If you’ve never listened to Jandek, consider yourself lucky. If you have, and you, like any normal person, can’t stand him nor the people who fawn over him, consider yourself luckier. But if you’re like me, and you’ve fallen for both the mystery (which, let’s be honest, is the entire initial appeal to this stuff) and the music (which, let’s be honest, is not appealing in any traditional manner) and you’ve listened to so many of his records that, against your better judgment, each and every poorly-tuned open chord, every schizophrenic drum hit, every high whispery moan starts to make a modicum of sense…
Well, the road to hell ends at Corwood Industries. I know. I’m in it.
For the uneducated and willing to learn, stop, now. You don’t want to be in my position. I don’t want to be in my position. Jandek composes a brand of blues and folk that conjures up reactions in normal folk along these lines: “atonal,” “scary,” “crap.” He has practically monopolized the market of atonal scary crap. And listening to his records for days on end will do nothing but awful things to you. Noise records make more sense than this. Christian rock makes more sense than this.
Oh God someone please help me.
The album I’m listening to right now, Somebody in the Snow, is incredibly misleading. It starts off with some of Jandek’s most downright accessible material – consistent drumbeats, chords that actually make sense when placed in tandem. It was so promising, like listening to Blue Corpse for the first time (dear readers, never listen to Blue Corpse, you’ll like it), but with a bluesier, electric Jandek this time around.
I am on the second side now and it is not a good place to be. I am somewhat frightened for my life and the lives of those around me. I think I am crying and bleeding from the lip from biting too much. I can’t tell anymore. I am typing on this keyboard but really I am touching glass, and the grass is breaking and entering my fingertips like slow daggers. I am tied to their cold embrace. I am nothing in it. Oh.
There is so much pain here. There is so much joy.
I figured, here, all tangled in glass, linking to Jandek’s music would be much more useful than linking to the Jandek on Corwood trailer – after all, that shit just makes people like him, and that’s not my aim. I repeat, you do not want to be here, 3 in the morning, swallowing your nails and finding that little choke you have just before one clears your esophagus beautiful, of all things. No, you should hate him, and you should find me pretentious, and you should never darken this entry ever again.
But, against my better judgment, I can’t help but feel that, in each of these records, beneath all of this glass and dross that I’ve endured as a result, this is some of the purest expression I’ve ever come across.
No no no no no no, don’t listen to me. I’m fucking crazy. This is not, I repeat, not expression. This is something much worse. This is… perversion. This is… not right. This is wrong. This is not music.
This deteriorates.
This… this breathes.
Link: Jandek, from his first live performance in 2004, performing “Real Wild.”
