| Page 1 2 3 COMMUNE WITH JANDEK by Mark Pittman Back in July, when I heard that Jandek was going to be playing in Austin the next month I knew two things: I had to get tickets, and I had to figure out if I liked Jandek at all. I had to get tickets because this would be Jandek’s first live US performance since he started releasing albums in 1978. Also, Jandek lives in or near Houston, TX so this would be almost like a show for the hometown crowd, whether they knew it or not. Jandek is the ultimate outsider musician and if I missed his first US show I stood to lose all my imagined hipster credibility. Plus I was really interested in seeing him live.The reason I say I had to figure out if I liked Jandek at all is because I had tried twice before to enjoy his music without any luck. The first time I tried, I found I definitely had to agree with what I remembered a certain writer claiming, that 99% of people in the world would not be able to make it through even a single Jandek song. I’ll add to that what I felt upon hearing my first Jandek song: I could probably get through it, but what was the point? Life’s too short to spend it listening to something that apparently contains so little: there’s no energy, no melody, no passion, no beat, no technique...no nothin’. The second time I tried to deal with Jandek it turned out no better, but for different reasons. I had just gone through a somewhat painful and embarrassing dating situation and was feeling rather down. Being depressed I could certainly identify more with what Jandek was doing, but I had to stop listening quickly. Jandek was putting me over the edge and I didn’t need to add any emotional turmoil to what I was already enduring. I decided I needed help. Maybe I was listening to the wrong stuff? At first, as with most of my projects, I became overly ambitious and decided to buy every single one of Jandek’s albums (he’s released more than forty). I would run the Jandek marathon without training and learn something after surviving the ordeal. I would buy the Jandek on Corwood documentary; I would purchase the two Jandek tribute albums; and I would see the show. It sounded like a grand plan, but I soon realized that such plans require large sums of money, and this past July I was alarmingly cash poor.  Like most people who have to back off from grand schemes, I convinced myself it was for the best and decided to review only albums people had recommended. Jandek albums are cheap, nearly always considerably less than $10, and so if I chose wisely I could get a good Jandek overview and still pay my utility bill. I scoured the Internet for recommendations. On one site half a dozen of his albums earned four star ratings. I bought those. I found another list of half-a-dozen recommendations—oddly with little overlap—in a forum discussion and bought those, too. Then I learned my friend Jeff, who was also buying Jandek tickets, owned a couple of Jandek CDs. I borrowed those. Here’s the final list of stuff I reviewed: Ready for the House (1978) Six and Six (1981) Living in a Moon So Blue (1982) Interstellar Discussion (1984) Follow Your Footsteps (1986) Modern Dances (1987) Blue Corpse (1987) Somebody in the Snow (1990) I Woke Up (1997) New Town (1998) Worthless Recluse (2001) The Place (2003) Jandek on Corwood documentary (2004) When I finally assembled my collection of discs, the Jandek performance was only a couple of weeks away. I thought it would be great if I actually recognized a Jandek song live: how many people in the audience would be able to say that! I needed to work fast. I hadn’t been able to even get through a single song before. It would be a baptism by fire, I thought, plowing through this amassed collection of depressing outsider insanity. However, once my project got underway, I unexpectedly found myself listening to whole albums at a time. The weekend after starting my project, I noted that there was a day when I had listened to three whole Jandek albums continuously in one sitting. I was actually enjoying it. I pondered about why my change in Jandek tolerance had occurred. Was the music on these albums better than what I had heard before? Possibly.  Finally, I decided the reason was that I was now in the right place emotionally to finally get Jandek. I had read that it’s easiest to enjoy Elliott Smith’s music just after a breakup. I knew that that didn’t work with Jandek. His music, in my opinion, works best two to three weeks after a breakup. It’s bleak music, no doubt about it, and it’s too painful and empty (I don’t mean that as a criticism) to be of help to people’s suffering. It’s good for people alone, people living between meaningful events in their lives.The cliché would be to say it’s a soundtrack for Edward Hopper paintings, but that’s not true. I can’t detect any color in Jandek’s music. That’s one thing I thought was inaccurate about the Jandek on Corwood documentary: they show lonely scenes against Jandek’s music, but the scenes are in color. I just don’t feel that. Jandek’s music also isn’t stark in a German, North European kind of way. His music isn’t that self-consciously serious or controlled. There’s a looseness to his music: looseness in technique, looseness in tuning, looseness in singing, looseness even in songwriting. I have since read the following claim elsewhere, but I can hear a lot of the blues in Jandek’s music. But it’s the blues devoid of everything the least bit entertaining, the least bit colorful. Not to be too obvious, but it’s the blues at its most basic: someone confronting his loneliness and depression by expressing himself in a song. It’s easy to claim Jandek sounds like the blues, but, really, who in the blues? Does he have any predecessors? I can think of only two possible comparisons: Skip James and King Solomon Hill. Jandek has the bleakness of Skip James, but not the technique or vocal prowess. Jandek has the strangeness and formless experimental tendencies of King Solomon Hill, but not the goofiness. I never thought I would claim that a bluesman like King Solomon Hill was goofy, but compared to Jandek, nearly everything sounds contrived and silly. Your ability to understand and enjoy Jandek will depend on what you’re used to listening to. One thing I both love and hate about art generally is that the enjoyment of it depends on so many factors: the person’s education, the person’s mood, what they’ve heard before, their tendency to listen for certain details, their expectations, their open- or closed-mindedness. This means nearly all art has the potential to please, which is good. It also means that art which doesn’t provide many ways to enjoy it—a good beat, colorful arrangements, virtuosic technique, drama, etc.—runs the risk of being dismissed. Irvin Chusid in his authoritative book on Outsider Music, Songs in the Key of Z, compares Jandek’s music with the Beatles’ (critically a typically amateurish thing to do, he admits) and finds Jandek wanting in every department. It’s a hilarious and very accurate piece of writing. But I would challenge someone who likes both artists (are there any rabid Beatles fans out there who also like Jandek? Or vice versa?) to listen to one or the other artist for a few days and then switch. The Beatles will make Jandek sound a talentless sham; Jandek will make the Beatles sound like two-dimensional idiots. Page 1 2 3 |  |
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