In Which The Original Rube Confronts The Notion of Ambiconstruable Art
Do you think the first culinary mavens to eat a dish prepared by a chef wielding a syringe and a foamer enjoyed it? Say it was duck breast injected with concentrated muskmelon nectar and then pan-seared and steamed over black tea and truffles and sauced with a foam consisting of lingonberry juice, lobster roe, bacon fat and lemongrass. Do you think the hardcore foodies who tasted this theoretical trainwreck of taste, texure, and cutting-edge technique really dug it for what it was, or just tripped out on the novelty?
I sort of suspect the latter. I am a big fan of "difficult" music (meaning everything from experimental noise rock to the mathematical compositions of Webern and Subotnick), but I do have to ask sometimes whether a particular example is more pretentious than good. Even leaving aside obvious rock-era eff-yous as Lou Reed's "Metal Machine Music" and the famous lost Van Morrison Contractual Fulfillment album, how many owners of legitimately musical yet hard to listen to albums by the Boredoms, Big Black, Captain Beefheart and Cecil Taylor give them a spin very often?
Oh, I know, some people really really can't get enough of Steve Albini or skronky free jazz, but on the whole... how does one tell Shinola from the other stuff? How do you distinguish "weird but kinda good" from "weird for the sake of weird?" Sometimes, sophisticate that I am, I feel like the Original Rube standing on a tiled floor in an art gallery asking passers-by about that Duchamp piece, "am I supposed to admire this, or am I supposed to pee in it?"
I raise this question thanks to the Sleepytime Gorilla Museum. Consisting of five Bay Area musicians who, all veterans of various avant-garde projects, the Museum present themselves as the travelling roadshow for the fictitious institution in question (no humans allowed!), a group of musicians "unified in [their] various crafts by the simplicity of their opposition to rock music." Their presskit and general presentation is strongly reminiscent of the anarcho-dada absurdist smartassery of Semiotext[e], the Church of the Subgenius, and of the original Dada and Surrealist movements. This is a dangerous road to travel: Dada and Surrealism proved that absurdism and randomness are a neat tricks once and once only, and only a few individuals have the patience and mental fortitude to hang on through the mass of random fish and sludgehammers to find their own faces in the wallpaper. (What?)
...On Natural History, the new album by the Sleepytime Gorilla Museum, isn't simply random. That much I can tell. In fact, there are as many as five minutes at a stretch where the band play enjoyable freaky music without bizarre intrusions or unheralded switch-ups. There also seems to be some kind of overarching concept to the album, a story pitting humanity against the "Adversary" in a prog-rock pastiche of everything from Pilgrim's Progress to "Funkentelechy vs. The Placebo Syndrome." My best proof of this is from the song titles, the first few of which are: "A Hymn to the Morning Star," "The Donkey-Headed Adversary of Humanity Opens The Discussion," "Phthisis" (a gloss on Egyptian gods P'tah and Isis?), and "Bring Back The Apocalypse." I'm not sure from the lyrics either exactly what they're getting at, but I've read Naked Lunch about a dozen times too, and even though I figured out the plot after the third or fourth time I still have no idea what that scene where they autoerotically execute that beautiful young boy is supposed to do with, well, anything at all.
Although I can tell sort of what ...On Natural History is about, I'm much less certain whether it's any good. One saving grace of some avant-rock albums is that they retain song structures even as they jettison most other musical conventions. Structure helps the mind orient itself to the piece so that the listener has something to hang onto-- it does help to be able to say to oneself "oh, here's the trashcan and screaming lady part again... I get it!" The Boredoms are great at this trick, as was Captain Beefheart's Magic Band circa "Trout Mask Replica." Even that little morsel of order can help a bewildered listener make an aestheic and emotional judgement as to whether or not they like what they're hearing.
But other times this strategy falls down. There's a difference, for example, between the Frank Zappa of Weasels Ripped My Flesh and the Frank Zappa of 200 Motels, and that difference means the world to me. "Weasels" makes sense, more or less. The "ee-uuh! Eee-uuh!" part of "Toads of the Short Forest" works, in that it makes musical sense and in fact shows up elsewhere as what Romantic composers would call a leitmotiv. On the other hand, the entirety of 200 Motels sounds to me like a totally incomprehensible hermetic fever-dream. The result: despite the presence of some nominal structure, the listener (i.e., me) remains bewildered (by chance or design) and in the case of this listener, feels a bit like the nonplussed victim of some obscure and unfunny practical joke. Is it damn thing art or a urinal?
Sleepytime Gorilla Museum's music falls into a middle region between Naked Lunch and 200 Motels. Most of the album does away with traditional structures (with parts organized ABACA for example), instead putting parts one after another (ABCDEF) in a string. When Metallica used to do this, it was okay (they didn't use the opportunity to, say switch abruptly between guitar and flute choir), but The Museum's transitions tend to be more jarring than the scale of their compositions can support. I suppose I should have expected this kind of high weirdness from a Bay Area collective featuring one third of the excellent Tin Hat Trio (violinist etc. Carla Kihlstedt) and veterans of other arty-sounding acts like Skeleton Key, Idiot Flesh, and Vic Thrill. Still, the experimental structures of ...Of Natural History make it very much a land without a map, and it's up to you to decide whether that's your bag of candy.
The actual musical sounds that are hung on the structure are... interesting... too. Rocketing between mock-opera flourishes (like a baritone intoning "O loathesome crawling thing, be done / with your miniscule affairs" accompanied by autoharp) and arty soundscapes replete with scratchy violin, homemade instruments and the occasional headbanging metal guitar interlude, most of ...On Natural History feels pretty much like weird for weird's sake. Many of the melodies, such as they are, are reminiscent of French-opera recitative, the quasimusical talky bits that move matters along between big numbers. This isn't so bad in and of itself, and there is nothing inherently wrong with doing weird things. However, this can quickly turn into a stunt, a tightrope walk between thwarting listener expectations and making music so involuted and twisty that the listener just wants it to stop.
After a good dozen runs through ...On Natural History, I have come to admire the care that went into recording the album, complete with great layering and separation and wonderfully mastered agreement between soft and loud patches, but have found most of the actual music forbiddingly formless and inscrutably, even enthusiastically weird, like Alfred Jarre's absurdist theater piece Pere Ubu performed entirely in Pig Latin. And I don't dig it.
Understand: there are albums outside music that for whatever reason grab me as a listener and music enthusiast and shows me something I'd never thought of before. I dig the Boredoms and Mr. Bungle for that reason exactly. And then there are albums of outside music that aspire to do the same thing and fail as such high-risk endeavors do: awfully, publicly, and utterly. Zappa managed this unfortunate trick a good half dozen times throughout his career. And as much as it surprises me to say so, ... On Natural History does so too.
I know for a fact there is an audience out there for this kind of thing. You might find ...on Natural History entertainingly freaky. In fact, I with my recordings of Xenakis and Harry Parch and lifesize cardboard cutout of Anton Webern am shocked and appalled to find that I am not part of that audience.
It is probable that the Sleepytime Gorilla Museum really excel in a
live setting where the Felliniesque quality of their music can be matched by equally wacky visuals, sort of a carnival-apocalyptic live-action Un Chien Andalou, if you'll let me mix my art-movie metaphors. But as an album, as a piece of music in its own right, this reluctant rube is pretty sure ...On Natural History is just a urinal.
This post also appears at blogcritics.org
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Based on your strained and
Based on your strained and ultimately futile efforts to like this album, I can be fairly sure that I would probably piss in it. Avant-rock and indeed most of modern art no matter the medium is, to me, an unfunny practical joke.
Tom Wolfe had it right in the Painted Word. Most of this stuff is only considered art because of a conspiracy of literati, and the only way to understand even a glimmering of most modern art is to be already steeped in the theory that supports it. Post Modernism leaves me cold to begin with, so it is unlikely that I'd be willing to go to enormous lengths to understand some East Village wanker's manifesto, just so I can look at the newest version of piss christ and "get" what its all about.
I firmly believe that art should mean something, and have an aesthetic quality independent of theory. Now, if I learn more about art history and renaissance culture I will deepen and increase my appreciation of, say, Rembrandt. If I study literature, my appreciation for Hamlet will be more profound. But there was something there to begin with, something that could affect me without preparation on my part.
I look at a Jackson Pollock and I see paint. I think these dudes are in the same universe, and it's one I don't like visiting.
"Most of this stuff is only
"Most of this stuff is only considered art because of a conspiracy of literati, and the only way to understand even a glimmering of most modern art is to be already steeped in the theory that supports it."
See, that's more true for visual art than it is for music. Music lacks the overwhelming "theorah," to use the Cartmanesque pronunciation that folds in "authoritah!," that visual art does, unless you get deep into art-music (the proper term for "modern classical") discussions. In the rock/pop/folks with guitars arena, there's not much theory to clutter it up.
"I firmly believe that art should mean something, and have an aesthetic quality independent of theory."
I'm afraid that's a tautology. Art is not a tree. A tree exists regardless of the theoretical framework you use to describe it. Art, on the other hand, only takes on beauty and meaning when theory is brought to the table. You will undoubtedly disagree, but I do believe that all meaning in art is extrinsic rather than intrinsic to the piece.
That you refer to art "that could affect you without preparation on my part" means that the "theory" of aesthetics you rely on is part of the warp and weft of the culture you were brought up in, rather than something that mainly exists in the minds of artists, gallery owners, and ArtForum. (There is, by the way, no value judgment inherent in that statement.) Without that theory, which is indeed part of the very structure of Western society at this point, it's just paint on canvas or smooth marble.
Me, I look at Jackson Pollock and I see what I want to see, and I love it, conspiracy of tastemakers or not. In the case of Sleepytime Gorilla Museum, I don't think there is that army of tastemakers, and I think the band are honestly trying for something arch, weird, and aesthetically coherent. But absent that fleet of tastemakers, there is no guide as to extrinsic worth except one's innate tastes. And I think it sucks.
Yeah, there's a lot that
Yeah, there's a lot that boils down to taste, taste usually informed by your culture. But on the other hand, while art isn't a tree - a physical object you can refer to - there are specific instances of art that are. And while the boundaries of what is nice are certainly fuzzy, there is a lot of overlap in what people find beautiful. I think a lot of our aesthetics are for all practical purposes hardwired. People around the world find the same things beautiful. And art, pre "modern art" anyway, is generally geared toward that sense.
Even some modern art still holds to that Dali and escher and even Picasso still made things that were arresting, beautiful, and so on, even on first sight.
A lot of that is fanciful, even bizarre. No problem there - but if you look at all the art produced before 1900, you can kind of abstract an aesthetic. But after that, there seems to be an awful lot of ugliness passed off as avante garde or what have you. It sometimes seems like it was a willful and rather cruel imposition of all this stuff on an unwilling audience by people who frankly despised that audience.
Look at modern art - "White Painting" or random pain splatters, or on the other side, Warhol's recolored commercial art. Even more vindictive is pretty much all of late twentieth century architecture going back to Le Courbiousier or however the hell you spell his stupid French name. The shitabrick style of architecture was sold as "functional" but they hurt the eyes and cause Legionaire's disease, and contribute to all the alienation the creators suffered from. It's like they had miserable lives, and wanted everyone else to suffer as they did. No matter that most people wanted to live in comfortable, cozy houses with eaves, not concrete blocks sans "Bourgeois ornamentation."
My knowledge of music is (to put it charitably) a lot smaller than yours. But it seems to me that even if it is lacking literary art theory like the visual arts, it is operating on some of the same trends. The modern classical music you mentioned certainly is, and I've personally suffered through many art bands/performance noise art/painful scratchings and wailings and I think most of it is just a audio version of of the post office in my home town.
Art can't be just what you (or any one individual) likes. Not that I care if some perverted individual creates joy for himself buy immersing an image of the Virgin Mary in elephant crap, but I do care if he insists past all reason that it is art that I *must* respect.
For it to be art, at a minimum there has to be participation on both the artist and the audience side. Most modern art is wanking, in that they don't care to communicate with their audience.