Hey Hipsters: Get Over It
Friday, April 25th, 2008Please read the first few lines from Pitchfork’s review of the Forever Changes rerelease, posted this morning, and with which I wholeheartedly agree:
If I were reviewing only the original material that forms the basis of this Collector’s Edition of Love’s Forever Changes, I’d certainly give it a 10.0 and praise it in the most glowing terms possible.
Me too. It’s one of my favorite albums. Good so far.
Pitchfork continues:
Such as: Fuck the Doors. This is the truer sound of late-1960s Los Angeles, which was neither a trippy paradise nor a Lizard Kingdom, but a purgatory characterized by paranoia and grievance.
OK, 1) No, fuck you, Pitchfork critic Stephen M. Deusner. Not enough paranoia and grievance in Jim Morrison’s lyrics? Are songs like “The End” and “My Wild Love” and “Five to One” and “The Unknown Soldier” just way too commercial and syrupy for you? What the hell is “truer” about Arthur Lee than Jim Morrison? What you mean is: Love was less successful than The Doors at the time, which means they must have been a better band.
Now, more significantly, 2) I feel like I will never hear the end of the Doors-bashing from today’s music journalists under 40. It’s a shibboleth to cement a person’s hipster cred, as vapid as it is tiresome, and with no obvious origin; I cannot remember ever reading a substantive critique of their music in my life, but sometime around 2002 my beloved Doors became the most hated band in history. I’ve personally had no more than one or two meaningful conversations about the band this decade, but I would need all my fingers and toes to count the number of times I’ve heard them casually referenced for punchline material by people in my Portland crowd who are taking it as a given that they’re a terrible joke of a band and everyone hates them. And none of the folks I know that personally hate them are willing or able to explain why. I’m never asking for publishable musicology either, just something a little meatier than “because they SUCK!”
So, two things. First, you people out there who hate The Doors: from now on, when you’re going to level me with a remark about how lame The Doors are, you have to back it up. Footnote your arguments. Pretend like you care for a second. I’m not taking the defensive in this conversation again unless the conversation can actually be about the music and/or the culture surrounding it.
Second, and maybe the same crowd that I would like to involve in the first discussion can help with the second: where did this obloquy come from? Precisely when and why did North America’s rock elite collectively decide to kick The Doors out of the sixties? Is it the same in Europe? Is it just the commonest, basest kind of revisionism, wherein Beatles/Stones/Doors need to get deëmphasized so that Zombies/Kinks/Love/Sonics can get vaunted? Because this rewriting of sixties rock history is very much going on. But still, I feel like The Doors get singled out for special abuse.
I’m not going to get into a big sociology monograph here where I try to get to the bottom of it myself, although I will briefly advance one theory, psychoanalytical in nature, and bipartite: a) the usual hate-all-bands-that-do-well-because-they-must-have-sold-their-souls nonsense that I touched upon in paragraph 1 above? that goes a long way—try talking about The Beatles with a garage-punk and watch his face and his arguments contort in unison; b) I think, with all of his self-important poetry and death-obsession and hedonism, that there was something unashamedly adolescent about Jim Morrison, and I think that most music hipsters 25-40 hate teenagers and esp. retrospectively hate who they themselves were as teenagers, and therefore hate all things in the culture that remind them of being a teenager.