The Doors
Strange Days

THE REVIEW

I love this album..

It is dark, wrapped in cold clouds, it is an album with no way out.

No way out like a labyrinth, a labyrinth of solitude, where alienation in the face of a foreign and therefore frightening reality is tackled without rhetoric and without pathetic embellishments, a reality that is a non-reality, a reality that, as Jim would say, lent itself as "a common hostess you took to bed", a reality that invites discovery and then prostrates itself in the quality of death.

"Strange days have found us," strange days have indeed found us, and that's already saying everything. The little man who is alone, the man "orphan of God," thrown into the world, begins his process of self-destruction, a self-destruction that starts from the subconscious, that starts "from crossing those doors of perception" so frequently cited by Aldous Huxley and William Blake, a self-destruction consisting of wiping the slate clean of the prejudices, disputes, and moralism of society, a self-destruction that is actually a new beginning, a saying yes to life, the pursuit of sublimation and derangement of the senses, in order to perceive every form of emotion, to accept every form of pain.

Yes because pain is part of life, accepting it means accepting life, and this Morrison seems to have understood well and thus in the portraits of "You are lost little girl", "Love me two times" and "Unhappy girl" he takes care to describe, sometimes with a touch of sincere emotion, sometimes with a cold and ruthless detachment, the pain and suffering of others, these are desolate, decadent episodes that leave no room for any commiseration, for any blame.. "you will die in a prison you built yourself"..

The words of this album's lyrics are heavy as boulders but, as often happens with the "Doors", they are lifted by the musical fabric, in a wonderful interpenetration, reaching truly impeccable levels on the album in question.

It starts again with "horse latitudes", once again with death as the protagonist, the death of the day with the night, the search for infinity that unfolds in the drowning of horses that, thrown into the sea to lighten the weight of the boat, flounder and thrash their limbs in the sea while their dilated nostrils exhale their last breaths, images again incredibly powerful, images of the end. "Moonlight drive" is not just a song, this "rock tango," initially harmless, is actually a mix of hallucinated colors, a madly gushing fountain, an invitation, once more, to go further, an invitation to sink into the darkness of the night, an invitation to live.. "down, down, down, below."

"People are strange" exemplifies, as if it were still necessary, the superb lyrical abilities of Morrison: a few verses, short but concise, mark the most total alienation, walking precariously on a cold wire, walking with one's head down among people, an estrangement that, however, allows things to be seen as they really are, an estrangement that allows one to rise above life's rains and look darkness in the face. After the cabaret-like tones of the previous track, and after the frantic "My eyes have seen you" and the funereal "I can't see your face in my mind" comes the masterpiece of the album, that "When the music's over", worthy counterpart of the Oedipal "The end" from the first album.

Lights off, a few organ notes with a bit of a jazz flavor, Ray's bass line on keyboards, the drum's tam-tam and then, Jim's cry at the top of his lungs.. "the Superman fears nothing, he dances in the fire and plays with death" these words from the German philosopher Nietzsche perfectly match this musical-theatrical composition, Jim knows very well that morality is the brain's weakness and doesn't fall into easy ethical stereotypes, he renounces resurrection to waltz the bacchanalian mazurka of Manzarek's organ, and thus the piece takes on the semblance of a purification ritual supervised by the god Dionysus, Jim gazes into the abyss, just as he will let the abyss gaze into him, and all this until the end. When the music's over.