Margaritaville and DSM-III

To follow up on my post about Jimmy Buffett, I looked for Nietzsche quotes about music. There are more than a few, of course, but here's the one which caught my attention, paraphrased just a bit for better translation in the absence of the original context:

Music sounds wonderful, and reasons ridiculous, when one is marching against an enemy.

I seriously doubt that Friedrich Nietzsche would have appreciated Margaritaville. But then again, nobody ever marched against an enemy to a full symphony orchestra performing a Wagnerian opera, at least not any farther than the edge of town, right? Short, silly songs like Yankee Doodle or I Wish I were in Dixie fit that bill far better. Who knows, maybe the philosopher would have been all about wastin' away again....

The ultimate marching song, perhaps, rose slowly in that dark final scene of Full Metal Jacket ("Hey there, hi there, ho there, we're as happy as can be! M-I-C, K-E-Y, M-O-U-S-E..."). And "Four dead in Ohio" worked beautifully with video of rampaging National Guard troops and tear gas on college campuses or in the streets of Chicago. 

But what could have been any martial backdrop in 1977 for, "Blew out my flip flop, stepped on a pop top, cut my heel, had to cruise on back home..."-? I don't recall cities in flames then. What enemy were we marching against, to love Buffett's music so much?

I'd be happy to think it was the whole society in which the machine was god. We had followed Mario Savio's gorgeous exhortation in the sixties, to "put our bodies on the gears and on the wheels and on the levers, and on all the apparatus" to make the machine stop. But the machine didn't stop. The Vietnam war was over, Nixon and Agnew were gone, we left college and got jobs, started families and were a bit embarrassed, as if for becoming part of the machine after all.

Then in 1980, at first almost unnoticed, came the ultimate insult and degradation: DSM-III. All of our romances and aspirations for freedom, all the dazzlingly beautiful music, wanting somebody to love in 1967, was "scientifically revealed" to be mere mechanical actions of neurotransmitters and receptors in our brains. We were medical subjects, not free people. Jon Franklin put it most succinctly, in his 1987 book, Molecules of the Mind: The Brave New Science of Molecular Psychology: "We will have to look in the mirror, surrender illusion, and make peace with the fact that we are staring at a machine..."

We baby boomers mostly bought it, stopped marching, and covered the mirror. The music became all about "booze in the blender, and soon it will render, that frozen concoction that helps me hang on." 

Or if we marched anymore, it was mostly on tropical beaches, "searching for my lost shaker of salt." Did Jimmy Buffett really create our marching songs, or were those poisoned anthems from a subtle enemy coming against us, lulling us into careless, lazy consent to something barely stated, like Yeats' rough slouching beast?

Maybe Nietzsche was far too violent a spirit, whose fevered thoughts I shouldn't try to consult about happy music. I honestly don't know. But I have worried, most of my life, that whenever I sit still and stay quiet, I sure as hell better have arrows, and a bow.  

"Some people claim there's a woman to blame, but I know it's my own damn fault." God help me, I do still love it.