madness... Madness... MADNESS!

I watch too many movies. Monday's culprit was The Devil and Daniel Johnston, a documentary about a troubled but legendary folk singer. Watching, I could not help but think of the other "crazy but brilliant musician" doc I have seen in the past six months, Wesley Willis: The Daddy of Rock and Roll. Some of the similarities between the two are uncanny:

Both unemployed (and essentially unemployable)
Both with rabid cult followings
Both producing music of questionable value
Both gifted visual artists
Both deeply religious
Both with mental illnesses
Both claiming to battle against demons (in the real, not metaphorical sense)
Both wrote songs about Casper, the Friendly Ghost

My questions for the day: what draws us to these men and others like them? What about walking the line between genius and insanity appeals to us? How much of their popularity stems from their instability?

Perhaps a quick rundown of the two is in order. Wesley Willis (sadly now deceased) was a homeless man who would roam the streets of Chicago playing his songs on a Casio Keyboard. The basic template for his songs was to take one of the premade tracks on the keyboard and loop it, singing in his gravelly voice overtop with cut and paste lyrics (a sampling of song titles: "I whipped Superman's ass", "I whooped Mighty Thor's ass", "I whupped Batman's ass", "Birdman kicked my ass"). Really any description fails to do him justice, so here's a chance to listen to the man himself: I would especially recommend "Rock and Roll McDonald's" (profanity free!) and "Cut the Mullet".

Daniel Johnston, meanwhile, is a folkish singer who at least has less of a schtick than Wesley Willis. All of his songs are different from one another, and he has legitimate talent as a piano player. The only problem? On most of his songs he chooses to play guitar, an instrument with which he is far less skilled. Additionally, his voice is the most horrendous sound known to man, a plaintively squeaky affair. Also, though he does not just cut and paste his lyrics like Willis, his "poetry" is hardly better; awkwardly metered, it never quite seems to fit into his music.

Now for the amazing part: both of these men in their prime gained massive cult followings. Johnston is an icon in the Austin music scene and gained national exposure in the early '90's when Kurt Cobain started incessantly wearing a Johnston t-shirt for his public appearances. Willis never had that measure of fame, but was pretty legendary in underground music circles, often touring the nation.

One might be immediately tempted to think that the adoration of these two figures was yet another ironic move by today's jaded society. Yet this cannot be completely the case. I will admit that most people I know who listen to Wesley Willis do so for the sheer ridiculousness of it, but there were many people in the documentary who took his work seriously (or did a very good job pretending to do so). With Johnston the admiration is even more clear cut: critics and friends describe his first work as better than early Dylan or Robert Johnson.

I think that there are several possible explanations for this seemingly misguided adoration. One would be the pursuit of novelty. The phrase that people keep using about Johnston's songs is that they are "unlike anything you have heard". This I cannot deny. Certainly Willis' music has no known ancestry, as my previous inability to adequately describe it would suggest. But does this legitimate interest in them? There are plenty of novel things in the world which I have no interest in experiencing. The problem with the cult of the genius is that it demands novelty, such that, to paraphrase Dr. Gardner, "You start out with Mozart and 200 years later you wind up with a bullwhip sticking out of your ass."

Is that it, though? Do people obsess over Johnston and Willis merely for sake of observing the strange and exotic? If this were so, I do not think they would hold the staying power they do over people. The answer, rather, lies in the very fact that both the artists battle against mental illness. Do not misunderstand; it isn't as if people take pity on them and listen to their music like you would congratulate a second grader for drawing disproportionate stick figures. What I mean is that both men have veered toward insanity but in doing so have created works of searing, raw power.

Again, a clarification: I do not find much of artistic value in the music of either Johnston or Willis, nor do I listen to them with great regularity (though I do enjoy the occasional Willis song). What I find appealing about their work is its primal intensity, its desperation. When Johnston sings about lost love, you can feel his heart being ripped from his chest. When Willis sings "My Mother Smokes Crack Rocks", it is easy to imagine Wesley the child cowering in the corner as his mother winds her way into oblivion. And when either sings about faith, it is something to behold. Johnston wailing about going to the funeral home is enough to put the fear of God in anyone, and one of my favorite Willis moments comes in his surprisingly touching "Jesus Christ", where the childlike rhymes hide a tender affection for Christ.

In a sense, I think, this sort of power comes only from direct experience with "battling demons". Whatever your views on the actual existence of demonic beings, the two men clearly are engaged in a war within themselves. They are no cut and paste saints. One of the harrowing parts of the Johnston documentary is the account by Johnston's father of the time when Daniel forced his father to cut the engines on their small plane and took over the controls, doing loop-the-loops before relinquishing the controls in time for his father to bail them out. Clearly Johnston is a disturbed man, dangerous when he is off medication. But this same man can speak earnestly of faith and it does not seem a contradiction. Likewise, Willis is a man who penned both the heartfelt "Jesus Christ" and the shockingly profane series of songs about sucking certain appendages of various large cats. Again, you get the sense that this is not mere hypocrisy or posturing on Willis' part, but rather an expression of the duality inside him.

The artist as mad genius is a common enough idea, one that nevertheless holds a unique appeal. Perhaps it is a matter of transcendence; we think that the artist, already reaching new heights of ecstasy through his work, will be propelled even higher by psychosis (or perhaps mind-altering drugs). We in the modern world long for art to save us, for the artist to step in as the one mediator between the gods and man. Johnston and Willis are refreshing, then, in the ways in which they shatter the myth of the insane artist. Madness for them is no desired muse; it is a destructive force in their lives. Yet it does lend their work a certain gravity. Rather than ascension, it gives their music the quality of descending down into the earth -- not in the mundane but the grave sense. Such earthy quality might scare you, but do not hold it against them; after all, you must die to be born again.