by Jamie Alvey
I’ve loved Hozier (AKA Andrew Hozier-Byrne) since around 2014. That’s a longer time than a lot of my high school friends’ failed marriages. It’s almost a whole solid decade, and it’s one of the most enduring relationships I’ve had with man (even if it’s just me admiring his artistry, but I digress). I’ve eagerly consumed all of his music, waited patiently, laughed at his apparent urge to eat silica gel, and watched the internet turn him into a cryptid. One of the twee cottagecore tinged trends surrounding Hozier is that the man is in the woods somewhere, some kind of glorious king of the fae. While most of this is harmless and often a bit funny, a good deal of it ignores Hozier’s radical political statements (that honestly shouldn’t be considered all that radical) or his sheer capacity for uninhibited morbidity. I am here to make what might be a controversial statement to some. Hozier is not some watered down cottagecore-esque king of the Sidhe, he’s a writer steeped in the trappings of the gothic and draws on the ideas of darker themes and desires.
Romantic love is a common theme of the gothic. That love can be toxic, it can be torrid, it can be all encompassing, and it can be pure. The gothic is a passionate genre. It melds the grotesque with the beautiful. Death often runs concurrent alongside the themes of romantic love. The gothic believes that love is often stronger and can overcome the concept of death. Ghosts of dead loved ones crop up almost constantly in the genre. (I mean, Catherine Earnshaw’s ghost and her tainted love for Heathcliff did inspire one of Kate Bush’s best, after all.) Hozier himself sings of the idea of a love so deep and grand that it defies death itself. “Work Song” is perhaps one of his most romantic and gothic offerings. It’s the kind of song that can be played at weddings or funerals because of the sheer gravity it has. The protagonist of the song’s love for his lady is so strong that the grave cannot keep him. He will literally crawl out of the grave in spite of God and nature, and he will return home to his beloved. Images of disturbed gravesites, romantic worship, emotional fulfillment, and a love worth eschewing eternal rest for are weft throughout this masterful song. It’s haunting and a paramount of romantic songwriting. The ideas of nature and trespassing against it echoes favorite themes of Romantic writers like Mary Shelley, whose writings popularized the gothic.
Another Hozier song, a recent offering too, compounds upon these themes. “Francesca,” a single from his forthcoming album Unreal, Unearth, is about love so strong that despite its unsavory origins and turmoil was unequivocally worth it in the end. Hozier would tell the fates to put him back into the hurricane of emotion if it meant that he could hold his beloved if only for a minute. (Swoon worthy. Utterly swoon worthy.) Hozier’s use of unbridled emotion is distinctly gothic, a genre that thrives on emotional extremes and passion. The song is inspired by the ill-fated love between Francesca da Rimini and her brother-in-law Paolo. The lovers are featured in Dante Aliegheri’s The Divine Comedy in the second circle of Hell together. Hozier ponders that this might be a better fate in the end, singing, “I would not change it each time / Heaven is not fit to house a love like you and I.” Tragedy and illicit affairs run amok in the gothic. Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, CRIMSON PEAK, The Castle of Otranto, THE WHIP AND THE BODY, The Scarlet Letter, and many, many more feature love stories that are either taboo or fraught.
The gothic has often pondered on religion and religious thematics and subjects and Hozier is no stranger to those sorts of overarching themes. He is, afterall, the man who wrote “Take Me to Church,” a song that meditates on the confines of organized religion and, well, sex. Some people seem to think that this song is legitimately religious and not about a man sick of society praying at the altar of a woman’s body. Sex and religion go together quite well in the gothic. I mean, if you’ve ever been near anything Nathaniel Hawthorne has touched, you have been lambasted with ideas of sex and sin all nestled into a frightfully creepy gothic passage. The gothic is notoriously horny, even to overwrought degrees. Sometimes that horniness can have a deeply philosophical bent (once again, looking at you, Hawthorne). Hozier? Well, that man is philosophically horny. There’s no elegant or academic way to put it. He’s pondering sex, lust, and the Lord all in one song all the while vibrating on some lyrically desirous level that we can all only dream of reaching. “Moment’s Silence (Common Tongue)” might be the best song about a blow job that is wrapped in religious imagery. With cheeky terms like “pearl rosary,” he goes to metaphorical levels of horny that can easily be found in the gothic. (Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier is painfully horny all the while never properly having a written out sex scene, but I digress.)
The gothic often explores ideas of innocence and purity and the contrast of that with rot and moral decay. Think of The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde. Poor innocent Sibyl never stood a chance against a prolific cad like Dorian, who is the personification of how hedonism can lead to such wicked moral decay. Hozier’s “From Eden” is much more earnest (or Ernest, for those Wildean folks out there) take on innocence versus evil. Hozier takes on the role of a good for nothing man who is in love with a woman he considers morally better than him. He does this by comparing himself to the snake from the Garden of Eden, and sings, “Honey, you’re familiar like my mirror years ago / Idealism sits in prison, chivalry fell on its sword / Innocence died screaming, honey, ask me I should know / I slithered here from Eden just to sit outside your door.” Does this woman’s purity and moral standing keep the protagonist from seeking her out? Nope. It does not. He pursues her knowing he’s not good enough, even willing to sink to murderous machinations to win her affections. “To the strand a picnic plan for you and me / A rope in hand for your other man to hang from a tree,” he sings.
One could sit all day pondering on just how gothic Hozier’s body of work is. He’s steeped in it, maybe even oversteeped. His literary prowess and strong emotional resonance pairs with his thematics to create a perfect musical gothic experience. This piece likely won’t change people’s minds about him being some “fae prince” or something, but it is imperative to humanize and give alternate readings of Hozier’s impressive work. He’s not a fae, he’s a man, one dealing with the darkness of humanity. (Hell, I could write about Hozier’s politics that line up beautifully with class discussions in gothic horror including but not limited to Sara Waters’s The Little Stranger, Naben Ruthnum’s Helpmeet, and du Maurier’s Rebecca.) So, consider that Hozier might in fact be our prolific literary and radical gothic bard instead of, y’know, some non-human entity.
Other songs by Hozier with a gothic bent not listed in the body of this article include: “To Be Alone,” “Like Real People Do,” “Shrike,” “Dinner & Diatribes,” “In a Week,” “Angel of Small Death & the Codeine Scene,” “Talk,” “In the Woods Somewhere,” and “Run.”
Tags: Columns, Gothic Horror, Hozier, Jamie Alvey, music
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