In the summer of 1966, my high school psychology teacher went to California to take a few refresher courses in their specialty. He returned in early 1967 as we were quite friends, I went to talk with him to his office to tell me their impressions. I remember asking:
- What's new in San Francisco?
Without hesitation he replied:
"-The hippie movement. Proclaim the old ideas of utopian socialism and free love, live in small communities, maintain an open opposition to almost all the provisions of the present society, visten de modo estrafalario (según ellos, más “natural”) y consumen diversos tipos de drogas, desde marihuana hasta estupefacientes más fuertes como la heroína y la cocaína. Han hecho del Pop Rock su bandera para expandir su ideología que la denominan “Psicodélica”. Lo que más me sorprende, es que este movimiento se está extendiendo rápidamente entre algunos jóvenes de muchos estados de norteamérica”.
Este relato se me quedó hondamente grabado por las inmediatas consecuencias posteriores: como era costumbre que un buen número de estudiantes mexicanos se fueran a tomar cursos de inglés durante las vacaciones, en poco tiempo, cientos de nuestros jóvenes were influenced by this movement and many returned significantly changed because it became fashionable to take drugs, usually mixed with alcohol. At this behavior is colloquially called "be cool" or "be lightened."
were placed as icons or idols to musicians, singers, Pop Rock guitarists such as Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Eric Clapton, or groups, such as The Rolling Stones, The Who, The Beatles, Cream,
Pink Floyd ... "-The U.S. group revelation of 1967 has been with The Doors singer Jim Morrison, are excellent musicians!," a friend told me recently arrived from Los Angeles where he had been studying for several years.
recognize that many of the songs I liked the aforementioned groups. Melodies were musically accomplished because some of them had gone through the Conservatory of Music but sometimes the lyrics of their songs conveyed his philosophy of life.
But I would like to focus on Jim Morrison, lead singer of The Doors. The year 2011 marks 40 years of his death from a heroin overdose. I deliberately wanted to advance, before starting the memorial tributes on this popular singer, to objectively analyze his life and his career.
This group The Doors "was released in 1966, and properly his fame started in 1967 with his hit "Light My Fire", until 1971. In most of the lyrics of songs of their poet and singer, Jim Morrison, have a dramatic tone, despairing, fatalistic, hedonistic, poetry reminds me of so-called "damned poet" of the nineteenth-century French literature, as Charles Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud. In his song "The End" says the so-called "Oedipus complex", which analyzed in detail the psychiatrist Sigmund Freud.
We know that Morrison was an autodidact and a relentless bookworm. He was influenced by authors such as Nietzsche, Jack Kerouac, William Blake and special form Aldous Huxley, who recommended the use of hallucinogenic drugs like LSD.
I never understand the attitudes of Morrison on stage, facing the audience, because he used to act in a exotic, bizarre. I always had the impression that in the midst of their desperate search for pleasure, a character was terribly lonely, solitary confinement and dissatisfied with his life: the drugs were his escape.
Because he knew that Morrison used alcohol and hard drugs and their music revolved obsessively around the destruction, death, to an existence without meaning or values. I was also influenced by the "Beat Generation" in the early fifties, who proclaimed nihilism and seeking to experiment with drugs to achieve originality in artistic creation.
Likewise, I believe that the existentialist philosopher Jean Paul Sartre, also managed to sink in its approach to life. For Sartre, at the absurdity of human existence and the fact that "we are beings inevitably destined to die," the only viable and endurable of this "dead end" is the immediate pleasure, which is presented as "here today and now. "
Morrison wrote some great tunes from Pop Rock, considered classics, but had an unexpected ending in Paris, when death surprised him because of his excesses of barbiturates and anarchic and chaotic life.
not stop calling attention to his artistic career lasted little more than five years and was cut slightly at age 27. Some believe he committed suicide, but is a non-confirmed. I think the epitaph on his grave in France, sums up its turbulent inner world: "Everyone has their own demon."
last year recalled the deaths of Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix. Also overdose. To these are added a long list of rock superstars, "as Keith Moon, drummer for The Who, Brian Jones of The Rolling Stones Kurt Cobian, Robert Johnson ... All of them also died very young and with a bright future ahead for their undeniable artistic talents.
Others have been detained on several occasions, rehabilitation centers and drug detoxification as the sophistication of The Rolling Stones, Keith Richards. Many others were left with irreversible brain and organ damage.
One of those featured guitarists, Eric Clapton, in his song "Strange Mix" gives the impression that not only sings but desperately yells his generation, who have been driven by the self-destructive world of drugs. Sings: "I say you want to 'experience' with a new mix of drugs, what kind of fool are you? Do not you realize that you're risking their lives? "
Many young people from different countries, who follow their idols of rock and ventured into the use of barbiturates, were killed, others were too emotional and fell an uncontrollable addiction. Recently
a renowned psychiatrist told me that addictions are compulsive. And in many cases, when a person is fond of alcohol or drugs, lose control, no longer master of himself and tends to be practically the whole day thinking about how return to their addiction. Only through humility to ask for help, carefully follow the medical advice and appropriate treatment of psychotherapy, can go back and move forward. Knowing also that this addiction will remain in their behavior for life and, if neglected, can have a severe relapse.
Right now being debated in Mexico and other countries the issue of legalization of drugs and, in certain circles of young people and in some clubs in our country, has turned into fashion immoderate consumption of alcohol and of some drugs, I think that is good to take stock of what happened to those "heroes Fallen Pop Rock and how many young people who imitated their lives destroyed, dashed his studies and, therefore, his career, damaged their families, their courtship and marriage, their children emotionally affected ... A very close
the "superstar" of rock, Jimi Hendrix (who died of an overdose in 1970) revealed the following: "I do not know why you have so much admiration. In the end, fell sharply in its artistic quality. He was my friend and visited him frequently. Almost all day he was drugged or asleep. Around him a cloud of sycophants who stole their money and valuables had few, all known abused him and Jimi was able to defend themselves. His mind was no longer in this world. In his last months seemed to be completely unrealistic. It gave him great shame. It did not take too much science to know that the victim would die from their addiction to drugs. "
A timely reflection on these events is that, no doubt, women and men of all time, we naturally tend to pursue happiness. The longing to be happy with us in this life and the Hereafter. But there are backdoors that lead to the precipice of self destruction as happened with the hippie movement and these "fallen heroes" of rock. Again, we see in our time many young people has lost the sense of their lives, what really has value. Seem to feel that life is just a joke, an endless fun, a long, hollow laugh.
remember as a reaction against this harmful tendency in the seventies when Disco music predominates, with singers like John Travolta and Olivia Newton John, were presented as models to young people who are healthy fun at parties, dancing happily at the Disco, but without drugs and popularized the phrase: "I
" step "with drugs. I will not die as a poor hippie.
Around 40, I think it is useful and helpful to remember these tragic events such as Jim Morrison, so many rock stars and hundreds of his followers who died from drugs and narrate the new generations, who have not had to live all the time of mass confusion and disorientation ideological order that take out, as they say, experience in "somebody else."
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