Amanda LePore – The WOW Report

October 20, 1854– Arthur Rimbaud

Rimbaud is familiar to me only because I had a single semester of 19th Century French Poetry, a class I took only because I had a crush on the professor. He was exactly as you would picture a teacher who specialized in European poetry: middle-aged with wild grey curly hair and soulful brown eyes. He was a mere slip of a thing that always came off as pessimistically passionate and mindfully melancholic. He seemed the kind of man who would cry after he had an orgasm. I wanted him badly. This is what I have retained from that class 45 years later:

As a boy, Rimbaud was a restless but especially bright student in his working-class town in the Champagne region of France. He often ran away from home. At 17-years-old he took off for Paris where he found work as a gun smuggler. He was raped by drunken soldiers, an incident Rimbaud recounts in his poem Le Cœur Supplicié.

Still in his teens, he had become an anarchist and was drinking, drugging and amusing himself by shocking the local bourgeoisie with his bohemian clothing and crazy long hair. He began to write about attaining a kind of poetical transcendence through a “long, immense and rational derangement of all the senses”.

After Rimbaud had sent him a letter with examples of his poems, he was invited to live in the Paris home of the great poet Paul Verlaine. Verlaine, who was married, promptly fell in love with the sullen, blue-eyed, auburn-haired youth. They became lovers. They lived a wild, vagabond life driven by absinthe and hashish. The couple scandalized the not easily shocked Parisian intellectual crowd with their outrageous behavior. Rimbaud, the very definition of “enfant terrible” still was able to compose strikingly visionary verse despite the lifestyle he shared with Verlaine.

Rimbaud and Verlaine took their tempestuous love affair to London in 1872. Verlaine left behind his wife and his infant son. The next year Rimbaud announced that he wanted to return to Paris without Verlaine. In a drunken rage, Verlaine shot at him. The wounds were not serious and Rimbaud refused to press charges against his lover.

After the shooting incident, Verlaine took young Rimbaud to Brussels where Verlaine had a nervous breakdown. Rimbaud feared for his life and he asked a police officer to arrest Verlaine. After the arrest Verlaine was subjected to a humiliating investigation into his private life, including his intimate correspondence with his lover and accusations from Verlaine’s wife about the nature of their relationship and her abuse at his hands.

Verlaine and Rimbaud, Brussels, 1873, public domain

Rimbaud withdrew the complaint, but the magistrate sentenced Verlaine to two years in prison. Rimbaud returned home to Champagne and completed his great work Une Saison En Enfer (A Season In Hell), one of the pioneering examples of Modern Symbolist Poetry, whatever that is; I wasn’t really paying attention. In 1874, the 20-year-old Rimbaud returned to London, this time in the company of gay poet Germain Nouveau, where he wrote the landmark free verse poem Les Illuminations.

Rimbaud and Verlaine met for the last time in March 1875, in Stuttgart, after Verlaine’s release from prison and his conversion to Catholicism. By then Rimbaud had given up writing, deciding on a proper working life, seemingly finished with his wild ways, hoping to become wealthy and independent. He saved up money and then explored Europe, mostly on foot. In the summer of 1876 he enlisted as a soldier in the Dutch Army in order to gain free passage to Java (now Indonesia) where he promptly deserted.

He made his way to Cyprus and settled there in 1880. He finally made that fortune as a gun-runner in Northern Africa, smart from his experience as a youth. In Africa, Rimbaud fell ill and returned to France in 1891 where his right leg was amputated, a particularly cruel fate for one of the world’s great walkers. Rimbaud died in Marseilles shortly after his birthday in 1891, taken by cancer. He was just 37-years -old when he left this world.

In that 19th Century French Poetry class four decades ago, I found Rimbaud more interesting as a person than interesting as a poet. I was fascinated by his life as a gay figure and by his love affair with Verlaine. I was especially intrigued with the notion of a wild young guy controlling an older married man as I listened to my handsome silver fox of a professor speak of their relationship.

Rimbaud’s influence in modern literature, music and art can be found in the works of Picasso, Dylan Thomas, Henri Cartier-Bresson, AllenGinsberg, Jack Kerouac, Vladimir Nabokov, Bob Dylan, Patti Smith, Henry Miller, Van Morrison, and Jim Morrison.

His life story has been made in to several films including Nelo Risi‘s Una Stagione All’inferno (1970) with Terence Stamp as Rimbaud and Jean Claude Brialy as Verlaine, and Agnieszka Holland’s Total Eclipse (1995), based on a play by Christopher Hampton who wrote the screenplay, starring Leonardo DiCaprio as Rimbaud and David Thewlis as Verlaine. He is also the subject of an opera Rimbaud Ou Le Fils DuSoleil (1978) by Lorenzo Ferrero. In 1939, gay composer BenjaminBritten set selections of Rimbaud’s Les Illuminations to music for tenor soloist and string orchestra.

Young DiCaprio as Rimbaud in Total Eclipse, via Youtube

My own favorite is Sahara Blue (1992) an ambient concept album based on his life and poems produced by Hector Zazou, with contributions by gay artists Dead Can Dance, John Cale and Ryuichi Sakamoto. Also check out the terrific biography Rimbaud: The Double Life Of A Rebel (2008) by Edmund White.

A Dream For Winter

In the winter, we will leave in a small pink railway carriage

With blue cushions

We will be comfortable

A nest of mad kisses lies

In each soft corner

You will close your eyes, in order not to see, through the glass,

The evening shadows making faces

Those snarling monstrosities, a populace

Of black demons and black wolves

Then you will feel your cheek scratched

A little kiss, like a mad spider

Will run around your neck

And you will say to me: “Get it!” as you bend your neck

And we will take a long time to find that creature

Which travels a great deal

Maverick Records, via YouTube

Madonna spent the 1980s blowing up boundaries, but her most provocative album Erotica was released on this day 25 years ago.

Erotica debuted at Number Two on the Billboard charts. It was her fifth album, the first on her own Maverick label, and the first since her debut to not to enter the charts at Number One. Garth Brooks’s The Chase out sold her by just 4,000 copies. You think she might have purchased 4001 copies at Tower Records just to be on top. Still, it sold a respectable two million copies in its first year. It’s one of my favorites.

Madonna presents the songs on Erotica with a self-satisfied candor that is not found on her previous albums. She expresses a bold interruption of female sexuality. She shares sharp X-rated bedroom talk, unafraid of taboo topics.

The first track, Erotica, celebrates the agony and ecstasy of sex with muscular hip-hop grooves and glittery beats, touching on S&M.

Where Life Begins is a sensual slow jam filled with frank double entendres. With Thief Of Hearts, she unloads a fierce rap about a woman who has taken her man.

Erotica’s more modern sound comes courtesy of producers André Betts and Shep Pettibone. Pettibone was Madonna’s collaborator on the smash hit Vogue. Together they really understood the early 1990s Dance Pop / Hip-Hop DJ culture.

I especially dig the silvery disco sound of Deeper And Deeper and her cover of the Fever, a worthy successor to the Peggy Lee version.

Madonna was unafraid to look at the darker sides of sex with songs on Erotica. The mournful ballad In This Life is an homage to the friends she lost to HIV/AIDS.

I always found Erotica to be filled with honest emotional depth, despite its chilly sound. Erotica’s overt sexuality caused quite the controversy at the time, even for Madonna. The title track’s video was banned from NBC’s Friday Night Videos, and MTV only aired it three times before removing from rotation. Yet, Erotica brought Madonna four Top 40 Pop hits and three Number One Dance chart hits.

Few female musicians, before or since Erotica, have been so forthright about their fantasies. Madonna sang songs that showed shame and sexuality are mutually exclusive.

Erotica embraced and espoused sexual pleasure, and Madonna was the Pop Music minister of the sexual revolution. This back before she wrote children’s books. It also has some of her best and most accomplished songs. Its meticulous production is calculated and domineering, but also funny and, well, arousing. The album has her best lyrics up to this point. She sounds mature.

By October 1992, Madonna was an icon, untouchable, literally and figuratively. Erotica was the first time Madonna’ songs music took on a decidedly threatening tone. It has more to say about the Sex=Death mindset of the era than any other album its time. It may not be Madonna at her musical apex, but Erotica was important and relevant. No other pop star at the time dared to talk about sex, love, and death with such frankness and fearlessness.

Erotica had the biggest backlash of any other album of that time. Madonna’s music was condemned and banned by The Vatican and so was she. It was the first album of her career to have Tipper Gore’s “Parental Advisory” label. Erotica was also banned in several countries, including China, Indonesia, Lebanon, and Singapore.

Erotica received very mixed reviews. It was released just a day before Madonna’s coffee-table book Sex (more on that tomorrow), which made matters worse: Madonna:

“The fact that my Erotica album was overlooked because of the whole thing with the Sex book. It just got lost in all that. I think there’s brilliant songs on it and people didn’t give it a chance. That disappointed me, but I’m not disappointed in the record itself… Every review of the movie or the album was really a review of the book. It was transparent: they weren’t even talking about the songs or the music. OK, I thought, I get what’s happening here. It was a shame, but I understand it.”

Erotica was ahead of its time. In the early 1990s, The Seattle Grunge sound was the thing. Madonna is not the sort of artist to release an album slap-dash. She had just started Maverick records, she had put together Sex, the film Dick Tracy had been released with Madonna sing Sondheim, and she was dating Warren Beatty. Erotica was the first album that was all her concept. She turned the music biz inside out, and they had to deal with the shock of it. Madonna paved the way for the next generation of female pop artists, Music with a woman’s point of view. I like to think that she opened things up creatively for Christina Aguilera and Britney Spears. Think of Janet Jackson’s album The Velvet Rope in 1997. Beyoncé’s self-titled 2013 album was described as “The most X-rated pop album since Madonna’s Erotica“.