June 12, 2009
A Boring Jandek Theory
by JeremySometime back in the 1980s, Cara played for me a scary record she had by a guy name Jandek (apparently pronounced in a completely non-European way: `Jan` as in Jan Brady, `dek` as in deck of cards). To put it briefly, if you don't know his work, it sounded like a gentle psychotic person playing around with a guitar, a microphone, and a tape recorder. We would occasionally put the record on just to spook each other, as if it were Vincent Price reading Poe (but scarier). It never lasted more than a minute.
I cannot honestly recommend you listen to Jandek, but it's impossible not to be fascinated by the fact that he has put out albums of this stuff without letup for the past 30 years -- I believe there are 52 of them. And you can only get them by mail from the man himself.
Alternative rockers and other artsy types like to mythologize him, and his reclusiveness adds to the mystique.
Search 'Jandek' on Youtube to get a taste of the guy. Theories, of course, abound. I did a little Googling and heard an extremely rare audio interview with the guy (who, I read elsewhere, is probably named Sterling R. Smith) and now I have a theory.
He sounds very lucid and very normal. He also sounds very concrete, and not overtly interested in his own music or whether anyone listens to it. So, as much as it's tempting and titillating to think of him as a psychopath with a tape recorder, or a misunderstood avant garde genius, my theory is something more prosaic...
The following is my theory, by me: so here it is; a theory about Jandek that's my own, created by me...about Jandek. It's not someone else's theory, or based on someone else's theory, but one of my own, totally by me, about Jandek. It is, and by "it" I'm referring to my theory, the one about Jandek, the one that is my theory, by me alone, as follows (hat tip: John Cleese):
I'm going to guess that he is an intelligent guy with a mild mental illness, or someone on the very mild end of the autistic spectrum. I think he has a strong and enduring drive to make poetry and music but lacks the organization and creativity to learn an instrument or to develop ideas in a structured way.
His drive to create won't go away, however, so he indulges it. His mental deficits won't allow him to get past the initial brainstorming phase, so he records that and releases these recordings semi-publicly, thereby giving substance and force to what would otherwise be something like meditation, or exercises in therapeutic daydreaming.
His guitar playing is deliberate, but completely devoid of any externally defined or even internally premeditated musical technique or structure.
I'd call it the musical equivalent of playing with food. This brings me to another observation I've made, which is that anything becomes artistically interesting when collected in large quantity, or focused in on. I realized this one day when I saw a photography studio whose storefront window was filled with hundreds of empty black plastic 35mm film containers. This was a joy to behold. I suspect, similarly, that if you made thousands of hours of film of yourself playing with peas and mashed potatoes on your plate, the artistic world would have to take notice.
This is not to say that Jandek has no poetic talent (though I'm not sure he has any musical talent), but what's interesting about his recordings is the apparent lack of any attempt to impose any structure or development to his output. It's just a very large collection of recorded manifestations of a brain's creative impulses. It gives him some kind of solace to feel the artistic cortex of his brain firing its synapses, and releasing records enhances this process. And his fans find a similar satisfaction in experiencing this kind of abstract induction of electro-chemical activity within similar synapses.
Personally, I'd rather spend my time doing other things. But I think I get it now.
UPDATE: His release of one of his songs with a somewhat crafted lyric, and sung by a woman who can actually sing, strikes me as strongly supporting my theory; what I get from this is that he has no objection to his work being turned into something recognizable as music or poetry, so he's not really devoted to surrealism or atonal music, nor does he have an axe to grind with the conventional world. The distinction is simply not meaningful or relevant to him.
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