| The Doors – The Soft Parade Lyrics | 4 years ago |
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We must look at the title first and foremost. Its a catchy line. Who ever thinks of a parade in terms of soft or hard? It is absurd-- this is the job of the poet to offer word play Joyce did it all the time. What comes to mind when you hear the word parade? The fourth of July, a bunch boy scouts and marching band, then sooner or later there is a military presence. We go to parades every year especially in small towns. We sometimes take part in the parade. Maybe our kid was in the little league or we are in the American Legion. But we all end up just marching down the road into the horizon, into the abyss and eventually we march no more as we arrive at our final destination. We repeat this little pagan ritual every year. Looking back at them with a little distance through a filtered cosmic abstraction parades represent nothing less than our slow inevitable march to the grave. As Rank pointed out, we do this because it gives a sense of victory that we might just beat the reaper and become immortal-- out heart thumping in time with the marching band convined that we are better something else by just being an American. But looking back at them and all the folks who have passed we know that is all just folly. It is only in the present do we get these feelings, yet the feelings are strong enough to have us attend them year after year. The specter of immortality is powerful and it is what keeps us doing our menial jobs because no one has the courage to challenge the parade-- to interrupt it's insipid flow --( except the Delts and John Belushi in Animal House) We delude ourselves everyday as we parade through life and all its mindless rituals which keep us hinged to a lot of useless toiling and suffering. But now enter the idea of the Soft Parade. It is like when Nietzsche introduces the Idea of Zarathustra and the ubermanch. That old Prussian, who like Morrison was raised in an oppressive ordered environment. He urges us to embrace the idea that society needs to develop a new kind of man. So Morrison is just echoing this idea with the suggestion of a soft parade or is that he is warning us that we are in the rapture of a soft parade following the powers that be to an inevitable destruction? It doesn't matter, the song is an observation inviting you to see what he sees to follow the shaman as it were. ( Unfortuantely, I think few including the band members, caught the message.) No doubt the idea of Vietnam taking young boys away from their homes and having them fight an unknown enemy is absurdity that was worthy of challenging at the time which spawned so much of the music and the hippie movement of the late 60s. So Morrison is inviting us to rebellion, to anarchy challenging these outdated ideals with our own soft parade. Morrison himself was anachronism; out of place and time. His wardrobe and his looks appear not to match the ambient styles of short cropped hair, fedoras and pin ties that abounded during that period. When we see a car pass by in the background we are shocked at how outdated it appears while Morrison appears as a timeless soul who in many ways was authentic and rebellious down to his dress code coaxing us into that soft parade. Morrison reminds us as good patriotic Americans we can challenge the stauts quo just as out founding fathers did. We can reject the apollonian military ideals for the more irrational and erasable Dionysion, Goathead or simple town fool which Morrison lost not a moment embracing himself. |
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| Bob Dylan – Desolation Row Lyrics | 5 years ago |
| @[mpalmer:34223] This was an amazing review But the song contradicts his later conversion to Christianity,It shows that Dylan has always been a works in progress throughout his career. | |
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