I don’t have any charts or figures, but I suspect that many Black Clock readers have at least some (if not fairly intimate) knowledge of the music of the late, great Frank Zappa and his occasional collaborator / rival / co-conspirator in eccentricity, the (very recently) late, also great, Don Van Vliet, aka “Captaison Beefheart.” For those of you who may not already be eating dough in a polyethylene bag, the Zappa / Beefheart body can be somewhat challenging. Hermeneutic, absurd, confrontational, scatological, highly technical and radically experimental—few composers, popular or otherwise, have measured so much of the sonic unknown, or so thrillingly enervated familiar musical forms from blues and bebop to punk and modern classical (to name only a few) with the kind of diabolical cunning that requires both natural talent and years of practice. Their music suggests (to the suggestible listener) a radical poetics of transgression–an insistent critique of the assumptions that attend formal categories of music in particular, but also art-making in general, as well as the values which structure its production and consumption.
So just what am I saying? I’m saying there’s a lot to these guys, and whether you’re a hungry freak just poised to dive into their old black water, or are even now– as your eyes scan the page—making tender love to a vampire with a monkey on your knee, you ought to read Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart and the Secret History of Maximalism by Michel Delville and Andrew Norris.
One of the most remarkable things about Delville and Norris’ book (expert exegeses of their challenging subjects aside) is the critical apparatus they assemble to contextualize the work of Zappa and Beefheart. Comprised of five chapters, each devoted to a salient motif in the iconoclasts’ considerable oeuvre, Delville and Norris’ readings exemplify immanent critique, illustrating the same playful abandon and intellectual elasticity in their analyses as was demonstrated by the musicians themselves. A chapter on commodity fetishism situates particularly Zappa in terms of Freud, Debord and Bataille and in the midst of a complex musico-literary conversation between (among many others) Gertrude Stein, Haryette Mullen, Erik Satie, and Arnold Schoenberg. Another explores the concept of the abject with Beefheart’s avant-blues as meditation on birth-trauma, situated at the crossroads of Julia Kristeva, Peggy Phelan, Samuel Beckett, Rousseau, and naturally, Robert Johnson. While at times, the net cast by the authors seems more like a few dozen homing missiles on wild trajectories according to their targets’ whimsy, the launch-pad is never quite out of sight. The picture may be teeming, but Delville and Norris’ framing of Zappa and Beefheart as contemporary progenitors of a kind of a “maximalism” in the tradition of Rabelais, Joyce and Pasolini, usefully focuses the discussion as well as presenting a compelling case for the authors’ own overflowing analyses. The maximalist work seems always as if it can only barely contain the ribald, primal exigencies of the body generating it, indeed, it is this primacy of the living body (both the flesh of producers / consumers and the “stuffs” of production, consumption, digestion, their urgency and constant interpenetration) which, according to Delville and Norris, defines maximalism.
Admittedly, this all probably sounds a bit nebulous, and while I doubt Zappa and Beefheart would begrudge me this, they would also undoubtedly demand the kind of rigor that Delville and Norris deliver. I highly recommend their work to any fans or curious readers interested in an excellent academic analysis of two giants of 20th century avant-garde music. In the meantime, listen up.
by Seth Blake
an Editorial Assistant for Black Clock and an MFA Writing candidate at CalArts
