A dream, Jim Morrison and Prometheus: The story of Patti Smith’s ‘Break It Up’
During Patti Smith’s beginnings as a young poet, she regarded her heroes as gods.
Part of what makes Smith’s writing so transmissible is her devotion. Musicians like Bob Dylan and poets across the Beat Generation are what drew her to New York City in the first place, with the grime a small price to pay to be able to walk the same streets as them, absorbing a semblance of their brilliance in hopes that she, too, could communicate as they did.
Moreover, Smith understood that the greatest art is not a sheer copy of someone else, but a product informed by others, so her emphasis was on communal understanding to make her art into a shared language that could speak to all and sundry.
In her mind, literature, religion and music all melded into one higher form of communication, and there was perhaps no other figure who represented the merger of all three than Jim Morrison. The controversial frontman of The Doors was on an entirely new plane of consciousness, dissecting institutions of thought in a way that other songwriters had not. His work struck a chord in Smith, who, before and after his death, revered him as one of rock’s greatest poets, so naturally, he served as an inspiration for her as a writer and in her material, most poignantly heard in her song ‘Break It Up’.
Taken from her debut album Horses, ‘Break It Up’ is a brilliant, classic rock ‘n’ roll song, both meditative and energised, taking Morrison’s tragedy and reimagining it through the lens of the Greek mythological tale of Prometheus. As the story goes, Prometheus was a god known for championing intelligence and the progression of mankind; some variations of the myth credit Prometheus as the creator of humanity from clay. He is punished for the sharing of wealth, after he took fire from the Olympian gods and gave it to humanity in its earliest form, manifesting in technology, knowledge and civilisation, at large. In turn, Zeus’ punishment saw him tied to a rock for his liver to be repeatedly consumed by an eagle, Zeus’ emblem, for all eternity.
The harrowing myth stuck in Smith’s mind, as she recalled in her memoir Just Kids, describing encoding Horses with “a salute to those who paved the way before us”, revealing, “Tom Verlaine and I wrote of a dream in which Jim Morrison, bound like Prometheus, suddenly broke free.”
Verlaine and Smith mirrored a reverence for their favourite poets that bound them for life, and it is fitting that Morrison is remembered through their joint visions of him.
In Smith’s later lyric collection Complete, she described her dream in vivid detail: “I came in on a clearing. There were natives in a circle, bending and gesturing. I saw a man stretched across a marble slab. Jim Morrison. He was alive with wings that merged with the marble. Like Prometheus, he struggled, but freedom was beyond him. I stood over him, chanting, break it up, break it up, break it up… The stone dissolved, and he moved away. I brushed the feathers from my hair, adjusted my pillow, and returned to sleep.”
‘Break It Up’ can be heard as an attempt at communicating with the dead, perhaps to revive Morrison’s spirit once more. She repeatedly refers to him as “the boy”, an endearment she would also use later on 1996’s ‘About a Boy’, written in memory of Kurt Cobain.
“I saw the boy crawl out of his skin / My heart turned over and I crawled in”, she sings, literally grasping for a closeness to Morrison that she could only achieve through consuming his work. As the pianos double, cymbals clash, and guitar wails, the song builds into each chorus’ crescendo, the repeated “Break it up!” echoed with the likes of “I can’t comprehend”, “Oh, I want to feel you” and “Oh please, take me with you”.
There is a growing desperation heard in Smith’s cries, as she mourns Morrison’s fleeting nature. She fashions himself as him, singing, “I ripped my skin open / and then, I broke through”, in reference to The Doors’ ‘Break On Through (To the Other Side)’. She continually calls out, “I can feel it breaking”, whether “it” be her consciousness, her spirit, her humanity, is up to interpretation as she is singing through the lens of a dream, after all.
Smith’s lament of the late Morrison symbolises her work’s true purpose: to commune with those who inspired her most and, in turn, inspire others to do the same. ‘Break It Up’ is a rapturous display of her earliest efforts to do so, and today stands as one of her finest songs, a gorgeous dedication to heroes, past and present.
