The advantage of working with younger generations is that they can turn you onto things you would not otherwise seek on your own. Such is the case with the music of Devendra Banhart: one of my students used to play a medley that, to my delight, included “Chinese Children” in class, and another sent me a couple of his CD’s recently (Cripple Crow and Smokey Rolls Down Thunder Canyon). I slipped them (one at a time) into the CD player and took to them immediately. The Ranting Economist, on the other hand, upon hearing Cripple Crow in the car, called it “derivative boring crap” (-;
I know what it is that I like about these records; it’s comfortable music. It shape shifts among a myriad of familiar genres that make up my musical consciousness and that, for the most part, I like: the receptors in my brain are already configured to respond to it. The following is a partial list of ingredients others have invoked to describe Banhart’s music: Funk, Samba, Eisenhower-era doo-wop, Tropicalia, Reggae, Beatles, Tiny Tim, Caetano Veloso, David Crosby, Donovan, Santana, Nick Drake, Skip Spence, Jerry Garcia, Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, The Byrds, Conga, Groove, bossa nova, psychedelia, folk, and I definitely hear The Doors... One of the favorable reviews of SRDTC on Amazon does say the CD “has something for everyone” with the assumption that that’s a good thing. It obviously does nothing for The Ranting Economist; and although I love listening to the albums, one of my favorite unfavorable reviews of Cripple Crow is: Este CD e espantosamente horrible... no tiene estilo proprio. I love the word “espantosamente”; but it is the phrase “no tiene estilo proprio” that interests me, and brings me back to Baudrillard and the ‘80’s.[1]
Although I first learned about the word “bricolage” from my French uncle while he tinkered around the construction site that was to be his future house, if I recall correctly, it went from fun to theory with Derrida[2], and was quite in vogue during the 80’s to describe what visual artists and writers were doing with their art and texts---or was everything just “text” then (?)... Baudrillard does not seem to use the word to describe the state of the arts in the 80’s; but what he describes as being postmodern in his interview Game with Vestiges[3] seems to fit under its definition (gestalt being what it is, of course it would). "Art can no longer operate as radical critique or deconstructive metaphor. So art at the moment is adrift in a kind of weightlessness. It has brought about a sphere where all forms can coexist. One can play in all possible ways, but no longer against each other. It amounts to this: art is losing its specificity. ...It is becoming mosaic... it cannot do anything more than operate out of a combinatory mode..... The postmodern is characteristic of a universe where there are no more definitions possible... It has all been done. The extreme limit of these possibilities has been reached. It has deconstructed its entire universe; so all that’s left are pieces. All that remains to be done is to play with the pieces.” Visual Art seems to have gotten past this; but could this be what Banhart is doing consciously or not?
By the 80’s Baudriallard could sound melodramatic and nostalgic, and he seems to imply a sadness to this postmodern form of play: “Postmodernism tries to bring back all past cultures, to bring back everything that one has destroyed in joy and which one is reconstructing in sadness in order to try to live, to survive...” And although I see Banhart’s music as quintessentially postmodern[4] and thus utterly digestible, I don’t see it as a “reconstruction in sadness” but one that is done in “joy”; it remains to be seen where he can take it from here.
I know what it is that I like about these records; it’s comfortable music. It shape shifts among a myriad of familiar genres that make up my musical consciousness and that, for the most part, I like: the receptors in my brain are already configured to respond to it. The following is a partial list of ingredients others have invoked to describe Banhart’s music: Funk, Samba, Eisenhower-era doo-wop, Tropicalia, Reggae, Beatles, Tiny Tim, Caetano Veloso, David Crosby, Donovan, Santana, Nick Drake, Skip Spence, Jerry Garcia, Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, The Byrds, Conga, Groove, bossa nova, psychedelia, folk, and I definitely hear The Doors... One of the favorable reviews of SRDTC on Amazon does say the CD “has something for everyone” with the assumption that that’s a good thing. It obviously does nothing for The Ranting Economist; and although I love listening to the albums, one of my favorite unfavorable reviews of Cripple Crow is: Este CD e espantosamente horrible... no tiene estilo proprio. I love the word “espantosamente”; but it is the phrase “no tiene estilo proprio” that interests me, and brings me back to Baudrillard and the ‘80’s.[1]
Although I first learned about the word “bricolage” from my French uncle while he tinkered around the construction site that was to be his future house, if I recall correctly, it went from fun to theory with Derrida[2], and was quite in vogue during the 80’s to describe what visual artists and writers were doing with their art and texts---or was everything just “text” then (?)... Baudrillard does not seem to use the word to describe the state of the arts in the 80’s; but what he describes as being postmodern in his interview Game with Vestiges[3] seems to fit under its definition (gestalt being what it is, of course it would). "Art can no longer operate as radical critique or deconstructive metaphor. So art at the moment is adrift in a kind of weightlessness. It has brought about a sphere where all forms can coexist. One can play in all possible ways, but no longer against each other. It amounts to this: art is losing its specificity. ...It is becoming mosaic... it cannot do anything more than operate out of a combinatory mode..... The postmodern is characteristic of a universe where there are no more definitions possible... It has all been done. The extreme limit of these possibilities has been reached. It has deconstructed its entire universe; so all that’s left are pieces. All that remains to be done is to play with the pieces.” Visual Art seems to have gotten past this; but could this be what Banhart is doing consciously or not?
By the 80’s Baudriallard could sound melodramatic and nostalgic, and he seems to imply a sadness to this postmodern form of play: “Postmodernism tries to bring back all past cultures, to bring back everything that one has destroyed in joy and which one is reconstructing in sadness in order to try to live, to survive...” And although I see Banhart’s music as quintessentially postmodern[4] and thus utterly digestible, I don’t see it as a “reconstruction in sadness” but one that is done in “joy”; it remains to be seen where he can take it from here.
[1] Once I finish reading Postmodern Theory, I’ll hopefully get off this “let’s revisit the 80’s" kick... though given our current state of economic affairs, it feels rather natural...
[2] Well it was first used by Claude Levi Strauss (if the memories of Anthro 101 serve me well); but it r-e-a-l-l-y got s-e-r-i-o-u-s after Derrida got adopted by the visual arts critical establishment. ...and then it disappeared...
[3] Interviews have titles?
[4] weightless, combinatory, and “bricolaged”
Banhart is also quintessentially postmodern in that he's almost completely derivative... came across a book of poetry and prose at Dia:Beacon by the almost totally forgotten writer Kenneth Patchen-- when he is remembered, he's classified under the Beat generation, but maintains a pretty isolated and unique stance even from those guys-- he wrote faux naive, deceptively childish, and incredibly political poems that were accompanied by outsider arty drawings of creatures, comfortably at home in the literary nonsense genre championed by edward lear and lewis carroll. Banhart did the preface, citing patchen as his most influential influence, and it's easy to see why: his songs could pass off as patchen poems, theme and style and all, and his faux outsider arty drawings that were recently snapped up by the MoMA for their permanent collection and included in Phaidon's Vitamin D survey, are easily dependent on Patchen's drawings from the forties and fifties.
ReplyDeleteHe never hid the fact that he loved musical genres, but I used to think his content was at least his own... c'est la postmodern era.
Hey Katarina- love the comment! Again, always learning from the younger generation (-; Seriously, Banhart’s faux drawings were snapped up by Moma? Holy shit, the man is sure doing alright for himself--- will all this fame seriously be the end of his music I wonder... I mean how does a one keep producing in the same vane when the landscape of one’s life changes so radically?! The Stones never did...
ReplyDeletemore: Looked at some of Patchen's stuff- yeah- definitely see the connection... I guess the thing boils down to the difference between influence (a good thing) and total derivation... It's a weird world we live in where we are not given the time to be influenced; just have to cobble things out of what there is, quickly before time passes... Maybe that's the "trying to survive" thing that Baudrillard alludes to...
ReplyDelete