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The Dionysus Theory:
Rock as Ecstatic Release, Tragic Knowledge,
and/or Unmitigated Romantic Bullshit
I want to begin with a few excerpts from Robert Palmer's wonderful
Rock & Roll: An Unruly History, which interrupts a
narrative hooked to a PBS series with three essays that add up to an
avant-primitivist revision of rock and roll history. Climaxing number
two, "Delinquents of Heaven, Hoodlums of Hell," is a section oddly
entitled "Safety Zone," the most inspired exposition I know of the
trope or claim or theory I'll explore here today. It begins:
The ancient Greeks enshrined philosophical dualism in their
hierarchy of gods and myths, identifying spiritual forces or powers
that embodied two basic tendencies in society and culture: the
'balanced, rational' Apollo and the 'intoxicated, irrational'
Dionysus. [147]
If this could be clearer and truer, that's nothing new. Western
thinkers have always used the Greeks as a metaphor bank, imposing
theoretical templates on a piecemeal historical record. Palmer's
template derives from The Birth of Tragedy, Friedrich
Nietzsche's long, murky riff on an Apollo-Dionysus polarity he copped
from German romanticism. But Palmer never mentions Nietzsche. Having
cited the reputable E.R. Dodds to establish that music and dance are
means to, or is it blessings of, Dionysian "madness," he relies
primarily on rogue ethnomusicologist Alain Daniélou, who equates the
Greek wine god with the Indian phallic god, Shiva.
Palmer grants that "compared to an ancient Dionysian
revel--trances, seizures, devotees tearing sacrificial animals to
pieces with their bare hands and eating the meat raw--a rock and roll
performance is almost tame." But he insists that in the wake of
Your Hit Parade and Father Knows Best, early rock
concerts became "temporary autonomous zones": "a kind of functional
anarchy that manages to exist within a more or less repressive
mainstream culture precisely because it is of limited duration and
scope." Whereupon, in a wickedly if also lazily disruptive formal
touch, he shelves scholarship and gives over half his six-page
exegesis to descriptions of the Rolling Stones, not in concert, but
wreaking mayhem at a Memphis hotel in 1975 and then, grayer and calmer
14 years later, turning into "mere musicians--professionals."
But this is OK, Palmer quickly adds; in fact, "that's the beauty of
rock and roll."
The lifestyle can be perilous, the rate of attrition remains high,
but the survivors can go on practicing and perfecting their craft
while the younger generation's best and brightest assume the Dionysian
mantle and get on with the main program, which is liberation through
ecstasy. . . . As rockers, we are heirs to one of our civilization's
richest, most time-honored spiritual traditions.
We must never forget our glorious Dionysian heritage.
If this material sounds familiar, let me note that I've now quoted
it in four pieces--including, unfortunately, Robert Palmer's
obituary. Keith Richards survived; his prophet did not. But even if
you've never encountered Palmer's version, the Dionysus theory you
know about. Nietzsche's dichotomy is now boilerplate. Ruth Benedict
held that whole cultures were Apollonian and Dionysian, although in
the end she never described a Dionysian one. Ayn Rand, various
Jungians, and endless New Agers have taken up the theme. It's proven
so adaptable in the world of letters that a 1996 article in the
journal of the Virginia Community College Association was called
"Apollo vs Dionysus: The Only Theme Your Students Will Ever Need in
Writing About Literature." And Nietzsche's full title, of course, is
The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music.
The music whose spirit Nietzsche thought uniquely worthy of the
Greeks was that of his soon-repudiated beau ideal Wagner. But
Apollo-versus-Dionysus has since been taken up by Stravinsky, Britten,
and most prominently Richard Strauss--whose greatest hit was named
after Nietzsche's signature Also Sprach Zarathustra--as well as
analyses of Beethoven, Liszt, Bizet, on and on. It surfaces frequently
in jazz commentary too. So rock has competition for the
wine-bringer. But Google the name of a rock demigod and the word
"Dionysian" and you'll hit paydirt. The trick doesn't work with black
artists, where who else but Jimi Hendrix is the only big winner, or
with Bob Dylan, who's on record as insisting that Stagger Lee was "not
some egotistical degraded existentialist dionysian idiot." But Beatles
Stones Velvets Zep Patti Ramones Pistols Nirvana PJ Harvey Smashing
Pumpkins--hell, why not? Tori Amos likes to throw the word
around. Phish's corporate arm is called Dionysian Productions. LA's
Dionysus Records has been purveying "the finest in Garage - Surf -
Rockabilly - Exotica - and more" since 1984.
Rock's champion Dionysian, however, is that egotistical degraded
existentialist idiot Jim Morrison, dubbed Bozo Dionysus by either
Lester Bangs or Lester Bangs's headline writer. Morrison is said to
have named his band during a bull session about The Birth of
Tragedy. And in Arnold Shaw's The Rock Revolution, he sums
up the history he gleaned at UCLA: "In its origin, the Greek theatre
was a band of worshippers, dancing and singing on a threshing floor at
the crucial agricultural seasons. Then, one day, a possessed person
leaped out of the crowd and started imitating a god." [155] This is a
little garbled, but its dancing and singing and leaping and god act
are clearly where rock's Dionysian claims reside--all evoke a Doors
concert better than a performance of Also Sprach
Zarathustra. Yet here's the odd thing. Not only do both Morrison
and Nietzsche, with their intense commitments to different kinds of
music, validate that commitment by reference to literature, but
neither bothers to guess how the original Dionysian music might have
sounded or, really, functioned. So I thought it might be instructive
to try and find out.
To begin, say there are three Dionysuses: the Dionysus of myth, of
cult, and of festival. Not that they sort out so neatly, of
course--Euripides' The Bacchae, for example, was originally
presented at one kind of Dionysian festival and purports to represent
cultic practices that have since been imported big-time into the
mythic record. In almost all accounts Dionysus is the son of the great
god Zeus and the mortal mother Semele and gestated in Zeus's thigh
after Semele was murdered. And although recent archaeological finds
indicate deep Greek origins for the god, in post-archaic Greece he was
universally believed to be an outsider--perhaps from Thrace, which we
call Bulgaria, or Lydia or Phrygia in Asia Minor. Dionysus gathers
around himself such a complicated entourage of tales and histories
that ass-covering contemporary scholars find it convenient to subsume
them all under the heading "god of paradox" [Henrichs 234]. Half
human, half divine, he's the bringer of madness and the deliverer from
madness, lord of masks and maenads, of the underworld and raw meat au
jus; he's the phallus god who turned femme and lost his beard. And
always Dionysus is the god of wine.
Leaving out lots of good stuff, that's the Dionysus of myth. In
varying versions--only one of which, the Pentheus story Euripides and
later Rene Girard made so much of, involved human sacrifice, and only
one of which, the myth of Dionysus Zagreus that Nietzsche
appropriated, has Christian overtones of divine suffering and
rebirth--the Dionysus of myth was the god called upon in cult and
celebrated in festival. Unfortunately, even more than most cults, the
cult of Dionysus was exceedingly secretive. Palmer's man Daniélou
defeats this inconvenience by positing that Dionysus was an
essentially unchanged descendant of Shiva, whose jism-jetting
erections are amply documented. But most settle for second-hand
evidence by skeptical or hostile sources scattered over a
thousand-year period. Here's Livy in Rome: "When wine, lascivious
discourse, night, and the intercourse of the sexes had extinguished
every sentiment of modesty, then debaucheries of every kind began to
be practiced, as every person found at hand that sort of enjoyment to
which he was disposed by the passion predominant in his nature."
Although "the beating of cymbals and drums" is as musicological as
Livy gets, Palmer would go for that. Problem is, all Livy knew for
sure when he wrote it in 186 BC was that he wanted the Roman senate to
ban the god then called Bacchus, as it then did. There's better info
in that old muso Plato: "In a Bacchic frenzy, and enthralled beyond
what is right by pleasure, they mixed lamentations with hymns and
paeans with dithyrambs, imitated aulos songs with their kithara songs,
and put everything together with everything else, thus
unintentionally, through their stupidity, giving false witness against
music, alleging that music possesses no standard of correctness, but
is most correctly judged by the pleasure of the person who enjoys it,
whether he is a better man or a worse."
Turn Plato's values upside down like they deserve and you have a
presentiment of popular music, as well as period details I'll fill in
later. But the "enthralled by pleasure" doesn't mean much. As with
Livy, Plato's facts are second-hand at best--third-hand is likely. And
while like any good postmodern I shrink from blanket generalizations
about human behavior, I'd like to suggest a tentative one, which is
that the guy who didn't get invited to the party always believes the
guy who did is having a ball. Historian of religion Walter Burkert is
part of an antisex wing of Dionysus scholarship that includes
Nietzsche and goes back to Euripides. But Burkert has studied ancient
cult practices as scrupulously as anyone, and he finds it impossible
to "associate them with the concept of orgies." [1] He also concludes
that most if not all of Dionysus's initiates were women, usually women
of means, and that after "days and days of fasting, purifications,
exhaustion, apprehension, and excitement," their big debauch was the
chance to wolf down some roast sacrifice. Yet Burkert does allow that
for "a few special individuals" initiation could provide "a veritable
change of consciousness in ecstasy" to which wine was essential, and
adds that "certain kinds of music" opened up pathways to the
divine. He also quotes a Christian-era source: "This is the purpose of
Bacchic initiation, that the depressive anxiety of less educated
people, produced by their state of life, or some misfortune, be
cleared away through the melodies and dances of the ritual in a joyful
and playful way."
With their trances, seizures, and gore, these barely
documented initiations are as close as we're going to get to
Palmer's "ancient Dionysian revel." Yet cults weren't the ancient
Dionysus's main venue. Far more amenable to outside observation
were uncounted festivals in rural and urban places. These were
more open-ended and less momentous for most partakers than
initiations--more rock and roll. A festival that jumbles rural
Dionysia and what was called the Anthesteria climaxes
Aristophanes's The Acharnians, and even correcting for the
playwright's comic will and dirty mind, it smells like one of
those orgies Burkert can't find as Aristophanes's farmer hero
calls for "dancing-girls" to grab his "rejoicing prick." We know
a lot about the Anthesteria, the spring festival of new wine,
because we have a thousand of the illustrated 3.2-liter jugs from
which the watered wine was quaffed. These depict dance moves
ranging from capers and acrobatics to mimetic set pieces, often
by satyrs or men in satyr costumes, and many varieties of music-making.
As even Livy knew, the true Dionysian instrument was the
drum. Greece was not a percussion culture compared to Egypt, where
Osiris's celebrants were far more polyrhythmic. But the tympanon,
which generated a deep thump from a single animal-skin side, always
came out for Dionysus, as did giant castanets called
krotala. Symbolically, however, the double-reed aulos, which used to
be translated flute but had a bigger oboe sound, also ruled. Charles
Keil suspects that the Macedonian dauli music he describes in
Bright Balkan Morning, music he claims is unrecordable due to
its fluctuating overtones, descends from aulos-and-tympanon. The
Anthesteria made room too for the panpipe, and for Apollo's ax, that
cornerstone of a ruling-caste education the lyre. Then there was
song. Remember Plato? "They mixed lamentations with hymns and paeans
with dithyrambs"? Happy-sad speaks for itself, but you should know
that paeans were for Apollo, more dignified than Dionysus's
dithyrambs. 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.
Shortly after 600 Cleisthenes of Sicyon cut into the authority of
the Dorian nobility by transferring a local choral festival from the
Dorian hero Adrastus to Dionysus. And by 500 or so, Dionysus and his
dithyramb were fixtures of Athenian life, because the midcentury
tyrant Peisistratus, in an end run around both the aristocracy and a
potentially anarchic popular force, had by then instituted the Great
Dionysia, a rival to the aristocratically controlled Pythian Games. In
other words, Apollo versus Dionysus reduces to a power struggle
between hereditary rulers and the populist big men who supplanted
them. And so Dionysus's dithyramb, once what a rakish classicist calls
"a merry song sung by anybody who was feeling up in the world (usually
after a few jars)," came to be performed by an elaborate chorus,
complete with choreography as contained and "noble" as all official
dance in Greece. Pindar, the untranslatable poetic titan who was the
last great spokesman of the Greek aristocracy, was one of its
masters.
Before too long, the dithyrambic chorus morphed into
tragedy, considered the most sublime of art forms even by some
Chuck Berry fans. You can read whole books about tragedy and
never guess that a third of it was sung, but for the most part
its musical history is off topic. Note, however, that tragic
music was dominated by the aulos, which like Dionysus himself
came to be regarded as exotic, disreputable, low-class--at best
non-Greek in origin (which like Dionysus it wasn't) and for Plato
and lesser snobs a carrier of cultural contagion. Tragedy enjoyed
a creative life of barely a century, but the classics continued
to be performed along with the New Comedy that succeeded it.
Actors toured and professionalized, and so did musicians--there
were virtuoso auletes, kitharodes who wowed the crowd with runs
on the concert lyre. They formed guilds that lasted for
centuries. The first harbinger of the American Federation of
Musicians translates as the Commonalty of the Artists Concerned
With Dionysus. Perfect.
Mere musicians-- professionals. Over a longer timespan, it's
Palmer's story, an exotic music of freeing frenzy brought to heel by
rationalizing exploiters, only "the younger generation's best and
brightest" don't do their part. So rather than an avant-primitivist
continuum we have the kind of decadence decried by, of all people,
rock criticism's most distinguished classicist: Nick Tosches, a major
Pindar and minor Doors fan who believes rock was formally exhausted by
the late '60s. But before we get too disillusioned, let's remember
that in the bargain we get tragedy, which for all its overrated
sublimity is some kind of recompense. And remember too that the
Dionysian reality that got rationalized was rarely if ever as ecstatic
as that postulated by Palmer or Nietzsche. Wine festivals certainly
didn't occasion as many rejoicing pricks as jealous playwrights and
censorious legislators believed; the Dionysus who embraces death in
affirmation of the collective life-force is a Nietzschean figment; the
maenads who tear Pentheus limb from limb in The Bacchae are a
Euripidean device. Nor need we altogether regret this loss. One of the
hundred reasons I wish Robert Palmer was still alive is so I could ask
him how he felt when Alain Daniélou, the most extreme contemporary
Dionysian of any standing, argued that the caste system is a natural
way of life and a small price to pay for Shiva, whose maxims include:
"Women are light-minded. They are the source of all trouble. Men who
seek liberation must avoid attaching themselves to women." [212]
Probably he'd shrug in bemused dismay. For certain rock and
rollers, the program will always be liberation through ecstasy, and
all the rest of us can do is thank them for creating temporary
autonomous zones and hope they don't die before they get old. Early in
The Bacchae, before Dionysus starts illing, the Asian chorus
sings his praises. I don't know the tune, so I'll just read:
These blessings he gave:
laughter to the flute
and the loosing of cares
when the shining wine is spilled [170]
And later:
--The deity, the son of Zeus
in feast, in festival, delights
He loves the goddess Peace
generous of good,
preserver of the young.
To rich and poor he gives
the simple gift of wine,
the gladness of the grape.
But him who scoffs he hates,
and him who mocks his life,
the happiness of those
for whom the day is blessed
but doubly blessed the night;
whose simple wisdom shuns the thoughts
of proud, uncommon men and all
their god-encroaching dreams.
But what the common people do,
the things that simple men believe,
I too believe and do. [171]
Experience Music Project, Apr. 2003
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