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Biographical note:  Michel Delville is a writer and musician living in Liège, Belgium. He is the author of several books including J.G. Ballard and The American Prose Poem, which won the 1998 SAMLA Studies Book Award. He teaches English and American literatures, as well as comparative literatures, at the University of Liège, where he directs the Interdisciplinary Center for Applied Poetics. He has been playing and composing music since the mid-eighties. His most recently formed rock-jazz band, the Wrong Object, plays the music of Frank Zappa and a few tunes of their own (http://www.wrongobject.be.tf).

Biographical note:  Andrew Norris is a writer and musician resident in Brussels. He has worked with a number of groups as vocalist and guitarist and has a special weakness for the interface between avant garde poetry and the blues. He teaches English and translation studies in Brussels and is currently working on a book on post-epiphanic style in James Joyce.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844710997
ISBN-10:  1844710998
ISBN-13:  9781844710997
Author:  Michel Delville
Title:  Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart and the Secret History of Maximalism
Series:  Salt Studies in Contemporary Literature and Culture
Product class:  BB
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  YAVX
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  01-Sep-05
Extent:  204pp
Height:  228 mm
Width:  152 mm
Thickness:  12 mm
Weight:  306 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  IP
Price:  GBP 40
Price:  USD 70
Rights:  World

Main description:  This book is not another critical biography, but an interpretive essay investigating what we feel is the cultural and historical importance of Zappa and Beefheart in the context of a wide-ranging network of references that run from Michelangelo and Arcimboldo to William Burroughs and Vaclav Havel. Readers who are only vaguely familiar with their music will be introduced to a projected pantheon of maximalist artists and “moments” which will in turn give rise to poetic-associational readings designed to encourage them to explore the processes of art production, consumption and rejection in their expanding totality and to consider the body as the fluctuating constant against which all composition (addition and subtraction of parts) is attempted. In many ways, this book is also intended as a maximalist alternative to the cultural studies take on the study of popular music, which generally neglects aesthetics in favor of the merely semiotic and sociological and is reluctant to investigate the relationships and coincidences of mass, underground and “elitist” culture. In what follows, we will propose an (anti-)method, a conspiracy theory of the mind that seeks to foster a promotional application of “paranoid” criticism risking its very credibility (and sanity) to abandon itself to the energizing virtues of connectivitis and coordinology.

Table of contents:
Introduction
Chapter One
Breaking You Down
Chapter Two
We are the Mothers and This is What We Sound Like: On the Uses and Abuses of Degenerate Art
Chapter Three
Birth Trauma and the Blues-Gothic: The Body at the Crossroads
Chapter Four
Laughter Inside and Out: The Subject-Object on the Edge
Chapter Five
Unprincipled Pleasure
Notes
Bibliography
Index

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Excerpt from book:  

That Blues Thing: Enter Captain Beefheart

When Frank Zappa and Don Van Vliet sat around after school eating pineapple buns (from the remains of Mr Vliet senior’s bread round) and listening to rhythm and blues records, they were indulging in an early form of maximalist synaesthesia, performing the basic tenets of an aesthetic philosophy and way of life which was, at various points throughout the next thirty years, to unite and divide their parallel careers as American maverick artists: Buns and blues, the listening body eating, this was an auspicious beginning.
     Van Vliet was one of Zappa’s earliest and most significant collaborators who eagerly assisted in the forging of links between discourses of bodily experience and music–making; along with Motorhead Sherwood and Ray Collins, he was a key figure in the conversion of teenage gross–out humour into an expanding aesthetic of the body’s parts and processes. Zappa’s account of the origin of the name “Captain Beefheart” captures the atmosphere of those formative years and illustrates how so much of what we analyse below can be traced back to the lewd anecdote or obscene gesture:

Captain Beefheart was a character I invented for the film [“Captain Beefheart Versus the Grunt People”]. His name derives from one of Don Vliet’s relatives who looked like Harry Truman. He used to piss with the door open when Don’s girlfriend walked by and make comments about how his whizzer looked just like a beef heart.

The vortex of Zappa’s maximalism is a toilet, and here we see him seizing on a creative détournement of the human body: the penis becomes a heart, a conflation of two organs of love — the literal and the symbolic are fused together in an anthropomorphic leap of imagination curiously prophetic of Van Vliet’s later pictorial style with its Wellsian miscegenations. Artistic experiment is already inseparable from research into what the body can do physically, how it behaves socially, and how it can be manipulated aesthetically.
     Van Vliet finally abandoned music for painting in 1982, and Captain Beefheart was no more. His recording career was characterised by an intermittent striving for an innovative rock–blues–jazz–avant–gardiste–mélange which would sing back to us in crazy voices from beyond the beat. In his assault on the “moma heartbeat” and the sedimentation of form and response it imposes, Van Vliet seemed to be working towards a maximalist enhancement of possibilities; and his efforts in this direction have proved very useful to us in our attempts to show how musical maximalism incorporates its opposite, and how the meeting of extremes more generally is one of the vital blowholes of maximalist art.
     As a musician, Van Vliet lacked both the formal know–how of technique, and an interest in advanced musical technologies, and this may explain his unwillingness to extend the experiments he was making at the level of the group to the broader plane of conceptual and materialist manipulation, his failure to objectify his moments of transcendent insight into a project/object with a life of its own. Regularly, also, the Captain tried to conform to the norms of popular music, writing songs which seem to labour under a load of assumed sincerity while lending themselves to a perversely melancholic listening experience. Much of the Unconditionally Guaranteed album falls into this category (especially “Magic Bee” and “This is the Day”), together with the notorious “Too Much Time” from Clear Spot and the Bluejeans and Moonbeams album, where the Magic Band was replaced with the critically lambasted “Tragic Band”. This hesitation between modes of creativity, together with his eventual selection of a neo–primitive abstract–expressionist aesthetic for his painting contrasts interestingly with Zappa’s self–consuming commitment to the Big Note and its cosmic ramifications. And it is significant that Zappa’s own attempts to write songs that could be played on the radio always contain elements of social and/or formal satire (“Bobby Brown”, “Dancing Fool”, “Valley Girl”).
     After his musical researches, where questions of sound and form were complicated by the struggles of individual and group, Van Vliet settled into a painting style which has achieved a traditional coherence (and a degree of international recognition to go with it) through the accumulation of signature effects from work to work. This kind of artistic practice is diametrically opposed to the genre–leaping of Zappa, and its origins in the fraught abutments of collage.
     In spite of these differences, many of Van Vliet’s texts are thematically consistent with Zappa’s concerns, and both hark back in various ways to the anti–art activities of Dada (perhaps the key maximalist movement of the modernist period): Van Vliet drew on the paradox of ordered disorder exploited by Hugo Ball in his sound poetry, together with the “primitivism” of Tzara, rendered urgently audible in the free jazz of Ornette Coleman; while Zappa fell in love with the materiality of sound, and the theatrical extravagances of burlesque, key components in his self–recharging brand of social satire. While Van Vliet played with the paradox, evolving his own surrealist slant on those odd overdetermined objects so dear to Zappa, the latter branched out and out into parody, satire and beyond. Often, in Van Vliet’s work, these objects are freakishly human, the Ant Man Bee, the Man With the Woman Head, Apes–Ma, The Human Totem Pole, and express his ludic approach to the lineaments of human being, a delight in monstrous combination and subtraction which has affinities with the gothic tradition and the uncanny stresses of the “is it or isn’t it?” exploited in the art and literature of terror. Here again, Van Vliet seems to cross Zappa’s maximalist trajectory, and we explore the double intersection of their work with the gothic tradition and some of its more recent avatars in Chapter Four.
     Van Vliets’s neo–primitivism proclaims itself through his interviews in the denial of all influence; a rhetorical move which is often coupled with an enthusiasm for the existential and ethical purity of animals. While Zappa could satirize the notion of natural being (and its racist overtones) in “You Are What You Is”, Van Vliet seems to work within the tradition of the individual genius, whose every act is a work of art, the quality of which is directly related to the sincerity of the gesture. In this system, authenticity remains the final index of artistic value: If Picasso wanted to paint like a child, Van Vliet wants to paint like an animal. From the relativisng perspective of post–modernism, Van Vliet’s stance might seem quaint or merely stubborn in its attachment to the mystique of essence, the “It” which the Beat generation venerated, that indefinable something which connects one to life and separates one from the mass of people who don’t have or haven’t found “It”. Whether or not Van Vliet had “it”, he was at the very least capable of remarkable idiosyncrasy; and Zappa, who was equally disdainful of the cultish “it” and the dogma of cultural relativity which came to oppose it, regularly sought to tap this source.
     Even if finally not a maximalist himself, Van Vliet participates in and engenders a series of maximalist moments through his lyrics and musical ideas, his physical presence and bodily projections, his ego statements, and his shifts between the verbal, visual and sonic media. By examining some of these moments below, we hope to shed more light on Zappa’s developing art and the key ideas of maximalism, and our essay will culminate with a comparative discussion of the two artists and their relationship to that vexed and faintly illicit subject — aesthetic pleasure.

Unpublished endorsement :  Here is a book that has to be played loud. Zapping as irreverently through the icons of dangerous culture as the zany Zappa himself, plotting the gothic with the abject cunning of Don Van Vliet, Michel Delville and Andrew Norris puncture quite a few balloons of our current esthetic doxa, from body art to weak consensual clichés on post-mortem postmodernism. Here is baroque modernism come back to haunt us with a vengeance: it screams, it bites, it claws and it kicks.

Jean-Michel Rabaté

Unpublished endorsement :  Amid the erudition and the exhaustive unpicking of the Zappa worldscape, the key to the value of this book is its understanding of the man's musical output – the records, the lyrics, the compositional approaches, the performance intentions. Delville and Norris exhibit an assured grasp of the creative line from the Mothers to Beefheart to Boulez and beyond. This book’s appeal lies in its richness of contexts – its ability to mention Braxton and Burroughs, Reich and Freud, Bakhtin and Houston A. Baker Jr, without ever moving too far from its object of scrutiny, a frustrating genius whose life of contradictions requires a study as unrelentingly unbound and as intellectually promiscuous as this one.

Simon Warner