Categories : Music Reviews, Rock + Pop.
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Rating: 2/5 Released: March 27, 2007 Reviewer: Jason Morelyle |
Greatest hits albums are like going through an old family photo album: sometimes it’s nice to revisit some old memories – to snigger at your parents in their dirty hippy clothes, have a good laugh at your sister’s too-cool buck-toothed boyfriend, or reminisce about your awkwardness at the Grade 8 graduation dance. But after a while you sometimes start to feel this weird sense of, well, uneasiness, even a kind of discomfort. You don’t really belong there anymore – the past is just that: past. You realize then that these moments are not really nostalgia but more like shame. This is the way things once were, and really you just have to put that old album down and get on with it.
Greatest hits albums give us that – a snapshot of the way things once were. There are many examples of greatest hits albums where revisiting the way things were can be a damn good thing. Examples abound. We all know them. On the other hand, there are greatest hits albums where you wonder why they ever bothered to spend the money and the time to put one together. The recent The Very Best of the Doors is just one of those albums. Why did they bother?
All the likely suspects are here on this new anthology: ‘Love Me Two Times,’ ‘Light My Fire,’ ‘Hello, I Love You,’ ‘Touch Me,’ and one of their best, the Kurt Weil and Bertolt Brecht classic, ‘Alabama Song (Whiskey Bar).’ Nevertheless, groan and yawn. There are a host of other Doors greatest hits anthologies out there, not to mention a boxed set or two. So why? Although I know I’ll get dirty looks for saying it, but the Doors were – and are – the most overrated band in the history of rock.
Don’t be fooled: this was a band based solely on the cult of personality and not musical talent. Frontman Jim Morrison, the self-styled shaman-poet Lizard King himself, was the gravitational center of the band that kept the entire works moving towards its gradual and tragic implosion. Jim Morrison was one of the reasons why The Doors have succeeded so well. Case in point – in the liner notes to this new anthology there’s more space given over to black and white photos of a pouting Lizard King lounging about in his leather pants than there is to text. Decades later, The Doors are still haunted by the one thing that has kept them popular: image.
Bruce Dickenson once said that the fun of rock music is that it should be gross, that it should get up and drop its trousers. No doubt frontman Morrison subscribed to this point of view. In fact, given his predilection for getting naked on stage it was the only point of view he subscribed to. And in fairness to Dickenson, he didn’t really mean it the way Morrison did. Morrison knew that the key to success was to draw attention to yourself, to be different in any way you could. You didn’t have to have talent to be a success. Many have referred to Morrison as a poetic genius – but if you’ve ever bothered to read his poetry or actually listen to some of the lyrics in The Doors’ music (and I’m including the posthumous ‘An American Prayer’ here) you will quickly disabuse yourself of this delusion.
All told The Doors cobbled together six albums, the majority of which were insipid garbage. The only one really worth mentioning was their first self-titled debut, The Doors in 1967 which, as it turns out, seven out of the twenty songs on The Very Best of the Doors come from – a ratio which tells us that these latter day rockers peaked with their first album.
Perhaps they even peaked with their very first hit, ‘Break On Through (To The Other Side),’ a song that tellingly leads off this new anthology. After their initial album, everything else was downhill after that. There’s no doubt that their debut was a challenging and somewhat transgressive album for its time, but like most dissenting rockers who actually might have something interesting to say at first, The Doors were quickly co-opted by a corporatist music industry interested in stealing from the poor to give to the rich.
And so we come to it: The tripe that the Doors ground out for five years (!) was certainly corporatist-style pop music hell bent on stealing money from children and teenagers alike. A word to the wise: don’t spend your hard earned dollars on this; you won’t be able to get past the shame.
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