Tribute to Jim Morrison

[Doug Millison]

 Otto: "I still appreciate the "An American Prayer" album, the idea of
fusing spoken
poetry and rock songs on one record."


Leonard Nimoy's rendition of Jonathan Livingston Seagull is probably a
better example of this sort of thing.
It's the same problem you see with so many pop music-meets-poetry/spoken
word experiments down through the years -- the poetry is lame, the music is
lame.  Take away the melting-crayolas-of-my-mind psychedelia and the ersatz
Surrealist and Beat retreads of Morrison's verses, you don't have much left
that reverberates if you're not on drugs.  Same thing with most rap music
today -- take away the drug and sex slang and the anti-authority cliches,
not much lyric left and what remains is too often as insipid as the sampled
music and beats. There are exceptions, of course -- KPFA plays some hip hop
with poetic and political content that rises above the laughable, but that's
not what you hear on mainstream radio.