Janis Joplin Found Dead at 27

For no reason that I could easily discern, Brain conjured up “Piece of my Heart” by Janis Joplin and whatever terrible band it was that backed her, and I put it on and listened to it a couple of times on my good sound system in the den, and it is such a great song despite the band being really awful, and the standard studio recording also being really awful, yet Janis’ screeching on that track singular and somehow correct. Is it screeching? If not, what is it? I never know what to think about Joplin’s voice. Definitely, it is singular, and probably very difficult to imitate. When I try to sing along with pretty much anything Janis recorded, I can’t. If I tried, I’d peel my throat; I hit a physical limitation right away, yet she does it over and over again. Truth be told, I think it is something more than screeching, like on the track “Try (a little bit harder)” when she launches into the Try . . . . . it really is something extra-human, like dogs probably hear it very differently as it seems to be skirting the edge of human perception. Janis’ voice isn’t pretty, and it isn’t all that musical, yet it is inimitable and I like it. It pleases me despite myself.

I read her wikipedia entry, and it was pretty good for wikipedia, which I have come to despise, but nevertheless I learned that Janis was a heroine junkie who claims to have fucked over a thousand people, and I totally get that. She’s exactly that type, a sort of low self-esteem mental-issues type of woman who makes it easy. She burned herself right out. I think it is well and good for her to have died at 27, and that was especially obvious to me when I clicked on R. Crumb’s entry to find out that he’s still alive. Something about peaking and then having to continue strikes me as untoward, like Crumb should have probably died thirty years ago. No one wanted to see Janis Joplin at 77. That would be all wrong.

All of us are just a good bit of water, some sinew and some mucous, and it isn’t impressive when you break it down, but what is sort of impressive is using this matter as a means to project something out into the world. This is what I want to say about Janis. She never married, and she had no children, and it seems to me that the vast majority of women have the birthing impulse wired into them, but a small number of them do not. Those are freaks like Janis; freaks in the best sense of that term, that she was not like all the others, that her voice was freakishly unique, that she projected herself out instead of in, and I can speak from experience that all the drugs and sex are an extension of that for one who has not developed the mental habits of projecting himself or herself outward, that the drugs and the sex force it. She wanted to live outside herself, or as she put it in a Cavett interview I watched on YouTube, she wanted to be in the lowest levels of the music, not flittering around at the periphery like she believed most women did. Anything that turned inward and became circumspect and which pointed her away from blaring her voice to the world she wanted to mute and blunt. That’s my take, anyway. Most women are perfectly content to have babies and the extent to which they can focus on externals is strictly on the subject of other people and gossipping about them. Rare women indeed can sustain a focus on something rather than some person, it seems.

Janis Joplin is that rare woman I admire. I’m glad she is recorded in this universe.