Dionysian frenzy: annihilating the comfortable self

Try to find your way home. Only if you lose yourself can you find yourself ….such is the message of the eternal orgy of spring….

When Dionysus arrived at a new place, though, accompanied by his followers, the “maenads” or “bacchae” – the women who played flutes, pounded on drums and dance tirelessly- he found that this bringer of ecstasy and regeneration was not always welcome. At first this seemed strange: who could reject the coming of a new life? But the legends that record the hostile reception Dionysus got in city after city of mythical Greece reflect a profound mystery- the inextricable unity of life and death.

Shore:Feminist geography has raised numerous debates surrounding the body, gender and sexual identity. Bell et al (1994) explore the body to illustrate the transgressiveness of dissident sexual identity in its hyper-embodiment, by using the example of the ‘gay skinhead’ and the ‘lipstick lesbian’ as embodied hyper-sexualities. Also, there have been important theoretical debates from postmodernist geographies in which we have seen socio-cultural products that have confronted generalisations of classification and category. As Cloke et al (1991) argues pop icons present a multitude of musical styles and juxtaposed imagery that ‘neatly introduces the complex world of postmodernism as object’ (p.172 – emphasis in the original). Hence, the androgynous body of rock’n’roll icons questions not only our ideas about what constitutes male/female, homosexual/heterosexual, but also importantly the way in which these categories are constituted both positively and negatively.Read More:http://thomasmaxwellshore.wordpress.com/androgynous-geographies-of-the-body-popular-music-and-1960s-counter-culture/ image:http://shewasabird.blogspot.com/2010/10/some-girls-marianne-faithfull.html

Dirk Dunbar:As Dionysian song and dance spread mania through prehistoric and ancient Greece, Rock moved the ids that moved the bodies that instinctively embraced the revolt. Driven by African-American slave songs, gospel, soul, funk, and rhythm and blues, the beat impelled Rock’s original devotees into dance-induced, altered states of consciousness, which is why Eldridge Cleaver proclaimed that black music gave whites their bodies back. With the help of 45s, the transistor, and business, the youth of America turned the black affirmation of suffering and release into Dionysian euphoria, the ecstasis and enthousiasmos that erupted through suddenly opened doors of perception. In the beginning, words didn’t matter; the beat was the message. So was the dance. Like the music, the dance didn’t follow any rules….Read More:http://www.usask.ca/relst/jrpc/evofrockprint.html

Dunbar:The success of logos as a defining force of Western theology abetted the demonization of Dionysus, eros the cosmic force, and Eros the god. Before Plato denigrated the powers of the nature god, Euripides’ depicted Dionysus as the horned beast in The Bacchae—a clear forerunner of Christianity’s Devil. Along with Dionysus, eros belongs to the pre-polis, Mother Goddess worshipping culture that was subsumed by the Olympian system and assimilated by the political and philosophical values of Athens, Delphi, and other cradles of Western civilization. The primeval, mysterious eros is the force that was—in ancient myths—“brought forth from a cosmic egg” with the purpose of causing “all things to mingle.” Hesiod depicts eros as the intangible force of love that emerged along with Chaos and Gaia at the beginning of the world. Read More:http://www.ashe-prem.org/seven/dunbar.shtml image:http://legendsrevealed.com/entertainment/2009/06/10/music-legends-revealed-9/

Just as the sexual act is at the same time life-giving and death-seeming; a “petite mort” as the French express it- so in order to be reborn, you must first die. Only if you lose yourself can you find yourself. This is the message of the Mysteries and the secret of all initiation. It is the secret of nature herself: the seed dies in the soil to be reborn as a plant. To the critical intellect such paradoxes are nothing but irritating contradictions. But Dionysus came into the world to abolish all contradictions. In his orgies, the Greek word meaning sacred rite, the individual is submerged in the mass like a drop of water in the ocean; it is no accident that the songs-or were they howls of ecstasy?- of his original worshipers became in time the choral odes of that most collective of the arts, the theatre.


---Dunbar:Of course, not all Rock artists aspire to a sacred return. The return for demonic rockers equals the abyss, universal nothingness, or "The End" as Jim Morrison screams in his Oedipal torment. The Stones also want to "Paint It Black" and the experience that Jimi Hendrix championed remained in "Purple Haze." The goal of demonic rockers was and is to "break on through" regardless of what exists on the other side; hence, "sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll" remains...Read More:http://www.usask.ca/relst/jrpc/evofrockprint.html image:http://www.gibson.com/en-us/Lifestyle/Features/10-great-rock-and-roll-lyricis/

Dunbar:Both were unregimented, improvised, and spontaneous, taking their lead from “jazz” – slang for fornication in the African‑American culture that produced the music. Vulgar to adults and exalting to kids, the dance was purposely revolting: felt more than learned and more erotically group‑oriented than romantic, the motion extended beyond partners and aimed at communal liberation. To the shock and horror of parents and other authorities, rock and roll’s new modes of expression defied convention, tradition, and social mores. Moreover, youth’s new communal identity demanded some sort of divinity, a “magical mystery,” and Elvis-then-Beatle mania offered it all – fun, unbridled sex, and a path to the collective unconscious. To share in the madness made sensible the howls and the sha‑la‑las of old-time rock and roll.Read More:http://www.usask.ca/relst/jrpc/evofrockprint.html

 

---Michel Foucault in ‘History of Sexuality: Volume One’ (1979), identifies that the androgynous body as one part the socially constructed ‘Other’, arguing that Victorian discourse was in the pursuit of a ‘truth’ about the sexual and gendered nature of the body in science. Critically, Foucault identified a clear rupture in this repressive schema as ‘Victorian Puritanism’. Whilst at the same time that this Puritanism gathered pace, it repelled the ‘Victorian Otherness’ – using the hetero-patriarchy of institutional power in terms of an embodied physicality (androgyny, the hermaphrodite). One could argue that whilst the androgyny of the 1960s counter-culture was offered on a plate to white, heterosexual men on a regular basis in pop music. The Foulcauldian notion of the socially constructed ‘Other’ in pop music took a lot longer to become ‘socially accepted’.---( Shore) Read More:http://thomasmaxwellshore.wordpress.com/androgynous-geographies-of-the-body-popular-music-and-1960s-counter-culture/ image:http://misspamela.wordpress.com/category/groupies/

So Dionysus’s harsh welcome is explained. He comes like a revolution, a psychic insurrection, laying reason to sleep with wine and annihilating the comfortable everyday  self. To the individual who is not at one with nature, that is, to any “civilized” person, the death of their mundane self and the awakening of a teeming, unruly, autonomous life force, within them is bound to be threatening. Their precious ego is at stake. And look at Dionysus himself. In the imagination of most of those who have known him- artists, seers, poets, madmen-he is young and good looking,but it is hard


ell his gender; his skin is soft and his limbs pliant, like a woman’s. He wears flowing robes and long hair, yet he is man enough to create an aura of sexual delirium among women wherever he goes. No wonder all good citizens, all solid and sensible folk, confronted with this sexually ambiguous demon turn him away as an intruder and subversive.

Shore:The Rolling Stones may (or may not) have realised that by singing misogynous songs and appearing androgynous they represented the changing notion of masculinity within 1960s counter-culture, locking horns with ‘the British class system and the interlocking hierarchy of gender and sexual identity’ (Gill, 1995, p.99). Androgyny was just another weapon in the band’s armoury of threats to society’s norms. What was conventional in women became subversive when assumed by men. As paragons of the Dionysian tradition in rock’n’roll, it was no coincidence that the Stones were drawn to femininity...Read More:http://thomasmaxwellshore.wordpress.com/androgynous-geographies-of-the-body-popular-music-and-1960s-counter-culture/ image:http://www.somanyrecordssolittletime.com/?cat=21

aFor this defiance,Dionysus exacts a terrible vengeance. The roll call is ominous. Lycurgus, king of Thrace, blinded, driven mad, pulled apart by horses; the women of the city of Argos frenzied and driven to kill their own children; the women of Boeotia plagued by hallucinations, seeing their looms turn into vines; the crew of a pirate ship, unwittingly taking him on board, turned into dolphins; and the women of Thebes running crazed crazed to the mountainsides with their queen, Agave, while Pentheus, her son, who has tried and failed to imprison the revelers, is persuaded to don women’s clothing and go to the place where the women are dancing to spy on their rituals.

aADDENDUM:a

Shore:As Valentine (1995) acknowledges this juxtaposition of embodied androgyny within pop music, creates transgressive space. Mick Jagger and Brian Jones, in particular were noted for their long immaculate haircuts and their effeminate stage appearance. This often resulted in the band receiving unwarranted homophobic abuse. Brian Jones in effect filled the vacuum created by this notion of sexual repression in pop music perfectly, ‘he wasn’t queer, very much the opposite, but he camped it up like mad, he did the whole feminine thing and, for climax, he’d rush (to) the front of the stage and make to jump off, flouncing and flirting like a gymslip girl’ (Cohn, 1969, p.162). It could be argued that the Rolling Stones and Brian Jones typify a certain type of androgyny offered exclusively to men, which would have serious repercussions for female artists. Read More:http://thomasmaxwellshore.wordpress.com/androgynous-geographies-of-the-body-popular-music-and-1960s-counter-culture/ image:http://wemakeitgood.com/the-gallery/cocksucker-blues-surfaces-on-web

Robert Christgau:…In absolute terms we have barely an inkling of how all this sounded–we can imagine only the sonic palette, not the rhythms, tempos, or God knows scales. But most likely it was perceived and received more like rock and roll in 1955 or rock in 1967 than Wagner in 1872. And its social history is redolent.

Dionysus was a minor god in Homer’s time. Only in the seventh century did his renown start spreading, in festival at least as much as cult. This was a grassroots movement–a grassroots movement of people who liked to party. Did it have graver meanings? Perhaps something to do with how inadequately paeans palliated mortality. Did it threaten the state? Made it nervous, maybe. Was it explicitly “versus” Apollo? Seems the Germans made that up. Did it offend bigshots and bigdomes? Plenty, but it also attracted some–most people like to party, and Dionysian partying featured big jugs and wild music. So get this–various Greek politicians proceeded to coopt it. Read More:http://www.robertchristgau.com/xg/music/dionysus-emp.php

Read More:http://thomasmaxwellshore.wordpress.com/androgynous-geographies-of-the-body-popular-music-and-1960s-counter-culture/

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