Should’ve Been A Classic #3

Bob Dylan: Self Portrait (1970)

I had been planning on making the next “Should’ve Been A Classic” on Bob Dylan’s John Wesley Harding, arguing that it should be as highly regarded as his mid-sixties pinnacles.  Of course, there’s really no such a thing as an obscure Dylan record (1973’s Dylan, which has yet to be issued on CD, might be one), so it’s pretty hard to make the case that any single one of his albums is underrated.  They’re either already bona fide classics (à la Blonde On Blonde) or correctly estimated crap (I’m looking at you, Dylan & The Dead, you piece of shit).  So even though John Wesley Harding – which I maintain is his best record – is not quite of the same stature as Blood On The Tracks (a somewhat overrated record), it’s still a classic.

There is, however, one Dylan record that deserves a radical reappraisal and that, as those of you who read the title to this piece can guess, is 1970’s much-maligned Self Portrait.  A friend of mine once declared the double album to be “his masterpiece that all the idiots didn’t get”, and he was absolutely right.  I think a case could definitely be made that Self Portrait is Dylan’s masterpiece and that case will be made right now.

First off, when the album was released, it suffered from ill-advised expectations.  Coming after the smooth country of Nashville Skyline, which made some of the rock’n’roll kids rethink their adoption of the folkie icon, Self Portrait infuriated fans expecting The New Dylan Record (that album, New Morning, was already prepped and would be issued shortly after Self Portrait’s befuddling drop).  “What is this shit?” opened Greil Marcus’ famously excessive four-page reviewing of the sprawling record.  What in the fuck was the Spokesman Of A Generation doing crooning through insipid country covers and half-assed live versions of classic Dylan tracks?

However, it’s better to think of Self Portrait not as a Dylan album proper, but as collection of outtakes; a Bootleg Series Vol. 0, if you will.  In fact, that seems to have been the idea from the get-go.  Around this time, the first bootleg records began to circulate drawing from the then-unreleased Basement Tapes and 1966 world tour so it only made sense for Dylan himself to get in on the act.  Indeed, in an interview the following year he referred to Self Portrait as “my own bootleg record”.   But even as critics unfavourably compared the music of the album with that of The Great White Wonder (the patriarch of Dylan bootlegs, and indeed bootlegs in general), seeing Self Portrait as just outtakes from the Nashville Skyline and New Morning sessions also misses the point.

Despite its detractors, the album does contain some great music.  Some.  The two “Alberta”s are thoroughly pleasant exercises in country-rock, and critics generally agree that while the album as a whole may be “shit”, “Copper Kettle” at least is still a fine performance.  In his biography of Dylan, Clinton Heylin calls it “one of the most affecting performances in Dylan’s entire official canon” (although I reckon it’s a little oversung).  Also, the instrumentals “All The Tired Horses” and “Wigwam” are two of the most objectively pretty pieces of music Dylan ever created, and that’s not to mention the jaw-dropping country-funk of the The Band-backed Isle of Wight version of “The Mighty Quinn (Quinn The Eskimo)”.

But, again, Self Portrait is more than the sum of its parts; to approach it on solely musical terms does not take into account its formal aspects.  The emphasis on cover versions of old songs, for example, not only illustrates Dylan’s debt to the history of American song, but also allows him to escape out from under the weight of being regarded a serious song-writer.  Without the expectations of creating A Work Of Art, Dylan is able to simply enjoy the act of playing music.  Given that most of the record’s cuts are essentially warm-ups for the Nashville Skyline and New Morning records, we get a glimpse into Dylan’s recording habits as the singer and his army A-list Nashville session musicians cut loose and have some fun in the studio.  This gives the album a sweet laid-back feel like the musical equivalent of a lazy summer Sunday down by the ol’ fishin’ hole.   All in all, the album manages to impossibly balance between its half-assed conception and execution and the impeccable musicianship of its players.

Though “I Forgot More Than You’ll Ever Know” and “Let It Be Me” may be schlock, you get the sense that Dylan just digs these songs as songs and, more importantly for our purposes here, he enjoys playing them.  As ace multi-instrumentalist Charlie McCoy stated: “I assumed … it was just stuff he’d thrown together for the heck of it”.  Check Side 1’s “Days Of 49” where even Dylan himself seems amusingly aghast at his own strained vocal:  “Oh my goodness!” he exclaims after one particularly overblown chorus.  By all objective measurements, it’s a pretty shitty performance, but Dylan sounds like he’s having fun playing it.  Indeed, many of the tracks seem to feed off the pleasant domesticity that Dylan was enjoying at the time (of course, it’s possible that like the earnest troubadour of the early 60s and the brimstone-spouting preacherman of the early 80s, the backwoods family-man of the early 70s was yet another role taken on by the Protean Dylan).

Throughout, the album exudes a spirit of playful jouissance, not unlike the career of Captain Beefheart, and this serves a double-purpose.  Not only is Dylan enjoying farting about in the studio, he is also able to slough off the weighty tag of Generational Spokesman (to the relief of one as-yet unborn Kanye West).  Dylan himself claims this as the main reason for the album.  In a 1984 interview, he explained: “I said, ‘Well, fuck it.  I wish these people would just forget about me. I wanna do something they can’t possibly like, they can’t relate to.’”

Yet Self Portrait is so much more than an elaborate career suicide; rather, it’s a deconstruction of the whole Dylan myth.  Juxtaposed with the covers of country standards like “Blue Moon” and “Little Sadie”, Dylan and his Nashvillian cohorts also tackle some more contemporary songs by a couple of pretenders to the Dylan throne, as if to suggest that the album positions Dylan in the continuity of his influences and his influence-ees.  His take on Gordon Lightfoot’s “Early Morning Rain” has a mellow congeniality that outshines its original, but it’s his version of Paul Simon’s “The Boxer” that really takes the biscuit and perhaps best encapsulates Self Portrait’s twisted genius.

Though Simon has suggested the song is autobiographical, many have claimed the track is really about Bob Dylan as one diminutive Hebrew resented the other’s success and abandonment of his folkie roots.   Simon, apparently, did not approve of Dylan “squander[ing his] resistance for a pocketful of mumbles”. So, here we have Dylan singing a song written about him by a song-writer who himself based his career on basically being a watered-down, sugared-up imitation of Dylan.  But the brainbending Baudrillardism does not end there:  see, Dylan’s “The Boxer” is actually a duet between two Dylans.  We have the “classic” nasal Guthrie-influenced voice, over top of which is laid the new, smooth country-croon Dylan had adopted for Nashville Skyline.  A double fuck you: while the folkies like Simon were still reeling from Dylan’s abandonment of the earnest coffeehouse scene in favour of rock’n’roll, the hipster kidz he’d picked up while rockin’ down Highway 61 were now the ones screaming “Judas!” to his ventures into Grand Ol’ Opry schmaltz.

And herein lies the sly duality of the album’s title (it also refers to Dylan’s godawful cover art, which would have surely been the most hideous cover of 1970 had Blind Faith not opted that year to issue The Worst Album Cover Of All Time).  Anyway, on the one hand, Self Portrait could be regarded as Dylan’s attempts to present his own influences (in the form of country standards), but on the other hand, it’s also Dylan’s own reworking of his public image.  And by “reworking”, I mean wholesale slaughter.

Released just two years after Roland Barthes’ famous “Death Of The Author” essay, Self Portrait seems to do just that for the author-function of Bob Dylan (which, it should be noted, is an entirely different beast from the human being born as Robert Allen Zimmerman).  Not only does the record fail to include any substantial new original songs, but Bob’s celebrated voice can’t even be arsed to show up for the opening track, “All The Tired Horses”.    Instead, we are treated to some polished (and beautifully arranged) strings over which a female chorus repeats the line “All the tired horses in the sun / How’m I supposed to get any riding done? / Mmm-hmmmm / Hmm-mmm-hmm-mm”.  It has been suggested that the minimal lyric slyly refers to the lack of original songs on the record (“how’m I supposed to get any writing done?”), although I wouldn’t discount it really being about Bob’s inability to fuck a pregnant Sara Dylan.

The absurdly pretty half-assedness of “All The Tired Horses” aside, the ultimate nail in the Dylan Mythos is the live version of “Like A Rolling Stone” that concludes the first disc.   Again, like “Days Of 49”, it’s a pretty awful performance by any objective criteria, yet within the context of Self Portrait it works.  Dylan’s methamphetamine-fuelled anthem to hipster ennui is recast as a laid-back country tune.  Gone is the speedfreak snarl, replaced instead by that now familiar syrupy croon.   The usually reliable The Band, who were absolutely cookin’ on some of the other Isle Of Wight tracks included on the record, sound like they’re about to fall asleep.  Dylan himself phones in his vocal performance and can’t even be bothered to remember the lyrics: instead of “the mystery tramp … not selling any alibis”, he mutters something about “the apple of his eye”, completely undercutting the put-down nature of the original song.  Yes, it sucks, but it’s also a work of fucking genius.

Self Portrait is definitely a bad album for those who expect Dylan to issue serious artistic statements, but to those who realize that, above all, Dylan is a trickster who refuses to be nailed down to a single identity (I’m still half-convinced that the born-again period was an elaborate – and hilarious – hoax), Self Portrait is perhaps the greatest manifestation of that mercurial genius.

Incidentally, I should mention as an interesting post-script to Self Portrait, that the Dylan album referred to at the beginning is really what most people think Self Portrait is.  Released in 1973, Dylan is also a collection of outtakes from the Nashville Skyline-New Morning era, but much shorter and weaker.  Yes that’s right; the stuff not good enough for Self Portrait.  The good folks at Columbia Records put it out has a hatchet job in retaliation for Bob leaving the venerable label for David Geffen’s upstart Asylum Records.  Lacking the sprawling scope and self-deprecatorily witty ironic conceit of Self Portrait, Dylan, well, kinda sucks.  That said, one track — “Sarah Jane” — is frickin’ sweet.  Got some more of them la-la-la’s like in  “The Man In Me”.

On Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize

Nobel Gas

Obama’s recent winning of the Nobel Peace Prize has taken many people by surprise and has prompted some puzzlement.  Why, after all, was Obama awarded the prize nine months into a first term in which much of his administrative efforts have been rather frustrated?

Some possible answers:

1.  He closed Guantanamo Bay, pulled out of Iraq, and stabilized Afghanistan.  Or at least said he would in the campaign.

2.  They’re messing with Glenn Beck and just wanted to see the look on his face.

3.  As an African-American, Obama’s election singlehandedly ended racism in America by letting it sublimate into vague protestations of “Marxism” and “Fascism” and “wanting ‘our country’ back”.  Vague protestations, that is, backed up with automatic weapons.

4.  Simply by being President of the United States of America, he ensures that George W. Bush isn’t.

5.  The International Community felt bad about giving the Olympics to Rio.

6.  Somehow Rod Blagojevich is involved.

7.  His tireless (and selfless) efforts to revive the Republican Party.

8.  Since the Nobel Prize Committee has pretty much admitted that their decision is based not on Obama’s actual accomplishments, but rather on what they think (or hope) he’s going to do, we can only conclude that Norway has somehow developed a mutant race of “precogs” who can predict the future like in that Minority Report movie.

9.  Bilderberg!

On Alim Khan & Prokudin-Gorsky

The Flash Bulb Tolls For Thee

Take a look at this picture:

Emir Seyyid Mir Mohamed Alim Khan

As my helpful caption states, that’s Emir Seyyid Mohammed Alim Khan, the last Emir of Bukhara, as photographed by Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky in 1911.  From 1909 to 1915, Prokudin-Gorsky traveled throughout the Russian Empire documenting its peoples and places in a beautiful series of photographs.  The entire collection (well, a large chunk of it) is available for viewing at the Library of Congress and is well-worth checking out.  You can do so at this link.

For the purposes of this posting, however, I’d like to concentrate on the picture above.  At the time, Alim Khan was the ruler of the Emirate of Bukhara, then a protectorate of the Russian Empire, now mostly in Uzbekistan.  In his beautiful robes and gilted belt, Alim Khan himself is an almost stereotypical image of Oriental majesty though his throneroom is a plain courtyard, his throne apparently little more than a basic stool.  His opulent rule seems auspiciously contained.

There’s a look of sad defiance in his face, however, as if he were grimly aware of his own anachronism: a direct descendent of Genghis Khan (the last one to be a national leader) captured on film by a modern camera.  A kind of melancholy pride that though he is a relic of the mediaeval world, he has at least survived to be the testament of former glory.

He clutches his sword not as gesture of power, but rather as a sign of weakness: a futile steeling of resolve before the imminent Bolshevik Revolution would bring with it an irruption of the 20th Century into the steppes of Central Asia.  But Frunze comes also for the photographer, the stand-in here for the distant and doomed Tsarist regime.

And that perhaps is the meaning of the Emir’s inscrutable gaze.  It is not antagonism towards a new, succeeding, and alien zeitgeist, but rather empathy.  He sees (or rather, with the lens of time, we see that he sees) Prokudin-Gorsky and his imperial apparatus not as conquerors, but as fellow travelers in the company of Ozymandias, also soon to be lost in the dust of history.

On Kazakhstan

In Soviet Union, Country Separates From You!

Whilst perusing The Wikipedia the other day, I discovered an interesting fact about the Central Asian republic and noted anti-Hobbite, Kazakhstan.

On December 16^th, 1991, the Republic of Kazakhstan declared its independence from the Soviet Union.  It was the last Soviet Republic to do so.  Think about that for a second.

You might be saying to yourself, “Wow, I guess they were really in no rush to leave Mother Russia.”  Well, even Russia declared its independence from the Union before Kazakhstan. In fact, there were four whole days when Kazakhstan was the Soviet Union all by itself.

The Politburo’s meetings must’ve been rather interesting.  I like to imagine a lone apparatchik in a grim office building somewhere on the steppes softly whimpering, “Guys?  Hello? Where’d everybody go?  Really, Belarus, you too? Aw c’mon, we can work it out…”  Kinda sad really.

That is all.

Actually, wait.  Speaking of Kazakhstan, how about that Aral Sea?  Check this out:

The Aral Sea in 1989 when it was a just a wee bit smaller than Lake Superior:

The Aral Sea today:

I know it’s old news and all, but that shit’s still fucked.

On GraphJam and What’s Gone Wrong With It

You Did It

I used to love GraphJam, one of the many sites on the Cheezburger network noted for its user-generated content.  Used to, that is, since it’s now seems to have gotten rather boring. Something’s changed.

See, whereas originally GraphJam just translated various pop culture references — usually song lyrics — into graph form, it’s now gotten into observational humour.

The problem is that the current crop of contributors (auto-recruited from the ranks of Time Magazine’s 2006 Person Of The Year and noted Everyman, You) are trying to make jokes in the format of a graph rather than, as before, out of the graph.  The earlier graphs worked precisely because they weren’t jokes per se, but rather earnest representations of data in graph form.  It just so happens that the data set is drawn from song lyrics and movie quotes.

Some exampling follows.

Old GraphJam:

see more Funny Graphs

see more Funny Graphs

see more Funny Graphs

All brilliant (although I think there may be some inaccuracies in the “I Am The Walrus” Venn diagram).  I couldn’t find the one charting personnel distribution in the Yellow Submarine.

Now check the new GraphJam.  Note the devolution into lame observational humour.

see more Funny Graphs

see more Funny Graphs

see more Funny Graphs

Okay, that last one was quite clever, but still, it’s kind of a shame to see the ol’ GraphJam lose the deadpanned absurdity of its earlier work.  What’s striking is how quickly it changed — it’s not yet two years old.

As more people became exposed to the site, some didn’t quite get the “joke” of the format and instead used for it their own simplisticly humorous observations on daily life. This illustrates that, well, most people just aren’t very funny.  While it’s great that The Internet has allowed a forum for Everyone’s own voice, the fact of the matter, mean as it may be, is that not every voice is worth hearing.

For GraphJam to work, the author-function of the submitting user must be minimized, in a manner not dissimilar from someone playing MadLibs.  Since the GraphJam formula itself is funny, endless repetitions of the same basic joke (representing song lyrics in graph form) work when you have the endless supply of pop cultural “riffs” to play with.  Sorta like the blues.  Also, getting the “joke” is a kind of shibboleth since the graph is only really funny if you know where the reference is from.

But, alas, GraphJam has become swamped with the mediocre comedic stylings of masses of unfunny fools emulating the lame observational humour of hack stand-ups and formulaic sit-coms.  Those same masses whose aspirations are lured by the seduction of the Everyman Celebrity Archetype as seen on TV.  I’m all for turning the consumer into a producer an’ all, but damnit, this sucks!  Sorta like how in a world where digital technology has enabled anyone with a personal computer to make professional sounding music, everyone’s playing Guitar Hero because they’d much rather pretend to be musicians than actually be musicians.

Still, a toast to GraphJam.  A victim of its own popularity: what was once an outlet for rogue bureaucratites has since been taken over by the Twilight lovin’, High School Musical diggin’, eMoticon usin’ Legions of the Lumpenjuvenalia.

Curses.

Moreover, I advise that Carthage be destroyed.

On Predator 2

The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill

For some reason I sat down and watched Predator 2 last night.  While I quite liked the first movie, I’d never seen the sequel before.  With good reason, perhaps: it’s pretty ridiculous. Basically, for the uninitiated, it’s set in a then future 1997 Los Angeles where escalating gang warfare has attracted the attentions of intergalactic trophy hunter and noted vagina dentata, The Predator.  And it’s up to Danny Glover to stop him (though Gary Busey’s on the case as well).

As opposed to, say, the Alien*, Predators are more like us. They have a recognizable – and understandable – culture.  Indeed, it is even held to have some sort of moral “hunter’s” code: an honourable alien (it let the pregnant woman go).  And in the end, with the inevitable props scene, the viewer is led to feel some admiration for the noble trophy gatherer.  For example, at the end of the movie when Danny Glover has killed the Predator, a bunch of other Predators appear, carry off their slain brother, and give Mr. Glover – who is clearly too old for this shit – props (in the form of a vintage pistol) and sod off.  ***SPOILER ALERT***.  Whoops, too late.

Anyway, this code and honour malarkey is bullshit; the Predator’s really just a douchebag.  Let me lay down some science as to why.  To start, the Predator is physically superior to human beings in pretty much every way.  I mean, it loses half an arm and what does it do?  Ducks into a passing washroom, cauterizes the stump, takes a shot, and then gets right back in to fucking shit up.

On top of that it’s got a load of badass killing technology and seems to literally shit out all manner of complicated projectiles and explosives.  Oh yeah, and it skulks around in an invisibility suit, the cowardly little bastard.  Come on, you’ve pretty much got the whole city outgunned and nothing short of a nuclear explosion can seem to kill you, you might as well show yourself.  Fuck man, if I had an invisibility suit and a bunch of futuristic ray guns and ninja stars, I don’t think I’d really need superhuman strength to bag me some humans.  Of course, I’d use my powers for good and only target people who drive Porsche Cayennes.  The point is that for all the pomp and circumstance they attend to their ritualistic hunting forays, these Predators are a bunch of pussies who get their kicks torturing small, defenceless animals.  They also like underage girls.

So it doesn’t harm unarmed civilians.  Big whoop.  As if having a handgun is going to make one little bit of difference in this tilted fight.  And these assholes, we are led to believe, were doing this shit back in the day when, judging from the props pistol, people barely had firearms at all.  You could get maybe one little puny shot off before being impaled by an unnecessarily ornate spear, whereas the contemporary characters can at least bust out a spread before getting cut in half by a large, heat-seeking circular saw.

Moreover, the Predator seems to be a fan of tribal dancing, which is clearly more evidence of its douchebaggery.  Maybe that’s why the other Predators let Danny Glover kill him.  Fucking assholes.

Either way, clearly the best thing to do when confronted by a Predator is to immediately divest yourself of any weapons.  It will most likely become dispirited and cease the hunt.  This is a good opportunity to engage the creature.  It will have some pretty good stories.

Interesting fact: Bill Paxton has been harassed, assaulted, and/or killed by an Alien, a Terminator, and a Predator.

Also, in the first movie, both Jesse Ventura and Arnold Schwarzenegger later each somehow got elected Governor of Minnesota and California, respectively (Carl Weathers did not make it through the Nebraska gubernatorial primary).  Well, while there’s no future governors, Predator 2’s got Rubèn Blades, who went on to become Panama’s Minister for Tourism.

* I will refrain from using the more correct term, “Xenomorph”, because I do not want people to know that I know that this is the correct term.

On Five Overrated Musical Acts

Why Your Favourite Band Sucks

The pantheon of rock is fickle.  Whereas earth-shattering geniuses such as Captain Beefheart, George Russell, and Lambchop — to name a few — skirt around the edges of cult appreciation, it seems some of the larger figures in the canon are hollow imposters, undeserving of their enshrinement in our collective consciousness.  [Translation: I am an elitist asshole who, looking down on the tastes of the masses, is now going to pretentiously argue that the following five figures are totally overrated].

1) Elvis Presley

Conventional Wisdom tells us that Elvis invented rock ‘n roll.  Someone should perhaps inform Conventional Wisdom of the musical stylings of Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Bill Haley, and Lonnie Donegan.  Of course, Elvis is a huge figure in the history of 20^th Century popular music and is genuinely influential, although, really, he’s only influential because he is considered influential.

Moreover, this influence is more the result of his good fortune – pretty much any decent looking white guy with a passable voice could have done what he did. Unlike singular talents such as Dylan, The Beatles, or Brian Wilson, Elvis more or less just happened to be in the right place at the right time.

As Sam Phillips famously said: “If I could find a white man who had the Negro sound and the Negro feel, I could make a billion dollars.”  See, Phillips correctly guessed that the rhythm and blues music of black juke joints had crossover appeal to white teenagers bored with the insipid, limpid crooning of Perry Como, Bing Crosby et al.  However, white audiences at the time found young, virile black men (or, in the case of Little Richard, young, virile, flamingly homosexual black men) somewhat threatening, so a Trojan horse was necessary; a reverse oreo, if you will.

Of course, as the various whitebread schmucks pretending to be from the streetz paraded for our enjoyment on network television attest (indeed, Elvis would do quite well on American Idol), such a creature is not a rare beast, and it was only a matter of time before one would wander into Phillips’ studio.  And it so happened that some redneck truck-driver did just that.  Again, Elvis didn’t do anything particularly innovative, he was just nice packaging.  He wasn’t the first “rock star”, just the first mass-marketed rock star, the Model T to Bill Haley’s Mercedes-Benz.

Still, it’s undeniable that Elvis released ten (45) sides of great rockabilly in 1954.  It’s also undeniable that he spent the next two decades releasing utter shit and starring in crap movies before wisely changing his artistic direction in 1977 when he transformed himself, phoenixlike, from a fat, old, washed-up hasbeen into an icon of decadent, corpulent excess.  Amazing what a heart attack on the toilet can do for your critical legacy.

2) The Sex Pistols

A prefabricated boy band put together by a fashion designer, the Sex Pistols compensated for their lack of discernable musical ability by being generally obnoxious and spitting on people.  Some people say they invented punk, which is a rather odd thing to say given that The Ramones had been around for a couple of years already at this point.  This is, of course, rather a moot point since it has been scientifically proven that Bob Dylan invented punk in 1965 (cf. “Tombstone Blues”).

Anyway, with singer John “Rotten” Lydon selected for his professed dislike of Pink Floyd and lack of dental hygiene, the Pistols broke into the global public consciousness with “God Save The Queen”, an earnest political anthem which offered the apparently controversial opinion that monarchical government is not as reflective of the people’s wishes and needs as a constitutional republic, a modification of their earlier single’s advocation for the dissolution of  all hierarchical power structures in favour of an anarcho-syndicalist commune.  This is to be achieved by such acts of radical civil disobedience as “giv[ing] a wrong time” and “stop[ping] a traffic line” culminating in a utopia in which the liberated individual is free to “get pissed, destroy”.  Ball’s in your court, Edmund Burke.  I would quote from the group’s other songs, but nobody has ever heard them.

A colleague of mine once opined that the Russian teen lesbian phenomenon t.A.T.u. are the real heirs to Rotten, Vicious et al’s legacy. He’s probably right.

3) Joy Division

A one hit wonder (admittedly “Love Will Tear Us Apart” is, not unlike “Boogie Nights”, a pretty good tune), Joy Division have become heroes for suburban bedwetters everywhere, largely on account of singer Ian Curtis’ flat monotone and berky dancing.   Actually, that’s a bit unfair.  They were a two-hit wonder: in addition to “Love Will Tear Us Apart”, Joy Division are also well known for Curtis’ pendulous interpretation of Iggy Pop’s The Idiot.

These tuneless manc wasters beautifully illustrate the strange phenomenon by which audiences confuse being miserable with being deep (Leonard Cohen might perhaps be to blame for this).  Apparently sitting around staring at your fuzzy navel feeling sorry for yourself – an activity primarily undertaken by white, middle class, bourgeois types (cf. Radiohead, Nine Inch Nails, etc) — is mistaken for philosophical complexity.  Depressing = poetry.  Happy = fluff.  Got it?

An illustration with the lyrics to Nine Inch Nails’ “Hurt” will explain this.  Here are the “deep” originals:

I hurt myself today
To see if I still feel
I focus on the pain
The only thing that’s real
The needle tears a hole
The old familiar sting
Try to kill it all away
But I remember everything
What have I become?
My sweetest friend
Everyone I know
Goes away in the end

Fuck man, this guy is, like, deep.  He really feels my pain and listening to him whinge is an instant of cathartic pathos.  Now, let’s take this poetry and simply madlib in some happier terms.

I tickled myself today
To see if I still feel
I focus on the joy
The only thing that’s real
The needle repairs a hole
The old familiar thing
Try to tidy it all away
But I remember everything
What have I become?
My sweetest friend
Everyone I know
Is coming round for tea this afternoon.

All of sudden, sixteen-year-olds with too much eye makeup and scars on their arms will not find this “expressive of the inner pain of growing up in the affluent West”.  Tell you what, when the Nigerian army invades your house and defenestrates your mother, then you can whine about how unjust the world is.

4) Michael Jackson

See “On Michael Jackson”.

5) Oasis

Starting out as a tribute to noted Beatles and Coca-Cola jingle cover band, No Way Sis, Oasis eventually became Britain’s answer to Matchbox 20, albeit with slightly more distorted guitars and unibrows.  They accomplished this mostly by loudly telling everyone how good they were — a clever strategy which dispenses with the difficulties of actually making interesting music.  Now recently broken up (for now at least), Oasis represent everything that’s wrong with modern so-called rock ‘n roll.

Endlessly recycling the same old song forms by mindlessly churning through fully strummed, straight major and minor chords while the lead guitar runs through ordinary blues scales, Oasis’ idea of experimentation is adding the occasional minor 7th or playing along to a drum loop.   Apparently unaware that music has progressed since 1968, they even think sitars add a dimension of exotic psychedelia rather than being a lazy shorthand for trite orientalism.  Still, former drummer Alan White was quite competent, but then again, when you play the exact same fucking beat for every goddamn song, you’re bound to get pretty good at it.

While rearranging traditional forms is the backbone of popular music (indeed, the Bickerstaff-approved group, Magnolia Electric Co., has made excellent record after excellent record based on the same country-rock blueprint laid down in the late 60’s), Oasis compounded their musical banality with pretentious pseudo-profound lyrics (though Magnolia Electric Co.’s Jason Molina is occasionally guilty of the same ponderous misery as discussed in #3, he at least is able to mine the floating pool of traditional bluesisms for some nice phrases: “I talked to the wolf on the mountain, I talked to the mule in the mine”; “I’ve been as lonesome as the world’s first ghost”; “Stay with me now, ol’ crimson pal, burn like this we’ll even outlive the dark and come after the blues”).  Noel, on the other hand, operates from the school of hasty, vaguely paradoxical clichés masquerading as super-serious lyrical musings. Throwing a dart at random Oasis songs, I offer this evidence from “Gas Panic”:

What tongueless ghost of sin crept through my curtains?

Sailing on a sea of sweat on a stormy night.

I think he don’t got a name, but I can’t be certain

And in me he starts to confide.

Ugh.  I once said some mean things about Stereolab’s sometimes hamhanded lyrics.  I take it all back.

Perhaps if Oasis had broken up after Be Here Now, they’d've been alright.  After all, their first two records had some decent tracks on them and Be Here Now had a certain perverse charm in its ridiculous, over the top bombast.  But no, Oasis elected to go the route of Elvis Presley and The Rolling Stones by spending the last decade descending into self-parody.

With original members leaving, Oasis quickly became a retirement home for other British dadrock refugees (who the fuck is Andy Bell?).  They even answered the accusations of aping the Beatles by hiring Ringo’s son, Zak Starkey, to drum for them (Alan White apparently got tired of playing the same monotonous, loping beat all the time).

At this point, atavistic Britpoppers will declare that Oasis were hugely influential kingpins of 90’s British rock.  No, they weren’t; or at least not as much as their fans (and the fawning British music press) would have us believe.  The British groups from the 90’s that have cast the largest shadow in contemporary music have had little to do with Oasis’ staid brand of tradrock: people like the Super Furry Animals, the Beta Band, Mogwai, even Belle & Sebastian all created interesting music that remains current today (and Oasis could’ve learned something from the Beta Band regarding call it quits while you’re ahead).  It’s a grim irony that Oasis’ hated rivals, Blur, who, despite being “shite” (source: S. Braithwaite), are still somewhat relevant.

Feel free to add your own overrated artists, or, conversely, tell me what a sanctimonious prick I am in the comments below.

On The Unsung Humour Of Wikipedia

Because it applies the same encyclopaedic voice of reason and authority to the realm of pop culture, Wikipedia regularly comes up with some deadpanningly humorous phrasings.  Often, part of the general knowledge of a personage or event will entail the inadvertent recounting of a joke, albeit in an utterly, and not unironically, matter-of-fact manner.

This results in something somewhat similar to Principal Seymour Skinner’s hilariously botched answer to Supernintendo Chalmers’ query as to who’s on first: “Not the pronoun, but a player with the unlikely name of ‘Who’ is on first.”  Now, of course the humour in the Simpsons bit is that Skinner is blowing the joke and ruining the routine at a school talent show (in this sense, it operates rather like the anti-comedy of Neil Hamburger).  Nonetheless, even stripped of this context, the simple summing up of the extended sketch packs all the humour of the joke – the “one joke” of the bit – into one distilled and, yes, witty phrase.

This occurs throughout any descriptive catalogue of comedy in The Great Wiki.  F’rinstance, an entry for a recurring sketch featuring Late Show announcer Alan Kalter from “List of David Letterman sketches”:

“Alan Kalter’s Campaign Roundup”

A near-daily running gag presented late in the 2000 presidential election season began with Letterman introducing Kalter, who would ostensibly give a summary of the latest campaign news. Instead, Kalter would perform an energetic rendition of the chorus to “Who Let the Dogs Out?” which was a popular and ubiquitous song at the time, and walk across the stage. In the skit’s later occurrences, Kalter would sometimes rip off his shirt as he sang (revealing a pale and flabby physique), while adding a manic and deranged tone to his performance. Kalter has demonstrated a compulsion to disrobe in many of his other segments before and since.

In many respects the deadpanned – and slightly disgusted, it seems – recounting of the bit is funnier than the actual sketch itself was.   I particularly liked the reference to “Who Let The Dogs Out?” as “a popular and ubiquitous song at the time” as if Abraham Simpson was describing an old vaudeville act.  The last sentence with its clinical and precise phrasing provides a perfect, understated punch line to the piece.

More evidence. From “List of Seinfeld minor characters”:

Poppie (played by Reni Santoni): Owner of an Italian restaurant who disapproves of abortion, is known to not wash his hands after visiting the bathroom, believes a pizza is a pizza when you put your fists in the dough, rejects cucumbers as a pizza topping, and once urinated on Jerry’s brand new couch. The “Poppie couch” turns up in “The Doorman“.

Seinfeld fans will easily pick out that the “fists in dough” factlet refers to the pizza-as-analogy-for-abortion bit, and by using it as a biographical descriptor of the character, gives the joke a new humorous twist.  After all, Poppie believes a pizza is created at kneading as strongly as the staunchest Pro-Lifer believes abortion is homicide, so it is a good piece of information regarding his character.  Compare this to the other descriptors which simply describe various notably funny incidences in which he incurred himself in the plotlines (such as peeing on Jerry’s couch); for these, the humour does not carry over as well precisely because they don’t really have that ulterior, encyclopaedic function.

Elsewhere, the dry tone of the site gives a perhaps not-unexpected witty effect to entries in a manner not dissimilar to Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide.  In fact many of Wikipedia’s entries on comedic subjects read like entries in the fictitious Guide.  Viz. this selection on the Total Perspective Vortex from Wikipedia’s “Technology in The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy”:

Located on Frogstar World B, the machine was originally invented by one Trin Tragula in order to annoy his wife. Because she was forever nagging him for having no sense of proportion, he decided to invent something that would show her what having a sense of proportion really meant. Unfortunately the shock of being placed in the Vortex destroyed her brain, but Trin Tragula’s grief was tempered by the knowledge that he had been right and she had been wrong.

Of course, this is really just a summary (perhaps of an almost plagiaristic nature) of Adams’ already funny writing.  Still, the blurring of realities entailed by describing pop cultural lore in an encyclopaedic manner means that fictional, and sometimes silly, subjects are discursively treated with the same scientificky methodicalness as a good, authoritative textbook.

The page for the Living Dead franchise of zombie movies has a large section distinguishing the depiction of zombies in the two divergent continuities in the franchise (George A. Romero’s Dead series, and John A. Russo Return Of The Living Dead series).  The subsection “Locution” makes the following observation:

In the Return of the Living Dead series, a zombie can speak normally (even if its lungs, trachea, and facial muscles are largely missing) but any conversation will tend to lean towards their attraction to the listener’s brain, how good it must taste and the speaker’s overwhelming desire to consume it.

It starts out in a straightforward, reliable manner – noting the discrepancy between the abilities of zombies in a certain film series and the established real world laws of vocal biomechanics. However, the entry quickly takes an abrupt turn into the absurd once it starts to explain the actual content of zombie speech – ie. their repeated and earnest declarations of love for the taste of sweet, sweet brains.  Yet all along, the tone is consistent.  The gap between the absurdity of the “information” and the seriousness of its delivery (after all, the above is a perfectly accurate description of fictional phenomena) is where the funny is.  Though the zombie movies in question aren’t really comedies (well, Return Of The Living Dead series kinda is…), the translation of the make-believe world – be it of zombie movies, sitcoms, or variety show bits – into the “factual” world of an encyclopaedia generates a form of humour in and of itself.

Of a different mode is the inadvertent humour one sometimes finds in otherwise well-meaning prose.  While it’s perhaps mean spirited to laugh at people who are not, we presume, writing in their native language, this passage from the Wikipedia page for the Russian (Tatar) city of Kazan seems a little, well, off and, if you imagine it being read by Borat, quite funny:

Immigrants in the 1990s

One of the biggest Kazan communities is the Azeri community. Most of them are unregistered and work illegally. Azeri tradesmen control all the bazaars. They often sell imitation clothes of famous trademarks or fruits. The number of Azeris is very big. Interestingly, Azeri speak both Russian and Tatar well.

Other Caucasians come from Dagestan, Georgia, Armenia and others. They often own cafés or work in construction.

Another big community is the Central Asian community, which includes Uzbeks, Tajiks, Roma (Lyuli branch) and Kyrgyz. Some of the Uzbeks and Tajiks own cafés or fast-food restaurants; they sell dried apricots, popular among Kazan citizens.

Now there’s nothing wrong with the language of the above, although its somewhat childish, truncated cadences are a little bit off rhythm.  Still, no grammatical schadenfreude here like those sites making fun of “English” signs in Asia.  Instead, the humour here derives from the subtle comment it makes on the author.  Y’see, in European Russia, immigrant communities from Central Asia and The Caucasus (in the case of Kazan’s Azeris) are regarded with suspicion by the native Russians (or, in Kazan’s case, Tatars) and there is something grimly amusing in the way this selection shows this prejudice.

Let’s take a deeper look.

First off, we’ve got the typical “they took our jobs!” declaration (“Most of them are unregistered and work illegally”), but then things get a little weird when, during the required accusation of shady dealings, we are informed that, “They often sell imitation clothes of famous trademarks or fruits.”  Or fruits?  Not sure how fruit’s related to designer knockoffs, but OK.   Perhaps they’re in league with the dried apricot dealin’ Uzbeks and Tajiks.   And of course, all bigotry should come tinged with conspiracy paranoia for not only do the Azeris “control all the bazaars,” but “Interestingly, Azeri speak both Russian and Tatar well.”  Yes, very interesting.  They’re up to some thing alright, those bilingual bastards.

And yes, Wikipedia is unfortunately (and somewhat unfairly in this correspondent’s view) criticized for its biases and is often accused of unfairly maligning things.  When this does actually occur, however, the results can be somewhat amusing as in this entry (from the “The Greatest Canadian” page) regarding a poll for the worst Canadian:

As a response to the Greatest Canadian, The Beaver ran a poll to find Canadians’ opinions on the “worst Canadian”, and as a way to get Canadians talking about Canada’s history. The top ten were:

1. Pierre Trudeau, prime minister
2. Chris Hannah, musician
3. Henry Morgentaler, physician and abortionist
4. Brian Mulroney, prime minister
5. Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka, serial killers
6. Stephen Harper, prime minister
7. Céline Dion, musician
8. Jean Chrétien, prime minister
9. Clifford Olson, serial killer
10. Conrad Black, convicted fraudster

Now, it is perfectly reasonable to call Clifford Olson and Paul Bernardo & Karla Homolka serial killers; that is, after all, what they are known for.  The labelling of Henry Morgentaler as an abortionist (as opposed to a more neutral euphemism) nudges towards some kind of incitement.  The last entry, “Conrad Black, convicted fraudster”, however, is nicely done.  Succinct, yet skewering; still maintaining that dry understatement illustrated previously.

The entry then goes on to conclude, with beautiful – and properly cited – self-referentiality:

The Beaver’s poll has received harsh criticism. For example, Vancouver’s Only Magazine stated that “Publishing such a poll in a history magazine officially makes The Beaver about as trustworthy as Wikipedia.”

It should also be noted that the entry is accompanied with a picture of David Suzuki from the actual Greatest Canadian list (carried over from that list’s description).  He is captioned as “#5″, the position of Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka.  Whoops.

Anyway, so here is a challenge to any and all faithful reader(s) out there.  If you stumble across an amusing Wikipedia entry, cut-n-paste it on over here. Well, down there.  Whatever.

Should’ve Been A Classic: #2

Leonard Cohen: Live Songs (1973)

When the good folks at Legacy Records reissued remastered editions of Leonard Cohen’s first three albums, I was really excited.  Not only were they beautifully packaged (in slim, hardback, book-like sleeves), but I was hoping that this would lead to a reissuing of this live album recorded during his 1970 and 1972 European tours.  Sadly, this is (so far) not to be (although Sundazed Records has remastered and reissued the album on vinyl).

Now, 1973’s Live Songs is available on compact disc, but it sounds like shit.  Although the CD version was released in 1998, it sounds more like discs from the 80s when standard practice was to cheaply copy over a third or fourth generation master with no sound restoration (at the time, record companies were not sure that CD’s were going to stick around; it wasn’t until the mid-90s that full remastering for back catalogues became a standard practice).

This is a shame, since the album, I think, is sorely underrated and one of Cohen’s best records.  Out of ten tracks, four are songs unique to this album, and the remainder act like a kind of best-of of Songs From A Room (1969) and Songs Of Love And Hate (1971).  In fact, some versions are better than their studio originals: a brooding take on “Seems So Long Ago, Nancy” and a jaunty, countrifried “Tonight Will Be Fine“, for example.

The most familiar Leonard Cohen record to most people is his 1967 debut, Songs Of Leonard Cohen.  I’ve always felt that one to be rather overrated: sure, it does have some excellent songs (“Master Song” and “The Stranger Song” in particular), but John Simon’s production can get a little twee and cloyingly heavyhanded in parts.  When Dylan producer Bob Johnston took over for the next two, the sparser arrangements opened up Cohen’s songs and allowed his resonant, if monotone, baritone to swell out into this newly-created space.  The jawharp throughout Songs From A Room was a nice touch, also.

Johnston remained behind the controls for Live Songs, though the sound is not as good as his other work (such as Johnny Cash’s famous concert album At Folsom Prison).  In many places, the record sounds like a bootleg from audience recordings, though this could be just the shitty mastering on the CD.

Still, there’s a certain warmth and intimacy to the recordings (especially the final track, “Queen Victoria“, which was taped in a Tennessee hotel room).  Away from the controlled atmosphere of the studio, Cohen is at his nakedest in these performances.    He blows the lead on “Story Of Isaac” by prefacing it with an introduction which makes the song’s subtle anti-war theme rather crushingly obvious, but trades in inscrutable mystique for raw urgency.

Elsewhere, the thirteen minute long audience sing-along, “Please Don’t Pass Me By (A Disgrace)” finds Cohen eviscerating himself and identifying with the “freaks”, “cripples”, and other “curious mutilations of the human form” he sees strewn in the gutters of New York City.  What follows is a descent into Hell and Cohen takes his country-gospel tinged band along for the ride as he sings:

Well I sing this for the Jews and the Gypsies and the smoke that they made.

And I sing this for the children of England, their faces so grave.

And I sing this for a saviour with no one to save.

…

Well I sing this song for you Blonde Beasts, I sing this song for you Venuses upon your shells on the foam of the sea.

And I sing this for the freaks and the cripples, and the hunchback, and the burned, and the burning, and the
maimed, and the broken, and the torn, and all of those that you talk about at the coffee tables, at the meetings, and the demonstrations, on the streets, in your music, in my songs.

I mean the real ones that are burning, I mean the real ones that are burning.

Yet out of this Cohen, upon destroying himself (“Oh don’t be the person that you came with. / Ah, I’m not going to be. I can’t stand him. I can’t stand who I am.”), emerges along with the audience newborn (albeit as a beggar):

Well I hope I see you out there on the corner.

Yeah I hope as I go by that I hear you whisper with the breeze.

Because I’m going to leave you now, I’m going to find me someone new.

Find someone new.

The back cover of the record features an ornate quotation from Daphne Richardson labelled “Transfiguration” and this idea of metamorphosis and rebirth seems to be the controlling idea of the album.

It’s rather a cliché to observe how live performance of songs gives a dynamic rebirth to their static studio versions, so I won’t say that.  Instead, let me say this:  Frequently, Cohen’s music is derided as depressing and I suppose it’s fair to admit that his albums do seem to be bathed in gloom. But here, on Live Songs, Cohen’s gloom becomes cathartic.

And throughout, the record is tempered with the faint hope of the humanism that is introduced in the gospel-cover-recast-as-existentialist-hymn “Passing Through” (“We’re all on one road, and we’re only passing through”) and reaches a radical apotheosis in “Please Don’t Pass Me By” where Cohen exhorts the audience to completely give themselves over to the all-too-marginalized Other.

And at this point a transformation occurs.  Most of the album’s tracks are taken from his 1972 European tour and, from the sounds of it, appear to be recorded in indoor halls.  The album’s penultimate track (before the hotel bonus “Queen Victoria”), however, is an ubpeat performance of “Tonight Will Be Fine” taken from his set at the 1970 Isle of Wight Festival.

Recorded around dawn in the English countryside amongst a throng of congregated hippies, the track relieves the heavy claustrophobic ambience of the rest of the record with some (uncharacteristic for England) light, sunshiney warmth. Yet even here, Cohen’s repeated refrains that “Tonight, tonight will be fine” take on an urgency which, towards the end of the track, makes his anticipated joy indistinguishable from rage.  Of course, he could also be annoyed that his set started at four in the freakin’ morning.

Yes, the album is painful, but it’s a good kind of hurt, the kind of hurt that comes with healing.  And that is the point here — as he states himself in the opening track, the hauntingly poignant “Minute Prologue“:

I’ve been listening to all the dissention.
I’ve been listening to all the pain.
And I feel that no matter what I do for you,
It’s going to come back again.
But I think that I can heal it,
But I think that I can heal it,
I’m a fool, but I think that I can heal it
With this song.

On Captain Beefheart

Old Fart At Play

A few months back, Eastern Ontario and Western Quebec radio celebrity and noted cougar prey Eric the Intern blogged about how, no matter how many people demand it, he is unable to get Captain Beefheart on to the radio, so quit askin’.  Unfortunately, it seems, the good Captain’s music does not exactly cater to mainstream tastes.  And of course, once again, the mainstream tastes miss out on some good tunes.

After having heard about him for a while, my first direct experience of Captain Beefheart was seeing a vintage clip of him performing “I’m Gonna Booglarize You, Baby” on the ol’ MuchMoreMusic many years ago.  It was, and still remains, the coolest thing I’d ever seen.

Everything – I said everything – in this video screams awesomic fantasticality: the pounding rhythms; the swirling waves of slide guitar; Beefheart’s menacing growl; the zoot suits and hats; the abrupt high squeals of gibberish towards the end; Rockette Morton’s (or is that Winged Eel Fingerling’s?) deployment of the slide glide around the three-and-a-half minute mark; etc, etc.  Indeed, Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band represent everything that I love about music.

For those unfamiliar with Beefheart and said Magic Band, it is the nom-de-plume (nom-de-mic?) of one Don Van Vliet, a high school pal of Frank Zappa.  Recognized as an artistic prodigy at an early age, Van Vliet fell in love with the blues during his teenage years in the deserts of southern California.  Taking his stage name from a description of his uncle’s genitalia, Beefheart took on a persona built from equal parts Howlin’ Wolf, Man Ray, and Rasputin.  His music sounds like something Stravinsky might have created had he grown up on the Southside of Chicago.  After issuing the comparatively tame psychedelic blues of Safe As Milk (1967) and its slightly more psychedelicized follow-up, Strictly Personal (1968), Beefheart temporarily left the music business until cajoled back by Frank Zappa the next year.

After holing up the Magic Band in a small house in a Los Angeles suburb to work out the strange new sounds the Captain had thought up, Beefheart, with Zappa as producer, issued the visionary double album Trout Mask Replica.

Here’s some audio-visual evidence taken from a 1969 concert in Belgium:

Despite its difficulty, its gonzoid brilliance has led to it becoming by far the best known Beefheart record.  As a result, his more generally palatable work gets overshadowed and tarnished with the tangled brush of assumed unlistenability.  Nonetheless, nothing comes close to being quite like it.  Perhaps Miles Davis’ electric period is the closest if not in terms of sonic resemblance, but more metaphysical aspects such as “feel” or “tone”.  However, Davis’ early 70s work had a streak of anger and bitterness, whereas Beefheart’s music, though equally atonal and dissonant, carries with it a spirit of joy and fun.

There is no better illustration of his modus operandi than an exchange which occurs immediately before the track “Pena”.  Apparently rehearsing a vocal skit from “Ella Guru”, we hear the Captain relishing in his absurd word play with his cousin and Magic Band bass clarinettist, The Mascara Snake.  The exchange is transcribed thusly:

Beefheart: [snickers]

Engineer: Fast ‘n bulbous!

The Mascara Snake: Fast ‘n bulbous!

Beefheart: That’s right… [snickers]

Engineer: Okay, do it again.

Beefheart: [aside] I just … I love those words…

The Mascara Snake: Fast ‘n bulbous!

Beefheart: That’s right, The Mascara Snake, fast ‘n bulbous!

The Mascara Snake: Bulbous, also tapered.

Beefheart: Yeah, but you’ve got to wait until I say, “Also, a tin teardrop.”

The Mascara Snake: Oh, Christ…

Engineer: Again, beginning.

The Mascara Snake: Fast ‘n bulbous!

Beefheart: That’s right, The Mascara Snake, fast ‘n bulbous!  Also, a tin teardrop.

The Mascara Snake: Bulbous, also tapered.

Beefheart: That’s right!

The actual dialogue itself (as opposed to the very lucid stage directions) is, of course, pure gibberish, arbitrary and nonsensical. Before the track “Pachuco Cadaver” (the inexplicable single off the record), however, he does try to offer somewhat of an explanation of the phrase “fast ‘n bulbous” with the statement: “A squid eating dough out of a polyethylene bag is fast ‘n bulbous. Got me?”  Strangely, this is actually quite helpful.  It’s not so much that an actual squid eating dough out of a polyethylene bag is really fast and/or bulbous (though it does present a wonderful, grotesque image); rather, the phrase itself is fast ‘n bulbous.

For Beefheart’s purposes, however, this is beside the point: he just enjoys the phrase itself as an acoustic-semantic phenomenon: “I love those words.” Each pronunciation of the phrase is attended with salivatory relish; Beefheart seems to swill the words around his mouth like a shot of fine whiskey, savouring with cunnilingual glee the physical utterance of the words.  Except, of course, these aren’t delicious morsels to be swallowed, but rather regurgitations being enjoyed on their way out.  As “steel-appendage guitar” player Antennae Jimmy Semens reports in “Pena” itself: “Smoke billowing up from between her legs / Made me vomit beautifully.”  A perfect description of Beefheart’s lyrics: beautiful vomit .

Moreover, his insistence that The Mascara Snake get the absurd dialogue exactly right shows that this isn’t just random nonsense.  Like The Magic Band’s music, it is precisely crafted non-sense; the vomit is arranged.  “Bulbous, also tapered” simply cannot come without having before it “Also, a tin teardrop”.  Perhaps “bulbous” is such a powerfully humourous word that its instances must be spread out.

A gifted painter (as a child, he was recognized as a prodigy by famed Portuguese sculpter Augustino Rodriguez; however, all Internet searches for Mr. Rodriguez only reference the Beefheart connection, so this claim is spurious), Beefheart uses words like pigments, playing with the sounds they produce and the tones they evoke.  Lyrically, he paints largely in shades of grotesque and bodily on Trout Mask Replica with vaguely organic hues (elsewhere his lyrics can range from Dadaist environmentalist sloganeering to skewed blues pastiches to sincere, almost ordinary, love songs).  Perhaps this is most typically atypically displayed in the beautifully titled “Neon Meate Dream Of A Octafish”:

Lucid tentacles test ‘n sleeved ‘n joined ‘n jointed jade pointed diamond back patterns

Neon meate dream of a octafish

…

In jest incest ingest injust in feast incessed

‘n specks ‘spreckled spreckled

Speckled speculation

The images he presents combine into some horrifying, and possibly psilocybin induced, malacalogical nightmare where “archaic faces frenzy” at the “fedlocks waddlin’ feast”, but this only heightens the acoustic beauty of the vocal phrasing (and, man, Beefheart’s got a pretty good flow, not dissimilar to the work of one Ol’ Dirty Bastard).  It’s as if he’s making fun of [or with...?] the differance between the word-as-sound and the concept to which it refers; playing in the referential gap, as it were. If it is true that poetry is language that aspires to be music, then Captain Beefheart’s work is the apotheosis of poetry.  Just say this comparatively mundane line from “Safe As Milk” out loud: “Cheese in the corner with a mile long beard / Bacon blue, bread dog-eared.”  Beautiful, isn’t it?  And, more to the point, fun to say.

Of course, Beefheart’s words are inseparable from his singular vocal abilities; allegedly, and possibly apocryphally, he possessed a five and a half octave range.  “Her Eyes Are A Blue Million Miles”, from 1972’s Clear Spot and featured in The Big Lebowski, is perhaps the closest thing to a conventional song in his catalogue.  The dissonant guitar lines of the Trout Mask era are brought into harmonic focus and the Captain opts to use his seldom-used soft croon voice.  With the vocal volume turned down from eleven, Beefheart brings incredible subtlety to the repetitive lyrics.

In the first repeat of the verse, he sings “I don’t know what she sees in a man like me, but she says she loves me”.  The second half of the line is delivered abruptly, with a defiance that belies a certain insecurity which is revealed when the same line is delivered in the second repeat: here, Beefheart trails off into a mumbled whisper, quieted and resigned to the fact that he may not be deserving of requitance for his love and that she only says she loves him.

Elsewhere, the different musical shadings given to each repeat of the song’s title colour the phrase with an evershifting and kaleidoscopic polyphony of different meanings as the girl in question’s eyes oscillate (not unlike a particle in quantum mechanics) between depth and distance.  Is the singer falling deep into the caring wells of his beloved’s eyes, or is her gaze a million miles away from the self-declared object of her affection?

Ultimately, however, like the Lovecraft-on-shrooms material of his earlier work, the semantic meaning of the words is shorn off; its repetition here turns the words into a mantra, fulfilling the same role as the nonsensical phrases of Trout Mask Replica. The aesthetic of Beefheart’s songs derives from this agonistic struggle between the sounds of the words themselves as musical objects and the, for lack of a better term, literal meaning they produce in reception: a civil war in the Sign Republic.

And this play of words is one facet of a larger impulse that flows throughout Beefheart’s work.  Though by his own admission, he often creates “opaque melodies that would bug most people”, Beefheart’s delight in the beauty of the vocal deliverance of strangely grotesque, vaguely biological imagery goes hand in hand with the tight weaving of dissonant guitar lines and interlocking drum patterns  that characterises his music (drummer John “Drumbo” French cannot be praised enough for both his drumming and arranging work).  The strange, angular melodies, often in different modes or keys, and the various clattering percussive riffs are mixed together in the same paintlike manner as his stream of consciousness lyrics.

Moreover, they only “bug” us because, like the strange verbal images of his lyrics, they are unfamiliar to us.  Like the musical avant-garde so beloved by Zappa, Beefheart has produced “original” music by eschewing convention.  However, while much avant-garde music is a calculated effort to avoid various rules and conventions at all costs (thereby inadvertently affirming the very rules it asserts to ignore), Beefheart, by all reports, is the real deal: a child in a sandbox dreaming up games to which he can set his own rules. Though Beefheart is certainly a skilled and deft musician as a vocalist and composer (to say nothing of the virtuosity of the various Magic Bands), he also has a naive freedom to his music and manages to come across as the Romantic ideal of the artist naïf.

In a piece on the Stooges, rock critic Lester Bangs retells free-jazz pianist Cecil Taylor’s story of an unknown and “freaked out” man who, having just walked in off the street, asked to sit in on double-bass with the band at some New York jazz club.  It quickly became apparent that the man had no prior musical experience: “He didn’t even know how to hold the instrument, so he just explored as a child would, pursuing songs or evocative sounds through the tangles of his ignorance.” Though certainly not musically ignorant (the Captain can also effortlessly slip into more conventional modes such as the above cited “Her Eyes Are A Blue Million Miles”), Beefheart’s music still has the same “unschooled innocence which cuts across known systems” Cecil Taylor saw in that enigmatic un-bassist.

One of the characteristics of avant-garde music (or, indeed, avant-garde art in general) is that it makes a point of flaunting convention by “breaking the rules” of established ideas of harmony and rhythm.  By deliberately setting out to break the rules, however, this still ultimately asserts the rules as rules (albethey rules to be broken).

Unlike the self-conscious avant-garde, Beefheart doesn’t simply invert systems by turning their prohibitions into proscriptions and vice versa; he ignores them, and instead of seeing music as a puzzle, he approaches it as pure free play.   This avoidance of systems becomes a metaphoric leitmotif throughout the record which represents itself, in content and form, an abandonment of order in favour of anarchic fun.

On Trout Mask Replica’s opening track, he declares: “My smile is stuck / I cannot go back t’ yer Frownland.”  Frownland is the grim meathook reality of the human world built on sensible language and purported order.  This is the horrible place of “Dachau Blues” and the “Veteran’s Day Poppy” (unike the opium poppy, “It don’t get me high / It can only make me cry”), and is abandoned in favour of an assortment of opiated invertebrate reveries.

The various musical and semantic rules and regulations are just as much products of Frownland as war and pollution.  It’s not that Trout Mask Replica is about retreating from (or advancing beyond?) imposed order; rather, its creation is the withdrawal (or liberation) itself.  And if there is a message to the record, it’s that all of us can follow along by literally playing along.  As he tells us in “My Human Gets Me Blues”:

I see you baby in yer x-ray gingham dress

I knew you were under duress

I knew you under yer dress

…

I could see the fear in yer windows

Under yer furry crawlin’ brow

Uh silver bow rings up in inches

You were afraid to be the devils’ red wife

But its alright God dug yer dance

‘n would have you young ‘n in his harem

In his own way, Beefheart is like James Joyce’s idealization of the artist: flying high above the various nets of society, albeit in the mousetrapreplica blimp (“The blimp! The blimp! / The drazy hoops! The drazy hoops!”).  Unlike the woman in “My Human Gets Me Blues”, he has not bought into a dualist metaphysics that through imposed rules demonizes pleasure.  Hmm, seems like the Captain’s been reading William Blake, or perhaps some Neecher.  Either way, he has traded “fear” and “duress” for joy and ecstasy and calls all of us to join him in his — our — dance.

Not chaotic (Beefheart’s music still makes use of traditional forms, it just twists them), he transcends order, whether it be diatonic harmony or keeping one’s clothes on.  To wit, “The Dust Blows Forward ‘N The Dust Blows Back”: “Well I put down my bush / ‘n took off my pants ‘n felt free / The breeze blowin’ up me / ‘n up the canyon far as I could see.”  Disrobed of conventions, Beefheart is able to turn what would otherwise be a solipsistic retreat from the ugliness of the human world into a glorious and utterly mad flight of fancy.

But it’s important to stress that this is not a challenge to order which itself would be a game based on Order’s rules; it’s a side-game altogether apart from order in which the rules of the main game can be adopted, mutated, and discarded at will.  I’m reminded of a brief moment from the Internet cartoon Homestar Runner, where noted non-sequiturist Homsar is playing Connect 4 and responds to another character’s move with: “Oh no! You shanked my jengaship.”  Like Beefheart, Homsar disregards the rules of the game he is playing in favour of his own cobbled-together mash-up of various other games. Just as in any good game of Calvinball, Order is trumped by creativity and freedom.

All in all, Beefheart’s music embodies what the great Roland Barthes calls jouissance: the joyous pleasure entailing the highest appreciation for a work of art.  Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band are great because their music is created with that same jouissant principle as its driving impulse.  We can hear that in the outtake aside, “I just love those words”; in the smirking snort at the end of the fifteen minute free-blues jam “Mirror Man”; in the huckster-like reception the Captain gives two bewildered hippies who stumbled upon the band “recording bush”; in every goddamn gonzo line of Trout Mask Replica.

During the course of a concert recorded in 1978 (and released as a live album in 2000), Beefheart responds to the audience’s constant demands for various songs by telling them “I’m going to do what I wanna do”, a pretty apt summation of his whole oeuvre.*  If only more artists would approach their art in this manner. Forget about working to please the audience; feel free to pleasure yourself.

*Except the two middle-period records Unconditionally Guaranteed and Bluejeans & Moonbeams; pretty much everything  I’ve stated in this piece doesn’t apply to them.