Junk for Code

surrealism & rock

I lost the plot yesterday when I was going back through my back pages to where I'd once been. That was a time when popular music seemed to burst with cultural possibility. I was going back to where I'd been many years ago; a point in time when the 1968er's fed their head, and reckoned they were going to change the world. I've moved away, but many of the rock declinists have devoted some time to figuring out how they could have got it so wrong.

On this cultural journey through yesterday to recover my childish things, I wore the hat of a rock critic disenchanted with rock; one whose aesthetic roots lay in Kant, Hegel and Adorno. This perspective approaches popular music as both a tradition and an industry; and as both a way of entertainment and a way of art.

In the afternoon I became caught up in exploring 'art works' in the pop music industry, the role of the avant garde in a rock music and the commercial and intellectual vacuum of the industry. The conventional rock terms for my aesthetic concerns are 'underground music' and 'mainstream music' that stands resolutely opposed to the crudities of the pessimistic cultural theoriests.

These terms of 'underground' and 'mainstream' sit comfortably in an way of thinking that holds rock music is proudly popular music, is progressive and of the people; whilst painting, as a high art is conservative and despised. Underneath this habitual mode of thinking sits a Nietzschean narrative of Dionysist rock versus Apollonian" pop, with rock as the triumphal stage (historical end point?) in the evolution of popular music.

Did the surrealist movement become a part of the innovative rock music that transgressed the boundaries of the conventional pop song? In rock music excess was generally associated with the rock lifestyle, not the musical form or composition.

Composition in rock music? Rock was about monster riffs and showmanship a la the Rolling Stones. And lipstick traces.

In a nostalgic mood in the afternoon, I wandered the empty city streets pulsating with the moral apocalypse. I made my way to the bookshops in the city, looking for books on the history of rock/pop music to help me recover my past. Alas, most books on the subject I came across were either books about the music industry, or individual musicians with the better ones giving a national interpretation of the history of rock music.

I found nothing I was looking for. So I ordered Lester Bangs' Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung; a reader, edited by Greil Marcus. I didn't know about the latter Mainlines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste: A Lester Bangs Reader (edited by John Morthland) this afternoon. Why Lester Bangs? Lester clicked to what Beefheart did to musical form, and did with ensemble improvisation.

My memory said surrealism in rock = Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band. I remembered I once owned Safe As Milk; or was it The Spotlight Kid? Maybe both. The covers look familar. After much searching and listening I judged that Trout Mask Replica is the classic example of the surrealist avant garde in rock music.

I walked back to the inner city apartment hear bits and pieces of old songs floating out from AM and FM radio in the shops and cars. I was acutely aware of the threatening, but veiled presence, of the law and order machine responding to the felt nihilism of the moral apocalypse.

I thought about whether I could play the Trout Mask Replica. Suzanne finds even the simmering flowing and exploding lines of The Grateful Dead's innovative Live/Dead pretty inaccessible, distorting and alienating. Music that straddles the border between blues, jazz, rock and classical music is going to sound like the sound track from hell on Sunday mornings. Honestly, I have no hope of selling this musical language that violently questions received western notions of harmony.

Captain Beefheart gave up making music in the early 80's and turned to painting in the Mojave Desert:

Don Van Vliet, Last Of A Dying Breed, 1982

The image is more abstract than surreal. Its very painterly, and though produced by West Coast hermit, it is linked to the abstract expressionism in New York.

The surrealism was in the music. In his History of Rock Music Piero Scaruffi pinpoints this. He says:

"If the rest of rock music put its heart into music, Van Vliet put his mind into it, but not the rational mind, rather the instinctive and primordial one, the mind torn to pieces by the frustrations and the contradictions of modern society, the mind of the collective subconscious that expresses itself in twitches, growls, roars and howls, like an animal in a cage."

You get a hit of this expressionism in this painting:

Don Van Vliet, Check Bif, 1986

Piero then introduces surealism. Captain Beefheart, he says, achieved:

"...the musical equivalent of a frightful visual deformation, a sort of demented exaggeration of the artistic dogmas of surrealism, Dadaism and cubism.
In order to realize that crazy deformation, that spatial-temporal warping, that apocalyptic and blasphemous perspective, Van Vliet exploited his outrageous vocal versatility that allowed him to impersonate all kinds of different and extreme characters in a subliminal performance of schizophrenia, often within the same piece, and to visit states of psychic depression and hallucination with all the grace of a charging rhinoceros."

Beefheart is the musical equivalent of surrealism in the visual arts.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at February 1, 2004 09:45 AM | TrackBack