Jane's Addiction vocalist Perry Farrell gives Adam Reader some heartfelt insight into Jane’s Addiction's hard rock manifesto "Mountain Song", which was the second single from their revolutionary album Nothing's Shocking. Mountain song was first recorded in 1986 and appeared on the soundtrack to the film Dudes starring Jon Cryer. The version on Nothing's Shocking was re-recorded in 1988.
"'Mountain Song' was actually about... I hate to say it but... drugs. Climbing this mountain and getting as high as you can, and then coming down that mountain," reveals Farrell. "What it feels to descend from the mountain top... not easy at all. The ascension is tough but exhilarating. Getting down is... it's a real bummer. Drugs is not for everybody obviously. For me, I wanted to experience the heights, and the lows come along with it."
"There's a part - 'Cash in now honey, cash in Miss Smith.' Miss Smith is my Mother; our last name was Smith. Cashing in when she cashed in her life. So... she decided that, to her... at that time, she was desperate. Life wasn't worth it for her, that was her opinion. Some people think, never take your life, and some people find that their life isn't worth living. She was in love with my Dad, and my Dad was not faithful to her, and it broke her heart. She was very desperate and she did something that I know she regrets."
"Death is the most terrible of all things; and to maintain its works is what requires the greatest of all strength." - Hegel
Would it all be absurd? Or might it make some kind of sense? I've mad myself sick wondering about it. I awake in the morning - just the way millions do, millions of boys, girls, infants and old men, their slumber dissipated forever... These millions, those slumbers have no meaning. A hidden meaning? Hidden, yes, "obviously"! But if nothing has any meaning, there's no point in my doing anything. I'll beg off. I'll use any deceitful means to get out of it, in the end I'll have to let go and sell myself to meaninglessness, nonsense: that is man's killer, the one who tortures and kills, not a glimmer of hope left. But if there is a meaning? Today I don't know what it is. Tomorrow? Tomorrow, who can tell me? Am I going to find out what it is? No, I can't conceive of any "meaning" other than "my" anguish, and as for that, I know all about it. And for the time being: nonsense. Monsieur Nonsense is writing and understands that he is mad. It's atrocious. But his madness, this meaninglessness - how "serious" it has become all of a sudden! - might that indeed be "meaningful"? My life has only a meaning insofar as I lack one: oh, but let me be mad! Make something of all this he who is able to, understand it he who is dying, and there the living self is, knowing not why, it's teeth chattering in the lashing wind: the immensity, the night engulfs it and, all on purpose, that living self is there just in order... "not to know". But as for GOD? GOD, if he knew, would be a swine. He would entirely grasp the idead... but what would there be of the human about him? Beyond, beyond everything... And yet farther, and even farther still... HIMSELF, in an ecstasy, above emptiness...
Cognitive activity: God comes to be known in ways that originate in God solely
God is nothing if He is not, in every sense, the surpassing of God:
in the sense of common everyday being, in the sense of dread,
horror and impurity, and, finally, in the sense of nothing...
He is mystery, indeed he is the absolute mystery
Divine disclosure is in direct proportion
To the degree of divine concealment
Intensification of revelation equals
To increasing of God's hiddenness
Descent of the Deus Absconditus
Vere tu es Deus Absconditus
The unreservedly open spirit - open to death, to torment, to joy -, the open spirit, open and dying, suffering and dying and happy, stands in a certain veiled light: that light is divine. And the cry that breaks from a twisted mouth may perhaps twist him who utters it, but what he speaks is an immense alleluia, flung into endless silence, and lost there.
Shall my only victory be available in conscience?
Why is absence the proof, when I demand palpable presence?
There is enough light to enlighten the elect and enough darkness to humble them.
There is enough darkness to blind the reprobate and enough clarity to condemn them,
And make them without excuse.
Our perception is subject to the fissure of concupiscence
Woestruck am I realising that the light cast on this
Chiaroscuro world is partial and selective
Division, election and predestination
Enabled by grace or left to one's own device...
Anguish is only sovereign absolute. The sovereign is a king no more: it dwells in low-biding in big cities. It knits itself up in silence, obscurring its sorrow. Crouching thick-wrapped, there it waits, lies waiting for the advent of Him who shall strike a general terror; but meanwhile and even so sorrow scornfully mocks at all that comes to pass, and all there is.
From very high above a kind of stillness swept down unpon me and froze me
It was as though I were borne aloft in a flight of headless and unbodied angels
Shaped rom the broad swooping of wings, but it was simpler than that.
I became unhappy and felt painfully forsaken, as one is when in the presence of God.
She was seated, she held one leg stuck up in the air, to open her crack
Yet wider she used fingers to draw the folds of skin apart.
And so her "old rag and ruin" loured at me, hairy and pink,
Just as full of life as some loathsome squid.
"Why", I stammered in a subdued tone, "Why are you doing that?"
"You can see for yourself", she said, "I'm God".
No use laying it all up to irony when I say of here that she is GOD. But GOD figured as a public whore and gone crazy - that, viewed through the optic of "philosophy", makes no sense at all. I don't mind having sorrow derided if derided it has to be, he only will grasp me aright whose heart holds a wound that is an incurable wound, who never, for anything, in any way, would be cured of it... And what man, if so wounded, would ever be willing to "die" of any other hurt?
If there is nothing that surpasses our powers and our understanding,
If we do not acknowledge something greater than ourselves,
Greater than we are despite ourselves,
Something which at all costs must not be,
Then we do not reach the insensate moment towards we strive
With all this is in our power and which at the same time
We exert with all our power to stave off.
I can utter no word, O my God, unless I be permitted by Thee,
And can move in no direction until I obtain Thy sanction.
It is Thou, O my God, Who hast called me into being through the power
Of Thy might, and hast endued me with Thy grace to manifest Thy cause.
The act whereby being - existence - is bestowed upon us is an unbearable surpassing of being, an act no less unbearable than that of dying. And since, in death, being is take away from us at the same time it is given to us, we must seek for it in the feeling of dying, in those unbearable moments when it seems to us that we are dying because the existence in us, during these interludes, exists through nothing but a sustaining and ruinous excess, when the fullness of horror and that of joy coincide.
As I waited for annihilation, all that subsisted in me
Seemed to me to be the dross over which man's life tarries...
Would it all be absurd? Or might it make some kind of sense? I've mad myself sick wondering about it. I awake in the morning - just the way millions do, millions of boys, girls, infants and old men, their slumber dissipated forever... These millions, those slumbers have no meaning. A hidden meaning? Hidden, yes, "obviously"! But if nothing has any meaning, there's no point in my doing anything. I'll beg off. I'll use any deceitful means to get out of it, in the end I'll have to let go and sell myself to meaninglessness, nonsense: that is man's killer, the one who tortures and kills, not a glimmer of hope left. But if there is a meaning? Today I don't know what it is. Tomorrow? Tomorrow, who can tell me? Am I going to find out what it is? No, I can't conceive of any "meaning" other than "my" anguish, and as for that, I know all about it. And for the time being: nonsense. Monsieur Nonsense is writing and understands that he is mad. It's atrocious. But his madness, this meaninglessness - how "serious" it has become all of a sudden! - might that indeed be "meaningful"? My life has only a meaning insofar as I lack one: oh, but let me be mad! Make something of all this he who is able to, understand it he who is dying, and there the living self is, knowing not why, it's teeth chattering in the lashing wind: the immensity, the night engulfs it and, all on purpose, that living self is there just in order... "not to know". But as for GOD? GOD, if he knew, would be a swine. He would entirely grasp the idead... but what would there be of the human about him? Beyond, beyond everything... And yet farther, and even farther still... HIMSELF, in an ecstasy, above emptiness...
Cognitive activity: God comes to be known in ways that originate in God solely
God is nothing if He is not, in every sense, the surpassing of God:
in the sense of common everyday being, in the sense of dread,
horror and impurity, and, finally, in the sense of nothing...
He is mystery, indeed he is the absolute mystery
Divine disclosure is in direct proportion
To the degree of divine concealment
Intensification of revelation equals
To increasing of God's hiddenness
Descent of the Deus Absconditus
Vere tu es Deus Absconditus
The unreservedly open spirit - open to death, to torment, to joy -, the open spirit, open and dying, suffering and dying and happy, stands in a certain veiled light: that light is divine. And the cry that breaks from a twisted mouth may perhaps twist him who utters it, but what he speaks is an immense alleluia, flung into endless silence, and lost there.
Shall my only victory be available in conscience?
Why is absence the proof, when I demand palpable presence?
There is enough light to enlighten the elect and enough darkness to humble them.
There is enough darkness to blind the reprobate and enough clarity to condemn them,
And make them without excuse.
Our perception is subject to the fissure of concupiscence
Woestruck am I realising that the light cast on this
Chiaroscuro world is partial and selective
Division, election and predestination
Enabled by grace or left to one's own device...
Anguish is only sovereign absolute. The sovereign is a king no more: it dwells in low-biding in big cities. It knits itself up in silence, obscurring its sorrow. Crouching thick-wrapped, there it waits, lies waiting for the advent of Him who shall strike a general terror; but meanwhile and even so sorrow scornfully mocks at all that comes to pass, and all there is.
From very high above a kind of stillness swept down unpon me and froze me
It was as though I were borne aloft in a flight of headless and unbodied angels
Shaped rom the broad swooping of wings, but it was simpler than that.
I became unhappy and felt painfully forsaken, as one is when in the presence of God.
She was seated, she held one leg stuck up in the air, to open her crack
Yet wider she used fingers to draw the folds of skin apart.
And so her "old rag and ruin" loured at me, hairy and pink,
Just as full of life as some loathsome squid.
"Why", I stammered in a subdued tone, "Why are you doing that?"
"You can see for yourself", she said, "I'm God".
No use laying it all up to irony when I say of here that she is GOD. But GOD figured as a public whore and gone crazy - that, viewed through the optic of "philosophy", makes no sense at all. I don't mind having sorrow derided if derided it has to be, he only will grasp me aright whose heart holds a wound that is an incurable wound, who never, for anything, in any way, would be cured of it... And what man, if so wounded, would ever be willing to "die" of any other hurt?
If there is nothing that surpasses our powers and our understanding,
If we do not acknowledge something greater than ourselves,
Greater than we are despite ourselves,
Something which at all costs must not be,
Then we do not reach the insensate moment towards we strive
With all this is in our power and which at the same time
We exert with all our power to stave off.
I can utter no word, O my God, unless I be permitted by Thee,
And can move in no direction until I obtain Thy sanction.
It is Thou, O my God, Who hast called me into being through the power
Of Thy might, and hast endued me with Thy grace to manifest Thy cause.
The act whereby being - existence - is bestowed upon us is an unbearable surpassing of being, an act no less unbearable than that of dying. And since, in death, being is take away from us at the same time it is given to us, we must seek for it in the feeling of dying, in those unbearable moments when it seems to us that we are dying because the existence in us, during these interludes, exists through nothing but a sustaining and ruinous excess, when the fullness of horror and that of joy coincide.
As I waited for annihilation, all that subsisted in me
Seemed to me to be the dross over which man's life tarries...
Lyrics submitted by Bloodmouth
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Mountain Song
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Must be one of the most stunning and coruscating lyrics I've read, though I haven't heard the actual song (yet), as it's only released on a low-published split.
But this really makes me think about things.