Bloom via Nafisi & Morrison

Discussion of rock and roll inevitably involves discussion of adolescence, the time in which one’s deepest connections to music and art are made. The youthful search for identity explodes with posters and t-shirts, stickers and buttons and graffiti. Bands are formed, lines are drawn. Tribes coalesce, carefully chosen sub-genres of rock and roll their sacred totems. Intra-clique animus develops; the tribes regard each other’s motives of dress and taste suspiciously. Tribal differences provide fodder for debate.

I’ve been listening to Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran during my commutes to and from work. I didn’t expect a passage from it to remind me of a fragment of one such debate I had as a teenager. Forgive the punctuation, spelling and paragraph breaks—I’m typing as I listen:

A few weeks ago, while driving down the George Washington Memorial Parkway, my children and I were reminiscing about Iran. I noticed, with a sudden misgiving, the alien tone they had adopted when talking about their own country. They kept repeating “they, they, over there.”

“Over where? Where you buried your dead canary, by a rose bush with your grandfather? Where your grandmother brought you chocolates we had forbidden you to eat?”

They didn’t remember many things. Some memories made them sad and nostalgic. Others, they dismissed. The names of my parents, Bijan’s aunt and uncle, our close friends, they evoked like magic mantras, joyfully taking shape and disappearing with each utterance.

What triggered our reminiscences? Was it the Doors CD that my children were so accustomed to hearing in Iran? They had bought it for me for Mother’s Day, and we were listening to it in the car. Jim Morrison’s seductively nonchalant voice purred from the stereo. I’d like to have another kiss. His voice stretched and curved and twisted while we talked and laughed. She’s a twentieth-century fox, he intoned.

Some memories bore them, some excite them, like when they make fun of their mother dancing all over the place, from the hall to the living room singing Come on baby, light my fire.

They tell me they have already forgotten so much. So many faces have become dim. When I ask them “Do you remember this, or that?” most often, they don’t. Now, Jim Morrison has moved to a song by Brecht. Oh show me the way to the next whiskey bar, he sings, and we accompany him on the next line. Oh, don’t ask why.


My dislike of Jim Morrison and the Doors is a teenage relic. I was revulsed by Morrison’s leathered brutishness and lame poetry. He seemed to have no interest in the mythic, the heroic, themes I was sure guided the efforts of my beloved Led Zeppelin. The Doors’ music seemed banal to me then, as it does now, as most of rock and roll does.

Nafisi’s mention of them brought me back to a flickering memory of a debate with a friend. His mother saw the Doors in abridged form at the height of their powers. The concert was cut short because of Morrison’s drunkenness and lewd gesticulations. I believe we were, in an awkward adolescent way, trying to suss out whether Morrison was or was not a sincere artist. What kind of artist would abuse their audience in such a way? What was his aim? How could he have shortchanged them so? Our innocence was only scraping the tip of the nihilistic iceberg of art and music. Neither of us had yet to fully experience the ennui of bourgeois life, though our rock and roll identities were preparing us for that.

Morrison’s behavior became an entrenched necessity of the rock idiom, the pinnacle of expression worthy of emulation. Rock’s blatant appeal to youthful sexuality chafed against social restraint. Tantrums ensued, on stage and in school. Bloom understood this evolution of spoiled petulance into virtue: “Selfishness thus becomes indignation and then transforms itself into morality.” This is what we have dwelt on in America for decades now—anger at thwarted desire elevated to an art form.

I don’t mean to impugn Nafisi’s and her daughters’ preference for the Doors. Though only a prelude to a much darker reminiscence (they then recall a disturbing event in which officers of the Revolutionary Committee pursue a pistol-wielding neighbor into their garden) I find the passage extraordinarily poignant . Morrison wielded his desire like a bludgeon at American middle class mores, values that created him and standards to which Nafisi and her family may have aspired. The Nafisi women treasured the Doors CD because it represented a freedom they could not publicly aspire to in Tehran. Rock and roll is held in such high regard by American youth because it helps them to renounce what they are, and pretend to be what they are not: rebels, murderers, addicts, revolutionaries.

Nafisi and her daughters used rock and roll as a modest life line linking them to a free culture far removed from the one that daily oppressed them. At the same time, in the middle of that free culture, rock and roll was consumed, vomited up and consumed again. A vast and vibrant ego culture paraded itself in front of the mirror, oblivious to those people across the globe putting its image to better use.

Western pop-cultural affinity for overseas revolution makes more sense if thought about this way. Impulses to destruction and copulation denied, American youth turn their gaze towards historical figures whose impulses were sated to great and tragic effect—Castro and Guevara and Lenin. Capitalism’s creative destruction comes at a pace too slow to satisfy the modern mind, but the supposedly creative destruction of the revolutionary is nearly instantaneous; the crowds gather and rage, explosions occur and hostages are taken with a speed suiting the digital age.