Appetite for Insanity: Why We Love the Crazy Ones
Art and madness go way back. We celebrate when our heroes suffer and canonize the fruits of their creative struggle. Maybe displays of pain attract our morbid voyeurism. (His songs aren’t as good since he's back on his meds. She’s better when she’s having breakdowns onstage.) The calculated, balanced, clear-thinking artists, what can they teach us about pain, loss, rapture?
Britney Spears shaves her head and becomes shorthand for “pop idol loses shit in public.” Bieber. Lohan. There are others.
Takes one to know one. “You’re fuckin’ crazy,” howls Axl Rose. The red-headed Hoosier is both wild-eyed dervish and manic nocturnal perfectionist, a hard rock Howard Hughes. Alice Cooper is not a crazy person, but he plays one on tour. He’s dynamite with a guillotine. January 20th, 1982. Ozzy Osbourne bites the head off a bat he mistakes for a rubber toy. The old Alice doesn’t live here anymore; he plays sober golf, while Ozzy putters about, shell-shocked.
Girls go crazy watching the Beatles onstage. Archival film footage struggles to contain all the honest, unrehearsed emotion. Their ecstatic faces express pure existential truths: only death is certain and this music is the only thing that matters or will ever matter.
Dick Clark asks his clean-cut TV audience for first impressions of the “Strawberry Fields Forever” promotional film. (The one with reversed footage making Paul jump into the tree.) The American teenagers think the Beatles look like grandparents. They don’t dig the band’s mustaches either.
Even during the band’s most experimental phase, McCartney appears to be of sound mind. It’s Lennon with the lunatic inside his head, the belligerent muse that giveth and taketh in equal measures.
Most days, the Rolling Stones seem sane and sober as bankers. OG bad boy reputation notwithstanding, Keith Richards’ competitive approach to substance abuse is more about self-determination than self-destruction.
Exene Cervenka’s voice is all mystery and rasp — the perfect counterpoint to John Doe’s every-man yodel. On a Venice Beach wall, the X vocalist holds court alongside Angeleno poets like Jim Morrison and Philomene Long. Lately, Cervenka performs as a solo conspiracy theorist.
In his Minneapolis lair, Prince Rogers Nelson conducts experiments with genre and gender. In the sand, Brian Wilson re-imagines pop as fragments of color and feels. In various apartments, David Bowie plays the original paranoid android, cornered by cocaine and a restless intellect. Mad men.
Sinead O’Connor sings Prince’s song better than him and can cry on camera. O’Connor’s voice is transcendent, her face seraphic but pained: a real life Joan of Arc. “We have confidence in the victory of good over evil,” she sings a cappella on Saturday Night Live right before tearing the pope’s picture in half. “Fight the real enemy.” Her gaze is constant. Later we discover the singer is bipolar. Then O’Connor goes missing in Chicago. Police find her. For 120 Minutes we feel guilty about not staying in touch.
The slight girl in white stares us down from the podium. Barely blinking, Fiona Apple invokes Maya Angelou: “We, as human beings, at our best, can only create opportunities. And I’m gonna use this opportunity the way I wanna use it.” She is scattered, beautiful, unselfconscious. “Go with yourself…go with yourself.” Next she is a teenager talking back to an unsympathetic parent: “This world is bullshit,” she says. “And it’s just stupid that I’m in this world.” Inside we cheer and wish we could be so raw. Around 2010, Apple spends entire days walking up and down a hill until her knees bow out. She calls it a rite of passage. Again, we understand.
There is a madman across the water. Julian Cope knows how to package his crazy. He is our lucid Barrett. On the cover of Fried, he peeks from beneath a tortoise shell. Now, Cope writes stream-of-unconsciousness prose like a druid Hunter S. Thompson. He is that rare bird who can harness eccentricity into a productive and prolific career.
Welles. Coppola. Lucas. Hollywood trumpets its love for the crazy auteur, until the golden child turns that crazy inward: second guessing and self-referencing and losing perspective. Coppola drives himself nuts making Apocalypse Now, but no more than any creative betting on their own vision.
It’s a ludicrous aspiration: making a life out of art. You have to be a little crazy. So let us praise our cracked and cranky, our oracles and outlaws, our heroes and villains, for showing us how to do the collapse with style.
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