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Why Has Heroin Use Resurged in the United States in the Past 10 Years? Explained. by Connor Wood

Modern Addiction: Heroin’s Resurgence in the United States in the New Millenium

Though the purpose of United States’ drug policy is to prevent drug use, its effects on drug-taking citizens have unseen ramifications. Shifts in recreational drug consumption are the symptomatic byproduct of the fluctuations in United States drug policies. Pharmaceutical opiates, which function as government approved drugs, in many cases are the primary introduction to narcotics for heroin addicts. The history of substance control in the United States is rich in oscillation. The Prohibition Act proved to exacerbate alcohol consumption in the United States. Homemade and unregulated, the potency of the Prohibition Era’s illegal alcohol was unreliable and subsequently more dangerous. Complete prohibition has never functioned as a successful means of preventing recreational drug consumption. In fact, heroin was outlawed around the same time as alcohol and was “unregulated and sold legally in the United States until 1920 (History of Heroin, Narconon International). Unlike alcohol, however, heroin is not only an anti-social intoxicant but exceptionally more addictive. Heroin was initially introduced to the United States as an over the counter cure-all to replace another over the counter cure-all—morphine—because it was too addictive. From opium smoking cowboys to pill popping sburbanites, opiate use has always been a piece of American culture but heroin’s recent resurgence in the United States is the result of a coincidance of factors which have been germinating since the 1990’s, involving a widespread use of prescription painkillers that created a new generation of opiate addicts, who, facing brand new government restrictions on pharmaceutical narcotics, replace their pills with heroin—a drug which delivers a more powerful high at a cheaper price.

Other than their euphoric effects, opiates have developed a dark allure to youth culture due to a long history of rebels and artists enjoying and propagating the drug. The list of famous opiate users is long and illustrious, spanning such romanticized and talented poets as Arthur Rimbaud, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, Charles Baudelaire, and countless jazz artists like Stan Getz, Billie Holiday, Chet Baker, & Bill Evans. While heroin was popular in 1950’s it primarily remained contained in jazz circles. During the 1960’s heroin was used by famous pop musicians with youth culture appeal—there is even a video available today of Bob Dylan and John Lennon high on heroin in the back of a taxi—and Lou Reed immortalized the drug as the definition of underground street cool fatalism in his songs dedicated to the drug. Heroin’s appeal to youth culture relies on that its users are just as romanticized as its use. Musicians such as Keith Richards, Sid Vicious and Jim Morrison (both of whom died of heroin overdoses) and more contemporary users such as Kurt Cobain, Pete Doherty, and Amy Winehouse represent the romanticized ideal of the self-destructive artist, the poetic visionary too talented and intelligent to handle the overwhelming pressures of the world. What unfortunately accompanied the iconizing of these artists is that it introduced their audiences to opiates in all forms. For these artists heroin provided an artificial paradise they could recede into. French author, movie-maker, and opiate addict himself wrote in his Opium Diaries: “It seems to me that on an earth so old, so wrinkled, so painted, where so many compromises and laughable conversations are rife, opium (if its harmful effects could be eliminated) would…cause more good than the fever of activity causes harm” (Cocteau, 24). Cocteau here also taps into a reason why opiate use has increased gradually in the modern age of existentialism. Collapsing economies, natural disasters, wars, disease, and poverty have been occurring for the entire duration of humanity, but as less people live life without the belief of an afterlife to look forward to, along with the accelerating pace of the world’s impending disintegration, receding into an opioid dream is more appealing than ever.

Heroin use reached its zenith in the 1990’s due to high profile users such as Kurt Cobain, Chloe Sevigny, and model Kate Moss, whose thin frame and gaunt bone structure inaugurated a style that came to be called ‘heroin-chic’. While heroin enjoyed a decade of newfound acceptance and glamour in the 1990’s its popularity and frequency of use declined after the midpoint of the decade. But the landscape has changed and “the life of a heroin addict is not the same as it was 20 years ago, and the biggest reason is what some doctors call heroin lite: prescription opiates” (Carey, New York Times). According to Stephen E. Lankenau, “a sociologist at Drexel University who has surveyed young addicts” the “old-school user, pre-1990’s mostly used just heroin” (Carey, New York Times). However, these days “users switch back and forth, to pills then back to heroin when it’s available” (Carey, New York Times). “The two,” he says, “have become integrated” (Carey, New York Times).

The resurgence of heroin use in the 2010’s could not exist of course, without its users. In the late 1990’s and 2000’s, a generation of future addicts developed their appetite for opiates in the form of prescription painkillers. Since “more people…get a taste of opiates at a young age” there are even more candidates fertile for heroin consumption (Carey, New York Times). OxyContin “entered the market in 1996 and quickly became an iatrogenic disaster” (Frazier, New Yorker). Of course, “people discovered that the capsules could be crushed, then swallowed, snorted, or injected for a powerful high” (Frazier, New Yorker). The pill was produced and sold by Purdue pharmaceuticals who “marketed the drug aggressively to general practitioners who accepted the company’s claim (untested and untrue) that OxyContin was difficult to abuse” (Frazier, New York). Purdue was lying to irresponsible doctors to make large profits and introduced a new generation early on to an opiate high. The company “pleaded guilty in federal court to misbranding the drug by not stating its potential for causing addiction—a felony—and paid a fine that totaled $634.5 million” (Frazier, New Yorker).

Addiction to opiate pills, while particularly prevalent in states such as New York & West Virginia, by the late 2000’s had become drug used recreationally nationwide. In 2012 “New York State passed a law called ISTOP/P.M.P,” acronyms for “Internet System for Tracking Over-Prescribing/Prescription Monitoring Program” (Frazier, New Yorker). The law “requires that most prescribers of painkillers and other drugs with the potential for abuse check the state’s Prescription Monitoring Program to see what the patient’s prescription history has been during the previous six months before giving out a prescription” (Frazier, New York). The law has certainly lowered pill abuse, as “seizures of pills had gone down forty four percent” (Frazier, New York).

Until recently, the US drug policy for prescription painkillers has been relatively relaxed. Many present day opiate addicts have similar stories, regarding a physical trauma or ailment they were suffering. Their doctors wrote them prescriptions for opioid painkillers, sometimes with multiple or even unlimited refills. Unlike heroin, whose notorious reputation repels potential opiate addicts, prescription painkillers are—while almost identical to heroin—are detached from heroin’s dark stigma. Prescription painkillers are legal, government approved, provided by your doctor, and arrive in pill form to be taken with a glass of water. Recovering addicts at a New York rehabilitation center “all said they had thought pills couldn’t be so bad, because doctors were prescribing them” (Frazier, New Yorker). The recent skyrocket in heroin use among United States citizens is the result of that while “rates of prescription opiate abuse have risen steadily over the last decade” new laws that have arisen to combat prescription opiate abuse are encouraging addicts to seek their fix on the streets for lower prices and higher highs in the form of heroin.

Heroin’s cheaper price and stronger potency is a major factor that coincides with new prescription pill restrictions to contribute to the resurgence of the drug’s popularity in the United States. Dr. Jason Jerry, “an addiction specialist at the Cleveland Clinic’s Alcohol & Drug Recovery Center” notes that pill addicts realize this and “eventually say, ‘Why am I pay $1 per milligram for oxycodone when for a tenth of the price I can get an equivalent dose of heroin?’” (Carey, New York Times).

Undoubtedly the new laws in New York and other states such as Maine, and West Virginia, have led to the increase in heroin use. The laws do not lower the nation’s consumption of opiates, only which opiate they consume. While “the seizures of pills had gone down forty-four percent” in New York after the ISTOP/P.M.P law was passed “seizures of heroin had gone up by the same amount” (Frazier, New Yorker). The new restriction laws coincide simultaneously with the resurgence in heroin use. Nationwide, the “number of people reporting that they used heroin in the past 12 months has nearly doubled since 2007 to 620,000” (Carey, New York Times). The demand has been heard and the supply is being delivered quickly: “In New York in 2014, more than two hundred kilos had been seized by July, more than twice as much as during all of 2013 (Frazier, New Yorker).

The resurgence of heroin consumption in the United States is the result of a new generation of opiate addicts recently deprived of the pharmaceutical opium pills they grew up on. Restrictive laws implemented by state governments to cure the “epidemic” of prescription painkiller addiction does not relieve the amount of opiates being consumed by American citizens, rather it discourages opiate addicts from using pills and makes heroin, already cheaper and stronger, an even more appealing alternative.

Works Cited

Carey, Benedict. "Prescription Painkillers Seen as a Gateway to Heroin." The New York Times.

The New York Times, 10 Feb. 2014. Web. 25 Apr. 2015.

Cocteau, Jean, and Margaret Crosland. Opium: The Diary of His Cure. N.p.: n.p., n.d. Print.

Frazier, Ian. "How Staten Island Is Fighting a Raging Heroin and Prescription-Pill Epidemic

The New Yorker." The New Yorker. Conde Naste, 8 Sept. 2014. Web. 25 Apr. 2015.

"Heroin-Related Deaths Have Quadrupled in America." Time. Time, n.d. Web. 25 Apr. 2015.

"History of Heroin." History of Heroin. Narcanon International, n.d. Web. 25 Apr. 2015.

#heroin #addiction #opiates #essay writing #drug addiction

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3-leggeddog-blog · 8 years

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Arthur Rimbaud Essay

The Indivisible Life and Poetry of Arthur Rimbaud

““Beware biography,” critics had told me,” says Paul Schmidt in his introduction to Rimbaud’s Complete Works before punctuating its final paragraph with the query, “Yes—but whose?” (Schmidt xiv). It is not difficult for the adolescent romantic to fall wildly in love with the poetry and life of Arthur Rimbaud. With a life so rich with romanticist turbulence it becomes quite almost entirely impossible to, as Roland Barthes says, detach the “person” of the author—the biography—from the work of the author in the case of Rimbaud. Surrounding the French symbolist poet is an aura of myth, cause of his wild, adventurous life. When reading Rimbaud it seems impossible to detach the life from the work; Rimbaud’s largest advertisement is his infamous biographical reputation. In fact, writers have historically found such an intimate kinship with the poet that translations, biographies, and collections of his work are almost guaranteed to include an “inevitable prefatory remark, on the part of the translator or biographer, about the moment when he or she first discovered the poet” (Mendelsohn). This is because more than most poets, the life of Rimbaud surrounds his work as much or perhaps more than it penetrates it. But adulating future writers are not the only ones involved in the partnership between Rimbaud’s life and work, the poet himself is equally responsible, inserting himself into his work often, honestly, and shamelessly.

One wonders that with such an infamous wealth of biographical details can one truly read Rimbaud without getting carried away with the distractions these details pose? His life indeed informed his work. His poetic philosophy found its way into his letters, and was fearlessly expressed in his life actions. What would the reader think of Rimbaud if they were to discover he never ran away from home, drank to excess wine, liquor, absinthe, smoked hashish and opium, never became involved in a homosexual extra-marital affair with Paul Verlaine, was never famously shot by Verlaine, never schizophrenically bounced between Brussels, London, and Paris, never quit poetry at nineteen, became a soldier and subsequent deserter of the Dutch Colonial army, disappearing into the Indian jungle, and reappearing as an arms merchant in Abssynia? Schmidt recalls the impossibility of this schism between biography and writing: “It became clear to me that the writing itself was his life, the clear set of objective facts we call biography” (Schmidt xiv).

Translator Paul Schmidt recounts his own quintessential adolescent experience discovering Rimbaud: “My own adolescence was swallowed up in the new one his poems revealed to me” (Schmidt xiv). Schmidt’s nostalgic introduction is tradition among “many of the translations and biographies of Rimbaud” (Mendelsohn 5).

Although missing the adolescent mark by about 15 years, author Henry Miller—keep in mind his reputation of exception—was “thirty six years old” when he discovered Rimbaud “in 1927, in the sunken basement of a dingy house in Brooklyn” (Miller 24). Similarly to the experiences of other writers mentioned earlier, Miller, who was “in the depths of my own protracted Season in Hell,” recalls a significant self-identification with Rimbaud upon first discovery, going on to divide his writing career into sections parallel to Rimbaud’s: “If that period in Brooklyn represented my Season in Hell, then the Paris period, especially from 1932 to 1934, was the period of my Illuminations” (Miller 23). While Miller “had yet to read a line of biography,” when he did he was “overwhelmed, tongue-tied. It seemed to me that I had never read of a more accurses existence than Rimbaud’s” (Miller 23). Singer and poet Patti Smith recollects: “When I was sixteen, working in a non-union factory in a small South Jersey town,” she writes in an introduction to “The Anchor Anthology of French Poetry,” “my salvation and respite from my dismal surroundings was a battered copy of Arthur Rimbaud’s Illuminations, which I kept in my back pocket.” The anthology, she adds, “became the bible of my life,” further providing an example of youth seduced by the poetry and life of Rimbaud.

Mendelsohn poses glibly that “depending on your view of human nature, either everything or nothing about Rimbaud’s drab origins explains what came later” (Mendelsohn, Rebel Rebel). He goes on however, to explain precisely how logical it is to presume Rimbaud’s work was heavily inspired by the scenes of his upbringing.

“When Arthur was five, his father went off to join his regiment and never came back. The memory of the abandonment haunts Rimbaud’s work, which often evokes lost childhood happiness, and occasionally seems to refer directly to his family’s crisis. (She, / all black and cold, hurries after the man’s departure!”)

So how complicit is Rimbaud in the phenomenon of the inseparable relationship between his life and work? It is significant to view the poetry of his youth, as to ascertain the gravity of intimacy felt by youthful writers discovering Rimbaud’s work and biography simultaneously.

At the age of ten writings of Rimbaud prove evident of his future artistry, but they also include his characteristic “self-awareness”. While already difficult for Rimbaud fans to detach the ‘person’ of the Author from the work, Rimbaud readily inserts his biography into his poetry. Perhaps it is even predictable for the poet to start so young and so well to have burnt out by nineteen, as Verlaine suggested as the reasoning behind Rimbaud’s abandonment of poetry. In fact, Rimbaud’s defining artistic trademark may be his “overwhelming consciousness of himself as a poet” evident in his poetry in his ten year old conception, and following him n 16 year old letters to poet friends in Paris until his abandonment of not only poetry itself but himself as a poet.

In a composition titled “Prologue” decade old Rimbaud relates a dream sequence: “I dreamed that…I had been born in Rheims, in the year 1503” (5, Complete Works). The parents Rimbaud describes he had in his dream appear extremely reminiscent of his own: “My parents were not rich, but very respectable,” in which his “father was an officer,” and his mother “a sweet, quiet woman, upset at very little, and yet maintaining perfect order in the house” (5, Complete Works). “Prologue” continues as a kind of predictive meditation of Rimbaud’s famous rebelliousness—“Why—I used to ask myself—learn Greek and Latin? I don’t know. After all, nobody needs it,” and self prophecizing “what do I care if I get promoted…Oh, yes; they say you can’t get a job if you don’t get promoted. But I don’t want a job; I’m going to be a rich man” (6 Complete Works). The ten year old curses: “Damn, Damn, Damn, Damn! Damn!” declaring “it’s no good wearing out the seat of your pants in school, for godsakes!” and deriding society, lamenting, “to get a job shining shoes, you have to pass an exam, and the jobs that you get are either to shine shoes, or to herd cows, or to tend pigs,” abandoning the prospect of a conventional adulthood, “Thank God, I don’t want any of that! Besides that they smack you for a reward; they call you an animal and it’s not true, a little kid, etc….” (7 Complete Works). The young poet punctuates “Prologue” with five more damns, signing: “To Be Continued, Arthur, Age 10”.

This sentiment is mirrored in a letter sent in 1871 to Georges Izambard in which Rimbaud chastises him for his “wishy-washy” poetry and for being “in the rut” of the “University trough.” Rimbaud continues on to echo “Prologue”: “That’s what holds me back when a wild fury drives me toward the battle in Paris, where so many workers are still dying while I am writing to you! Work now? Never, never. I’m on strike.” Here is clearly Rimbaud’s trademark relentless dedication to transgression and subversion. But the common thread is more of how clearly and passionately and precisely Rimbaud has laid out the architecture of his future, it is his “overwhelming self-consciousness” of his poetic identity. It is where Rimbaud plainly rejects the Barthes approved “poetics” of Mallarme which “consists in suppressing the author for the sake of the writing” (Barthes 3). Rather, Rimbaud does the exact opposite, declaring that he was “born a poet. And I have realized that I am a poet,” but does not take responsibility: “It’s not my doing at all.” He continues in this letter to describe his poetic philosophy: “Right now, I’m depraving myself as much as I can. Why? I want to be a poet, and I am working at making myself a visionary: you won’t understand at all, and I’m not even sure can explain it to you. The problem is to attain the unknown by disorganizing all the senses” (Complete Works 113).

Does Rimbaud’s extreme poetic self-awareness find its way into his poetry autobiographically? How much so does Rimbaud contribute to his biographical legacy in his biography? Arthur Symons argues that this nature of Rimbaud’s personality was the “reason why he was able to do the unique thing in literature he did, and then to disappear quietly and become a legend in the East,” is because Rimbaud “had not the mind of the artist but of the man of action” (Symon 12). Of course it is easiest to read A Season in Hell under the assumption of Rimbaud’s relationship with Verlaine, or the epic prose-poem’s opening line as an obvious recall to his raucous times in Paris. But in an earlier poem, “Seven-Year-Old Poets”, Rimbaud obviously speaks of himself, and relates himself to other young poets of his disposition. The poem begins, “The Mother closed the copybook, and went away/Content, and very proud, and never saw/In the blue eyes, beneath the pimply forehead, the horror and loathing in her child’s soul.” (Complete Works 86). Rimbaud describes the boy as “very bright,” but with “some traits” which “seemed to shadow sour hypocrisies”—running back to his mother continually in life. The young boy also already possesses the self-induced visionary intentional disorganization of the senses, “shut[ting] his eyes to see spots,” and hanging out in “the cool latrine: there he could think, be calm, and sniff the air,” and “squeezing his dazzled eyes to make visions come.” The precocious boy of seven “made up novels: life in the desert, liberty in transports gleaming,” prophesizing Rimbaud’s time in the Middle East, getting there via riding ships as a stowaway. Of course, present in the poem is also Rimbaud’s characteristic sexual hedonisms, the boy cantankers with a young female and “bites her ass because she wore no panties underneath,” the boy “hated God, but loved the men he saw.” The poems ends with another vision of Rimbaud’s post-adolescent, post-poetry future, with the boy reading “while the noises of the neighborhood swelled below—stretched out alone on unbleached canvas sheets” the boy sees “a turbulent vision of sails!” (88 Complete Works).

A classic Rimbaud poem details his rape by French soldiers he encountered on foot travel during one of his famous runaway to Paris endeavors. His escape from his family and home was of utmost importance to Rimbaud, whose biography—absent of runaway endeavours—would similarly be found that in his work, would be absent of some of his most iconic poems. Mendelsohn explains:

“Certainly the teen-rebel phase that began when he was around fifteen looks like a reaction to life with Vitalie. The frenetic pursuit of what, in one letter, he called “free freedom” runs like a leitmotif through Rimbaud’s life: few poets have walked, run, ridden, or sailed as frequently or as far as he did. Late in the summer of 1870, a couple of months before his sixteenth birthday, he ran away from Vitalie’s dour home and took a train to Paris: the first of many escapes. Since he didn’t have enough money for the full fare, he was arrested and jailed on his arrival and, after writing a plaintive letter to a beloved teacher back in Charleville, Georges Izambard (and not, as far as we know, one to his mother), he was bailed out and slunk back home. The pattern of flight and return would recur up until his final return, a few months before his death.”

It is not only Rimbaud’s magical biography disentaglable from his poetry—which could hardly fill two volumes—it’s that his life story has been reappropriated by disenfranchised youth so enchanted with the romantics of his life. Ruth Franklin, Rimbaud biographer, tell us: “the poetry ranges from inspired to truly puerile; many of the letters contain outright lies, while others are fragmented or of dubious authenticity…. In the words of the biographer Graham Robb, he [Rimbaud] has been resurrected as “Symbolist, Surrealist, Beat poet, student revolutionary, rock lyricist, gay pioneer, and inspired drug-user,” and invoked by artists from Picasso to Jim Morrison.

Perhaps the greatest providence in the case of Rimbaud’s exceptionality to Barthes’ rule is when Barthes echoes a famously Rimbaud sentiment, saying: “just as I is no more than the man who says I: language knows a “subject,” and not a “person” (Barthes 3). Here Barthes explains perfectly the reappropriation of Rimbaud’s identity—“person”—into myth—“subject”. Which perfectly coincides with the point made above by Ruth Franklin and Graham Robb.

One must ask, however, if it is possible to detach the poet’s work from his life, is it further yet, possible—or wise—to demystify the life of Rimbaud? Paul Schmidt reveals the unreliable recollections of Rimbaud’s “early biographers,” stating:

“…his high school teacher Georges Izambard, his friend Ernest Delahaye, his sister Isabelle and her husband Paterne Berrichon. They were all clearly writing reports in retrospect, reminiscences of a familiar and therefore largely unperceived individual who had become suddenly famous; with the best wills in the world, they all had axes to grind: Izambard had to justify his inability to recognize in his pupil a great poet of the nineteenth century; Delahaye had to prove himself an intellectual intimate of a great poet, without too much incriminating himself in some of the more sordid experiences of the poet’s life; Isabelle, a woman of somewhat hysterical comportment, to judge by her letters, was concerned to present the great poet as a good Catholic and a credit to a bourgeois family; while Berrichon corrected the great poet’s grammar and his public figure in general” (Schmidt xix).

Daniel Mendersohn also takes a jab at demystifying the romantic idealism surrounding

the biography of Rimbaud by revealing the contradictions inherent in his life:

“He was a docile, prize-winning schoolboy who wrote “Shit on God” on walls in his home town; a teen-age rebel who mocked small-town conventionality, only to run back to his mother’s farm after each emotional crisis; a would-be anarchist who in one poem called for the downfall of “Emperors / Regiments, colonizers, peoples!” and yet spent his adult life as an energetic capitalist operating out of colonial Africa; a poet who liberated French lyric verse from the late nineteenth century’s starched themes and corseted forms—from, as Paul Valéry put it, “the language of common sense”—and yet who, in his most revolutionary work, admitted to a love of “maudlin pictures, . . . fairytales, children’s storybooks, old operas, inane refrains and artless rhythms.”

But what happens with an illumination of Rimbaud’s philosophic compromises and recurring paradoxes does not deromanticize the poet’s biography. On the contrary, the poet’s ambivalence and impulsivity only add to the milieu of esoterica surrounding his legend. Mendelsohn admits “these paradoxes, and the extraordinarily conflicted feelings of admiration and dismay that Rimbaud’s story can evoke, are at the center of a powerful mystique that has seduced readers from Marcel Proust to Patti Smith.” (Mendelsohn Rebel Rebel).

While the timing of Illuminations is famously ambiguous, it is widely read as Rimbaud’s abandonment of poetry, or his eulogy to that life. However, the title of the collection, or the arrangement of the collection itself is derivative of Rimbaud’s disorganization of the poems but was collected, curated, and titled by his former lover Paul Verlaine. What haunts both the biography and the poetry, is Rimbaud’s life decision to abandon poetry, deducibly in search to live more life. After Rimbaud quits poetry the rebellious tropes of his adolescence become adult adventures. While one’s adolescent discovery of Rimbaud could be classified as a decisive teenage experience, do we outgrow Rimbaud as Rimbaud outgrew poetry? Mendelsohn attests that, sadly, it is likely so.

“I suspect that the chances that Rimbaud will become the bible of your life are inversely proportional to the age at which you first discover him. I recently did an informal survey among some well-read acquaintances, and the e-mail I received from a ninety-year-old friend fairly sums up the consensus. “I loved Rimbaud poems when I read the Norman Cameron translations in 1942,” she wrote—Cameron’s translation, my favorite, too, is among the very few in English that try to reproduce Rimbaud’s rhymes—but she added, “I have quite lost what it was that so thrilled me.” In 1942, my friend was twenty-one. I was twice that age when I first started to read Rimbaud seriously, and, although I found much that dazzled and impressed me, I couldn’t get swept away—couldn’t feel those feelings again, the urgency, the orneriness, the rebellion.”

Here Rimbaud directly transcends the rules imposed by Barthes in Death of The Author which says: “To give an author to a text is to impose upon that text a stop clause, to furnish it with a final signification to close to the writing” (Barthes 5). As proved by the quote above and other instances of young writers, since Rimbaud loses a sense of magic as time passes proves that Rimbaud finds himself in the category “imposed upon” by a “stop clause” because when his biography no longer is so easily attached to his work by the reader in terms of adolescent relatability it changes, becomes, as Barthes says, “closed” (Barthes 5).

Miller too echoes the adult disillusionment with Rimbaud Mendelsohn raises: “It is only now, eighteen years after I first heard the name, that I am able to see him clearly, to read him like a clairvoyant” (Miller 24). To add my own experience to the canon of how aging refracts one’s feelings about Rimbaud, I discovered the poetry of Rimbaud at fifteen, and I recall how easily the visceral energy breathed from his poems, and I recall the detailed biography an enthralling and endless piece of esoterica. And already, four years later, I know what these writers mean when they admit the disenchantment they feel upon aging with Rimbaud. “Rimbaud was a dreamer, but all of his dreams were discoveries.” Once Rimbaud is discovered, is it then easy to exhaust him? Is it, perhaps, the combination of the disillusionment inherent in aging with his small quantity or work? Or is present literary youth culture so saturated with his image and his name and his work and his biography that we discover Rimbaud younger and exhaust him faster? Hopefully the instances of occasional rediscovery will capture at least an essence of the primal sensations of discovering Rimbaud in the dizzy of adolescence.

In the case of Rimbaud the Author does not have to die for his writing to live, rather, the longer and more viscerally he lives in the reader’s conscience, the better. In conclusion it is impossible to detach Rimbaud’s life from his work as it is so romantically seductive to the literary adolescent or upstart. However, with age, the magic of adolescence fades and our perception of Rimbaud shifts from a standpoint in which our individual lives cease to connect with the poetry of Rimbaud age-wise. But the author’s biography, so entrenched in our mentality and nostalgia, will never cease to pervade—if not our current disposition—the charms of our memory.

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#arthur rimbaud #poetry #essay writing #patti smith #paul verlaine #literature #french symbolists #biography #roland barthes #henry miller #rimbaud

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I Got a Woman: Sexism in the Lyrics of 1960′s Rock’n’Roll Music by Connor Wood

I Got a Woman: Sexism in the Lyrics of 1960’s Rock’n’Roll Music

While it’s no secret that sexism was the rampant unchallenged status quo of the famously conservative 1950’s, as the liberal, progressive, and so-called revolutionary 1960’s advanced, sexism continued to plague the lyrics of the love generation’s most popular tunes. Though artists such as Big Mama Thornton and Wanda Jackson were powerful female voices in 1950’s rock’n’roll, they were nowhere close to as popular and appreciated artists as their male contemporaries, though no less talented, and quite arguably more innovative. And though the 1960’s had the pride of its prominent cast of famous female rock’n’rollers such as Janis Joplin, Grace Slick, Nico, Joni Mitchell, Dusty Springfield, and Mama Cass who took control of a predominately male dominated art form, masterfully bending it to their will, it was not until the 1970’s when revolutionary artists like Patti Smith, Debbie Harry, and Joan Jett appeared that women began to have a semblance of achievement in the rock’n’roll sphere while using the perceptually masculine elements of the art form—androgyny, leather jackets, shouted, atonal vocals, etc. The 1960’s contained the most revolutionary advances in pop and rock music in history. The decade was also host to a variety of progressive movements such as civil rights, the Black Panther party, the initial decay of sexual repression, and advancements for women’s rights including equality in the workplace.

However, despite its reputation as a famous time for liberal mores and socio-cultural revolutions, the soundtrack to this era of progress was afflicted with lyrics full of outright, flagrant, and shameless sexism. This paper refuses to deny intersectionality as an integral aspect of the nature of oppression as well as an integral aspect of overcoming oppression. Women were an incredibly marginalized identity in the lyrics of 1960’s rock music, and their negative portrayal in these lyrics is not limited to white middle-class women, but also stretches to black women and other women of color, of both high and low socio-economic status who were fetishized and romanticized by white male rock’n’rollers for their supposed ‘exoticism’ and ‘hard living’ and ‘blues’ credibility. Homosexual women and men were also marginalized and negatively portrayed, and homosexual men especially were trivialized by many straight male 60’s rockstars who appropriated feminine and homosexually associated gestures, dance moves, mannerisms, make-up, and clothing styles while maintaining an emphasized and unquestionable heterosexual identity. The portrayal of females and femininity in the lyrics of 1960’s rock’n’roll artists stands in stark contrast to the popular notion of the liberated era.

The most famous rock’n’roll artists of the 1960’s were predominately male. Groups like the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Animals, the Zombies, the Jimi Hendrix Experience, the Kinks, the Beach Boys, the Velvet Underground, and the Doors, as well as solo artists like Bob Dylan, Donovan, and Johnny Cash dominated the pop charts. What these white male artists shared in common, were the roots of their musical origins: black American blues and 1950’s rock’n’roll. The Rolling Stones famously took their name from a Muddy Waters song, and the Animals achieved international stardom with the black traditional “House of the Rising Sun”. What all these groups and artists also shared in common was a life-changing love of Elvis.

Bob Dylan describes “hearing [Elvis] for the first time” as akin to “busting out of jail” (“Quotes About Elvis”, Graceland.com). Jim Morrison called Elvis “the best ever” and that he “started the ball rolling for us all” while Paul McCartney said he “doubt[s] very much if the Beatles would have happened if it was not for Elvis” and that when “[the Beatles] were kids growing up in Liverpool, all we ever wanted to be was Elvis Presley”. Keith Richards said that “before Elvis, everything was black and white. Then came Elvis. Zoom, glorious technicolor” (Elivs.net, “What They Say About Elvis”). Mick Jagger called him “an original in an area of imitators” and “no-one, but no-one, is his equal, or ever will be” and John Lennon famously said that “before Elvis, there was nothing” (“Quotes About Elvis”, Graceland.com). It’s clear that Elvis was the catalyst, the progenitor, the inspiration, the blueprint, and the instigator for the rock’n’roll of the 1960’s. One not need to analyze too closely—if at all—to find blatant sexism in his lyrics. One of Elvis’ most famous songs, the Ray Charles cover “I Got a Woman”, includes the lyrics: “She's there to love me/Both day and night/Never grumbles or fusses/Always treats me right/Never runnin' in the streets/Leavin' me alone/She knows a woman's place/Is right there, now, in the home” plainly celebrating a woman who never challenges her male counterpart, treats them according to their whims, and never ventures out around in the outside world. Another one of Elvis’ famous songs, “Shake, Rattle, and Roll” includes the lyrics: “Get outta that bed, wash your face and hands/Get outta that bed, wash your face and hands/Well, you get in that kitchen, make some noise with the pots’n pans”, once again quite explicitly not only celebrating a docile and home-chained woman, but demanding that she wake up, wash up, and cook for him. Such lyrics were hardly challenged by the mainstream public of the time. It’s no surprise or arguable assertion that the genesis of sexist lyrics found in 1960’s rock music lies in the fact that these future lyricists of the 60’s grew up idolizing a singer whose patently sexist lyrics saw no challenge during his own heyday, so why not theirs?

Rock’n’roll was a primal, visceral, sexual, political, and emotionally powerful force appreciated by countless women. Feminist and historian Sheila Rowbotham, who grew up in 1960’s England, eventually ending up in London, says of 1960’s rock music that it “went straight to your cunt and hit the bottom of your spine” while simultaneously acknowledging that “the culture which was presented as ‘revolutionary’ was so blatantly phallic” (August, Gender and 1960’s Youth Culture: The Rolling Stones and the New Woman). The Rolling Stones’ catalogue is fertile with lyrical examples of flagrant sexism. But no song of theirs is both so plain and so popular an example as their 1966 hit “Under My Thumb”. The song eponymously refers to male domination of a woman. The female in the song is conceded, in the song’s first verse, at most a brief history of agency. The words begin “Under my thumb/the girl who once had me down/Under my thumb/the girl who once pushed me around” showing that the male narrator has tamed and controlled the female who once dared to insult and exert power over them. The song’s lyrics are rife from then on with lyrics animalizing the woman, calling her a “squirmin’ dog” a “Siamese cat” and a “pet” and boasts of how the he controls her life, including “the difference in the clothes she wears” and “the way she talks when she’s spoken to” (Jagger, Aftermath). The song contains quite possibly one of the most explicitly sexist lyrics in 1960’s pop history, labeled by scholar Susan Hiwatt as a “revenge song filled with hatred for women” and remains a testament to the kind of sexism—as evidenced by record sales alone—that was at best, overlookable if not acceptable, and no doubt even enjoyable, to listeners during its time.

The Rolling Stones were deemed and marketed by their manager as the anti-Beatles, the bad boys who you couldn’t take home to ma and pa. Though the Beatles still weren’t most parents’ cup of tea, they had a notably more conservative image and mainstream charm. This didn’t prevent the Beatles from penning quite a few tunes whose sexism was anything but subtle. The song’s title is an obvious indication of what’s to come, titled “You Can’t Do That”, it features John Lennon chastising a girl who is, ostensibly his girlfriend, for “talking to that boy again”. He threatens to “let [her] down” and “leave [her] flat” because he “told” them already: “You can’t do that” (Lennon, “You Can’t Do That”). He equates this girl’s conversation with another male as “a sin” and also threatens to end their relationship based merely on observing “the second time” he’s “caught” her “talking to him” saying “listen to me, if you wanna stay mine” (Lennon, “You Can’t Do That”). The Beatles’ boyish and innocent veneer didn’t prevent them from writing overtly sexist lyrics, and more tellingly, was not tarnished by the sexist lyrics of this song, among others, such as “Run for Your Life”, in which a male narrator swears he’ll kill a lover of his if he catches her with another man.

Though veiled at the time—it’s public fact now—Donovan’s 1966 hit “Sunshine Superman” was about the male singer’s designs not only to make a girl his by whatever means, but specifically by drugging her with LSD without her knowledge. In the first verse Donovan makes plain the female of his liking is “gonna be mine, I know it” simply because he has “made my mind up” that she is “going to be mine” displaying the male privilege and hubristic sense of entitlement it grants. Other than the horrendous premise that Donovan sees no problem with drugging someone without their consent, this idea devalues the female as not a human with individual agency but a prey that shall inevitably be captured by the male predator. Donovan goes on to speak directly to his victim declaring that he’ll use “any trick in the book” to possess her, and that, unbeknownst to the girl of his affection, assisted by psychedelic drugs, his male prowess will “slowly blow” her “little mind” (Donovan, “Sunshine Superman”). Here Donovan unknowingly forecasts the same type of LSD assisted mind manipulation that would be used by Charles Manson and other serial killers. Unfortunately, as the 1960’s went on and free love, civil rights, and women’s equality gained more traction towards progress, the lyrics of pop music did not.

Harry Shapiro may try to gloss over history in order to protect the image of venerated male rock stars when he ignorantly excuses Jimi Hendrix of “magnag[ing] to avoid the worst excesses of rock’s schoolboy sexism” when the innovative guitar player’s catalogue, like his peers, is full of lyrics objectifying women, dismissing their agency, and shaming them for expressing their sexuality the same way that is acceptable, if not laudable, a man does (Shapiro, 169). In fact, the song that launched Hendrix’s career contains one of the most notoriously misogynistic lyrics, normalizing and celebrating and justifying murderous violence against women. The lyrics function as a call and response between the singer and the murderer they’re speaking with, beginning with the question: “Hey Joe, where you goin' with that gun in your hand? Hey Joe, I said where you goin' with that gun in your hand?” to which Joe responds: “I'm goin’ down to shoot my old lady, you know I caught her messin' 'round with another man” (“Hey Joe”, Hendrix). If one were to try, albeit foolishly and futilely, to make the case that the song’s lyric is simply an expression in objective storytelling, one need only hear the tone of Hendrix’s voice when he sings it. It is certainly not a lament of remorse. But one need look no further than the lyrics and their punctuations at each line’s end. Joe confesses readily, happily: “And I gave her the gun and I shot her! Shoot her one more time again, baby!” (“Hey Joe”, Hendrix). Meanwhile the killer escapes scot-free “down south to Mexico” where he “can be free!” (“Hey Joe”, Hendrix). Though the Summer of Love was in full swing, lyrics about violence against women were blasting out the transistor radios of hippie’s Volkswagens all over the western hemisphere.

Finally, as the 1960’s drew to a close, a band whose reputation for sexist lyrics and behavior would extend ever more extravagantly and shamelessly as their popularity increased, released their debut album in 1969. This band was called Led Zeppelin. One of the most famous songs on this record is called “Dazed and Confused”. The song completes a common concoction of sexist alchemy where the male at once elevates a woman and while in doing so, objectifies them, pressing upon them outrageous standards and unachievable expectations. The romanticization of the mortal woman to an ethereal otherworldly ‘creature’ dehumanizes them under the disguise of so-called flattery. A common sexist trope in blues and rock’n’roll, stretching back to the sexist binary treatments and codes of Christianity, is that the woman is akin to, ‘born of’, a symbol, spokesperson, etc. of the devil. This trope is symptomatic of a culture that scapegoats women as the undeniable temptresses who render men powerless with their inherently evil sexuality, and therefore, dangerously excuse men of their actions. In the first verse, lyricist Robert Plant says that though “lots of people talk,…few of them know” that the “soul of a woman was created below”, claiming that this woman’s lies have “hypnotize[d]” him, he is powerless to her malicious supernatural manipulations of his affections. The lyrics also reinforce binary stereotypes, that the man goes out into the world to work, making money, while the woman stays at home and takes care of the household; the third verse begins “Every day I work so hard/Bringin’ home my hard earned pay”, going even farther into reinforcing deeply sexist stereotypes he implies that this female owes him sexual gratification because he’s worked “hard” to earn money by following the aforementioned lines with “try to love you baby, but you push me away” (Plant, “Dazed and Confused”). Once the sexual advancement from the narrator is presumably rejected by the woman in question, the song ends with the narrator deciding to rescind the money with which they’ve already given, lent, or spent on the woman under the presumption that she would return the favor with sex once they’ve learned she never intended to do so when Plant sings “let them say what they will/Will your tongue wag so much when I send you the bill?” (Plant, “Dazed and Confused”). Who knows?

One thing is certain though. While the 1960’s was a time of political and social upheaval renowned for its cultural, sexual, and civil progress, the music that blared from the Vox amps, car radios, airport speakers, portable bedroom turntables, and discothèque or acid test hi-fi speakers though universally, decidedly, and irresistibly groovy, the words to these tunes possessed incredibly old-fashioned, conservatively sexist content. Though the music felt right, and captured the minds and hearts of many female listeners, its lyrics did not reflect the times or pay heed to precisely just who were giving such groups as the Rolling Stones and the Beatles their immortal and international fame: girls.

#sexism in music #1960's #sexism #feminism #essay writing

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