Good Artists Gone Bad (Rachel Zegler, Syd Barrett & Charles Manson)

Good Artists Gone Bad! A Marxcissist, a Maniac, and a Murderer!

I know what my audience wants more of, even though nobody asked for it: more Rachel Zegler! But that’s not all! How about some Syd Barrett, after acid had eaten a hole through his head and his mind had fallen out of it? And while we’re at it, let’s add Charles Manson and his happy, ritual-sacrifice-performing family to the mix! Yes, ladies and gentlemen, we will be discussing good artists gone bad: a Marxcissist, a maniac, and a murderer.

In the last podcast episode,¹ I discussed the question of what makes us Human (in the context of what sets us apart from “artificial intelligence”), and I argued that one essentially human attribute is Man’s capacity for creating great art that captures, however imperfectly, some aspect of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. My man G.K. Chesterton made a similar argument in The Everlasting Man (and of course he did it much better, though in the context of comparing Man to the beasts, rather than to A.I.). The upshot of all this is that I am convinced that a necessary (but not sufficient) condition for a person to become a true artist is that he or she has that divine spark that sets souled humans apart from Hylics/NPCs.

Then, I did a post humanizing Rachel Zegler ² (the face of insufferable Disney girlbossery), in which I honed in on her talent as an artist. Because whatever else you may think about her, Rachel Zegler, has the soul of a true artist. Don’t believe me? Think I’m ridiculously exaggerating? Then check out her song Twisted (video embedded below — the song starts around the 2:00 mark), and understand that she composed this song, arranged it, sang all the vocals, played all the instruments, and then recorded and “produced” it on amateur equipment at home, at the age of seventeen. This was before Hollywood got ahold of her. Just as Darth Vader became “more machine than man,” so too has Rachel Zegler become more actress than musician … but she still has the heart of a musician, just like Vader retained the heart of a man. Maybe one day she will have a daughter who confronts her the way Luke Skywalker confronted Vader at the end of Return of the Jedi, only instead of a light saber, her daughter will be wielding a guitar, and instead of the Death Star, her daughter will be rescuing her from the bowels of Hollywood (when it comes to planet-destroying capabilities, the Death Star could never have been a match for America’s movie industry).

I bring up Zegler’s age because, what do you think, say, Roger Waters’ compositions were sounding like at age seventeen? Keep in mind that he was almost 30 when he finally hit his stride with Dark Side of the Moon, and the first several songs he wrote for Pink Floyd after Syd Barrett went crazy (more on Syd Barrett in a minute) were comparatively amateurish. In my opinion, Waters’ early songwriting efforts failed to rise to the level of Zegler’s song Twisted. All I’m saying is, Rachel Zegler has a real gift. She has shown that she has the potential to tap into something transcendent and bring it down to earth and make its melancholic beauty accessible to others in the form of a catchy three-minute song. And then she showed that she also has the potential to chant idiotic clownworld political slogans like a braindead NPC.

If the embedded video doesn’t play (I’ve had YouTube say there’s something wrong with my IP address, probably because of my VPN), you can access it on YouTube «HERE».

And then there’s Charles Manson. Charles Manson’s Look at Your Game, Girl is legitimately a good song. (Video embedded below.) It’s got a similar kind of vibe: simple acoustic accompaniment and haunting, plaintive vocals (zero processing or auto-tune). This song is easily better than 95% (if not more) of the “music” that’s currently popular; it’s not mass-produced with computerized inputs following a mechanical formula, but is created by a real human playing a real instrument and singing naturally and doing so in an interesting and innovative way. Regardless of how evil the artist who created it was, this song is genuine art.

For comparison, here’s Guns ‘N Roses version (starts around 2:18, because it was the “secret” or “hidden” track on Spaghetti Incident?):

And last but not least, here’s Syd Barrett singing and strumming an acoustic guitar on the outro of Pink Floyd’s Jugband Blues. “What exactly is a dream? And what exactly is a joke?” I wonder if he ever found an answer? Or if he just blotted out his capacity to formulate the question, so that it no longer bothered him anymore? His compositions, guitar work, and singing on Pink Floyd’s first album, Piper at the Gates of Dawn, really make the album memorable, but on Pink Floyd’s second album, Saucerful of Secrets, Barrett’s parting song, Jugband Blues, is like a song from another planet, and its closing stanza is like the last letter home from an astronaut who has no intention of ever coming back to earth again. “Haunting” doesn’t even begin to describe it. Maybe those legends are true about Lucifer having been heaven’s leader of worship music before he fell, and the same with stories about the Sirens enchanting sailors with their song and beguiling them towards calamity. Somehow the song’s ending captures both terrible beauty and terrible spiritual danger.

So we have three musicians — Rachel Zegler the Marxcissist, Charles Manson the Murderer, and Syd Barrett the Maniac — who serve as examples of good artists gone bad. If good art necessarily captures some aspect of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful, then these three artists connected in some very real and meaningful way with the Good, the True, and the Beautiful … and then they went to hell (some more literally than others). This strikes me as a problem, pointing towards a paradox of some sort that I am having trouble articulating, although I feel it deeply in my gut.³ Because I could have picked any number of other artists. Layne Staley. Jimi Hendrix. Kurt Cobain. Different names and faces and styles of art, but a similar pattern of getting eaten alive and killed by their Muse.

Anyway, on that heartwarming note, I invite you to share your thoughts on the matter. It’s one thing when a one-dimensional NPC with a chat-bot personality embraces a death cult like Marxcissism, or seeks to create a death cult like the Manson family, or just takes Timothy Leary’s mantra of “tune in, turn on, drop out” to the furthest possible extreme and fries their brain like the eggs in an 80s anti-drug commercial, but it seems far more tragic and evil when someone with a human soul and a spark of divinity does it. There’s something about the stories of Rachel Zegler, Syd Barrett, and Charles Manson that really puts the fear of God in me.

[If you are listening to this on a podcast app or streaming platform, check out the Substack post for this episode to view embedded media and share your comments …]

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3. Here’s a parable I wrote to try to deal with this paradox of great art involving both the Good, the True, and the Beautiful, on the one hand, and grave spiritual danger, on the other. On one level this answer works, but not fully. I don’t feel fully satisfied by it.