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Mystic Allusions in Heavy Rock Lyrics

Contents

Lyrics mystic phenom. allusion theory. 1

Mystic allusions in Acid Rock. 1

How popular is mysticism with pop music?. 2

"Love" in Lyrics. 5

 

Lyrics mystic phenom. allusion theory

>I've just read your research/discovery on "Rush lyrics alluding to mystic dissociative phenomena" and I am totally blown away. To think that someone has finally figured Neil, Alex and Geddy out (mainly Neil). I haven't trancended the ego in quite some time but after reading this I have an extreme urge to caress the hemisphere's again.  Excellent work! Thank you!

...

>>I am intrigued by your comments and analysis of Rush lyrics.  Have you analyzed or any comments to the lyrics of their latest album / CD, Vapor Trails (2002)?

Many people have asked for such an analysis.  My time would be best spent developing or clarifying this general theory of lyric interpretation, rather than adding more particular albums to the pile.  I hope to get around to this album, but it's not a top priority.  It's possible for anyone to apply my theory to any album to evaluate how compatible the album is with the theory.  Several people have posted such analyses they have done of other groups' lyrics, proving that my theory or analysis technique is being communicated well enough to be understood and applied.

Mystic allusions in Acid Rock

This site presents a straightforward theory of entheogenic, deterministic ego-death. 

The theory was encouraged by Rush songs alluding to LSD phenomena such as the following:

No One at the Bridge

Bastille Day

Chemistry

The Body Electric

Bacchus Plateau

The Twilight Zone

Cygnus X-1

Freewill

Vital Signs

Driven

I found the core theory of ego death in January 1988 and discovered the acid-rock allusions to egodeath and mystic altered state phenomena in Rush around 1994.  The allusions reported phenomena and insights that fully supported the core theory, thus serving as confirmation and encouragement and showing how Art is ahead of Theory.

>From: OnlinePromotionsCoord

>Sent: Saturday, December 15, 2001 8:01 AM

>To: unitOne at egodeath.com

>Subject: RushCon II

>

>RushCon II is really happening!!!

>

>RushCon II: Citizens of the World will be July 12 - 14, 2002.  The Friday Night Mixer will be at The Toronto Colony Hotel, which is again the official hotel of RushCon.  They have given us a special room rate of $149.00 CDN per night (plus taxes).  You can book your room with them by calling 1-800-387-8687 and quoting the code RushCon 2112.

>On Saturday July 13, 2002, The Opera House (located at 735 Queen Street East) will host the main events for RushCon II.  Some of the things you will see are: a Tribute Band Concert, Rush Karaoke, Rush JeoParody, Countdown (a Rush song identification game), fabulous door prizes, contests, our annual charity auction, and a guest speaker or two!  You get all of this for the special price of just $30 CDN!  Quite a bargain!

>I also want to tell you about the exciting happenings we have for Sunday July 14, 2002.  We will be holding our Bastille Day Walking Tour for 50 lucky attendees.  We will storm Toronto on an exciting tour of all the significant Rush sites, including Canada's Walk of Fame, Massey Hall, Sam the Record Man, Maple Leaf Gardens, Danforth and Pape and Queen's Park (Moving Pictures cover).  More information about the Sunday events will be released soon.

>If you have any questions about RushCon II please ask them on the official RushCon message board http://pub37.ezboard.com/brushcon or for a quicker response please join the RushCon discussion list at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/RushCon/  Of course the official RushCon website at www.rushcon.org is another way to learn all you to need to know about RushCon II.  We are currently updating the site and should have all the new information up soon.  We apologize for any inconvience this may cause you and thank you for your understanding and patience.

>Once the website is up and running we'll have online registration available. If you just can't wait, you can register by calling (705) 446-2481 and asking for a registration form.  You can also call that number if you have any questions that need to be answered.  Thanks!

How popular is mysticism with pop music?

>To properly study this takes quite an effort to see through heaps of lyrics.  Meantime I propose that mysticism is not only hugely popular with Classic Rock but also throughout pop music in a an all-encompassing sense (ie. any music which is popular with the people).

I have mentioned a degree of presence in other pop music genres before, in this discussion group, such as Windy.

>For example, 80's synth-pop is *utterly* contaminated with mystic state allusions.

Classic Rock inherently has more potential for acid allusions, because it includes the entire range from Heavy to Soothing, whereas Pop is limited to Soothing, and Metal is limited to Heavy.  This is why Led Zeppelin ranks at the top of Rock history: a broad command of the full range of modes.  That's why Pop and Metal have a harder time becoming Classic.  Pop has the advantage of being acceptable in public.

I thought the Michael Jackson lyrics had too low density of potential acid-mystic allusions.  My doubt about that particular case slightly lessens the extent of my agreement with the assertion that there was a *high* density of acid allusions in Pop music such as 80s synth pop.

>A-HA, Alphaville and Freddie Mercury are only the first few which immediately come to mind.

I would have to analyze their lyrics.  Plus, lyric sheets often mismatch the words which are actually mumbled.  All of this hiding is plainly driven by suppression. 

The obviousness of this suppression, the way the Establishment *forced* artists to resort to subtle double-entendres and mumbling, provides sound evidence and an example for the same suppression in esoteric religion; entheogen mystics who sit at the heart of all religions were forced, by the same forces, to encode their allusions to visionary plants; such allusions are directly and inherently and actively *anti*-literalist.

Visionary plants are a spear aimed at the heart of literalist religion and all the Establishment that is founded upon or interwoven with literalist religion.  Visionary plants are a death threat to literalist religion and the associated cultural institutions.

I have previously included some synth-pop in "Classic Rock" and "Pop Rock", defining these terms broadly, explicitly to include a range such as the Cars, Eddie Money, Tom Petty, Queen, Metallica, and jumping to electronica.  In terms of genres, we move from Freakbeat through Psychedelic, Acid Rock, Heavy Metal, Heavy Rock, New Wave, Metal -- a *clearly discernable* ongoing tradition and language runs throughout. 

It's debatable whether your clarification is an "expansion" of the premise.  In some mild sense it is an expansion of the premise, but such an expansion fits seamlessly with the general point.  I have a minor disagreement.  Acid mysticism is found somewhat more in Heavy Rock than in Pop, because the natural heaviness of LSD fits better with the heaviness of Heavy Rock. 

On the other hand, *lots* of artists are very interested in LSD, recognizing the Muse coming through it, and these artists also choose to work in the Pop genre rather than in the Heavy Rock genre, and it is not difficult for them to weave in acid mystic conceptual language into their Art.  It's like the way all the Greco-Roman Mystery Cults were various brandings of the same core Mystery Religion, including the Jewish and Christian religions.

>Likewise Religion, plant-based mysticism was not only present in the beginning of pop/rock-music (Beatles) which is the conventional assumption. Everybody knows that the Beatles tripped out on LSD for good but what about Freddie Mercury?

I don't know anything about Mercury.  I posted a full analysis of the Queen song "Bohemian Rhapsody".  Clearly someone in that band of poets is a genuine experienced mystic.

People are clueless about the Beatles' use of acid in the same way as for religion and for Pop music and Classic Rock.  People make the same chronically narrowing assumption, that the Beatles only used acid a little, only during one or two years.  Judging from the Net, I'm about the only one who recognizes the totally obvious, that the song Help! is the Beatles' first acid-allusion song. 

People's fake, narrow "psychedelic music" category -- which relegates all entheogens to in Rock to the period only of the Summer of Love -- makes them commit the same fallacy as seeing entheogens only at the ancient beginning of one or two religions, and only in the inner circle of a couple groups within that religion. 

That is the minimal entheogen theory of religion, whereas I take the exact opposite approach, and attempt to perceive heavy use of entheogens in all religions, all eras, all locales, and then shrink the theory from there.  The equivalent maximal entheogen theory of music is that all music in all eras in all locales was heavily entheogen-oriented -- then, from that starting assumption or paradigm, shrink the scope to a limited degree.

>I propose, like Mr. Hoffman does for Religion, that entheogens are not only the root of pop music but its ongoing wellspring.

That is a possibly clarified way of emphasizing a point (the broad rather than narrow presence of entheogen-induced mysticism in music) which I wrote in previous posts about Eddie Money, "Windy", Cars, and Devo -- artists who are not typical of "Classic Rock".  Sting and U2 have high density of allusions to direct mystic experiencing in some songs.  At issue still is the exact extent of acid allusions in Pop music other than Heavy Rock/Classic Rock. 

As much research as I've done, I could hardly guess the statistics even for Heavy Rock: how many songs, %, include acid allusions?  I have not done enough analysis of Pop music to estimate the commonness of high density of allusions in songs.

Some deluded prissy, prudish, and priggish empty-headed fans of Rush are completely reluctant to lump Rush in with the "dirty" acid-using Heavy Rock bands.  Rush is philosophical and therefore it follows that they don't use drugs -- never mind the unanimous and uncontroverted, yet literally *forgotten* fact that Passage to Bangkok is about cannabis -- a "forgotten" fact due to paradigm-based blindness. 

It is irrelevant whether anyone cares about the music of Rush: their case is fascinating with regard to paradigmatic perception and recognition of a semi-systemic language of embedded allusions.

People who operate from the assumption-framework that only Heavy Rock or Psychedelic Rock is acid-oriented can only perceive acid in those genres; they've decided where they will and will not see acid, before they even look -- just as people do in religion, and then they demand of the entheogen scholars "if entheogens were used, how come there is no evidence?"  To those who have blinded themselves by sticking a paradigm in the way blocking their view, there is no evidence.

>>Entheogens were not used once by one group [paradigm of minimal entheogen use] but are used all the time by all the groups [paradigm of maximal enthegen use].

>The latter is proposing too much but is the more useful paradigm as it clears the way for further study.

Merker wrote:

>It's debatable if suppression is the only cause of the way pop artists choose to encode their lyric. There at least two other points which demand attention:

>1 - the artistic point of view to encode /form allusion/allegories naturally lies closer to the artist than saying things out straight.

>2 - profanation the mystic state typically was spoken of /hinted at only in allegorized form

>I propose a hierarchy of advancement of lyrics:

>level x: lyrics about entheogens. very profane and not necessarily inspired. focus at the means.

>level y: lyrics about the mystic experience. intermediate, more advanced than focus on the drug itself, but doesn't go beyond what's directly experienced.

>level z: lyrics about the perfected mind. may also include references to the drug and the mystic experience, but only adjacent. first of all the lyrics are about the enlightened mind and *from* an enlightened mind.

>As (pop) music can be recognized as our current legitimate mythic/mystic-religion it should be noted that profanation may very well be a serious problem to the artist.

I agree that not *all* veiling of allusions to visionary plants in Rock and Pop lyrics was *entirely* driven by suppression.

Suppression wasn't the only cause of veiling allusions to LSD in Rock lyrics, but it was the first and strongest.  Video shows John Lennon lying and denying the acronym of Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.  Rock lyricists were raked over the coals, literally put in jail because of drug hysteria.  The Beatles and Stones were persecuted and punished, though they should've been left alone.  Eight Miles High had to be denied as alluding to drug use. 

Songs with open drug references were banned, providing a filtering effect like in mystic writings with the result that all that was permitted to get and remain in print was the veiled allusions. 

Tug-of-war processes and filtering processes have to be recognized as systemic and cybernetic systems, such that mystic veiled allusions are consistently the product.  This could connect with my theory of ultimate referent-meaning; allegory is a more or less distorted pointing at a definite thing, transcendent knowledge itself, even if no one person perfectly aims at the target and has perfectly accurate intent of meaning.  No one may have intended to think of ultimate meaning as I describe it, but they intended to intend that ultimate meaning. 

There is a perfect target up in the sky, and all mystics point more or less toward it even if no one points exactly at it.  If I were to perfectly express transcendent truth, no mystic might be in full agreement, yet I'd say that just indicates that any particular mystic is less than perfect in their understanding.  This way my theory is not dependent upon the detail of how many individual mystics would fully agree with it.  My goal isn't to find what the mystics meant in their poetic allusions to transcendent truth, but what they meant to mean or ideally should have meant.

Received mythic-religio-philosophy is a consistent-in-character product of ongoing typical conflicting forces, shaped by a long-lasting tension between mystic description of the altered state experiential insights and the official restrictive demands of literalist socio-religio-politics that are enforced.

"Love" in Lyrics

merker wrote:

>You're a victim of love

>just a victim of love

>i could be wrong

>but you know i'm not

I continue to think of the song "I think I'm in love" by Eddie Money: "something's got ahold of me now ... it controls me -- makes me do all the things I do for you ... and I don't think I can make it through the night; [your love] help me make it through the night".  Love and sexual climax is rich in potential for metaphorizing entheogen determinism.

>Psilocybin mushrooms combined with Cannabis can be a *highly* potent mixture.

That can't be emphasized too much, THC as effective augmenter of the core psychedelics -- one reason to look for mixtures in history.

>I could see myself laying in a coffin. I was dead as dead can be. I knew what it was all about. I knew everything. All meaning was revealed to me.

It helps alot to have read my theorization of ego death.

>I was guilty as hell. My body was alive but *I* was dead by all means. So dead. All Time is present outside of Time. We don't stand a chance in hell. That's how it is how it's going to be.

>Sometimes I wish I've never been born at all

>

>You're just another sucker ready for the Fall.

>Fight from the inside, you can't win with your hands tied.

>Everything is about *it*, revelation of the nature of things brings the most horrible death to be died.

 

>No one gets to heaven till they've lived awhile in hell

>And even then it's rare

>That you'll be going there [Dio]

>

>I *completely* understand this. This is 100% true.

 

>ROCK'N'ROLL i completely decoded.

>ROCK: Perception of CosmicDeterminism, time can be perceived as being not a stream (usual conception of time) but rather being like a *Rock*, ie. solid as a rock.

>ROLL: Describes in a minor sense the usual sense of flowing time but more important it hints at the phases of perception in the mystic experience in which time is seen as flowing *BUT* it is known it does *NOT*.

>Highest knowledge: Union of perception of ROCK and of perception of ROLL. Marriage of low and highEST thinking. ULTIMATE perfection.

>"You'll never know why we ROCK, ROCK, ROCK" [ozzy]

>

>Saint of Saints merker

 

Oh you prideful saint, they say -- but how can one be proud if determinism?  I think what it makes me think; I'm washed of culpability, metaphysically.

I've written some about 'Rock' as metaphor, and am impressed with the climactic line "To be a rock, and not to roll" in context in the song Stairway to Heaven.

The End of Time: The Next Revolution in Physics

Julian Barbour

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0195117298

13K (very popular)

Book list: Tenseless time, eternity, and timelessness

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/listmania/list-browse/-/CYO513ZOJFHM

 


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