The Hungry Brain is supposedly the best bar in America and it is getting further and further away with every step I take. Later, my brother will tell his friends how he had been psychically dragging me the whole way, whatever that means. Then we’ve been walking for I don’t know how long and we’re standing in another bar called the Burlington. It’s got just enough lighting to allow a person to maneuver from one end of the bar to the other without hurting themselves, but not enough lighting for anyone’s acne to be noticeable, and Jules and I are discussing walking BACK to the Hungry Brain, and the show is about to begin. Which, in the end, we just slipped in the back and I ordered a beer in a stupid little plastic cup, and there was this awkward-seeming guy with an acoustic guitar on stage. I thought, “Oh God.” The man with the acoustic guitar began to play.
John Bellows is a screamer. Hence the name. He belts it out. I can still recreate that sensation of a loosening inside of me, as in, for a few moments I was listening to a man with an acoustic guitar and thinking about how many times have I listened to a man with an acoustic guitar, and then I was listening more intently, and then I had moved to the front of the room, and then I was hanging on every note like each one was a different answer to this particularly tricky question I had been asking myself for so long that I’d forgotten it’s a question and had instead got to thinking of it as just a fixture of my internal horizon. I exaggerate, but I exaggerate only because this is what I felt at the time, and I have always had a melodramatic heart.
Thing that lured me in was the way he vocalized what would have been the other instruments’ parts. That first song can be found below. It is a good introduction to his musical aesthetic. But this song turns out to actually be a cover of Thunderstorm by Gen Orange.
It’s only with the second song in the set do we start to hear his voice as a songwriter, and this feels more like a grittier yodeling psychedelic Michael Hurley or John Prine. People have described Bellows as writing adult kids’ songs, and there is certainly this playfulness to both his songwriting and performance as well. His voice sometimes sounds like Daniel Smith of the Danielson Famile, or even like a more heartfelt Tiny Tim, but it can also have this deeper register. Sometimes He switches within a song from almost talking-singing to this higher volume higher pitch stuff, which reminds me of the hard-soft-hard thing my artrock post-punk friends used to do. Simple and effective. But he also plays with rhythm in an interesting way, allowing the song to get awkward and uncertain at points. It can feels like he’s just telling you something, and the guitar is just there so he can fully explain this unfortunate thing to you in his halting English.
Outsider musicians like Daniel Johnston, Larry Fischer, and Wesley Willis have become the driving force behind a whole subset of underground folk and hip-hop. Oh, and let’s not forget Roky Erickson’s post-institutionalization work. Each is certainly his own person and weird in his own way, but I would argue what draws fans in to the music of each is a very similar sort of thing. A love of schizophrenic authenticity, laughing at and with the sheer weirdness of it all, perhaps even embracing this sincere weirdness as a true expression of our own not-as-fully-actualized weirdness. At it’s best, what drives us towards these artists is the same thing that drove us towards punk—a lack of trust in the authenticity of mainstream music and culture—at its worst, the careers of these artists can be like what Will Sheff wrote concerning Wesley Willis: “[P]eriodic appearances for crowds of jeering white fratboys evoke an uncomfortable combination of minstrel act and traveling freak show.” [Full disclosure. Mutable has its own outsider musician release.] Perhaps what drew me to Bellows was his similar kooky-ness and sincere awkwardness. He seemed very drunk.
He seemed like a comic who has been doing the strip club circuit for so many years and is spiraling towards the gutter, but he also wasn’t. He wasn’t bitter. He was missionary style jovial. He was belting out a few bars of billboard favorites with a hilarious over-the-topness in between his own songs, and telling bad jokes that somehow were really great bad jokes, like the sorts of bad jokes the comedian in The Dark Backwards would tell. The Dark Backwards being a comedy that isn’t funny about an alternate universe that is literally drowning in trash, in which this very unfunny comedian played by Judd Nelson wakes up one morning with a third arm growing out of his back, and about his friendship to accordian-playing garbageman Bill Paxton and talent agent Wayne Newton. My favorite joke in that movie involves a barber cutting off a bald man’s ear because there is no hair to cut.
But there was this question I mentioned earlier. You remember. The one I had come to believe was just a ceiling fixture of my mind. This question was and is a question of songs, sounds, and finding new corners of your cavernous interior through the exploration of unknown sounds—the idea that through listening to unfamiliar things a person might discover the unexplored portions of their inner depths. It is the search for the alien within. The difference within the familiar. The familiar within that which is so different. Form is emptiness. Emptiness is form.
However, Daniel Johnston is not an alien within America. He is the outsider in our midst. We embrace him as the symbol of all that is marginalized in 21st Century America. What makes him wonderful is that he plays the part of everyman on stage. His awkward and unrhyming ballads. His religiosity is part of this, as well as his sincerity, and his persona as the reviled geek. He represents the downtrodden. But there is also this “jeering white fratboys” element to the crowd at a Daniel Johnston show.
Or is it the punk aesthetic? Like audience members putting their cigarettes out on Henry Rollins’ legs?
These subtleties in audience disdain are not for the weak-minded, and unfortunately I think I qualify as the weak-minded in my efforts to clarify this particular subtlety. But I can say this, when hipsters are mouthing punk disdain it sounds like frat-boy jeers to my virgin ears. When bohemian yuppies are playing that part, it is just plain obnoxious.
I have seen footage of a Daniel Johnston show that was like this. They’re cheering sure, but the same way the jocks would cheer the class geek to take his pants off in front of the prettiest girl in school. Which is exactly why this sort of disdain has become questionable. On the other end of the spectrum, Justin Timberlake may be the nicest guy in the room, but he will always stand out as the patron saint of assholes in my mind. Both due to the style of his song-writing and his public persona in general, and regardless of his private life, the man exists to make assholes feel better about themselves.
Thing of it is, we’re never falling in love with a celebrity because of “who they are”, but because of what this person represents. Mainstream musicians are loved by the mainstream for their mainstream-ness. Outsider musicians are loved by the outsider for their outsider-ness. When I love a mainstream musician it is with the hatred of the outsider, and when the mainstream loves an outsider, it is with the hatred of the mainstream. John Bellows fits into neither of these categories.
Which is also why John Bellows and The Imaginations are so interesting. In the same way that the artists on Flying Nun are interesting. Because it’s neither/nor. Neither pop nor punk. Neither outsider nor insider. Bellows exists somewhere between Daniel Johnston and Justin Timberlake. He is the sincere class clown who just wants you to see the world in a playful way while also perhaps becoming maybe a little bit of a better person while you’re at it. He has taken on the persona of the reviled geek, not as a mask, but because this is genuinely who he is, and his particular brand of endearing sincerity is the genuine offspring of the punk aesthetic. Punk disdain has evolved into its opposite as things are wont to do. At least according to Hegel with his whole thesis antithesis synthesis bag. The alien has just gotten a whole shitload more familiar.
I should perhaps mention here that John Bellows is not just one man. I’ve been lying to you. At one point during the set, The Imaginations got on stage with him. Playing flute and omnichord, the Imaginations added another element to the songs, and the solo stuff blossomed into something entirely other. Suddenly this man who had seemed like a comedian spiraling towards the bottom has turned into a cult leader with a following of two. It was a lovely transition.
John’s solo stuff always has this kid’s music alt-country feel, but once the other members of the band joined him onstage they immediately started exploring genres while all the while putting their own peculiar stamp on them. Flute and omnichord R&B and RockNRoll is a delicious thing, and with the Sha-la-la-la’s coming out of nowhere, or the Do-hoo-hoo’s sounding very self-mocking and parodies of whatever the creators of this particular musical form’d had in mind when it was they created it in the back alleys of the world. The whole group was genre-hopping and instrument-hopping like the stage was their very own clown car and they were just loving this Chinese fire drill routine. All of which only added to the intentional amateurishness and the endearing cult quality of the set.
But the messages are very powerful stuff, concerning compassion, and love, and hope, and hopelessness. The usual stuff. Ultimately, John Bellows and the Imaginations are a live band and should be seen live. Because this is our folk music. This is a tradition in the making.
With the rise of digital media and our ability to download and explore vast amounts of media easily and quickly, underground music appears to be going in two directions. One is a privately-produced art, in which the mp3’s may be free to download, but the cd itself, the cassette itself, the lp itself is a small-run artistic product. High-brow DIY. On the other is the folk tradition, the band that is a live experience, which could mean some ritualistic black metal bullshit, old-timey tiddley-winks, or it could mean John Bellows. The underground music of the now is a physical thing. It means physical copies, usually analog, or a physical show. In our digital age, underground music is the analog within. The opposite of waiting in line for the newest iPhone.
Furthermore, if you consider music as a language, as Leonard Bernstein did in his Harvard Lecture series, “The Unanswered Question“, and look at western ways of music-making, our circles of fifths and tempered instruments, and compare these with the instruments and scales of the santur or the guqin, say, both harp-like string instruments, the first Arabic and the second Chinese—to most music listeners this sort of stuff is the truly alien stuff of sound. The maqams and ragas and various other styles of music from other parts of the world, but there are those others who would argue that we are the ones who have mutilated music. We are the ones who bound the feet of sound by tempering our klaviers and twisting octaves into twelve note systems with all the major and minor derivations within, very pretty and nice, and easy, but far removed from the actual physics of harmony, or further removed than the santur in any case. There are those who make this argument.
One of whom being my roommate, who recently took me to hear some maqam music up at the Old Town School of Music, and specifically a four-hundred year old style of maqam special to Iraq as performed by Hamid Al-Saadi. This was his first-ever US appearance, and we were surrounded by old women in burkas, and twiddling our toes and thrumming our fingers while we waited.
At first the singer himself was absent from the scene, and instead it was just the three instrumentalists, a young iraqi-american on the santur, a much older man on the jowza, and a very thick-set man playing percussion with various hand drums. I remember thinking the jowza-player must be somebody’s father. He didn’t seem as proficient as the other two and he was much louder, like maybe during sound check he’d demanded that they turn up his mic, being the senior of the three. They were all wearing dark suits with black hats that look sort of like fedoras without the brim.
Halfway through what may have been the third song this man walks out and sits at the far right. He starts to belt out this music that is like the sound of crying, this broken up-down sound, like when children go, “And… you… said… you’d… take… me… to… the… ice… cream… shop,” with a little tug at the end of each word, this high-pitched tug that is meant also to be a tug at your heart-strings. This is what Hamid Al-Saadi was doing, but like John Coltrane might do it. It was awesome.
Like I said before, I got this melodramatic heart, and so it maybe isn’t wise for me to go see music that’s too emotional? But I go. Cause I’m the kind of ecstasy-junky who keeps going back for more even after he’s already damaged his dopamine receptors.
But. The maqam is an improvisational music form. And although I could certainly appreciate this man’s vocal stylings, there were many points when it was obvious that it’s specifically the ideas he was expressing that were so powerful. This particular phrase he’s just come up with on the fly that causes the entire audience to burst out laughing. Or the old women surrounding us to start doing the tongue ululation thing, the, Aiaiaiaiai, in their appreciation. But oddly enough, my feeling as I allowed these sounds to wash over me was not that I was immersed in an ancient tradition, but that this is the future of sound.
Which may have something to do with the book I was reading at the time. Dune, by Frank Herbert, is itself full of Arabic words and ideas, and could largely be viewed as an allegory for Western involvement in the Middle East. This book that was published in 1965, in which the main character, Paul Atreides, is continually having flashes of a coming jihad that will overwhelm the universe and himself at the head of it. He uses this exact word and is spending the whole book trying to curb this eventuality. I can almost imagine Herbert hoping to psychically curb the crescendoing violence in the Middle East through the writing of Dune. I especially liked his comparison of Paul’s vision of the future to a handkerchief blowing in the wind. And I love the idea of spice as a stand-in for both the hashish and oil of our world. Gets you high and it’s how you power your space craft. Once again, can’t help thinking of John Coltrane and of course Sun Ra. Not to mention, the campy brilliance of Lynch’s film version. Or Jodorowski’s failed attempt to make Dune for that matter.
Of course, the whole glamorizing of the exotic Near East as unknowable and by implication inhuman is just as offensive as the ideas of those who say that there must be something inherently wrong with a religion that has as part of its ideology the concept of the holy war, or “crusade”, when the political truth is that we just happen to live in a world where these traditionally Christian nations—sure, “secularized” in the modern era, but nonetheless traditionally Christian—hold all the power and the offspring of the Moslem nations hold all the oil, and the Christian-offspring want that Moslem oil, all of which means the people in the Moslem nations are suffering more than a people should, and are understandably angry because of it.
But be that as it may, maqam is the music of the future, because this is the music of space. This is the music of the infinity within and between the notes. This is the sound of a person lost in the reaches of the on-going abyss. It should be the music of the new Mars colony, whoever it is that gets there first. Whether it’s paypal co-founder Elon Musk with his space shuttle company Spacex or Mars One with their reality TV show on Mars idea. This is a planet with water, yes, but far more uninhabitable than Dune, and a perfect place for maqam’s beautiful weeping improvisational sound to flourish, as well as possibly psychedelic drugs and Second Life, and extremist ideologies. But the point is some extremist ideologies are simply extremely beautiful. Think zen-sufi space religion. “God created [Dune] to train the faithful.” Could so easily be the mindset on Mars in a hundred years!
John Bellows is not the sound of future space exploration, however, but more the sound of the forgotten proles of the here and now back on planet America. His is not the music of Mars, but those unfortunate enough to linger in the basements of the foremost military power on our earth. The dispossessed living in the cracks among the elites.
This is the place I’ve always felt at home. The on-going universe of house shows and the on-going underground of beatnik to hippie to punk to hipster to just hateful. Because I never wanted to be a part of their club, and although I’m not one of those who believe the reptilians are running the show and have been for five thousand years, I do truck with the absolute power corrupts absolutely idea, and furthermore that power mishandled can absolutely destroy a person’s psyche. Think of GW Bush and his bathtub paintings. The man is cracked.
As well as the idea that there is a mystery and we’re all working to figure it out, and that this is the why and the how of living. This is also part of that question that’s always bothering me, and why mystical texts have such funny names, like The Shape of Light or The Cloud of Unknowing. Because we feel that light SHOULD have a shape, and the truth IS to not know. Because this question I keep asking is ultimately a religious question. I am always looking for new ways of asking the same question to see how my brain reacts to it when the question is asked this way or that way. Group Inerane was one such discovery.
You see, for several years I have been obsessed with this label, Sublime Frequencies, and its various products. Its samplings of radio in North Korea, Cambodia, and the Mediterranean, and its many field recordings, of the streets of Lhasa or Bali, but also specific groups, and videos of various musicians in Jakarta for example. My favorite stuff coming out of Sublime Frequencies, however, isn’t the straight world music, like Smithsonian Folkways would do, although some of their stuff is like this. What I like most coming out of Sublime Frequencies are the fusions of western instruments and musical ideas with ideas local to that region. Just as multinationals are interested in localizing their products, local peoples are embracing now globally known genres like rocknroll and techno to express themselves.
But my favorite stuff turned out to be the Tuareg Blues, which—perhaps you have heard of this genre of music. It seems to be growing in popularity. It’s like a bedouin blues, and Group Inerane was my introduction. A video of this group performing can be found below. This is another example of the alien within. The use of electric guitar and drums in a way that we in the west are unfamiliar with. Or the dance music of Omar Souleyman. It sounds exotic. It sounds different, but not wholly different. Or more different because it cannot be easily classified as “ethnic music”. So we are drawn to this sound more. The alien within stands out here in the same manner as a blue note. In the case of a blue note the dissonance works to heighten the musical flavor. So it is with Tuareg and the cultural dissonance within what is otherwise a known musical art form.
Of course, this could be described as a kind of ethnic tourism. And that perhaps instead we should be searching out and creating our own culture of weird. Which is exactly what bands like The Residents and Negativland are doing. Theirs is the blatant weirdness of the surrealists—for the work of both these bands is very consciously surreal. Searching out weirdness for its own sake, as if that which were weird by its very nature must be true. Like the conspiracy theorist who follows all conspiracies even when they conflict with each other.
We here at Mutable could also be accused of this, but only because we so wanted you to listen with your ears fully cocked and to take all our preconceptions out back and shoot them. We wanted you to engage a song as if it were a part of your own psychical constitution, a bit of the continent of your brain that was lost once but has now returned to fly in from the outside in mp3 form and snuggle up to the rest of all that you consider you, for we are both nothing more than a pronoun dressed up in play-pretend clothes and pieces of culture pasted together with the adhesive of emotion and memory. Nothing more than that I love this person and that this person loves me. Negativland’s jarring sound collages may hurt to hear, but they hurt because they sound like a dead culture decaying.
Last time I saw Bellows and the Imaginations is at a house show, and I was manically drinking tea while simultaneously trying to talk to everyone and also avoid all eye contact with as many people as possible. Bellows was a little more haggard this time around, and these songs were a sound in the dark, like if Johnny Cash lived in the post-apocalyptic America of today, and was trying to cheer up the ones left behind after the blast with a few melodies that could only approximate the musical forms of that earlier unknown age we call the 20th Century.
—GBoyer
Chicago, 2013
Gabriel Boyer has been making up stories about himself for as long as he can remember. There was never a time he was not fully seated in his various delusions. He continues to delude himself daily. His latest release is below. You can read more about him here.
