Music When Lana Del Rey compared herself to Jim Morrison: “I just feel good”
There are at least two songs that explicitly mention The Doors’ charismatic frontman Jim Morrison. Radiohead’s Thom Yorke spits an acidic riposte against the mythos that surround the countercultural archetype on 1993’s acerbic ‘Anyone Can Play Guitar’. 20 years later, sultry melancholy-pop queen Lana Del Rey also weaved Morisson into her ‘Gods & Monsters’ track from 2012’s Paradise EP: “No one’s gonna take my soul away / I’m living like Jim Morrison / Heading towards a fucked up holiday”.
There’s no cynical quip at play for Del Rey. “I just feel good when I listen to Jim Morrison,” she revealed to Electronic Beats in 2012. Many have observed strange similarities that may or may not be conscious—both experienced early awkwardness live before eventually commanding the stage, shared thematic fascination with death, a history of addiction, and a mutual affinity for Mad Magazine and Beat poetry.
Yorke dissected the heritage institute that props up Morrison as an eternal poster boy from a sardonic bent. On the other hand, Del Rey too explores The Doors’ enigmatic singer as less a human and more an icon that piques her fascination with America’s cultural landscape.
Morisson is viewed by many as a paragon of ecstatic authenticity. A performer shaped by rock’s greatest moment and guided by the mind-expanding clarity found through lysergic-soaked bohemia and a hell of a lot of free love.
There’s truth to all this, but he was also prone to bouts of gobsmacking arrogance, a harbinger of stress with his unreliability on band duty, and reportedly a terrible drunk. He was a young guy swept up in extraordinary musical and social upheaval that became an idyll that he perhaps wavered on believing. Yorke tore that apart, but Del Rey sees the humanity.
The painful death of the hippy dream began its sad unravelling following the death of Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and Morrison in quick succession across the early 1970s. This potent symbol of counterculture’s passing inspired Patti Smith’s Horses, a 1977 adrenalin shot of a debut that sought to exorcise the Woodstock generation’s radicalism back into a rock sphere that had disappeared into prog’s lofty excesses.
“I wish it was the ’60s, I wish I could be happy,” Yorke later sang on The Bends‘ title track, knowing full well the era’s artifice propped up by a rockist vanguard still dwelling in the 20th century’s cultural shadow, yet torn with a spiritual need to get stuck in the dropped-out exploration and hedonism. As the neoliberal age has lurched on, it’s a mythos that grows ever more appealing despite its haze of clichés and propped-up narratives.
Del Rey’s wander through Americana’s spectral realm navigates these cultural dilemmas, similarly referencing long-gone heroes of old from David Bowie, Tom Petty, Eddie van Halen, and Lou Reed, smattering their presence all over her unique brand of vintage pop that’s forever wedded to a musical world that exists half in reality and our collective dreamscapes. “No one’s gonna take my soul away,” she purrs on ‘Gods & Monsters’ as if expressing two concerns—the threat of pop mystique’s slow erosion clashing with the staving off to meet music’s manufacture of who you are.