Sensor Scan: Rocket Man

Elton John and Bernie Taupin's “Rocket Man” is usually read as a very poor imitation of David Bowie's “Space Oddity”. Both songs explore the mundane reality of space travel and both came out just as the wave of public interest in outer space and spaceflight had crested and was beginning to roll back (though “Space Oddity”, at least the original version, was far more timely in 1969, with “Rocket Man”'s 1972 release date already making it feel curiously dated, though do recall “Space Oddity” was re-released that year too) and, to top it off, both songs were even produced by the same guy: Gus Dudgeon. And of course, the critical consensus goes, no-one is going to call Bernie Taupin an especially poetic, captivating or moving songwriter, and David Bowie is, well, David Bowie.

But this misses, I feel, a big part of the nuance “Rocket Man” actually displays. Yes, I'll come right out and say it: This is pretty clunky song, and there are a fair few embarrassing verses and questionable lines. But I'll also freely admit this is one of my favourite pop songs, and while I'm well aware my taste in music can be described as “eclectic” at best and “suspect” at worst, just hear me out for a bit. First of all, that chorus has got to be one of the most achingly beautiful things ever recorded, and that's really all “Rocket Man” needs to become an instant classic, because in pop the hooks and chorus are unabashedly the most important parts of the song. Secondly though, “Rocket Man”'s origins are a bit more interesting than most people tend to give them credit for, as it was inspired both by a Ray Bradbury short story of the same name and Taupin witnessing a meteor or faraway airplane when looking up at the sky at night. Far from echoing David Bowie's indictment of (or at least very mixed feelings about) the Space Age on “Space Oddity”, what “Rocket Man” is actually about is a world where rocketry, at one time the most exciting and fashionable technology around, is so commonplace and mundane that astronauts become like truck drivers.

This is what takes “Rocket Man” from being curiously out of time to being very much of its time: In the mid-to-late 1970s pop culture in the United States had a particular fascination with truck drivers and trucker culture, brought upon by a number of movies from this period glamourizing the lifestyle and the widespread popularity of CB radio. With the 1970s fuel crisis in full swing, many people, but especially truckers, used CB radio to coordinate fuel runs to stations that had the best gas prices and to organise protests against new regulations. Truckers were seen as, in a sense, bringing back lost “American” values of rugged cowboy individualism (never mind the fact this assumption had zero historical precedent and is due more to the popularity of John Wayne movies: The fact is it existed) and, as a result, truck drivers, CB radio, and the distinctive language of slang they used, became very fashionable.

This peaked in 1975 with the release of the movie White Line Fever, about a Vietnam veteran who takes over his father's truck driving business and is forced to contend with corrupt executives who want him to haul illegal cargo, and the novelty song “Convoy”, which uses a bunch of CB radio slang to tell a story about a massive convoy that drives 24/7 across the United States in defiance of new federal truck driving regulations. So, in 1972, “Rocket Man” would have been an actually very savvy release, coming as it did right between Space Fever and the trucker fad and incorporating elements of both (Elton John even appears on the sleeve cover of the single in a spangly cowboy outfit).

But, of course, we're not looking at “Rocket Man” in 1972. We're looking at it in 1978-9, which is an altogether different cultural landscape. Actually, by the way I measure zeitgeists and timescapes, we're for all intents and purposes in the 1980s now, the changeover between the Long 1960s and Long 1980s happening about a year ago. And, while the trucker fad continued into the late 1970s, with other movies like Smokey and the Bandit (1977) and F.I.S.T. (1978), it never again quite matched the popularity it saw in the earlier part of the decade. But even so, “Rocket Man” remains relevant because there's a secondary thread to its invocation and likening of space travellers with truck drivers, and that's most clearly revealed in what remains, in my view, the song's definitive performance in January 1978.

When we talk about “Rocket Man” in the context of Star Trek, really only one thing comes to mind: William Shatner's legendarily insane interpretation of it at the 1977 Saturn Awards. Apart from Captain Kirk, this may actually be the one thing Shatner will forever be most remembered for: It has been mercilessly parodied any number of ways ever since, and is probably singlehandedly responsible for Shatner's reputation as a self-absorbed, self-indulgent, out-of-touch egotistical blowhard. You don't need me to tell you by now that I consider this to be a terribly unfair and undeserved reading, but let's take a moment to unpack this reaction as I concede “Rocket Man” is likely Shatner's most difficult and easily misread work. More so than even The Transformed Man, this is the thing that's going to cause people who are only familiar with Star Trek to think Shatner has absolutely lost his goddamned mind: Captain Kirk sits under a spotlight on stool in a velvet smoking jacket in the middle of a darkened stage, then begins monloguing a pop song from six years ago while other, smaller, CSO Shatners suddenly and inexplicably pop out of hammerspace and start having a conversation with each other.

At this point, if you only know Shatner from Star Trek, the immediate, and understandable, reaction is to stare at the screen blinking for a few moments before exclaiming “what the actual fuck” and then wondering which of the two of you has snapped and become unhinged from reality. But we of course know the kind of performer William Shatner really is, and we can see “Rocket Man” for what it truly is: The next step in Shatner's evolution as a performance artist and his first stab at a mixed media work that incorporates television and televisual logic. The first clue ought to be that Bernie Taupin himself is actually on hand to introduce Shatner's performance personally, claiming he's very proud to do so “due to the interest in the meaning of the song”, as if somehow Shatner was the only person who could actually explicitly spell out everything the song was about.

Which, actually, he does. There are two major things about this performance that make it really unique and effective. The first of these is the fact this was done for the televised broadcast of a live event: Already, this piece is playing with the interaction between different mediums. Given that this is William Shatner, we have spoken word poetry, theatre and pop music by default, but now we throw television into the mix as well. But this performance is meant as much for the actual audience at the Saturn Awards as it is for us: You can hear the live attendees reacting to the piece in progress which, given the fact it relies upon CSO to work, means there had to have been a viewscreen in the actual auditorium for people to watch. So we have Shatner performing the song for the cameras, which is performing his performance for the live audience, and we at home can watch the audience watching the live feed of Shatner's show on the monitor on site. This is incredibly medium aware, actually recursively so, which puts it firmly in the Long 1980s tradition of postmodern cinematography, which we'll talk about a great deal more as the era progresses. It not only ties into Shatner's own predilection for recursive artifice, it builds upon it and takes it to the next level.

(Another thing worth noting about the switch to television is this also provides Shatner with a kind of memorable “music video” to go with his performance: MTV isn't too far away, and the genre had been around for several years already. Combine this with the choice of covering an iconic single, and making sure to maintain the chorus and all its melancholy beauty, means “Rocket Man” is, paradoxically, William Shatner's most accessible and radio-friendly song yet. This awareness will help him relaunch his music career decades later.)

Tying into this is the use of CSO itself. CSO, or chroma key, or colour separation overlay, is what we commonly refer to day as bluescreening or greenscreening: That is, composting two images together by superimposing one over a flat, unnatural colour in the background. Here, Shatner and his editors use to it create the multiple Shatner effect that this video is so famous (and derided) for. But if we watch those scenes keeping in mind that we're watching a performance artist, they start to make a whole lot more sense. The purpose is to indicate different facets of the titular Rocket Man's personality: Watch how the performance opens with a solitary Shatner sitting alone in darkness smoking and reciting the song's opening verse, as if he's contemplating the meaning of it (the smoking actually shows off Shatner's incredibly formidable dedication to performing a role: In real life he's firmly straight edge and doesn't even drink alcohol, but he's playing a Space Trucker, and Space Truckers would probably smoke). We get the first chorus, and it's only *then* that the CSO performers come out.

And when they do, they deliver their lines an entirely different way to the seated Shatner's pensiveness: The performer on the right puts on a show of being a bold gruff, manly renegade hero (AllMusic describes this as Shatner's “Private Dick” performance), but this is clearly a facade, as he grows increasingly lonesome and neurotic as the song progresses. The performer on the left, meanwhile, acts like a fun loving, uninhibited stud who clearly wants to be the life of every party, but who also seems to be using this as a mask to disguise his inner loneliness. This is a perfect showcase for Shatner's recursive artifice, and he takes full advantage of the repetitiveness of Taupin's lyrics: Note the wildly different ways each performer delivers the lines to the chorus (such as in the wordplay joke of delivering “rocket” one time as “rock it”), and yet how each one seems to be using it to convey the Rocket Man's conflicted emotions. Take, for example, the line

I'm not the man they think I am at home

Oh no, no, no

Shatner runs the gamut here, delivering it every way it could possibly be delivered: The Rocket Man thus becomes someone who's both claiming to be a more suave and courageous person than people think he is, but who also worries about living up to other people's expectations of him. Much as he did in The Transformed Man, Shatner is showing us that this contradictory melange of emotions is something common to everyone and part of the human experience.

And this also brings us to the other important factor about this performance: That William Shatner did it for a science fiction awards show in 1978. Because “I'm not the man they think I am at home” is a sentence that describes William Shatner himself as much as it does the Rocket Man. The Transformed Man came out in 1968: At a time when Shatner was trying to carve out a new career for himself in the wake of Star Trek, and before he realised what a big deal that show was going to become and how much he was going to be burned because of it in the 1970s. That record, despite its reputation and packaging that misled people into thinking it was a celebrity cash-in, wasn't about Star Trek or science fiction overtly: It was about how central performance is to our lives. Furthermore though, The Transformed Man wasn't autobiographical, at least any more then we would expect given it was a project that was important to Shatner and was about something he felt united all humans. “Rocket Man”, meanwhile, came out a decade later and at the cusp of Star Trek being relaunched, when it was probably safe to say science fiction fans were the only people paying any sort of attention to William Shatner, and it *does* carry a whiff of self-reflection about it.

Thus, one of the many interpretive layers to “Rocket Man” becomes William Shatner working through the phenomenon that is Captain Kirk and Star Trek and what both have meant to him over the past ten years. William Shatner is not “the man they think [he is] at home”, because William Shatner is not Captain Kirk, and Star Trek fans have an irritating and unhealthy tendency to forget this. The real kicker comes when the Shatner on the right says

And all this science, I don't understand

It's just a job, five days a week

and the way its delivered, you can totally read Shatner's confusion and bewilderment at the way Trekkers obsess over a TV show from the 1960s in it (recall the Star Fleet Technical Manual was out by now too) and his awkward attempts to remind people that Captain Kirk was only someone he played on television for an acting gig years ago. Not that Shatner doesn't respect Trekkers' passion, of course (Star Trek: The New Voyages came out the previous year, and you can see Shatner working through many of these same themes in his introduction to “Mind Sifter”, yet he remains positive, gracious and encouraging throughout), it's just that...well, he doesn't quite understand yet.

But the coup de grace comes when all of this is taken together. The real power of “Rocket Man” comes from its expressly working class heart. It is, after all, a song about a world where astronauts became truck drivers, and it's even possible to use this to excuse some of Taupin's sketchy songwriting: One would not necessarily expect a truck driver to speak like a refined and educated Oxford Dean, for example. And the thing about truck drivers that the mid-70s fad didn't pick up on was their tendency towards introspection and crushing loneliness. But “Rocket Man”, both the original and William Shatner's re-conceptualization, do get this: You can't take a job like that and not be OK with having a considerable amount of time to yourself, and when you're driving down a highway in the middle of the night when everyone else is asleep, you tend to get lost in your own thoughts. It's why late night radio is so popular with truckers: It's the only thing on, and when you're in a state of mind like that your imagination drifts towards more esoteric and cosmic things anyway.

(While Coast to Coast AM, the archetypical example of this genre, wouldn't premier until 1984, truckers in previous decades would have been entertained by Long John Nebel's show out of New York, considered the pioneer of paranormal radio. Coincidentally, Nebel died in 1978.)

This is what “Rocket Man” is really about to me. And while this theme is present in the original song to some extent, it's William Shatner who seizes and doubles down on it. “Rocket Man” sounds like nothing here so much as it does the ruminations of a trucker driving down a cosmic highway contemplating his place in the universe. Shatner wears these mixed feelings as a mask in a grand performance that makes a theatre out of the mundane and of himself. And, in doing so, he not only highlights the original motif of rocket men as truck drivers, he also, given the positionality and perspective he injects into this performance, equates Captain Kirk with these sorts of people as well. Once and for all then, the soul of Kirk and Star Trek forever becomes that of the working class spaceman, just like D.C. Fontana always knew it was and that we long suspected it to be.

And furthermore, it's really funny: Not because of the reasons most people give (that Shatner is comically bombing due to his complete lack of self-awareness, which he's not) but because it's supposed to be funny: You can hear the live audience laughing at a number of points: They clearly get the joke, and so does Shatner, who gives us one of his trademark twinkling smiles at the end of the show, which is met with a thunderous applause. Perhaps people from the Long 1960s and Long 1980s weren't more naive then we are today. Maybe they just saw and understood some things we don't know to look for anymore.

Of the almost innumerable things William Shatner has done over the years, I think this may well be his truest masterpiece. All of the themes that are the most important to him as a performer and an observer of human nature are on display here, and they're all wrapped up in a package that's as provocative as it is memorable and charmingly funny. It's an art house piece about, and done as, a pop single, which puts William Shatner squarely in good company with the blossoming counterculture of the Long 1980s. In a different universe where this Star Trek thing never worked out, maybe he'd be seen as a contemporary of William S. Burroughs or Laurie Anderson. As it stands though, for a few glorious moments in January, 1978 that continue to this day, William Shatner captured something of the human experience.

And the human adventure is just beginning.

Sensor Scan: William Shatner in the 1970s

Modern genre fiction actors are superstars. They're today’s teen idols, appearing in multi-billion dollar film and television projects and have their name and face instantly splattered across the Internet the moment their franchise sees the merest inkling of popular success. Typecasting too is far less of a problem now then it used to be: Nowadays up-and-coming genre stars go out of their way to nurture a cult of personality as soon as they start to become famous, and take care to ensure each marquee role they play is a slightly different twist on their iconic public persona from the start: Benedict Cumberbatch, for example, plays a version of Khan Noonien Singh in Star Trek Into Darkness that can succinctly be described as “Evil Sherlock” even though he is self-evidently capable of a vast and diverse acting range. Likewise, there's not a whole lot of difference between Martin Freeman's Bilbo Baggins, his John Watson and his Arthur Dent, which was already an exaggerated and caricatured version of the character he played in The Office. This isn't so much a criticism as it is an observation that in contemporary genre fiction, typecasting is something that's acknowledged and accounted for from the beginning

It wasn't always like this.

It's not like the cast of Star Trek were ever really not famous. The series was always afforded a primetime slot in its original run: Even in the third season when it was shunted into the Friday Night Death Slot, at least it was in the primetime part of the Friday Night Death Slot. Star Trek was a marquee show for NBC, and all the accounts I could find dating to the 1960s indicate it was a series that was considerably recognisable and well-known. At the very least, you don't get to record novelty albums or appear on variety shows if you're not doing at least somewhat well for yourself (and certainly this also would seem to indicate there's always been some sort of teen idol appeal within genre fiction). But the flip side of this is that if you became famous for genre fiction in the 20th century...well, there was a good chance that's all you were ever going to be famous for. And, sadly, perhaps the archetypical example of this phenomenon is what happened to the Star Trek cast, who universally struggled to find work throughout the 1970s, forever becoming associated with the roles they played for three years on the starship Enterprise. No matter how rough the cancellation of the Original Series was for Trekkers, the fact is it was infinitely worse for the cast and crew. And arguably few had it as bad as William Shatner.

Shatner's bad luck started a few months before the end of Star Trek when his wife Gloria Rand divorced him. While things like this are of course complicated and involve many different factors and variables, Shatner himself has expressed suspicion that this might have had something to do with his character bedding a different woman every week on a popular primetime science fiction show. Once Star Trek ended, Shatner was now responsible for supporting his estranged ex-wife in addition to his three daughters, and now he was out of a regular job and unable to find a new one as nobody wanted to hire Captain Kirk to play “real” roles (actually a case could be made this really started in 1968 when The Transformed Man tanked: Again, what Star Trek fan would believe Captain Kirk was capable of making a serious and respectable piece of avant garde performance art?). Shatner wound up losing his home as a result, and spent the early part of the 1970s living out of a flatbed truck in the San Fernando Valley.

So, all throughout the 1970s William Shatner took on any job that would hire him up to and including doing car commercials and showing up as a novelty guest at private parties. As for the actual acting gigs he landed, they could charitably be described as “subpar”: Shatner spent the majority of the decade bouncing around a series of incredibly shlocky low-budget exploitation movies, most of which are regarded as the worst work he's ever done (and remember this is from a “fanbase” who already consider The Transformed Man to be one of the worst music albums in history). Shatner calls this phase of his career “That Period” and describes the experience as “humbling”, but I can only imagine how unappreciated and unwanted he must have felt. Before Star Trek, this was a guy who was regularly appearing in stuff like Oedipus the King, The Brothers Karamazov and Judgment at Nuremberg. After Star Trek, he was more known for such classics such as Big Bad Mama and Kingdom of the Spiders. This is why I find it completely understandable when actors express reticence about genre fiction franchises, in spite of how upset this can make fans: Stories like Shatner's are prime examples of how being associated with genre fiction can legitimately ruin someone's career. We know now that Shatner eventually gets a happy ending, but it certainly wouldn't have seemed that way in 1971 or so.

Even in spite of being forced to appear in a string of unwatchably terrible movies, William Shatner remains as fascinating a personality in the 1970s as he did in the 1960s. Many of the films he starred in from this era, terrible as they may be, at least manage to occasionally have some interesting motifs. Like many horror movies, Shatner's 1970s output draws heavily on folklore and ancient mythology, but what's interesting from my perspective is to learn how close it actually comes to themes I've explored in this blog already within the context of Star Trek. The Horror at 37,000 Feet, for example, concerns a Boeing 747 passenger jet coming under attack by Druidic ice elemental spirits. Naturally, Shatner's character figures out the ice spirits can be combated with fire, which puts the film roughly in the same narrative league as your average- to below-average generic fantasy RPG video game. However, the specific invocation of Druids, dubious historical figures widely believed to be the priest and shaman class of the Celtic and Germanic people, is certainly interesting, especially given the reading we afforded “The Tholian Web”.

Likewise, The Devil's Rain which, along with The Horror at 37,000 Feet is usually regarded as the absolute nadir of Shatner's filmic career (thus making them both, naturally, just as iconic and memorable as his best work), is seeped in syncrestic mashups of Satanic, Biblical and Pagan imagery. Most notably, there is a strong connection between The Devil's Rain, through Shatner, to John Carpenter's Halloween: Michael Myers wears a William Shatner mask and acts in an eerily similar manner to Shatner's character in The Devil's Rain. The novelization of Halloween posits that Michael Myers was under the influence of an ancient Celtic curse, and later films attempt to tie the film's mythos into the history and symbolism of Samhain (usually spectacularly poorly, but it's nice to see them attempt it nevertheless).

So, if we were to apply our synchromystic Twilight Language skills here, we could maybe say William Shatner is a person who seems to attract mystical and occult imagery, between his movies here and the supernatural and Otherworldy aspects of later-period Star Trek, most evident in stories like “The Tholian Web”, “Wink of an Eye” and “That Which Survives”. And of course, there's his noted interest in transcendence and enlightenment that we saw in The Transformed Man and to which Shatner will return when Star Trek is once again firmly established as part of the mainstream. This, combined with the unfortunate dire straits he was dealing with in the 1970s, but also thanks to the way many of his characters have been written (including Kirk), we might say William Shatner is a kind of working-class mystic, or perhaps more accurately someone very good at playing the role of a working-class mystic.

And it's that working-class mysticism that is going to define Star Trek in the short term, at least in terms of how it comes back. Star Trek: The Animated Series doesn't really get a lot of respect, but one thing among many that it really absolutely must be credited for is giving its cast a job when nobody else was willing to. Although if we're being honest William Shatner was always going to be asked to come back, his co-stars were a less sure thing, and it's telling this was the only place that would take any of them. George Takei, Nichelle Nichols and Walter Koenig were originally not going to be cast on the Animated Series because Paramount partnered with Filmation and Filmation had no money and couldn't afford the full cast (not to mention this was the 1970s, a famously bleak time in animation history anyway). Leonard Nimoy refused to do the show unless they brought everybody back, partially because he knew how important Star Trek's diverse cast had been, but also because he knew how poor and desperate he and his co-stars were. And even then Filmation couldn't afford Koenig (although he was able to submit a script). In addition, Star Trek: The Animated Series is the first Star Trek to seriously push the boundaries of what the franchise was capable of: We really are soon about to go Where No One Has Gone Before.

Sensor Scan: The Transformed Man

William Shatner is one of those personalities who is so ubiquitous that their reputation precedes and obfuscates their actual contributions to art and pop culture. Shatner is so famous as Captain Kirk and the the king of unironic and self-evidently ridiculous camp that his iconic public persona dwarfs and overshadows his entire creative body of work. One of the reasons why I focus so heavily on Shatner in my overview of this period of Star Trek history (if not the primary one) is that his status as an omnipresent and immediately recognisable part of pop culture has ironically made it difficult to discern any reasonable erudition about the kind of actor he is, the style of performance he delivers and what the positionality he draws it all from really is. That's not to say Leonard Nimoy, James Doohan, DeForest Kelley, George Takei, Nichelle Nichols and Walter Koenig aren't equally as iconic and memorable in their roles, they are, but everyone knows they're brilliant and, more to the point, everyone largely knows why they're brilliant. That's not really the case with with William Shatner.

All of which is to say that in 1968 William Shatner released an album of spoken-word poetry.

This is, it should probably go without saying, manifestly not the sort of thing anybody expected of William Shatner at the time, two thirds of the way through the original run of Star Trek. It is also probably fairly safe to say it is still not the sort of thing people expect of William Shatner today, because despite his subsequent musical performances becoming part of his camp reputation, the sort of bemused detachment this part of his oeuvre attracts from would-be fans and critics is rather telling. But the existence of The Transformed Man is in fact a very revealing look at not only the approach to Soda Pop Art in the late-1960s but also Shatner's own worldview and how his presence helped re-shape what Star Trek came to represent. So with that said, what the heck even *is* The Transformed Man?

It may actually be beneficial to begin with an overview of what The Transformed Man *isn't*, as this is the source of the overwhelming majority of confusion and bafflement this record attracts. In this regard it's worth comparing it, if for no other reason then the comparison is unavoidable, with Leonard Nimoy's musical catalog. In 1967, just as Star Trek was starting to gain a significant following, Dot Records released an album called Mr. Spock's Songs from Space, which was pretty much exactly what it sounds like: A collection of fluffy novelty songs Nimoy recorded in full-on Spock-the-logician mode to abjectly hilarious results. Literally the only reason this album exists is because Spock was the show's breakout character, and in the 1960s releasing an album of novelty music to tie in to a popular TV show was just sort of the thing you did, no matter how nonsensical it might sound if you think too hard about it (see also “Snoopy's Christmas” by The Royal Guardians). However, the album was popular enough it spawned a follow-up release in 1968 entitled The Two Sides of Leonard Nimoy, which added the twist of having one side be the in-character Spock one and the other side being dedicated to Nimoy singing as himself. This album also featured the mythically bonkers “The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins”, which has gone on to become Internet Famous.

The thing about both of Nimoy's releases however is that, like all novelty music, it's abundantly clear none of this is meant to be taken remotely seriously. This is Nimoy goofing around and clearly having a fantastic time running with the self-evidently ridiculous (and amazing) idea of Spock singing songs to children (in fact, next time a Trekker approaches you to complain about something or other betraying the sanctity of these characters, just remind them Spock once recorded an album full of songs with names like “Music To Watch Space Girls By” and “A Visit To A Sad Planet” and that it's 100% canonical). Go watch “The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins” again and it very obviously looks like the sort of thing you'd see on a variety show targeted towards children to get them excited about literature-There are even direct references to slogan buttons and Carnaby Street fashion. This is largely because that's exactly what it was.

This is not, however, what The Transformed Man is. Shatner's release had the spectacular ill fortune to come out around the same time as Nimoy's, and while Star Trek was more popular and visible than it had ever been before to boot. It would have been impossible to not compare the two and mentally associate them with each other, when in truth the two records couldn't have been more different. The first clue should be in the artwork and liner notes: Nimoy's albums unabashedly cashed in on the popularity of Spock and Star Trek and latched onto the delightfully lunatic concept of Mr. Spock recording a novelty album. However, Shatner barely references Star Trek at all, except to say he met his collaborators in between filming blocks. There's a solitary picture of Shatner in costume as Kirk and while he is credited as “William Shatner: Captain Kirk of Star Trek”, I presume for marketing purposes, this had the side-effect of fundamentally altering people's expectations. As a result, fans picking this up expecting a cheerfully tongue-in-cheek comedy record about Captain Kirk singing space songs instead got a somber and profound meditation on the nature of performativity and the meaning of life. Suffice to say, this made Shatner look cataclysmically self-indulgent.

But if we cast aside all preconceptions of The Transformed Man being a celebrity novelty cash-in, which it's not, and try to take it at face value, it starts to become clearer what Shatner may have been aiming for here. At its most basic, The Transformed Man comes out of the spoken word poetry most famously associated with the Beat Generation movement of the 1950s. Spoken word is fundamentally focused on the dynamics of language, especially the tone and sound of words, often combined with an emphasis on nonverbal gestures. The genre has its origins, as much avant-garde art in North America does, with black culture, in particular modernist Jazz, blues and the poetry of the Harlem Renaissance. This is an environment that will also provide some of the inspiration for the early Mod scene and many art rock acts of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, thus linking the Mods with the Beats and the literary underground. Spoken word performance then, at least this kind of spoken word performance, is thus an extremely countercultural form of creative expression, such that if you come up with a list of spoken word performers, it will also double as a roughly comprehensive introduction to some of the most significant artists, thinkers and social justice activists of the past half-century (Sojourner Truth, Booker T. Washington, William S. Burroughs and Laurie Anderson, just to name a few).

What William Shatner realised, and indeed what he was uniquely poised to realise, was that there is an intrinsic connection between something like spoken word poetry, theatre and music. Namely, that they are all explicitly, and in fact almost uniquely, performative. In the liner notes, Shatner talks about how as a child visiting the theatre he was always fascinated by orchestral music and how it complimented the performance, and how he's always wanted to do a project that explores the interconnection between the two art forms. The Transformed Man, he goes on to say, is the product of a chance meeting with producer Dan Ralke after working with his son Cliff on Star Trek where they would talk about Shakespeare, music and poetry on breaks, and that he knew he needed to make an album after being exposed to the wonderful poetry of Frank Davenport. Seeing this album released, he claims, is the realisation of that dream he's had since boyhood. Shatner may be pulling our leg here, but then again he actually does seem like the kind of person who would talk about poetry on his lunch break. What he does on The Transformed Man then is use his perspective as a thespian to explore this interlinking performativity.

The way Shatner accomplishes this is by taking a mixture of poetry and classic Shakespeare scenes and pairing them up with spoken-word renditions of famous contemporary pop songs. This basic approach is usually a source of derision, but I have nothing against reinterpreting pop songs in different genres. What Shatner is saying is that pop music, poetry and Shakespearean prose are all equally creative outlets for people to explore human experience, which is something I really can't find fault with. After all what is Vaka Rangi but a long-winded experiment in treating pop culture like any other form of “serious” art? And anyway, you can't help but smile to hear Shatner breathlessly introduce each track like an old-fashioned stage manager, quite literally “setting the stage” for the audience at the beginning of a play. He's clearly having an absolute blast.

And furthermore, the structure works great. The album opener, for example, “King Henry the Fifth; Elegy for the Brave” takes the bombast and zeal of King Henry rousing his troops to action and sets it up against a somber poem about soldiers lying dead and dying on a battlefield after a conflict. The glory of the battle is shown to have little meaning in the hereafter, as the bodies of the deceased are unable to know of the effect their efforts had on the ordinary people at home, or of the comings and goings of nature's cycle, indifferent as it is to human ambition. Similarly, “Hamlet; It Was A Very Good Year” and “Romeo and Juliet; How Insensitive (Insensatez)” look at anguish and nihilism in opposition to rose-tinted nostalgia and obsessive young love contrasted with the clumsy, confused coldness of a relationship coming to a close, respectively. Crucially though, Shatner is saying that all of these conflicting emotions are things everyone experiences throughout life, and that expressing them is itself a kind of staged artifice.

The pinnacle of this theme would appear to be “Theme From Cyrano; Mr. Tambourine Man”, which seems like Shatner's exploration of the creative process, and how creators struggle between appealing to to the demands of fandom and doing what they personally find intellectually rewarding and stimulating. It's possible to read this track as a bit of autobiographical embellishment on Shanter's part, especially knowing what was going on with Star Trek at the time (or indeed what we know the Star Trek phenomenon is going to eventually become), but I think there's something altogether more subtle going on here. Never once on The Transformed Man does Shatner ever indicate he's doing anything different than what he normally does, that is, play a role. The creator of “Theme From Cyrano; Mr. Tambourine Man” isn't meant to be a crass stand-in for Shatner himself any more than he's the lover in “Romeo and Juliet; How Insensitive (Insensatez)”, the soldiers in “King Henry the Fifth; Elegy for the Brave”, or Captain Kirk in Star Trek, for that matter (And anyway, Shatner plays the creator as frenzied and standoffishly huffy, so if he is talking about himself he's being *extremely* self-deprecating about it). These are all different *characters* Shatner is playing, and while they may come out of his positionality as all art by definition has to, he's frankly too good a writer and a performer to do something like that.

But one of The Transformed Man's many hidden virtues is its ability to slowly and methodically build tension all the while lulling the audience into a false sense of security with fake climaxes. The real stunner comes on side two, which features only one track (the title one) as Shatner and his producers very wisely recognised it stands on its own. This track, a recitation of a poem of the same name, tells the story of a person who gives up a day job and house in the city to seek wisdom and inner peace in the wilderness. The speaker begins a lengthy meditation amongst and communion with the land, the sky and the wild creatures before eventually experiencing something that can very easily be described as ego death: A complete dispossession of the Self leading to an understanding of their place within and connection to a cosmic consciousness. Interestingly though, the last line of the poem mentions “touching God”, which would imply a pop Christian reading, despite the rest of the poem describing a very pagan version of enlightenment. The lynchpin, however, is, as always, William Shatner.

Although the words are not his, I'm going to speculate a bit and hazard a guess this is a kind of experience not altogether unfamiliar to Shatner. See, despite becoming known mainly for being part of a ubiquitous and iconic piece of United States pop culture and being seen primarily as a US actor, William Shatner is, of course, actually Canadian and was born and raised in Quebec. Canada has the largest, most unbroken stretch of wilderness in the world: The Boreal Forest, and Quebec, one of the nation's oldest and most storied provinces, is situated right where the forest's great expanse truly begins to open up. I don't think it's unreasonable to presume this might have left an impact on him. Furthermore, as a performer, and in particular thanks to his unique style of performance, Shatner is very, very good at conveying and drawing attention to artifice, and that's the entire point of The Transformed Man, both the album and the poem: Shatner's overall message here is that our conception of reality, all the way up to the way we can attain enlightenment, is subjective. Furthermore, enlightenment, wisdom and inner peace are deeply personal and ethereal things, and in the end it's ultimately impossible to convey them to others in a way that is 100% loyal. So, if Shatner's rendition of “The Transformed Man” feels hammy and stilted, well, that's the point: It's a metaphor unto itself, and the almost audible twinkle in Shatner's eye lets us all know it's a grand, cosmic joke that he's in on as much as we are.

What's even more marvelous is that “The Transformed Man” comes directly after “Spleen; Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds”, where the contrast is despair and hopelessness pitted against the euphoria of describing a transcendental experience (and the ultimate futility of trying to get someone who didn't experience it firsthand to understand it the same way you do). While “Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds” may not actually be about LSD, it was definitely the poster song for altered states of consciousness for a very long time, and certainly would have been seen as such in 1968. The easy thing to do here would be to draw parallels between the two songs and declare Shatner is endorsing the 1960s counterculture and the possibility enlightenment can be found by allying with them. However, I'm going to go one better.

While the youth culture themes are there, I think it's even more rewarding to put Shatner amongst a larger group of colleagues. See, reading William Shatner as someone who is first and foremost invested in the performativity and artifice of human interaction puts him square in the tradition of Avital Ronell, who is herself operating in the tradition of Giles Delueze, Goethe, George Bataille, Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, Søren Kierkegaard, Edmund Husserl and Walter Benjamin. Ronell regularly likens writing, and really all creativity, to drug tripping. Writers, like junkies, let go of the sense of Self and independent will and let themselves be taken over by an outside force. Writers and creators, if we can allows ourselves to momentarily use those words despite their patriarchal connotations, take dictation from an ethereal spirit and become “writing beings”, in the language of Kafka. The text exists only inasmuch as it is a dead signifier of some long-forgotten intangible mental and physical confluence. In the language of William Shatner and Avital Ronell, we're all putting on some stilted and awkward show in an attempt to pay our dues to writing. We transform ourselves every day in an attempt to grasp and understand truths that will transform us spiritually.

In case it wasn't abundantly clear after all that, I consider The Transformed Man to be something of a masterpiece. It's not Shatner's absolute best effort (there are in fact moments where it feels like Shatner is trying a bit too hard-His histrionics at the end of “Theme From Cyrano; Mr. Tambourine Man” tread dangerously close to “Omega Glory” territory), but it's an absolutely staggering debut album and piece of work once you figure out what it's trying to tell you. See, the big secret about William Shatner is that, in truth, something like this record is a far better showcase for his style of acting then something like Star Trek, and it's in an environment like this where he's finally and truly allowed to shine. The end result of all this is that we finally have a handle on what William Shatner really is and the perspective he brings to the table: Shatner certainly isn't a musician, but he's not an actor either.

No, William Shatner is a performance artist. And his subject is the performativity of our lives.