All musicians and writers are over-analyzed and taken for more than what they mean. This even helps writers and musicians make a living.
Examples of musicians and writers who have been over-analyzed:
- Jim Morrison
- Freud
- Shakespeare
An example is Jim Morrison's Hyacinth House song he and the Doors wrote.
What are they doing in the Hyacinth House?
What are they doing in the Hyacinth House?
To please the lions this day
I need a brand new friend who doesn't bother me
I need a brand new friend who doesn't trouble me
I need someone, yeah, who doesn't need me
I see the bathroom is clear
I think that somebody's near
I'm sure that someone is following me, oh yeah
Why did you throw the Jack of Hearts away?
Why did you throw the Jack of Hearts away?
It was the only card in the deck that I had left to play
And I'll say it again, I need a brand new friend
And I'll say it again, I need a brand new friend
And I'll say it again, I need a brand new friend, the end
All sorts of meanings and interpretations were floating about after the song was released. People assumed there was a deep meaning to this song. Fans over analyzed this song to death.
When Jim Morrison/The Doors explained what the song meant - they confirmed it was an extremely simple song created while they were looking at a bathroom in their apartment building or room they were in, and they happened to see a cat while making the song (lions).
It goes unnoticed that the real meaning behind Hyacinth House is simple and shallow. People continue to over-analyze and make assumptions that anything a famous person wrote must have an extremely deep meaning to it.
When a musician or writer has people over-analyze his work he starts to make big bucks - as anything that he writes is accepted in the community as "deep meaning stuff", even if the intention was for the work to be shallow and good sounding.
Led Zeppelin had similar songs which were interpreted as deep, when in fact they were just playing with words. The Ocean was just about the crowd which looked like an ocean, and there really wasn't any meaning to Stairway to Heaven - Robert Plant just thought it up and put down words that happened to rhyme - and some of the song made sense to him, but some of it didn't. He even admitted that some of the song didn't make any sense to him and that he just wrote a lot of gibberish down.
Since many writers and musicians know that most of life is just showing up and coming up with something that people will like (whether deep or shallow in meaning) they continue to pump out more and more text or words which may or may not have a deep meaning. Even the text or words which are intended to have a deep meaning are then over-analyzed further past their original deep meaning.
Books, novels, songs, philosophies, operas, and poems are perfect examples of items that can be infinitely over-analyzed past the original author's intention.
After listening to the Doors music for many years I realized that Jim Morrison wasn't a skilled poet or an extremely intelligent man, nor was he a very good writer. Most of his songs were sexual and perverted, without too much meaning at all. Most of his poems were designed to rhyme with many sexual references that made any sense at the time. He was drunk half the time too.
People have over-analyzed Jim Morrison to be some god or some poet - when in fact he is a perverted writer who happens to have mediocre poetry skills. I do enjoy the rythyms and beat of the Doors songs, they are one of favorite bands. Don't assume that I am being biased here because I hate the band. I do not hate them - I like them a lot. After careful analysis I confirmed that it wasn't the poetry which I liked about the Doors as most of it was shallow, negative, pessimistic and meaningless gibberish. It was the beat, the soothing voice, and the comedy which I enjoyed. Some of the meaningless gibberish was so meaningless it was funny. Other gibberish in The Doors music had some meaning to it - but it was mostly shallow meaning. Such as when he claims to want to Fuck His Mother in the song called "The End". There's nothing deep about this folks.
As Jim Morrison says
"I dont know how many you people believe in astrology...
Yeah, thats right...thats right, baby, i...i am a Sagittarius
The most philosophical of all the signs
But anyway, I dont believe in it
I think its a bunch of bullshit, myself
But I tell you this, man, I tell you this
I dont know whats gonna happen, man, but I wanna have
my kicks before the whole shithouse goes up in flames".
There is no deep meaning in the above. Read it as it is.
As Woody Allen was quoted "80% of life is just showing up", many people assume that if someone famous says something it means it must have a deep meaning. Since life is more about showing up, anything someone famous says when they show up will be over analyzed and interpreted many times further than originally intended.
Most of Shakespeare's writing is a bunch of violent nonsense with shallow meaning - however Shakespeare produced so much quantity and structured thoughts onto paper (shallow or not). The important fact about Shakespeare was that he wrote down the thoughts, whether they were shallow, violent, and meaningless or not. After writing and writing so much quantity, he defined our English history because he was the only one showing up. If someone during his time showed up and wrote less violent and less shallow words than him, we would have a different English language today. All sorts of snobs and English specialists will over analyze his works because Shakespeare happened to put quantities of stories down on paper that appeared to have deep meaning. If you tell this same advocate that your pencil has much more of a deep meaning to it since the wood had a certain wood grain pattern to it - he may even believe you.
Another subject that is over-analyzed further than its original meaning is Opera. Some folk won't listen to Operas that are written in English, because they don't want to hear the story. They find there is a deeper meaning if they listen to it in Italian, since they cannot completely understand Italian. Part of it is the fact that the Italian language may flow with the Opera music more than English due to the different structures of the languages - but the fact that some Opera fans openly admit that they can't even understand the Italian Opera's and yet they still find deep meanings in the music... proves my point.
Delusion is the truth
Part of the over-analysis stems from delusion. A perfect example of delusion, those who go to further depths than actually possible, is the act of wine snobbery.
Quoting from Peter Mayle:
"...I thought I would never see the ear used as an instrument to assess a wine's quality. I was wrong.
I was at a champagne tasting. How I came to be there I'm not quite sure, since it is not something I drink more than two or three times a year. But there I was, surrounded by people of some distinction (and, I have to say, considerable pretension) who were tasting six different marques of champagne.
One of the tasters, a man with an impressively tinted nose that suggested a long and close relationship with the grape, suddenly held up his hand for silence. He raised his glass to his ear, tilted his head, and listened.
'One can always tell Krug from Roederer,' he said, 'by the sound of the bubbles.'
I know when I'm out of my depth."
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