Captain Beefheart

This book is not another critical biography, but an interpretive essay investigating what we feel is the cultural and historical importance of Zappa and Beefheart in the context of a wide-ranging network of references that run from Michelangelo and Arcimboldo to William Burroughs and Vaclav Havel. Readers who are only vaguely familiar with their music will be introduced to a projected pantheon of maximalist artists and “moments” which will in turn give rise to poetic-associational readings designed to encourage them to explore the processes of art production, consumption and rejection in their expanding totality and to consider the body as the fluctuating constant against which all composition (addition and subtraction of parts) is attempted. In many ways, this book is also intended as a maximalist alternative to the cultural studies take on the study of popular music, which generally neglects aesthetics in favor of the merely semiotic and sociological and is reluctant to investigate the relationships and coincidences of mass, underground and “elitist” culture. In what follows, we will propose an (anti-)method, a conspiracy theory of the mind that seeks to foster a promotional application of “paranoid” criticism risking its very credibility (and sanity) to abandon itself to the energizing virtues of connectivitis and coordinology.

The avant-garde blues of Captain Beefheart appeared out of the psychedelic moment in popular music, his career spanning the period of transition from AM pop to FM alternative rock radio in the USA, and the rise of pirate and then commercial and public service pop radio in Europe. Relatively unsuccessful commercially, Beefheart was a cult for hardcore fans and musicians. Among his unusual qualities was a powerful commitment to environmentalist themes in his songs and interviews. While individual songs by more popular artists raised such themes, especially about the threat of nuclear war and concerns about pesticides and air pollution, Beefheart was out on a limb musically, lyrically and politically. This chapter traces the curious concatenations of ecopolitics with dictatorial attitudes ascribed to Beefheart by members of his band; and the relations between his debts to African American traditions in music and the environmental themes of so many of his compositions.