Don
Van Vliet, aka Captain Beefheart, singer, composer, wind-player,
theorist, bully and animating genius of the seminal avant-garde
rock group was driven by a horror of the “mama heartbeat”:
I don’t do BUM-BUM-BUM – you know, mama heartbeat drums. I can’t
imagine anyone wanting to put that much emphasis on a heartbeat, because a
heartbeat… well, I don’t want my heart to attack me so I don’t
do that. I won’t.1
A tendency to personify parts of
the body in a self-protective and flippant wordplay which evokes
in order to baffle with silliness, this is the essence of Van
Vliet’s public manner. But this heart which might attack,
if it is not appeased with kindness, reveals a struggle with
a phantom enemy within; an obscure war which the subject wages
against itself, buying protection against the libidinalised menace
through obeisance to a symbolic ally: “If you only let
it not be a heart attack, God, I’ll believe in you forever.” The
wager of the first panic attack, when the heart of the child
finds that it cannot beat itself back to the womb; and the wager,
perhaps, of the last, when the body is finally expelled from
the protective sheath of medical science. When the heart is on
its own; when you are on your own with your heart.
Captain Beefheart
drummer John French tells a story from the early days of the
group: the scene is a warm-up gig for the Monterey
Pop Festival, Van Vliet who has been suffering regular panic
attacks has just arrived on stage and bellowed the title of the
song “Eeeelectricity” (Safe As Milk). A blank ensues,
the rest of the lyric is blocked and Van Vliet walks off the
back of the elevated stage, falling onto the manager’s
head2.
In the light of this incident, let us pose a technical question : how does electricity
kill? Answer : by causing the heart muscles to contract out of
synch; the heart loses the beat and breaks time. This is known
as ventricular fibrillation, and translated into music it might
well sound like the nervous pulses and competing organic urges
typical of the Captain Beefheart sound, and first brought to
perfection on the album Trout Mask Replica which appeared in
1969. By his own confession, Van Vliet did not want to be born:
I was born with my eyes open - I didn’t WANT
to be born - I can remember deep down in my head that I fought
against my
mother bringing me into the world.
(Barnes, 2000, p2)
Deep down in his head, or deep down in his heart, perhaps, where
the repetitive boom-boom of the backbeat recalls this traumatic
entry into the world, where the heart of the infant, no longer
in synch with that of the mother, runs a lifelong risk of ventricular
fibrillation.
The primal trauma of birth is also the first social trauma where
the new-born baby must knuckle down and negotiate a truce with
the world; separation from the maternal beat coincides with the
need to construct oneself as an individual. Whereby most people
respond to the post-natal social imperative by becoming an oxymoron
(that is, a normal individual), Van Vliet became a maverick who
attempted to recreate the world in the image of his idiosyncrasies.
The backbeat, in reminding Van Vliet of the pre-individual bliss
of his mother’s womb, also, it seems, goaded him with an
aural imago of post-individual cultural conformism. His reaction
was to throw a psychic stone at these two psychic birds, in the
hope of killing them both. The mama heartbeat of rock’n’roll
had to go, and the regular pulse, as a defining characteristic
of the musical form he had chosen to work in, thus became the
defining formal problematic of Van Vliet’s musical career.
In compositional terms this led to an explosion of rhythmic constraints,
as John French explained with reference to his role as drummer:
My first concept was, “I’ll take the bass rhythm
and put it on bass drum, I’ll take one guitar and use cymbals
and snare. I’ll take the other guitar and use just toms.
I’ll try to put it all together, see what happens. Boy,
was I sorry that I decided to do that.3
Under Van Vliet’s incitement, French deconstructed the backbeat
by tailoring his patterns to the individual harmonic, melodic and lyrical
content of each track. The mama heartbeat and the trauma it inscribes
were thus expunged through fanatical rhythmic overdetermination.
Through his obsession with the backbeat, Van Vliet created problems
for himself at a number of levels and it may, in the end, have
been the chief reason behind his decision to abandon music for
painting in 1983. In psycho-sexual terms, the beat reminded Van
Vliet of his mother and of the intra-uterine security which,
if prolonged beyond infancy, would become a pattern of crushing
boredom and creative failure. The beat, then, also represents
the aesthetic problem of the solidifying form, to which any artist
of individual vision is particularly sensitive. On the social
plane, the beat highlighted the compromises of group production,
as a pragmatic device for making sure that everybody plays together
in spite of individual deviancies. Submission to a regular beat
was for Van Vliet a surrender of the individual to the soporific
sameness of the common denominator; and for this reason, perhaps,
he was always jumping in and out of things, filling and then
emptying the spaces and institutions of popular music with himself
and his project.
Remarking on Van Vliet’s failure to pass his first audition
for the Bongo Fury tour in 1975, Frank Zappa stressed the singer’s
inability to “make things happen on the beat” (Barnes,
2000, p218). Was this slack musicianship or another example of
Van Vliet’s aversion to the group discipline of strict
timing ? Commenting on the two albums produced by Mallard, which
was formed around the nucleus of Bill Harkleroad and Mark Boston,
former key members of the Trout Mask Magic Band, Van Vliet again
referred to the “mama heartbeat” as a commercially-motivated
surrender to conformism:
Well…that same beat…. what
are they gonna do, make money with that or something? Everybody’s
different. Why do they make it one thing? … Why so much
emphasis, emphasis, emphasis, why do they keep doing that same
beat? It’s boring.
I’ve never been able to enjoy that. I mean it’s too
forced. Too hypnotic.4
The implication is that individuality is unmarketable and that
rock’n’roll performs a devolutionary tabula
rasa in which mass appeal is achieved through a suppression of originality.
The hypnotic beat appeases the listener’s anxieties,
just as the maternal heartbeat mollifies the infant: as the
baby is grooved back into serenity, so the record-buying subject
is soothed into making the purchase. But Van Vliet’s
analogy also works on a more subjective level, where the dubious
practice of psycho-biography crosses over into a somatics of
cultural production and reception, where the particular body
of the individual artist is recognised as a privileged site
of discussion only insofar as it allows us to investigate the
modalities of physical presence in art and culture. Don Van
Vliet’s interviews read like a demonstration of evasiveness,
but somatic criticism works on the assumption that the slippery
subject may be run to ground in the body, and Van Vliet’s
insistent rejection of the “mama heartbeat” focuses
attention on the cardio-vascular system as a viable context
for a discussion of the special rhythmicity of Captain Beefheart.
That it should be the mother’s heartbeat specifically
that Van Vliet assails in his compositional practice restores
to our discussion the neurotic scene and libidinal investiture
of the bodily function, without which cultural somatics would
be mere observation, a tributary of medical science.
In the late 1950s Vliet’s father had a heart attack and, in the early
days of Captain Beefheart, Van Vliet junior began to suffer panic attacks,
as the fear of sharing his father’s fate combined with the pressures
of collective creativity and early stardom. Anecdotal evidence supplied by
Ry Cooder indicates that Van Vliet frequently had to be rushed to hospital
to be reassured that he was only hyperventilating, and that everything would
be alright5. Now, the panic attack, like the asthma attack, feeds on the horror
of a breathlessness which cannot be relieved by rest, of the cardio-vascular
system running out of control. Given that this was clearly Van Vliet’s
psychosomatic symptom of preference, it is revealing that the fifth of his “Ten
Commandments of Guitar Playing” should read in part: “You should
play like a drowning man struggling to reach shore.”6 Once again we note
a tendency in Van Vliet to project his physical fears into music; and this
interest in the creative potential of breathlessness is confirmed by his saxophone
performances on Trout Mask Replica and elsewhere, where the human body oxygenating
itself in extremis works as an experimental context for the testing of the
modes and limits of musical reception. The locus classicus of this effect is
the track “Japan in a Dishpan” (Lick My Decals Off, Baby) where
it sounds as if Van Vliet is taking up his own advice to guitar players and
applying it through the soprano sax. If he is playing like a drowning man,
a question for somatic criticism might be “what exactly is the shore
he is trying to reach?” A Rankian analysis of this musical panic attack
would suggest that Van Vliet’s asphyxiated playing and composing represents
a return of the primal trauma of birth, and what the hyperventilating musician
is trying to reach is the haven of the womb:
…man, because of his long period of pregnancy and with
the help of later-developed and higher capacities for thought,
attempts, in every conceivable way, to re-establish, as it were,
creatively the real primal condition. He succeeds in doing this
with a great amount of pleasure in the socially adjusted fantasy
products of art, religion, mythology; whereas he fails piteously
in the neurosis.
(Rank, 1994, p28)
In such an analysis, the musical panic attack would stand as
the unconscious return of the mother imago repressed through
Van Vliet’s routing of the beat. The body which refuses
the mama heartbeat is doomed to respiratory panic, and Van
Vliet, under the far from accidental nom de guerre Captain
Beefheart, uniquely performs this psychosomatic struggle as
music.7
To be a member of this band was to be implicated in Van Vliet’s
struggle with the rhythmicity of breathing, which, as we have
seen, was also played out on the social plane in the struggle
between individual and group: who would follow who’s beat?
Who was the heart of this oddly beating body? Could a body of
musicians function without a heart? And what passes between group
members also passes between the music and its audience ; somatic
criticism therefore should also take into account the body of
the listener and how it responds to the special agitations of
Captain Beefheart.
In yet another reference to the detested mama heartbeat, Van
Vliet suggests that the listening body will respond hypersensitively
to his music through an over-stimulation of the ear which prevents
it from registering the sonic information unconsciously :
Rock’n’roll has a fixation, that bam, bam, bam,
bam, bam, mama heartbeat. I don’t like hypnotics. You
see I’m doing a non-hypnotic music to break up the catatonic
state.8
In non-soporific music the body is denied anything it can groove
to automatically; such music is designed to be hostile to the
ear’s need for a sonic projection of the body’s
beat. “Space age couple why don’t you flex your
magic muscle”9 wrote Van Vliet, and this might be taken
as an incitement to a new, more consciously muscular kind of
hearing where the beat is broken up and listened to in fragments,
where the fanatical ear grooves to the constituents of rhythm,
where each beat is a discrete compositional element. Compared
to the alienated listening of rock’n’roll, where
the hypnotic beat effects a glib passage between the semiotic
and the somatic, where rhythm acts on the body as a subliminal
sign of itself, Van Vliet is trying to perform a physical seizure
of the musical instant in time. Listening in fragments is like
listening to each heartbeat and appreciating its individual
qualities: “That one was better than the last, not as
gay, more restrained, I bet the next one will be the best yet.” Or,
if we return to the analogy of the panic attack: “That
beat definitely wasn’t normal, will the next one restore
order and save me? That one was slightly better, slightly shallower,
oh I can feel that the next one is going to be the last.” The
terror here is of a body divided between the voluntary and
the involuntary, of a self-absorbed system becoming conscious
of itself and its multiple vulnerabilities. Captain Beefheart,
like anxiety, would also deny us the involuntary, as the listening
body (which includes that of the performer) is divided between
its life-sustaining organs of respiration and the sense-making
pleasure-giving organs of audition: the tympanum responds to
the wiggles and lurches of Captain Beefheart by sending strange
and awkward pulses to the brain, which hammers back out of
time. Released from the womb of regularity, where a shared
circulation unites mother and infant in a single all-around
sound system, the body experiences its temporality as complex
sound, freely accented. In his essay “Listening”,
Roland Barthes insists on a familiar distinction between “signifying” and “signification”,
evoking in relation to the music of John Cage a :
shimmering of signifiers, ceaselessly restored to a listening
which ceaselessly produces new ones from them without ever arresting
their meaning: this phenomenon of shimmering is called signifying as distinct from signification.
(1985, p259)
Though it may sound here a little like mere escapism, this signifying,
I would suggest, is akin to the agitations of arrested meaning
performed by Captain Beefheart, where rhythm is conceived of
as re-birth rather than regression. Whereas the signification
of the backbeat for Van Vliet was the mama heartbeat, in a
signifying music, where the body attends as closely as it can
(both in time and physiological space) to the stimuli it receives,
or is stimulated to do so against its inherent laziness, some
kind of freedom from familial imagoes may be envisaged. The
jouissance of performative listening (which Cage and
Captain Beefheart sought within the dissolving parameters of
their
different genres) allows the body to live its own temporality,
to discover it and hear it at the same time. Where sensuality
and physical self-presence fall together, even if only for
an instant, the effect is of an erotic utopia ideally detached
from mother10.
However, since listening is a subjective act impossible to
abstract from the listener’s psychic reality, an alternative
scenario presents itself : alive to the presence of its own
temporality in what it hears, the body also listens to itself
with a paranoid avidity of attention to each beat in the sequence
which makes up its life. Inevitably, in such a listening, the
ear begins to anticipate the last accent, the end of rhythm,
while pinning its hopes for immortality on an eventual modulation
of the groove.11
A key point of convergence between musicology and somatic criticism
is provided by John Cage’s observation that the body is
inevitably noisy. In 1951 Cage entered a sound-proof booth at
Harvard University in search of silence, what he heard instead
were :
Two sounds, one high and one low. When I described them to the
engineer in charge he informed me that the high one was my nervous
system in operation and the low one was my blood in circulation.
Until I die there will be sounds. And they will continue following
my death. One need not fear for the future of music.
(Quoted in Warr, 2000, p200)
In addition to these high and low tones, one imagines that the
rhythmic pulse and percussive whistle of Cage’s breathing
was also audible as his body systematically dismantled the myth
of silence, or exposed it as a dead myth, equating the future
of music with his own death. If the human body is the fundamental
ground against which sounds are made and music derived, respiration
might be seen both as a basic condition of the physical production
of sound, and as a determining factor in the organisation of
bodily noise into rhythm ; and we have seen how Don Van Vliet
has reacted against the psychic determinism implied by this synthesis.
Though it was only one episode in the development of Cage’s
panaural vision of music, the discovery of the body’s fundamental
resistance to silence importantly added a ludic imperative to
his ongoing expansion of musical means: while the body lives,
music is something we are stuck with, and since we are stuck
with it we might as well play ; an attitude thrown into relief
by the threat of infantilisation which Van Vliet felt in the
ryhthmicity of his own heartbeat.
The first and last things we hear, perhaps, are ourselves, and what we hear
in between, if we manage to distil it from the flux of sounds that assails
us, is also ourselves in the form of what we do, the ground level of behaviour
registered as bodily noise (sighing, belching, laughing, breathing, screaming,
etc.). Apparently it is difficult to listen to what we do without also hearing
what we are, and the element of surprise in Cage’s statement perhaps
registers this abrupt transition from the sociological to the existential,
where the body ceases to be an instrument of communication as it becomes an
absurd prevision of its own non-existence, or an anguished echo of the body
of its progenitors. The music of the body, in a sense, condemns the subject
to death since it projects a silence beyond bodily sound which, as Cage’s
experience makes clear, is essential to its survival. While the music continues,
therefore, it might be heard as some kind of morbid fanfare or macabre improvisation
prolonged to the point of expiration, which it ceaselessly tries to postpone.
The pulseless body in Cage is, quite simply, death, a silence which the subject
will never hear and which, in any case, would be inaudible behind all those
other hearts which continue to beat, those bodies which continue to thrum.
Absolute silence, in this perspective, is apocalyptic, the absence of sound
revealed by the ruin of all life12. While we may not fear then, for the future
of music, the music of the body may make for a fearful listen; and Cage’s
experience in the anechoic chamber helps us to re-hear a Van Vliet saxophone
solo, for example, as an expression of life itself expressing itself in order
to remain alive.
Cage’s response to his discovery was to launch an “exploration
into non-intention”13 in search
of a chance-based compositional practice which would produce music as naturally
and as natural as nature itself. The
music of the body, he seems to have decided, is coterminous with the music
of nature, and should be exploited as such without imposition of taste and
other manifestations of the ego. That awkward moment we noted in Captain Beefheart
where the body begins listening to itself in impossible detail is soothed out
of consideration by Cage’s neutralisation of the subject’s responsibilities.
The body’s progression towards an unbearable degree of self-consciousness
is checked by this assertion that all the body can do is what comes naturally.
Such an attitude would conjugate music with its absence, as in the following
declension : music ? sound ? noise ? interference ? disturbance ? difference
? indifference ? silence. The logic of this system is, of course, purely elective,
and Cage’s theories continue to invite the million dollar existential
question : “Are we nature ?” If the human body may produce involuntary
noise and contribute thus to nature’s cosmic cacophony, may it not also
manipulate the sonorities of its given condition and play upon itself, ludically
or otherwise ?
Cage’s annihilation of the ego in music was consistent with his rejection
of psychoanalysis in favour of Zen Buddhism. His religious convictions led
him to conclude that music shouldn’t attempt to communicate. Bodily noise,
like every other sound, should be submitted to the operations of chance to
produce compositions designed to “sober and quiet the mind…making
it susceptible to divine influences”14 ; music, he desired, should take
on the condition of nature, and a corollary of this assimilation is that nature
doesn’t communicate. If we are nature, then it is certainly true that
nature has nothing to say to us; it is in this sense that one long current
of heroic romanticism, based on the otherness of nature or the otherness of
man within nature, shrivels up and disappears in Jackson Pollock's famous assertion “I
am nature”15, a statement which boldly suppresses the awkward
presence of consciousness as a non-material element in a material world. Like
many issues
decided by religious conviction, the logic of the statement “nature doesn’t
communicate” begins to unravel if we consider the history of the question
alongside the question itself. If we ask, for example, “how do we know
we are nature?” then the proposition “nature doesn’t communicate” is
more difficult to sustain. Pollock’s own progression historicises his
assertion. His early work, with its surrealist engagement with dream, is clearly
informed by a concept of the unconscious, or, if we prefer, by the unconscious
itself. How then, we are entitled to ask, might we arrive at an absolute conscious
conviction of our naturalness against the backdrop of this subconscious dimension
of experience ? Does nature also embrace the subject’s unconscious ?
Is dream natural ?
Nature, unlike logic, of course does not yet have a history, and Cage’s
refusal to explore and exploit the human body as a musical instrument immediately
after his discovery of its inevitable status as musical entity confronts aesthetics
with the transcendentalism of religious thought. Sound poetry, as something
distinct from music, on the other hand, has, from its origins in the work of
Henri Chopin and François Dufrêne, been determined to hear this
instrumentality of the body in its sociological and existential modes. By treating
the body within an anthropological rather than a religious framework, sound
poetry is well placed to raise and raise again the issue of the sociological
and existential body within nature. Chopin’s use of respiration, in particular,
stages the issue of the voluntariness of bodily noise, its status as communication,
as a hesitant passage in and out of language. Sound, in Chopin, is the ghost
of what has been said, while words are haunted by the body as pure noise, Cage’s
nature. Sound poetry develops a historiography of breath which resolves the
two great existential questions so far evoked into a third, more desperate,
one: “What on earth are we?”16
If we can hear in such work the human body emerging as an extra-natural phenomenon,
Chopin’s pioneering use of recording and sound manipulation technology
anticipates the passage of the body into a further phase of existence which
we might even term “super-natural”. The articulation of breath
as verbal language, thus appears through sound poetry as merely one phase in
the long and unending history of the human organism. Far from being “in
the beginning” as the Book of Genesis would have us believe, the word
may have suggested itself somewhere along the way as simply something else
that can be done with the body, interposing itself, perhaps, between a grunt
and a sigh. Chopin clearly locates the origins of the word not in the vocal
cords but in the breath:
…we are a thousand, thousand,
thousand years with sound and the first instrument in the world
was the human or animal
voice. When you are born you are born with the voice. For your
breathing. And for me it is absolutely natural to find the music
together with the poetry.17
For many theorists of the human body the future is with us already
and it is prosthetic18.
Chopin’s strong sense of the ludic
imperative, which he shares with John Cage, led him to play
with the available technology, and it is through his infantile
sense of the body and its objects as co-extensive, a transitional
phase of subjectivity to be compared with Van Vliet’s
enthralment with the mother as primary object, that he effects
a transition from the anthropological to the futuristic:
being curious, I put the microphone in my mouth, and when you
put the microphone into your mouth, you have immediately four
or five different sounds. … inside you have an echo with
the liquid way in the mouth., with breathing, with a strong sound
from the tongue, you have respiration with the body… altogether,
it’s like a factory for sound. It was a great surprise
for me. The body is like a factory that never stops. The body
ignores silence. It is always a big factory, for example, on
the outside there is a very good silence, but if you put the
microphone inside it is like… America.19
To thrust a microphone into the mouth is an unnatural if inherently
musical act ; or perhaps we should think of it as an act of unnatural
music? In any case its sheer wilfulness amply demonstrates how
sharply Chopin’s practice differs from that of Cage, even
if their founding observations are essentially the same: that
the body knows nothing of silence. Chopin’s discovery of
this factory of noise inside the body, reverses the Cagean declension
from music to silence which I sketched above. The substitution
of the modern metropolis for the pastoral peace of the nature
aesthetic, hails sound as the opposite of silence, a positive
value to set against the negative of its absence.
A second important step in Chopin’s projected history of the body was
his use of multi-tracking devices to superimpose sounds, and once again it
is in relation to respiration that these techniques appear most radical. By
overlaying the inhalation and the exhalation, making the two incompatible acts
of the respiratory system happen at once, Chopin is able to liberate something
in between, a sound generated by the body which is rendered arrhythmic, something
otherworldly, which sings in spite of its organic malaise, which seizes on
the rising panic of our existential doubts and voices them in a traumatised
version of the great question of being: “What in Hell’s name might
we become?”. While this move refers us back to Van Vliet’s horror
of the mama heartbeat, which it seems both to heighten and resolve, it might
also remind us of Edgar Allan Poe’s tale “The Facts in the Case
of Mr Valdemar” in which the eponymous character is mesmerised during
his death agony and then brought to utterance after the cessation of his breath:
At the expiration of this period, there issued from the distended
and motionless jaws a voice - such as it would be madness in
me to attempt describing. There are, indeed, two or three epithets
which might be considered as applicable to it in part; I might
say, for example, that the sound was harsh, and broken and hollow;
but the hideous whole is indescribable, for the simple reason
that no similar sounds have ever jarred upon the ear of humanity.
There were two particulars, nevertheless, which I thought then,
and still think, might fairly be stated as characteristic of
the intonation - as well adapted to convey some idea of its unearthly
peculiarity. In the first place, the voice seemed to reach our
ears - at least mine - from a vast distance, or from some deep
cavern within the earth. In the second place, it impressed me
(I fear, indeed, that it will be impossible to make myself comprehended)
as gelatinous or glutinous matters impress the sense of touch.
(Poe, 1967, 356-357)
What is shocking here, is that Valdemar brings together the silence
of death consequent on the body’s expiration and speech,
the instrumentalisation of the body as language. It is literally
as if the human body has evolved into a corpse. While it is
difficult to imagine a process further removed from Cage’s
re-assimilation of the sonic body to nature, this extreme musical
experiment stands as a perverted extension of the ludic imperative
through the application of a technology which may or may not
be imaginable. The projective trajectory of sound poetry intersects
here with the regressive tendency in Cagean naturalism : the
dead myth of silence becomes a myth of dead sound.
If the unrespiring undead voice of Valdemar speaks to us from the realm of
the technological and gothic sublime, there is another sonic approximation
to that vision of the timeless body which, while appearing completely unnatural,
is a technique which can be voluntarily mastered and applied by the breathing
subject. This is continuous or circular breathing, as practised by singers
and wind players, where the mouth expires at the same time as the nose takes
in air. The simultaneous sucking and blowing of air turns the body into a kind
of aeolian chime, shifting the emphasis off the body as the direct source of
music and onto the medium in which the body exists. To adapt Cage’s revelation
: until the wind stops blowing through the body, there will be sounds. As in
Poe’s horror vision of the mesmerised corpse, the metrics of in and out,
sequential suck and blow, are transcended, and the image of the aeolian chimes
with its connotations of New Age neo-primitivism, might lead us in conclusion
to a consideration of that musical style which relies on a suppression (or
natural wasting) of rhythmic differentiation and instrumental attack. Ambient
music, which is supposed to negotiate the passage from contemplation into trance,
has affinities with both futuristic explorations of human being beyond the
human body and the Cagean revolution of non-intention which resolves the body
and its music into nature. It also offers us a beatless version of that “catatonic
state” which Don Van Vliet associates with the appeasing regularity of
the mama heartbeat.
In his book Noise, Water, Meat, Douglas Kahn suggests that Jackson
Pollock gave up painting in 1952 because he couldn’t think of another
question to ask (1999, p270); the assertiveness of that ill-considered “I
am nature” came
back to haunt him with a vengeance. For the want of a new question, Cage also
came close to giving up composition ; and I have suggested above that Van Vliet’s
abandonment of music might have been connected with the problem of the pulse,
the inexorability of the mother imago, which continued to dog his music until
the end.20 The music of the body, we have seen, raises questions and thus assures
itself of a future beyond the limited careers of its protagonists and apologists,
but if we shift the agency of music-making from the body itself to what passes
through it, the questions give way to silence, a philosophical abstraction
to which the pulseless mutism of ambient music approximates. The image of the
musical body as a chamber through which air passes producing its own music,
suggests that the sonic presence of the body, pushed to an extreme by Captain
Beefheart and to another extreme by Henri Chopin and his followers, has given
way to a peculiar kind of absence which is as naturally unnatural, that is
as unquestionable, as Poe’s speaking cadaver. At this point the de-instrumentalisation
of the body pursued by Cage becomes something which we might term etherealisation,
as the body and the music become one with the air, and the audible angst of
breath and nerves becomes discorporate sound, subject to wholly chaotic variations
of intensity, universal and, as far as we can tell, immortal.
Electronic music has found many ways to resist the respiring body by pushing
synthesised sound beyond the metrics of breath and redeeming those stretched
ees of Beefheart’s “EEEEElectricity” and their promise of
infinite sustain, but one of the most ambient (and, according to my theory,
discorporate) of modern composer, is Morton Feldman whose extreme impressionism
coincides with an unusually organic form of minimalism, dependent on acoustically
generated sounds21. Feldman’s work has the capacity to arouse emotive disagreement
in audiences, polarising listeners into those who find it ecstatically spiritual
and those who find it infuriatingly dull. The listening body, we should never
forget, is subject to its own natural rhythms, it is productive of its own
decidedly unambient music while it attends intellectually, emotionally, spiritually
to these etherialisations. And here we are straying into one of the great unresolved
debates of aesthetic philosophy: how static or abstracted categories of beauty
interact with the human being’s kinetic experience of his or her physical
being. Can we listen through our own bodies to Feldman’s etherealisations,
or are we inevitably defeated by the nagging presence of mind? And if we listen
with our minds, how do we hold our bodies in abeyance ? If nature abhors a
vacuum, how does it handle human subjectivity with its preferences and prejudices,
its psychosomatic complexities and their unconscious engines ? Where is taste,
and do we in the end prefer the implications of Feldman’s discorporations
or those of the absolute incorporation of presence produced by the flexing
of a Beefheartian magic muscle ?
While I write as a fan of Captain Beefheart, a less sympathetic application
of somatic criticism to the saga of Van Vliet and the mama heartbeat might
register in the music a mere chaos of rule-breaking which the listener fails
to hear precisely because it has thrown over the communicative common ground
of beat: Captain Beefheart as the musical language of an unknown body, or mere
bodiless music, a music for musicologists who don’t know the value of
a good deep groove. Such objections could be taken up as chapter headings in
an anthology of negative responses to the avant-garde, in that they highlight
typical problems of response raised by anti-conventional art. The example of
Captain Beefheart, perhaps, reveals that the centrality of the body in social,
cultural and historical appreciations of the avant-garde has been largely neglected.
Our brief excursion into somatic criticism, then, hints perhaps at a way of
re-investigating the anthropological leap attempted by certain avant-garde
tendencies into a realm of pure aesthetics, where the body is no longer evoked
by the actions it performs. The somatics of minimal and conceptual art, for
example, would seem to present interesting problems. More precisely, Captain
Beefheart raises the spectre of a groove beyond the groove, a hypergroove perhaps
to set alongside the etherealisations of a Morton Feldman, where a dematerialization
of art connects with a post-materialisation of the body. To break up the catatonic
state, is of course, a political gesture, and it is easy to see how a de-infantilisation
of the subject would provoke urgent questions of freedom and responsibility.
The dance beyond the dance which the hypergroove of avant-garde art invites
us to perform, strongly implies that the social configurations of the future
will be strictly dependent on the fate of the individual human body which shouts “I
was a subject !”
References
1. From a 1980 interview with Don
Van Vliet conducted by Dave DiMartino and published as an article
entitled « Don’t Sit on That Porcupine Fence : Beefheart’s
Grown the Best Batch Yet » (Creem, March 1981, vol. 12,
no. 10),, available on line at www.beefheart.com/datharp/porc.htm
2. French tells this story in the BBC TV documentary « The
Artist Formerly Known As Captain Beefheart », first broadcast
in August 1997.
3. See « The Artist Formerly Known As Captain Beefheart ».
4. See DiMartino, “Don’t Sit on That Porcupine
Fence”.
5. See « The Artist Formerly Known As Captain Beefheart ».
6. Available on line at http://www.beefheart.com/datharp/10com.htm
7. The libidinalisation of the cardio-vascular system emerges
in the account given by Frank Zappa and repeated by Mike Barnes
of the origin of the name “Captain Beefheart”: Here
it is the paternal (or avuncular) imago which takes its heart
in its hands in an act of excretory exhibitionism. See Barnes,
16.
8. See « The Artist Formerly
Known As Captain Beefheart ».
9. From the song « Space-Age
Couple » (Lick My
Decals Off, Baby). The concept of a « magic muscle » which
might be flexed by a futuristic humanoid, suggests a link between
Van Vliet’s avant-garde fantasies and the work of contemporary
body artists such as Orlan and Stellarc, both of whom refuse
to accept the actual form of the human body as a compositional
restraint, and who attempt, through the technological remoulding
of its contours, to accelerate its evolutionary colonisation
of new forms and potentialities. The transgenetic vision of the
fishhead which breaks the window in Captain Beefheart’s « Old
Fart at Play » or the image of « Pena » (Trout
Mask Replica) who sunbathes « while sitting on uh turned
on waffle iron , smoke billowing up from between her legs »,
for instance, might be linked at the phantasmal level with Orlan’s
facial modifications and Stellarc’s sado-masochistic enactment
of ancient Native American torture rituals, both of which seem
to play on the body’s power to transcend its normal repertoire
of acts and sensations through a certain kind of magical flexing.
10. Arthur C. Clarke explores a dystopian inversion of this
situation in his short short story « Playback » :
a spaceman survives an accident only to discover that he has
become a mere recording ; his attempts to reconstruct a fuller
version of himself from this alienated ontological condition
founder at the limits of technology and he ends up screaming
for his mother.
11. It is in this sense, perhaps,
that Shakespeare’s
Richard II anticipates his imminent death as a form of musical
crisis : « How sour sweet music is/ when time is broke
and no proportion kept./ So is it in the music of men’s
lives ; / And here I have the daintiness of ear/ To check time
broke in a disordered string. » (V.v.42-45). The external
music he hears from his dungeon in Pomfret Castle provokes a
shift and intensification of focus onto the « music of
men’s lives », their behaviour, certainly, but also
perhaps the ensemble of bodily noise which expresses the duration
of a physical life. In a subsequent conceit Richard’s heart
is amplified by the wind section of his body, producing a sonorous
rhythmic expression of his body beating out its final moments
of life:
