The Doors

While rock has always been a genre practically defined by being a melting pot of other styles and ideas, The Doors were certainly the first to perfect and apply the idea to create a single focused and powerful piece. They created a style that blended an aggressive, fierce interpretation blues best expressed through John Densmore's drumming, the vaguely ethnic, exotic tones of Hawaiian, Indian and Latin music played through Bobby Krieger's guitar, the keyboards of Ray Manzarek, which showed a predilection to a reinterpretation of psychedelia through the lens of jazz and classical and, finally, the voice and lyrics of Jim Morrison, who was a melodramatic and menacing shaman who hid this behind a deep and seductive voice. His lyrics became a ground breaking style that seemed to be Freudian (i.e. psycho-sexual) vision of traditional tragedies;Oedipus Rex placed in the light of modern times.

 The first track on their self-titled debut is Break On Through (To The Other Side). The song is a spasm full of dangerous aggression, the exact type or aggression of aggression that would define punk a decade later. Morrison's voice tosses the song with enough momentum to carry it by itself and the rapid-fire percussion of Densmore only adds to this. As that track finishes burning up its fuel we move into Soul Kitchen. An atmosphere of occult rituals permeates throughout this piece of blues desperation complete with spiritual chants and mantras that invoke visions of world-weary clerics and travelling preachers, though with a Mephistophelian twist. The next track The Crystal Ship is a trance which creates visions that are romantic, pristine, desperate and fearful. Twentieth Century Woman is a another piece of blues, although this time it's re-imagined as a sarcastic ode to a woman  who encompasses all the modern trends of fashionable attitude. The first half of the album ends with one the groups more famous tracks, Light My Fire, an opulent, mesmerizing  hymn dedicated to the most primordial pleasures and fascinations (sex, fire, death). It weaves it's savage instinct around an anxious, albeit refined, tone. I Looked At You reveals a romantic inclination that is buried beneath a mountain of desperate chants and pleas that create an underlying danger;the romanticism is directly tied to the distress and anguish. End Of The Night is nocturnal hypnosis, enticing with it's beckoning melodrama and no less paranoid about it's reality than the more feverish pieces. Take It As It Comes is another melodramatic vortex of passive-aggressive despondency that serves as a recap of the whole album as we move into the final track. The End is the 11 minute opus that all the previous songs have been building up to, set pieces meant to create the mood and exacerbate the devastation of the final song. It begins with the light brushing of faint, exotic guitar while the nervous, schizophrenic percussion serves as the ultimate expression of neurosis in rock. Keyboards sound off in the distance like the warning signals of some unseen tragedy. The guitar picks up, rising and falling as if it too wants to send a message of foreboding danger. Morrison reads off a poem of romantic, sexual and dangerous tension. The imagery is apocalyptic, only the cataclysm is personal , the destruction of the ego. Mystical phrases and assortments of ghostly landscapes are carved out of this eternity. The piece stretches itself to the distant past and back to the present. As the song crescendos the percussion becomes more unpredictable;the guitar acts up in a frenzy. The tension comes to a fever pitch and all the sound engages in a melee, colliding and exploding before all energy is expended and the piece slowly descends into unconsciousness, before finally snuffing itself out with a final rattling moan.