Van Morrison’s career traces a cultural movement from youthful openness and spiritual wonder towards bitterness, calculation and disenchantment.
Looking back on Irish singer-songwriter Van Morrison’s career when he turned 80 last year, I was struck by how it reflects a larger cultural movement from enchantment to disenchantment that has unfolded since the 1960s.
Over a century ago, classical sociologist Max Weber foresaw our current predicament when he declared:
The fate of our times is characterised by rationalisation and intellectualisation and, above all, by the disenchantment of the world.
For Weber, modern life was being drained of meaning by the cold logic of bureaucratic efficiency, leaving us trapped in an “iron cage” that worships calculation over spirit. Later thinkers sharpened the vision.
Iain McGilchrist gave these insights a neurological frame, arguing that the brain’s hemispheres attend to the world in radically different ways. The right embraces metaphor, ambiguity and awe; the left pursues abstraction, categorisation and control. For McGilchrist, modern western culture has enthroned the left hemisphere, mistaking models for reality and reducing the living whole to fragments that can be manipulated but never fully understood.
Artificial intelligence represents the culmination of these tendencies, favouring classification, prediction and optimisation. Algorithms not only calculate but define what is real, fastening the locks on Weber’s cage through processes that enclose even imagination itself.
Perhaps no musician shows this more vividly than Van Morrison, who is not merely an entertainer but a cultural barometer: his early work reminds us what enchantment sounds like, his later work how swiftly it can be extinguished.
At 23, Morrison recorded Astral Weeks (1968), an album that defies genre. It marked a dramatic departure from his earlier radio hits, Here Comes the Night and Brown Eyed Girl. Unlike those short hook-driven pop songs, Astral Weeks offered long, improvisational epiphanies – emotionally raw, spiritually awake, childlike not in immaturity but in radical openness. These songs belong to a world where feeling and reflection are immediate and interconnected, where meaning is glimpsed rather than dissected: a right-hemisphere sound, intuitive, holistic, alive. Elvis Costello called it “the most adventurous record made in the rock medium.”
Two key tracks frame the album: Cypress Avenue and Madame George. Both explore the fact that, living in the modern world, enchantment is fleeting and often just out of reach.
In Cypress Avenue, the protagonist is “caught one more time” on a Belfast street, longing to catch a glimpse of a girl leaving school, who may or may not be real. She is idealised, unreachable, perhaps imaginary. Like Dante’s Beatrice, she glows with premodern chivalric love, immaterial and eternal. The protagonist is trapped in his car seat, staring from afar.
Yonder come my lady
Rainbow ribbons in her hair
Six white horses and a carriage
She’s returning from the fair
Here his obsession is both a schoolgirl and an aristocratic lady from another age, a right-hemisphere vision that refuses left-hemisphere particulars. The song’s final minutes, with circling strings, stumbling harpsichord and Morrison’s repeated cries of “way up on,” conjure one of the most powerful moments of enchantment in modern music.
The sister song, Madame George, is even more striking. The schoolboy protagonist is captivated by Madame George (or Madame Joy), a transvestite who welcomes him and his friends into a flat filled with cigarettes, laughing and music. She is enchanting yet tragic, both liberating and unsettling. Morrison captures this tension in a single line:
With your folded arms and history books you glance,
into the eyes of Madame George
He witnesses and laments the fate of one who has drawn him to the edge of rational understanding and acceptable behaviour, then returns to the safety of his world:
Get on the train, the train, the train
Say goodbye, goodbye to Madame George
Contemporary sociology might interpret the scene in reductive, materialist terms. Morrison’s vision is broader. The refrain, “the love that loves to love the love that loves”, is not gibberish but awe before a love that simply loves, much as Christ recognised in “the woman who loveth much” a beauty invisible to the Pharisees. To see someone in their wretchedness and still find them radiant is the gift of the artist and the religious seer.
The recklessness and emotional openness of Astral Weeks came at a cost. Morrison admitted he was starving during its recording, and the follow-up Moondance (1970) tilted toward commercial success. As the 70s progressed, the artist who had trusted improvisation and intuition now found himself increasingly measured by sales and reviews.
By the 1990s bitterness and resentment began to dominate. Professional Jealousy (1991) signals the turn, portraying art as product:
The only requirement is to know what is needed
Be best at delivering the product on time
Here the visionary mystic hardened into a calculating, suspicious cynic. By the 2000s and 2010s, Morrison was railing against celebrity, critics, and eventually even public health measures. Latest Record Project, Vol. 1 (2021) and What’s It Gonna Take? (2022) shocked listeners with their contempt and conspiracy tropes, and sneering dismissal of “sheeple”.
As Morrison nears his 81st birthday, the childlike wonder and compassion of Astral Weeks seem distant. Yet he remains one of the last great visionaries of popular music. His career traces a cultural arc: from youthful openness to the hardening effects of rationalisation, fragmentation and hyper-reflexivity.
If Weber was right in saying that these forces of modern life trap us in an iron cage, Morrison’s decline shows how relentless they are, grinding down even the most gifted artists.
Yet a song can still suspend time, fracture certainty, and remind us that another mode of being is possible. Enchantment lingers in the trance-like codas of Madame George and Cypress Avenue, in any moment where music suspends time and opens a glimpse beyond left-hemisphere AI abstraction.
Disenchantment is powerful but not final.
While Morrison’s life and music warn us how difficult it is to escape the “fate of our times”, his best music gives us something enduring: the ongoing possibility of enchantment in a disenchanted world.
Adrian Rosenfeldt
Dr Adrian Rosenfeldt teaches at Melbourne University. He is a journalist, public speaker and the author of The God Debaters: New Atheist Identity-Making and the Religious Self in the New Millennium (2022).