What a horrible-beautiful song...

What a horrible-beautiful song: the bottom of despair and alienation: "no country, no god, no family, no friends, no money, no class, no love, no nothing", just yourself... Do you believe this? I don't. And yet that's how she really felt. The depths of deadening "black" rage (more psychological than racial, although at those times the racial part was very, very real), pain (personal and social, political), depression, rejection, cry of protest and demand for fairness and understanding and a beautiful soul, streaming out of her body ("that's all she got") in a music "screaming to high heaven", which she denied to herself. Why did she feel so rejected and misunderstood? The so called "bipolar disorder"? Do not make me laugh, this does not explain anything and, as an attempt at explanation, serves only to put a distance between her pain and our "healthy self-protective all-togetherness". The sign of the times? Yes, those were the times, but it does not explain much either. A soul of an artist is always a mystery, more so than a soul of "nonartist" (the distinction is very arbitrary), it cannot and should not be solved, analysed and rationalised; it is beyond our capacity for understanding; it should be viewed "as is", as such, as a given, as a mystery within a mystery, as a part of the art incorporated in his-her being; as a dancer's dance.
Mike Nova