Counting Crows, Toxic Masculinity, and the Unity of Being
What Adam Duritz can teach us about the journey to find ourselves and escape the “self”
“Sha-la-la-la-la-la mmm uh-huh,” the opening lines to the 1993 smash-hit “Mr. Jones,'' or the meditative chants of a mystic in communion with the universe? Why not both?
There’s something incredibly compelling about frontman for Counting Crows, Adam Duritz. One might chalk his magnetism up to his musical talents, or the gall of his dreadlocks. Maybe it’s the fact that his love life in the 90’s and 00’s rivals Pete Davidson’s in the present day. But the real answer is this: he lays his vulnerabilities bare and celebrates them.
In the music video for “Mr. Jones,” Adam Duritz is bouncing, jerking, and flailing to the music, in the closest approximation to dancing he can muster. It’s not “good” dancing, but it’s hypnotic—a pure expression of freedom, unbound by worldly judgment. All the while he’s crooning sensitive lines like, “I wish I was beautiful,” “Believe in me/‘Cause I don’t believe in anything,” and “When everybody loves me/ I will never be lonely.”
You might counter that vulnerability describes a lot of artists, what makes Duritz special? What is so relatable about Duritz is that he’s both vulnerable and goofy without one quality smothering the other. Often, people (typically men) use humor and silliness to cover up vulnerability, but Duritz pours heartache into the lines, “I wanna be a lion./ Yeah, everybody wants to pass as cats.” Every now and then, I laugh to myself about how he delivers those lines. But also, what an honest reflection of how many of us are tormented by not living up to who we want to be.
Juxtapose this with the message of misogynist influencer and alleged rapist and human trafficker Andrew Tate, who says these feelings should be controlled, and subsumed. To Tate, and others who think like him, acknowledging feelings of depression, anxiety, and self-doubt as anything other than obstacles to overcome prevents personal growth and creates “weak men.” Following Tate’s prescription for self-imposed repression, he claims, allows young vulnerable men to “escape the Matrix” and get all the women, money, and power that fit a shallow definition of success. This is, of course, a false promise (Tate’s Hustler’s University for example is an obvious scam).
But it’s not crazy that conforming to patriarchal ideas of masculinity gains men success and status in our society, though it comes at the cost of burying parts of ourselves. This may partially explain why there are such violent and intolerant responses to transgender women; we cisgender men are envious to some degree. That they and “feminine” gay men are accepted may mean that it’s actually OK for cisgender men not to conform to the strictures of “traditional” masculinity, and all that self-imposed repression was for nothing; we need not conform to gender norms to be loved, accepted, and admired.
There is a connection between what Duritz is touching on in his music and what Tate is exploiting through his grifts—deep feelings of loneliness. Duritz has been courageously open about his dissociative mental illness that makes it difficult for him to connect with people, but feelings of loneliness are incredibly common, particularly for men.
It is easy in moments of despair and loneliness to villainize others. I have found that in my more vulnerable moments, I sometimes am sucked in by aggrievement, that I have been particularly unjustly wronged by people and circumstances. Sometimes, this is true, but it’s not a good place to dwell.
What helps me in these moments is to take walks and listen to clips about religious ideas. One central theme I’m drawn to is the notion that everything, and everyone, is interconnected. Feelings of separateness from other people or the universe are illusions: Muslim sheikh Ibn ‘Arabi calls this ‘wahdat al wujud’ or the ‘unity of being;’ Christian mystic Meister Eckhart described ‘Grunt,’ or the absence of self within oneself, which is connected to God, and ‘Advaita Vedanta,’ a Hindu school of thought, speaks of the non-duality of existence. There are meaningful differences between all of these discourses, but they all speak to the illusion of the self. And if there is no self to identify with, then personal grievances are inconsequential. Moreover, if there’s no real difference between you and I, then your absolute well-being and mine are one and the same.
You may be thinking at this point that this is all too “woo woo” for you, and you want what I’m smoking. But I’d like to point out that a similar perspective can be arrived at through pure secularism. Take Spinoza’s God, that we are all merely expressions of same stuff of the universe, or Carl Sagan’s beautiful Pale Blue Dot speech, which zooms us out to perceive humanity as but specks sharing a dot suspended in a sunbeam, and that all our conflicts and fears are insignificant on a larger scale.
In Mr. Jones, Duritz sings, “When everybody loves you./ Oh son, that's just about as funky as you can be.” Well, if you believe that we are all expressions of the same unified existence, all you need to do for everyone to love you, dear reader, is love yourself.
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