Weird Scenes Inside the Gold Mine: An Analytical Study of the Music of the Doors
Item
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Title
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Weird Scenes Inside the Gold Mine: An Analytical Study of the Music of the Doors
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Identifier
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d_2009_2013:ddddc13d78cb:11551
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identifier
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12068
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Creator
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Johnson, David N.,
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Contributor
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Mark Spicer
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Date
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2012
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Music | American studies | 1960s counterculture | Jim Morrison | psychedelic music | Ray Manzarek | rock musicology | The Doors
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Abstract
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The Los Angeles-based band the Doors remains iconic in rock music history and is synonymous with 1960s counterculture. Through their cultivation of a dark self-image and idiom, the band expressed, reflected, and artistically commented on the turmoil and social upheaval of late-1960s America. The Doors influenced the country's socio-cultural nexus for many reasons: their serious and often sober artistic intent, singular and pioneering styles of music, poetic ambition, theatrical inclination, countercultural affiliation, and psychedelic drug associations.;This is the first dissertation to focus specifically on the Doors' music, utilizing musicological and analytical tools to explore its modus operandi and its enduring appeal. This study attempts to establish a paradigm with which to read and parse the band's style and musical meaning. Rather than taking a chronological or encyclopedic approach, I examine their output via a taxonomy I have developed based on interlinked musical and thematic qualities: songs derived from existing musical forms, those delineated by subject matter, and epic song formats. Thus, I concentrate on a representative spectrum of songs---including many lesser-known compositions that have not been addressed to date---which aptly displays the group's ethos and musical imagination.;Moreover, this study is unique because I frequently consult live recordings that were captured during the Doors' extensive tours but released years later. These recordings and my analyses of them speak to the exceptional importance of the bands' live concerts, where theatrical and improvisational forays were plumbed, and which had a tremendous impact on bands in the Doors' wake. These inclusions, taken together with the landmark hits, fill out the Doors' portrait and serve to further underscore their musical innovations as well as the boundaries they transgressed. Finally, in contradistinction to the sociological and cultural studies approaches that have prevailed, which address Morrison and the Doors primarily as signifiers of the late 1960s per se, my considerations of cultural factors and context are tethered to the Doors' actual musical, lyric, and performative production, and as such they examine the complex ways these intersected with their audience and with the larger public sphere.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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2009_2013.csv
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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Music
