Mastodons of Ghastliness

In my down time while I’m polishing off the next Hopkinsville Goblins product, I’ve been plowing through biographies of David Bowie and Iggy Pop. Both of them are rollicking good reads and nicely filled in the back stories of some of the best rock albums ever made, and enhancing (not busting) some of the myths around these guys. Turns out not only are both real gents (within the confines of excessive 70s rock stardom), they are also highly intellectual and interested in something called art.

Now visitors to the pages of this humble blog will be visioning me as some kind of bookworm, but the truth is I don’t read as much as I’d like. Just like I don’t see as many movies as I’d like. And I definitely don’t go to art galleries because they bore me rigid. There are only so many hours in the day aren’t there. So the discovery that two serious rock icons were also into the link between rock and German expressionism (or something) came as a big surprise.

Art has always alienated me. I grew up in a city that had a high profile art community but I never had any desire to sign up to the clique. People got serious when art came up and I couldn’t understand what they were getting fired up about. It was too much like the Masons for me. One can only imagine what the conversations were like in the 70s when the topic of Art Rock came up. Arguing for the merits of Jethro Tull over Van Der Graaf Generator strikes me as being up there with the ultimate wastes of time imaginable, but no doubt people used to do it.

The Bowie biography helped clarify some of that. Within the confines of Art Rock there were different approaches and different takes on what qualified as art in rock’n’roll, and even where the continuum from art to rock could be drawn. For some it was the overall concept (eg Yes), for others it was the use of sound as an artistic medium (eg Bowie) and this fired up some of the serious discussions alluded to above. In 1972, one observer described King Crimson as “mastodons of ghastliness”, and the arrival of Bowie as crystallising in a vision everything they had felt growing up as an outsider to society. Those kind of extreme reactions were common throughout the book as Bowie moved from one phase to another, trashing what he had just done and changing groups of fans like he did his carefully designed pants.

Little did that Bowie observer know, but in five years Robert Fripp would be supplying the guitar muscle on Bowie’s “Heroes” album, so bagging King Crimson that badly is a tad unfair. Musically there isn’t too much wrong with them. They were more classically influenced than art influenced, and they treated their compositions accordingly. Any ghastliness comes from their lyrics, which frequently rely on fantasy mythology, obtuse poeticism and a gag-inducing interest in underage sex. To be fair, I think a lot of that stemmed from their contempt for the rock biz, rock morality and the rock world in general, and their reaction to that come out in their lyrics as a refusal, rather than a celebration, of it. Robert Fripp was well aware of the irony of being in his position despite it all, and was armoured to deal with the reaction to him as a rock star. As he said, the main difference between rock'n'roll and pop was that with rock, you might get fucked.

The same applies to art as well, in spades. I’ve seen art groupies at play. It truly defies logic, as artists are usually among the least sexy people imaginable and often can’t string two sentences together in a conversation on any topic other than themselves. Check out the Modern Lovers “Pablo Picasso” for their dead on take on it.

I think I’ve got a better handle on the whole Art Rock thing now, and I don’t have an opinion either way. It’s a bit like Bowie’s albums – love some of the tracks, don’t get others (but still find them interesting), and skip the rest. It all comes down to what you listen to music for: thrills, intellectual stimulation, artistic wonder, relaxation…whatever you want to get out of it, if it works, who cares what it’s labelled as. Don’t know about art but I know what I like.

Stay tuned for new Hopkinsville Goblins tunes soon. Art or no art, hopefully they will give you a big slice of what you like.

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