Bopping to "Brian Wilson"
...thoughts on mental illness and normalcy
According to the Fandom dot com website, the Barenaked Ladies’ song “Brian Wilson” was written by band member Stephen Page sometime around the time of his 20th birthday in 1990. Appearing two years later on the band’s debut Gordon album, the song rose to respectable levels on various charts in Canada and the U.S., and apparently became a kind of signature piece for the group. From what I’m seeing online, it was performed regularly in concerts over the years.
It’s a catchy, “boppy” tune. Thing is, to me, the catchiness and boppiness of the music — infused, I will grant, with a sort of brooding intensity — lands at a rather odd angle given the core cultural allusion made in the lyrics. Basically, the poetic “I” in the song created by songwriter Stephen Page is identifying with the sufferings of songwriter Brian Wilson, the famous co-founder of The Beach Boys. The song centers on a reference to Wilson’s profound and debilitating mental illness.
As I started looking into this online I found articles corroborating stories I’d read and been told years ago that Wilson had suffered from a condition termed agoraphobia, characterized on the Mayo Clinic website as “…fearing and avoiding places or situations that might cause panic and feelings of being trapped, helpless or embarrassed.” Not surprisingly, people with this condition often do not want to leave their homes. On the other hand, a 2019 article in Forbes reported that Wilson suffered from schizoaffective disorder and mild manic depression. I don’t know much about all these labels, but bottom line is, these can be serious, debilitating conditions. It has even been reported that the genius behind The Beach Boys had sand brought indoors at one point to help inspire his beach-themed music. Photo linked here.
Now let’s be clear: I’m all for art, and I’m all for the transcendent qualities that art brings us as we grapple with the suffering that comes with being human. Really, I don’t need to know if Stephen Page was comparing what he personally was going through with Brian Wilson’s issues, or if it was just a clever use of a cultural reference by a writer with an eye for effective imagery. I’m sure there are interviews with Stephen Page, but even that approach, in the end, only goes so far. When writers tell stories about their writing, they’re really just telling more stories.
Ultimately, the song itself is the important thing. And yes, to understand the lyrics it probably helps to know a little of the background about Brian Wilson and his life and problems, much like when a poet refers to Aphrodite it probably helps to know at least something about Greek mythology.
So last weekend as I was considering all this, I happened to find an online video of the Barenaked Ladies performing the song in the 1999 Farm Aid benefit concert. Watching it, naturally the cameras are mainly focused on the lead and backup singer and the rest of the band onstage. Occasionally, however, the videographer shares some shots of the audience dancing along. And who can blame them? Catchy tune, great musicians. If I were there I would probably be on my feet, too.
But still, it seemed a little odd, seeing everyone all happy and moving together while the song in its lyric content elaborates a state of acute emotional distress with a kind of devastating, laser-like effectiveness. The effect is not quite as surreal as if people in ballroom attire were waltzing to Jimi Hendrix’s “Manic Depression” — which by the way is possible, given that the song is written in 3/4 time. Even so, it still seems kinda strange to me, this response to a song whose core imagery centers on severe mental illness.
After watching the video of the Farm Aid performance and thinking about it for a while last weekend, I sent the link in an email to my brother in which I framed my question this way: “I don't know whether this represents a triumph of life or a triumph of idiocy, the ability to feel sexy and youthful and free in the face of lyric content like this. I mean, seriously [I quoted the song]: ‘Somebody help me, somebody help me, somebody help me…’
“Is it just me, or does the intensity of the desperation expressed here not seem like an invitation to a lotta giggles and wiggles?”
Again, granted, this is art. This is a singer performing a song on stage for the bazillionth time, not someone screaming for help in a burning building. And I don’t mean to be ungenerous — goodness knows, we need more dancing, not less, these days. And furthermore, consider: how many unmarked graves do we cross daily in our comings and goings? To dance on this planet is, inevitably, to dance upon those graves. It can’t be helped. Why not dance, then? Dance we must!
Still… still… and even knowing how many tearjerker love songs there are in pop music — I mean, come on, emotional anguish is practically a mainstay of the genre — still, in this instance for some reason I find the level of dissociation more than a little disconcerting.
Partly, I am sure, this is because I see this kind of thing in other areas of life right now. I guess we’d all go nuts if we really stopped to consider all the suffering in the world, all the terrible mental and physical disorders, yes, but even more, all the avoidable, needless, intentionally caused suffering, much of it bought and paid for by our tax dollars and with corporate sponsorship. Call it the public-private partnership of pain. Best to just dance on, it seems.
Problem is, I’m really not so sure that in the end we’re actually more sane by virtue of our ability to ignore so very, very well. Such a studied, well-cultivated ability to ignore things can start to look a lot like plain ol’ ordinary ignorance after a while. I’m not convinced, for example, this being an election year, that it is sane to forget what the folks we are voting for have done, repeatedly, or left undone, again and again, or to think they won’t do more of the same. These people’s songs and words, one might observe, do not jibe well with their dances. Personally I feel at a loss to explain the current state of U.S. politics. What’s the diagnosis here? Is it collective amnesia? Fugue state? Schizoid tendencies? Outright schizophrenia? Psychosocial infantilism? Stockholm syndrome?
And if you think I must be joking, well, good. Just go ahead and think that, if it helps. Laughing is a bit like dancing: It makes us human and it often helps, especially since so much of what we do and so many things we accept as ‘normal’ do not, in the end, make a whole lotta sense.
As a teen I had the good fortune of encountering the works of Scottish psychiatrist R.D. Laing, whose book The Politics of Experience was by uncanny providence included in the library collection of little ol’ Chelsea High School, circa 1978. In it, one will find pithy and memorable observations like this:
“The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one's mind, is the condition of the normal man. Society highly values its normal man. It educates children to lose themselves and to become absurd, and thus to be normal.”
Ah, so you see, my darlings: Now it all makes sense. Please just give me a minute and I’ll change into my tuxedo.
Jimi Hendrix is on, singing “Manic Depression”.
That song points to the profound loneliness most people feel as they suffer without true friendships, without people in their lives who can be with them when they can't dance. The song creates an inversion which is why you noticed it, Clifford, and a particularly personal one at that where the sound and beat of the music compells one to dance freely as the lyrics speak of a life of confined suffering. At a time when inversions are constant and everywhere we look, it's true, we must dance...and fall to the floor when someone we love is down.
We make normal whatever we want it to be at any given time. Burning witches at the stake was normal at one point. Crucifixions too. Eating potatos was for peasants and rich, fashionable men wore wigs and high heels. We are indeed absurd. It's in our nature.