bowie’s new songs had taken on an apocalyptic tone — he sang about madness, death, and in the last song, a race of long-dead supermen.

  The following year, Bowie finally caught a break: a song he’d written and sold to ex Herman’s Hermits singer Peter No-one became an unlikely hit. ‘Oh You Pretty Things’ is one of Bowie’s catchiest songs, but it’s also one of his most frightening. What starts out as a normal day, getting dressed, making breakfast, takes an extraordinary turn in the very first verse. The singer, stirring his coffee, looks out the window and sees a great hand coming out of a crack in the sky, reaching toward him. The singer has been chosen as a prophet, his task is to announce the end of the human race as we know it. ‘Homo sapiens’, says the singer, ‘have outgrown their use. You’d better make way for the homo superior’.2

  The singer’s prophecy soon came true, as the ubermensch arrived on earth only six months later. He did not appear, as Nietzsche might have imagined, on a dramatic mountain peak silhouetted by a flash of lightning — but in the slightly less impressive surrounds of the Toby Jug pub in Tolworth. The lightning was provided by a hand-painted banner hung from the back of the stage — a red flash zigzagging across a white disc. In front of this stood a rock and roll band with ‘The Spiders from Mars’ painted on their drum kit. And towering over all (thanks to a pair of shiny stack-heeled boots) was the homo superior: David Bowie, now reborn as the alien rock singer Ziggy Stardust. Bowie as he later admitted, ‘always had a repulsive need to be something more than human’.3

  Bowie had read his Nietzsche, along with his Brecht and Burroughs. He’d also spent a lot of time watching Stanley Kubrick films like 2001 and A Clockwork Orange, from which he’d picked up the idea, as he later put it, that ‘nothing was true’.4 Over the next two years, the singer would set out to prove it.

  What really pushed Bowie over the top was a 1972 interview in Melody Maker wherein the singer declared: ‘I’m gay’, and a nation choked on its tea.5 This was the first open admission of homosexuality by a British pop star. It was also, it later transpired, a flat-out lie — but Bowie had a point to make, and the fuss his confession caused served his purpose well. His new plastic pop star had to be seen to be a destroyer of morality because morality, as Nietzsche said, is the herd instinct in the individual, and Bowie was never going to be one of a herd. The Melody Maker writer picked up on this immediately. Noting that Bowie, while claiming to be gay, refused to identify with or make himself available to the cause of gay lib in Britain, Michael Watts concluded that the only cause David Bowie was really interested in was David Bowie. ‘It’s individuality he’s really trying to preserve.’6

  ‘Starman’, the first single from 1973’s The Rise and Fall…, was the sound of Ziggy beaming in a message through the static and the space junk. The kids huddled around their radio in the middle of the night can just make out Ziggy’s hazy cosmic jive. ‘Let the children lose it…fzzzzzt…let all the children boogie…’ It’s been suggested that Ziggy’s message, and his mission on earth, was supposed to bring peace and love to humanity, but this is not at all what he meant to do. Ziggy’s arrival (heralded by a new star in the sky), his martyrdom and his resurrection undoubtedly make him a Christ-like figure, but his message is not one of tolerance, forgiveness and brotherly love. He wants us to realise our potential (‘use it’), discard our moral standards (‘lose it’) and — in a final directive which combines the previous two in their highest form of expression — dance (‘boogie’). But he is not a m
an of the people — he is aloof, superior and aristocratic.7

  British critic Herbert Read has suggested that Christ’s sermon on the mount — ‘love thy neighbour’ — contains the essence of the democratic ideal.8 Ziggy, like Nietzsche, wants nothing to do with this ideal. He is the ‘special man’ — the strong individual who acts in defiance of his community, the one who realises his visions at the expense of others. Ziggy is able to do this partly because he’s an alien — but mostly because he’s an artist. In ‘Star’, Ziggy contemplates the suffering of the world, and realises that it can only be redeemed by art. ‘I could make it all worthwhile as a rock and roll star,’ he muses.9 His ability to view suffering as an aesthetic phenomenon means he is unlikely to be troubled by morality.

  Bowie chose the lightning bolt as Ziggy’s insignia because lightning is the perfect symbol for such an individual. Lightning, for Nietzsche, represented ‘free power, without morality’.10 His superman was a result of his attempt to imagine a man who could accept, and conduct such vast energies. Nietzsche is not asking us to imagine some God-like being — a blonde giant with lightning coursing through his veins. The Superman, for Nietzsche, is nothing more than a man who can accept everything — beauty, sadness, joy, madness, the awful, destructive force of nature itself, and still say ‘yes’ to life. That’s why Zarathustra asks the people:

  Where is the madness that will cleanse you?

  Where is the lightning to lick you with its tongue?

  behold: I teach you The Superman

  he is this madness, he is this lightning!11

  For his follow up to Ziggy Stardust, Bowie fused these two supremely anti-social motifs — madness and lightning — into one image. The cover of Aladdin Sane shows Ziggy with a lightning-flash painted across his face and a mercury tear pooling on his snow-white collarbone.

  Bowie’s magpie eye had first spied this lightning logo on the equipment cases used to carry the band’s gear to his shows — ‘Danger: High Voltage’.12 Contemplating the vast energies that surge through the mains power supply and into the Spiders’ amplifiers, Bowie had an epiphany — a modern-day variation on Nietzsche’s lightning-storm. Bowie’s rock star ideal would be a man who could accept these vast energies and dispense them freely, joyfully, immorally. It worked — as Mojo’s Ben Fisher must have realised when, in 1997, he described Bowie’s guitarist Mick Ronson as ‘a Nietzschean ubermensch, hatched straight from Bowie’s consciousness’.13 And it may have worked too well — within a couple of months the lighting flash seemed to have been appropriated by a group of rival super-beings. ‘I was not a little peeved when Kiss purloined it,’ Bowie later recalled. ‘Purloining, after all, was my job.’14

  Destroyer

  LIKE WAGNER, PAUL Stanley understood the need for new myths in the wasteland of modern life. His first band, Wicked Lester, was going nowhere precisely because it had failed to grasp this principle. One night in 1972, Stanley’s bandmate Ace Frehely symbolically killed Wicked Lester when he wrote the band’s new name — which Stanley had just recently come up with — over the old one on a poster outside a club. Frehely took out a texta and wrote the word ‘KISS’, stylising the two ‘s’s to make them look like twin lightning-bolts.1

  In re-inventing themselves as a readymade rock and roll myth, the members of Kiss combined two ideas — both of which are Nietzschean. One is the lightning motif, the other is the Superhero. Inspired by the Marvel and DC comics they loved, the members of Kiss transformed themselves from a mere rock band into a league of supermen — the demon, the cat-man, the space-man, the star-child. Kiss was the first band to spell out the connection between power-chords and super-powers, first on their album covers and in their live shows; and later when they became stars of their own Marvel Comics series in 1977. The rock and roll superman now shared shelf-space in the newsagents with the real Superman.

  In Men of Tomorrow, Gerard Jones traces the development of Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster’s original man of steel, Superman, to Nietzsche’s ideas, which by the 1930s were popular not just in Germany — where he had been ignored for so long — but in the United States as well.2 In Siegel’s 1932 short story, The Reign of the Superman, the teenage author re-imagined Nietzsche’s ubermensch for the readers of his self-published magazine, appropriately titled, Science Fiction — The Advance Guard of Future Civilization. Like many Nietzscheans of the early twentieth century, Siegel misunderstood the ubermensch — in The Reign of The Superman, he becomes a fantasy of personal power instead of a religious idea of transcendence. But Nietzsche might still have enjoyed Siegel’s story, in which the protagonist is not the upholder of ‘truth, justice, and the American way’ he would later become, but a moral monster, who uses his super-powers to trample and destroy.

  Superman, in his final form, would vow to constrain his elemental power in the interests of good-old-fashioned morality. But the danger implied by such power would be constantly invoked over the next seventy years of his life — not just in the Superman comics, but throughout the Superhero universe. This barely concealed threat is what draws the rock singer to the super-being. In the storylines of Superhero comics, the questions of power and responsibility that nag at the thoughtful young rock star are played out on a cosmic scale. The rock singer, as a romantic outsider, senses the tremendous power that awaits the individual who throws off social bonds forever and enjoys free energy without morality. But the singer is also burdened with a feeling of social responsibility — a burden which becomes heavier as the band’s audiences start to fill stadiums. In the comic books, these two conflicting ideas are usually split between the Supervillain and the Superhero — the first is a threat because he is powerful and selfish; the second is still powerful but feels he must help others. Glam rock stars like Bowie or Kiss tend to be more like Supervillains than superheroes — they’re a-moral destroyers and corruptors, whose existence poses a threat to the status quo. But in the mythical universe of My Chemical Romance, it’s not so simple. By embracing symbols of death and evil, and by portraying himself as a Byronic super-sinner, Gerard Way at first seems to be of the same type as Ziggy — who he admires intensely. But Gerard is too moral (and, as we’ll see later, too democratic) to embrace this idea completely. He knows that a Kiss comic book will very likely inspire its young reader to want to play guitar, score with groupies and flirt with Satanism. But he hopes that the kids who buy My Chemical Romance action figures will grow up to be super-heroes, not a super-villains.3 They might accidentally destroy civilisation with the awesome power of their shredding; but they’ll use that same power to rescue babies from the rubble after they’ve done it.

  Rilke: Love your loneliness.

  Such a Special Guy

  IN 1992, RIVERS Cuomo was still hiding in the garage with his X-Men comics and Kiss posters. Back then, he was worried we might call him a nerd or a dork. Now, he couldn’t care less what we think of him. He has become the thing he used to dream about — an axe-guitar-wielding superman, a not-so-teen Titan. He can do what he likes — in or out of the garage. In ‘Pork and Beans’ he sings:

  I’m-a do the things that I wanna do

  I ain’t got a thing to prove to you1

  With 2008’s The Red Album, Rivers Cuomo seemed finally to have busted out of the underground. The self-loathing and self-denial of the late ’90s was long gone. Part of Cuomo’s disgust with the cult of Pinkerton stemmed from his belief that emo’s insistence on misery and the inability to act was profoundly unhealthy. Andy Greenwald has observed that post-Pinkerton emo — the period that produced lyrics like ‘I’m afraid to try, I’ll keep my hands by my side’ — was defined by ‘an arrogance derived from superior humility’.2 Greenwald’s description of emo ethics here echoes Nietzsche’s thoughts on Christianity in his On the Genealogy of Morals. In Nietzsche’s view, Judeo-Christian morality is a fairy story invented by the weak to justify their weakness. ‘They are stronger,’ say the oppressed, ‘but we are more virtuous.’ For Nietzsche, nothing could be further fr
om the truth:

  All truly noble morality grows out of triumphant self-affirmation. Slave ethics, on the other hand, begins by saying “no” to an ‘outside’ an ‘other’ and that “no” is its creative act.3

  A rock-and-roll superman could have no use for such perverse ethics. With The Red Album, Cuomo traded slave morality for triumphant self-affirmation — emo self-denial for the Nietzschean philosophy of Queen’s ‘We Are the Champions’. The new Cuomo had no time for losers. ‘One look in the mirror and I’m tickled pink,’ he sang in ‘Pork and Beans’. His mood was proud and defiant. No wonder he never fit in — he’s not one of a herd, but a lone, inspired individual. In ‘Troublemaker’, Cuomo boils the romantic philosophy down to one sentence: ‘There isn’t anybody else exactly quite like me.’4

  While the self-asserting superman of The Red Album might seem worlds away from the human wreckage at the centre of Pinkerton, one very important trait connects the old Rivers to the new Rivers. In ‘Troublemaker’ he reminds us he’s a big star, and that everyone wants a piece of him. But the grabbing hands will never touch him. You won’t see Rivers out having fun like everybody else — and even if you do, you might as well not be there. Here’s why: