More Poemetry

I suppose "poemetry" is something like "telemetry" or "telepathy."

Case in point: Jane's Addiction's "Ritual de lo Habitual". Everyone knows it, everyone's heard it, most people were sick of it by the time they were 18. Recently, however, I decided to revisit it, and have been listening obsessively ever since. This is a fine album. Had I not begun to research poetry, though, I would never have noticed how fine.

Three Days: The most overplayed song in high school from this album. It was everyone's favorite song for, I suppose, mention of candles and incense, and possibly for it's extreme length, which meant infinitely less "getting up to mess with the stereo" for stoned teenagers.

What I'd never noticed was WHY the song is so long. As I listen to it now, I hear this: Starts out with that droning, almost medatitive intro... ritualistic overtones, then builds and builds into a total dervish almost imperceptibly with a constant, or at least recurring drumbeat and bassline that can only be described as "tribal". The tribal element comes up over and over and over in the album... "Habitually," perhaps? "Classic Girl" has a very similar drumbeat, for example.

I'm not a music critic, and I am probably doing a very poor job of explaning why I'm so impressed with these connections.

It has something to do with this, though: T.S. Eliot said that art exists as a substitute for religion, Joseph Campbell called artists, poets in particular, modern-day shaman. Kearouac was forever on about the divinity of fellow writers and friends who were obsessed with ideas as he was. So there's one question. To what degree is spirituality involved in art or the act of being an artist?

I started listening, essentially, to this entire album, as I would read a poem: Searching for common threads, connections to the title, images and sounds that stood out... clues, clues, clues... and discovered it to basically be an aural book of poetry. I would NEVER have come across this had I not learned how to enjoy poetry. So that's the second question: Is proper understanding of one artform sufficient to appreciate them all? If so, what does that say about the interconnectedness, and apparent irrelevance of preference of one form over another?

This is a little deeper than I'd normally get, but this issue is really preoccupying me. Ignore my clumsy wording; my brain is going a mile a minute.