Michael Zapruder, Pink Thunder (book & CD), Black Ocean, 2012.
michaelzapruder.com/
With contributions from 23 poets, 3 engineers, and over 30 musicians, Pink Thunder
presents a musical and lyrical experiment by award-winning songwriter /
composer Michael Zapruder, to see what happens when poems are sung
instead of spoken. Potent with weird, funny, and singular possibilities,
Pink Thunder's playful and startling songs take their form
entirely from the shape of the poems from which they are made. The
result is a collection of musical readings both compelling and
surprising. You are invited to listen.
This full-color hardcover book contains an artist's statement by Michael Zapruder with an introduction by Scott Pinkmountain, and comes with a CD containing 22 tracks. The book also features photographs from the recording sessions and the Wave Poetry Bus Tour and hand-lettered versions of the poems illuminated by Arrington de Dionyso.
Contributing poets include: Joshua
Beckman, David Berman, Carrie St. George Comer, Gillian Conoley, Bob
Hicok, Noelle Kocot, Dorothea Lasky, Brett Fletcher Lauer, Anthony
McCann, Valzhyna Mort, Hoa Nguyen, Sierra Nelson, Tyehimba Jess, Travis
Nichols, D.A. Powell, Matthew Rohrer, Mary Ruefle, James Tate, Joe
Wenderoth, Dara Weir, and Matthew Zapruder.
Imagine, for a moment, two competing narratives of the history and development of American poetry in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries: The first, one in which the postwar explosion in the number of graduate creative writing programs nationwide plays mustachioed villain to the blinding sunburst of creativity attendant only upon the nation's coastal bohemian enclaves; the second, in which the Program Era and the literary bohème are siblings--the former acting, in large but not exclusive part, as a necessary delivery system for the inventions of the latter--with both, in their own subtle ways, gregariously rebelling against their shared parental unit: the High Modernists. (We might say, too, that this latter history would have both Program Era children and children of the literary bohème secretly idolizing their crazed European grandparents from the WWI-era historical avant-garde.)
The first of these narratives is, at present, the gospel; the second, a gnostic reading of events only lately receiving its proper attention and due. The prediction made in this space is that within less than five years the latter reading of the history and development of American verse over the last century and a quarter will entirely and permanently eclipse the former. And if and when that happens, it will be because literary criticism begins, once again, to contextualize its scholarly obsessions and also, as importantly, because of stellar, iconoclastic, multimedia literary-art productions like Michael Zapruder's poetry anthology-cum-musical album, Pink Thunder.
In a lengthy essay this reviewer wrote recently for Spoon River Poetry Review (available from same this coming spring), entitled "The Golden Age of American Poetry Is Now," the following claim appears:
"What we might expect to find in poets whose work encapsulates this singular moment in the historicity of letters...[is] an aspiration to unify literary arts communities with those of other artforms already admired in the bohemian enclaves poets increasingly live and write in...an embrace of the performative elements of the written word...an especially vigorous willingness to produce collaborative works...a desire to produce mixed-genre or non-generic artifacts, by way of acknowledging that the sociocultural and curricular spaces of creative writing programs and non- or quasi-institutional literary communities are often mixed- or non-genred spaces...and a sensitivity to the costs and benefits of social media."
Not a week later, Michael Zapruder's Pink Thunder (a Black Ocean and, indirectly, Wave Books joint) appeared in this reviewer's mailbox.
If an objective correlative could be said to exist for the myriad phenomena of the present Golden Age of American poetry, it would be Pink Thunder. In short, it's a genre-mixing, community-driven, performance-oriented, collaborative project that represents everything that's right with American poetry and everything American poetry is fast becoming. More specifically, Pink Thunder is the culmination of a six-year project initiated by Michael Zapruder, brother of poet and editor Matthew Zapruder. After a week spent riding on Wave Books' Poetry Bus in 2006, Zapruder gathered together poems written and performed by poets on the tour and began turning them into vehicles for musical composition. According to Zapruder's Artist's Statement, "my inviolable rule was that the poems must control the music and not vice-versa. I made a rule that I would never change a single word, nor would I reorder or otherwise alter any of the poems, and I stuck to that."
Indeed he did; the songs of Pink Thunder are in every respect poems set to music, meaning that they lack choruses of the traditional sort, for instance, or much in the way of rigid melodic schemes. What's stunning is that they're the better for it: Zapruder, clearly a consummate professional as a musician, produces songs which are in every respect "real" songs but also, too, "real" poems. This is not your daddy's sixties-era, bongo-playing poetic accompaniment; these are songs you'd want to listen to, not just once but many times, because they're both lyrically and compositionally superlative.
When this reviewer originally received Pink Thunder, he made the mistake--seeing that the poem-songs were anthologized in the book portion of the package--of reading along with the poems-cum-liner notes as the music was playing. It became clear, soon enough, that this was the grave mistake. (And a mistake, one fears, that too many of those who will purchase Pink Thunder are likely to make.) These artifacts are meant to be experienced as ineluctable wholes, not as bifurcated literary and musical experiences. Once one puts down the beautifully-produced hardcover book that partially comprises Pink Thunder and just listens to the sounds one hears, one realizes that Zapruder may well have taken the largest step any artist, literary or otherwise, has taken in years toward reminding us why we love poetry. Ultimately, the physical product of Pink Thunder is superfluous, just as it is poetry we value--its invisible sound and core-felt sense--not the publishing scene. This reviewer wanting to read words on a page simultaneous to hearing those same words recited or sung was, it now seems, a mere habit--a fetishizing of a narrow way of experiencing poetry, one that belongs more to the twentieth century than this one.
Without question, if you are yourself a poet and you decide to purchase only one poetry collection in 2013, it should be Zapruder's Pink Thunder. The reason is that you can't fully understand what will be expected of you as a literary artist in the next decade until you listen to the album that comes with this poetry collection. The synesthesia of the collection's title--a combination of image and sound--heralds the important gestures contained therein, gestures which had their birth in various bohemian enclaves in the sixties but have since taken on new life in the literally hundreds of graduate creative writing programs and small, independent publishing institutions now dotting the American landscape. The mid- and late-century avant-garde gave us sound poetry and cross-generic investigations of language (from Charles Bernstein's recovery of folk tunes to the professional Googlers of flarf; from Carla Harryman's flirtations with generic fiction to Susan Howe's unpacking of documentary techniques); but it is the Program Era that has found a way to disseminate these advances across the entire nation and thus change poetry permanently--something that was impossible when good ideas about Art were just things that occasionally popped up in remote coffeehouses in New York's Greenwich Village and San Francisco's Mission District.
Music is moving closer and closer to poetry, and poetry ever closer to music, even as neither is sacrificing any part of what makes it valuable. At first this seems a paradox, but it's one that begins to make sense when one considers that the roster of truly great sixties lyricists includes Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, Joni Mitchell, and only a handful of others, whereas today a thoroughly idiosyncratic singer, harpist, and lyricist like Joanna Newsom can be reviewed in Rolling Stone and represent only the smallest portion of America's increasingly poetic musical pantheon.
The line between musical concert and poetry reading is slowly blurring, indeed is already blurred, which means the dirt piled atop the grave of Language poetry will now, too, be urinated upon by additional passersby. Is it fair? Probably not; the contributions of Language poets and their kin to the roster of what academic poetry is willing to risk and what it can accomplish has undoubtedly, via the Program Era, profoundly influenced the far greater stock of American poets whose only intersection with the Academy is in largely non-academic fine arts degree programs. But the more important point remains: In the future, poetry readings will once again be cultural happenings of significant note, the sort of social event any right-thinking, even-marginally-educated American would want to check out at least a few times per year.
Is it wise that poetry turn so violently from its recent history as a predominantly "page" phenomenon ripe and ready for academic scholarship and canonization? Again, probably not. The less poets participate in Art primarily on the page, the less accountable they are to strangers, and a lack of accountability in poetry (whether in publishing, book promotion, reading series organization, networking, program admissions, program funding, or any other realm that deeply touches the lives of literary artists) has often served to harm Art and artists alike. But it's hard to see poetry that doesn't perform exceedingly well--or, better stated, poets who perform exceedingly well, whatever they're writing--having much of a leg to stand on in the years ahead. (Which is not to say this trend hasn't been evident for many years, albeit only on the corners of the poetry-publishing scene; Patricia Smith, a star performance poet, was recently a National Book Award finalist for her collection Blood Dazzler, for instance. And certainly several of the great post-avants of the 1960s were also great performers--Charles Olson comes to mind--though one would be hard-pressed to say that the literary project of these poets was as much a "stage" as a "page" phenomenon, and few of these men and women hailed directly from the non-literary performing arts.)
In one of the finest tracks--in one of the finest poems--on/in Pink Thunder, "Pennsylvania," contemporary American poetry literally touches its Resurrection. The song-poem/poem-song (or, as you like, "song" or "poem") illustrates Zapruder's ability to suss out, in a piece of literary art, those rhythms and turns and peculiar syntactic constructions and thematic obsessions that are now, and have always been, printed poetry's companion phenomena to similar reifications of spiritual detritus in music. In the repetitions of the word "tree," and in Zapruder's decision to soften his voice and playing whenever the poem's whimsy bleeds through ("I found a tree, a naked tree...a big f*cking deal tree"; "I've been your girlfriend...for several minutes" [ellipses added]); in his ability to attach the appropriate keys (minor or major, higher- or lower-octave) to words and phrases of different diction ("starcase" [sic] gets an ethereal, higher key; "Denver" a lower, minor-or-warbling one), and in his mirroring of chord progressions across far-flung sections of the poem differently constituted syllabically but sonically linked by their textures; in all of these artistic decisions Zapruder reveals poems to already be songs-in-waiting, and music simply a different form of poetic logic and rhetoric. While this hardly means every song can function as a poem, or every poem as something you'd listen to for pleasure or edification with no liner notes or lyrics before you, Pink Thunder is that remarkable historical happening that's both a great album and a great poetry collection.
Poetry is not, of course, synonymous with song lyric, and this review stops well short of that dubious claim. In fact, the divergences between the two endeavors are not just instructive but strike at the core of what makes poetry an essential artform in any civilization. The twenty-two works of Pink Thunder do not, as noted, have choruses, though Zapruder has clearly studied the units of measure in the poems received by him from friends and family, and gives equivalent units (rhythmically, syntactically, temporally, and/or thematically) similar enough musical treatment that we can understand, indeed cannot fail to miss, how it is that poetry preceded song lyrics in the history of inventions--and will always eclipse its stepchild when given the opportunity and resources. It goes without saying, then, that the "lyrics" in Pink Thunder outstrip in every conceivable aspect the lyrics found everywhere this side of--well, anyone. Joanna Newsom, Fiona Apple, Paul Simon, Bob Dylan: From a purely literary standpoint, all of these superstars are relative neophytes, at least when compared to poets of the caliber found in Pink Thunder.
Soon, then, we must surmise, the circle will be complete, the worm will turn--choose your metaphor--and the distance between an obscure, independent-press poetry release and Joanna Newsom's Rolling Stone-reviewed music will disappear completely. It is then that America will discover it actually still does (in fact never did stop) liking poetry. Not because poetry and song lyrics are indistinguishable, but because there is, in the human, a form of imaginative impulse we may term poetic, and it can and does make itself manifest in countless media. For Zapruder, those media include the visual arts: A music video for the poem-song "Florida" can be found here, and it further entrenches Pink Thunder as the sort of project that spits in the face of Kenneth Goldsmith's defeatist "Peak Language" theory. It is not that we have too much language, but that (and in this Goldsmith might agree) we exhibit too much possessiveness over language. One can easily imagine, watching "Florida," further poem-music collaborations in myriad generic spaces long absent of poets' presence: For instance, we might predict post-hardcore poetry albums, country poetry albums, electronica poetry albums, and so on. (Zapruder, for his part, is, as a musician, three parts Wilco and one part something else.) And many would argue that we already have indie-rap albums of sufficient lyric complexity and poetic sensibility to earn shelf-space next to the likes of Pink Thunder.
All this sea change suggests that something, somewhere, is gradually getting washed away, and one suspects it is, by and large--Language poetry excepted--the academic rat race-cum-publishing scene. If that specter of the 1970s and 1980s is becoming increasingly flimsy in the view of contemporary American poets and poetry, the reason is not the one most think: It's not that the conventional lyric-narrative favored in many university-based creative writing circles is dead (though it is), or that no one has quite the same faith in old-guard university publishing that they once did (though they don't), it's that the foundational premise of the publish-or-perish ethos is that we're all in this alone and the problem is--or, rather, the opportunity is--we're not. Not anymore.
This series has contended, before, that the archetypal Romantic-Era literary-genius isolato, however celebrated by both post-Language Poetry scions and hordes of would-be "professional" poets now working in academia, is in fact a dying breed; poetry is more and more a communal and community-oriented enterprise. On the seedier side of things, that means a lot of cronyism, nepotism, crass networking, and high-school cliquishness masquerading as aesthetic gestalt; on the less seedy side of things, that means a lot of cronyism, nepotism, crass networking, and high-school cliquishness masquerading as aesthetic gestalt with, somewhere in the bargain, some pretty amazing poetry to boot.
So it is--if we approach the subject of this review socioculturally--with Pink Thunder, a friends-and-family-publishing-friends-and-family enterprise that has the unique distinction of a) involving some pretty darn talented friends and family, and consequently some of the more striking literary art published in America this decade; b) having a distinct vision for what it means to be a poet living and writing in the Golden Age of American Poetry; and c) further revealing the well-intentioned ephemera of top-down (merit-based, "blind," and contest-oriented) publishing and the historic ascension of grassroots (relationship-based, relationship-based, and relationship-based) publishing.
So, we might well ask, whither a geographically isolated, shy, prickly, impolitic, awkward, or infamous poet in a literary publishing scene that rewards going along to get along, and getting along to publish along with? The hope here is that, in time, so-called "objective" assessment of Art (such as it is) will, like the cockroach, persist despite all threats foreign and domestic, and the seemingly universal view, in contemporary American poetry, that--despite a national scene suffused with 70,000 poets--one's ten best friends are likely also the ten best poets in America will come in for some serious scrutiny. Until then, grassroots publishing will now and again strike solid gold--as is the case with Pink Thunder--and we'll all be green with envy but also much the better for it.
Read strictly as "page" poetry, the poems of Pink Thunder are pretty good but, in many spots, unspectacular. The individual poems are, like so much hip-lit these days, a little funny, a little ironic, a little despairing, and a little in love with themselves. These poems don't go in much for caged-page technical artistry like clever enjambment, nor do they have much truck with subtlety; they love people and their quirks and hate Big Ideas-qua-Big Ideas. There's a lot of mash-notes-to-the-way-we-live happening here, which is fine, though it doesn't stick around in the gut as long as it should, perhaps because it doesn't want to or perhaps because it can't. Great Art-qua-Great Art is in its rear-view mirror. But having said that, the poems of Pink Thunder are also more viscerally enjoyable than four-fifths of the poetry one is likely to encounter on the shelves of the local bookstore (if you can remember bookstores), so there's that. And in the final accounting, that's far from nothing.
But if, as this review argues, we do better to speak of the literary art of Pink Thunder than its poems--which literary art enfolds but is by no means limited to poetry--we can only conclude that there's ample excellence in evidence here. This includes a gorgeous physical product (and yes, artistry in production increasingly matters to Golden Ager, multi-generic artists) filled with glossy photographs, ample prose surrounding the poetry, and, most importantly, a musical album that holds up better than nearly any poetry you've read on the page in years. It's so good, somewhere in America John Darnielle is nervous.
Here's hoping that Pink Thunder, or something of its ilk, becomes an annual anthology, indeed one that casts its net even wider in the future. This means including poets and poetics presently unknown to whatever artist (or, better still, whichever different and varying artists) shall collaboratively act as their anthologists-cum-musicologists. By any accounting, though, Pink Thunder is an idea whose time has come, and an idea worth sharing and spreading outside the provincial boundaries of any and every literary subcommunity extant today.
This review closes by noting that it's this generation of undergraduate and graduate creative writing students that developed the book trailer, gave birth to the band the Decemberists, put a credible and abiding reading series in every state in America, made possible a sufficient national audience for poetry that ten-city "book tours" became possible for poets as well as novelists, convinced state and federal governments to hand out millions of no-strings-attached dollars in public patronage to bucolic college campus-dwelling artists around the country, created vibrant online workshops and social-media communities where poets could share their poetics and their poems 24/7/365, and even supplied us with poetry's first supergroup--all while being told by their elders that they lacked any of the imaginative gusto of their mid-twentieth-century predecessors. (These were predecessors who were, for their part, doing their utmost to court--almost exclusively--the attentions of remote academic chairs with a narrower knowledge of contemporary poetry than most first-year MFA students.) Children and stepchildren and friends-of-the-family of the Program Era--now virtually synonymous with the Golden Age of American poetry--have brought us Pink Thunder and, it says here, the rebirth of poetry in America. If we could speak to an entire historical era, we could imagine the Program Era first admonishing us for being ingrates and then, second, saying, "And you're welcome."
[Excerpt: "Florida"].
Note: When an album is reviewed, top billing is generally given to either a band name or single singer-songwriter; the liner notes of the album, however, thank all those who participated in the making of the album, including those who collaborated in its songwriting or musical production. Poetry collections have a slightly different history. While many or most collections include acknowledgments sections, these are generally regarded as a personal indulgence rather than a vital aggregation of collaborators. For this review, every major player in the collection under consideration has been acknowledged because, it suddenly seems, this is both a more accurate and more honest portrayal of how literary art is produced in this century. The critical introduction to Pink Thunder matters, as do the musicians who helped Michael Zapruder produce the CD that accompanies the collection; just so, each of the poets who contributed work to this project is an essential collaborator.
In the years ahead, we may well find poets less and less willing to feature their name--and only their name--on their collections' front covers, as increasingly the debt literary artists who write into and out of vibrant bohemian and/or institutional communities owe to those communities will be impossible to elide. Pink Thunder expands our understanding of the institutions literary artists move through and within; the graduate creative writing program that offered teaching and learning opportunities to (say) D.A. Powell, whose work appears in this volume, ought be considered no more or less an institutional support to this project than (say) Tiny Telephone Studios in San Francisco, the likewise non- or minimal-profit art institution in which Zapruder mixed the songs appearing on the Pink Thunder CD.
How long will we have to wait until a literary-arts composition appears that borrows even more fully and literally than does Pink Thunder from the ethos and ethic of the sonic arts? Not long, is the thinking here. That is, we could choose to narrow our understanding of what it takes to produce a poem until not even a single author is observable--some of the newer Conceptual Poetry stretches in this direction--or we could engage in a perhaps more generous, honest, and contemporary act: Acknowledgment that the production of novel language and the use of novel compositional methods is not now more difficult (or less rewarding) than it has been in the past, it merely involves an ever-increasing number of players and intersecting communities. So we end up with more art, produced by more artists, operating within more and more (and more and more intertwined) communities of artists. In what possible way should such developments displease us? Or, more broadly, displease America? - Seth Abramson
The idea behind the bus tour was to bring poetry to its readers by making it accessible in the most public way. Poetry, after all, remains on a fundamental level aural, a form in which meaning is as much a matter of sound, of music and rhythm, as it is of the content of the words.
As a musician, Zapruder understood this, and when he left the tour, he took a sheaf of poems with the intention of using them as the basis for a suite of songs. Six years later, the result is “Pink Thunder” (Black Ocean: 64 pages, $24.95), an artist book featuring the work of 23 poets, along with illustrations by Arrington de Dionyso and a CD of Zapruder’s musical adaptations of the poems.
I’m a sucker for this kind of project, I’ll admit; back in college, I was even known to put Jim Morrison’s poetry album “An American Prayer” on the turntable, although it’s been a long time since I queued that up. Still, I’ve listened to a lot of other poetry/music collaborations, going back to Allen Ginsberg’s “The Lion for Real” and William Burroughs’ work with Bill Laswell and Material — experiments that speak to a different strategy for interacting with language, in which we bypass the intellect for a more direct emotional approach.
This is what “Pink Thunder” achieves too, although in issuing the CD as part of a book, Zapruder gives a nod to the primacy of the text. His music is delightfully eclectic, reminiscent of everything from Kurt Weill to Elliot Smith, and he builds space around the language, taking his lead from the words.
Some songs — “Word,” based on a poem by Joe Wenderoth, or “Florida,” built around a piece by Travis Nichols — almost seem to operate in verse/chorus format, despite the fact that none of the poetry here was produced with music in mind.
And yet, if “Pink Thunder” has a message, it’s that the relationship between poetry and music is more elusive, more conditional, than that of traditional lyrics in a song. This is the best thing about the project, the way Zapruder uses his music to mirror, or echo, his own reading of the material, and its emotional effect.
When at the end of “Pennsylvania” (a collaboration by Nichols, Joshua Beckman, Anthony McCann and Matthew Zapruder), he sings, “like technology you are like technology / Everything you do other people want to do it too,” his voice goes up quizzically as if commenting on the image, which is both absurd and precisely accurate. (That’s where its beauty resides.)
“I started out wondering if a song can be as specific, as particular as a poem,” Zapruder writes at the beginning of “Pink Thunder.” “After doing this, I think the answer is yes, but not in the way I thought it would be. Nothing can equal silence as a background for communications. Silence is the full spectrum. It’s power lies in its potential, which is infinite. Within that silence, these poets can achieve the ultimate, most accurate communication.” -
Full Disclosure: While I had nothing whatsoever to do with the making of this project, I have known and worked with Michael since 2004, and I wrote the introduction to the Pink Thunder book. However, I found the scope of this project to beg greater creative and cultural concerns than could be fully addressed in the introduction to the book.
***
Dear People of the Future,
With your lightning powered aggregators, your nanomembranophones, your hydrolytic isomer skin-suit apparatus, it will require an imaginative leap wider than the great San Andreas Canyon that separates The People’s Republic of California from the once great nation of the “United” States to conceive of the cultural landscape in which Michael Zapruder’s Pink Thunder, which I recommend you ingest via light pulse array, was created.
This is a little difficult to explain, but for a brief aberrant cycle in the history of human civilization, a violent minority of militaristic nations operated according to a spurious system based almost exclusively on the degradation of spirit via mass production and mechanized standardization, and on the pacification of the majority populace by reducing their access to education, nutritious food and health care, and increasing their access to pleasure-center stimulants. Weird, right? It’s likely you’ve never even heard of this cycle as its ideas were surely so overwhelmingly disproven and unanimously rejected as to be expunged from the annals of history.
Needless to say, this system had some strange repercussions on what we called “The Arts,” and what I assume you people simply call “The Skills.” There was a bizarre and reductive practice of measuring the merit of an “artist’s” (or “skilled maker” in your lingo) worth in economic terms, which fostered an environment where skilled makers were pressured into narrowly defined roles of limited practical function (painter, dancer, writer), because we found it much easier to commodify, market and monetize people and things which can be simply identified, labeled and thus branded. I apologize for the use of jargon that is likely incomprehensible to you, the entire epistemology of Late-Era-Cynical-Genocidal-Capitalism being (one hopes) gibberish to your ears. Maybe your Native Onboard Ingress Glyph-erator App will help you blow through this section?
Michael Zapruder was one such skilled maker whose vast creative identity was squished down into the horrible moniker of “songwriter.” Even typing the word makes my skin crawl and it’s better than many others because it incorporates both music and words, though its generally accepted domain is smaller than either of those individual realms. You likely know of Zapruder’s work as it allies with the inevitable values of your evolved civilization – one in which human creativity is appreciated and respected, one where skilled makers are encouraged to cast their visions far and wide across a spectrum of ideas, mediums, tasks, materials, one where invested scholarship, dedication, practice, ongoing questioning, deep listening, humility, quietude, skeptical faith, servility and mortal appreciation are esteemed above all other qualities; a civilization that has decoupled creativity from commerce in order to unfetter the range and capability of the human mind driven by the belief that the infinite and the unification can only be accessed/achieved through unbounded creativity.
Dear People of the Future, you have it good! What you need to understand is that essentially none of this was in place during Michael Zapruder’s era. So his skilled labor, though it has all the elements you are familiar with – fundamental cross platform integration, individual core identity with simultaneous off-the-charts collaborative authenticity indices, cosmic philosophical interrogatives, poly-genre divagation, virtuosic technical execution in the material/vibrational sphere – was virtually unprecedented in its period. The Pink Thunder project in particular was a first of its kind, though I assume this will be nearly impossible for you to accept given the universality of its influence.
The period in which the Pink Thunder project was created was a short blip in Western culture when people widely believed that the making of music and the writing of songs was something that required absolutely no training, no experience, next to no investment of time, effort, energy, really nothing more than forty-five minutes and an electric guitar (eventually something called a “laptop”). This is not to be confused with the so-called “untrained” practice of folk arts, which is where generally the most skilled, most invested, most virtuosic and heartfelt, handmade, laboriously crafted work was created. What started as a populist notion of personal connection with human creativity, quickly degenerated (due to the intoxicating cultural ether of aforementioned Genocidal Capitalism) to a sort of widespread entitlement or belief that said creativity needed to be not only documented but packaged, sold, and widely disseminated (to the social and financial benefit of the non-trained musician creating it).
This era or tradition (the “Punk” age, which, at the time of this writing is roughly forty years old) initially had tremendous value of course (as a reaction to technocratic tendencies and as a revolutionary reclamation of the means of cultural production, etc…), but it had the negative effect of distracting people from the tradition to which Zapruder belonged; one that was roughly between forty thousand to one hundred thousand years old. That tradition being the devotional mystic tradition, which, I assume is the only tradition of great significance and familiarity to you Good People of the Future.
Zapruder’s adherence to the devotional mystic tradition allowed him to see beyond the artificially circumscribed limitations and boundaries of genre and medium (musician, writer, visual artist, inventor, raconteur, showman, scholar, etc.). It also allowed him to side-step his time cycle’s obsessive system of containing music in controlled standardized formats for easy and lucrative commerce, which is why he hand-crafted individual objects like the portmanteau sound-sculptures that accompany and deliver Pink Thunder. Other creative sonic conveyance platforms such as music boxes, travelling sideshows, strolling balladeers, wind chimes, children’s song, ambient environmental saturation spheres, psychic serenades and car horn orchestras were either mechanized, commoditized and mass produced or dismissed as “untenable” forms and pipe dreams. (Pipe dreams also being one of the great Lost Mediums of musical conveyance). They were too difficult to capture and reproduce identically, and thus eluded market control, so they had to be co-opted, emulated in the grossest, most broad-stroke form, drained of meaning, reduced to signifiers, mass produced in a foreign country by child labor, cast in non-degradable materials, adorned with bright, eye-catching colors or panty-clad women, sold in bulk and, very shortly thereafter, landfilled.
But as Zapruder’s example demonstrates, there were always renegades and bandits, fierce outlaws operating under a separate moral flag, a completely unrelated vision of what the world could be. Like a country within a country which drew its boundaries based on the deeply held belief that mortally invested human creativity mattered, inherently, whether it was witnessed solely by the devoted spirit generating it, or by an entire galaxy. It didn’t need to be legitimated by being in service to a “god,” (the whole god thing, which I’m sure didn’t survive the rigors of history in its current form, is a really long story, not one I can totally get into now, but suffice it to say, there were some weird ideas floating around for a while), or to a commercial Industry with a god-sized sense of its own self-worth, or even a subsidiary of that industry that believed itself to be modest and earnest in contrast but was sadly operating (perhaps unknowingly) as a shadow arm extension of the Industry.
These bandits were probably not unlike their descendants with whom you would be far more familiar – the Hackers who disrupt the government and corporate control of your interpersonal global commerce-communication systems, the Smashers who flow from the hills late at night and destroy the for-profit broadcast studios and mediated message disseminators, the Scramblers who intercept the soundwaves of politicians and pundits as they speechify propaganda, hysteria, fear, lies and deception, the Sirens who make unadulterated devotional human creativity freely and widely available to the public while supporting the labor of other skilled generators through their coordinated network of donors, gifters, charitable aids, and volunteers.
But sadly, in our time, these bandits were viewed as chumps.
Have sympathy for the non-bandits of our time. They had no way to predict the calamity, violence and utter fucking stilted boringness of an art-free society. I know it’s too little too late, but let me personally apologize for the thousand-year art drought. We got a bit mixed up in our priorities. We kind of lost touch with history and hadn’t noticed that no society ever survived without a thriving non-commercial creative culture. And that there was a direct correlation between unfettered pragmatic observation of, and creative elaboration on the daily lived experience (what we used to call “art”) and the health of a person, society, planet. On behalf of the people of my time, allow me to recommend Pink Thunder both as joyful celebration of the shared values between your civilization and our underground resistance, and as evidence that we were not all completely insane, that the seeds for your peaceful and creative society had been planted long ago.
Sincerely,
Rebel Bandit #M611974
- Scott Pinkmountain
MUSIC Shellacked gummy worms, cherubic Ebay'd figurines, one of those ships in a glass bottle usually reserved for nautical-themed offices, a red bike reflector, a holarctic blue copper butterfly, a vintage stenograph. The physical items sit on separate pedestals as part of the release for Michael Zapruder's newest album, Pink Thunder (www.michaelzapruder.com).
You have through Nov. 18 to visit the Curiosity Shoppe on Valencia in the Mission, stick some headphones on your ears, and press a small red button on a bubblegum-pink square circuit board affixed with a kitschy sculpture of a bear holding an empty pot attached, or that bowl of shellacked gummy worms, or that holarctic blue copper butterfly, and hear the single track encased within. Zapruder dubbed the structures "portmanteaus" after the linguistic term meaning two blended words.
These particular portmanteus are blends of vision and sound, sculpture and music. The objects, and the individual songs that pump out of them — Zapruder's free-form pop built from poetry — force you, the listener, to think beyond your lazy current manner of music absorption.
"Just generally, I love the idea of a totally unconnected song. This is a song. That feels like an object that's somewhere closer to the stature of the music, as opposed to a CD. This celebrates music. It dresses it up," Oakland's Zapruder says, smiling in the center of his portmanteaus.
Plus, it's fun to touch the art.
"Imagine if you went into a record store and there weren't that many things but each thing was really cool, you wanted to pick it up and play with it, and there was only one copy of each thing. Don't you think that'd be cool?" He laughs after he says it. Could this be the future of the now-shuttered mega record stores? Could downsizing have saved the behemoths?
Of course, it all goes a bit deeper than that, the vision behind this multifaceted, six-year-long project.
"I think it's good when people listen to stuff in an uncertain state. So many listening experiences are so familiar. You're working on your computer and you're listening, or you're in a club. And it can be amazing. But you know what you're going to get, you know the structure. [Pink Thunder] songs are all experimental, all free-composed. Hopefully they're very listenable, but they're odd, and I thought it'd be good for people to be in a 'what is this?' state."
Though the songs are also being released through a few more traditional venues. Pink Thunder as a whole is the portmanteaus, each with one of 22 songs that are also compiled into CD form and 12-inch vinyl on The Kora Records (known for releasing records such as Philip Glass' recent Reworked), seven-inches released by Howells Transmitter, which Zapruder helps run, and a bright pink poetry book, put out by Black Ocean.
The whole process took half a decade to create, completed with the Oct. 16 release on The Kora and the installation at Curiosity Shoppe, which opened in mid-October. Though clearly, the wider range of this project, beyond the physical objects, is the relationship between poetry and music.
It all began with a poetry tour organized by Seattle's Wave Books; Zapruder's renowned poet brother Matthew helps run the small publishing house. Zapruder jumped on the Green Tortoise poetry bus for a week of the 50-city tour and after a few false starts, he came up with the idea: "I wanted to see if songs could communicate those same kinds of things that these poets' poems do."
He gathered up poems by the likes of the Silver Jews' David Berman, Carrie St. George Comer, Gillian Conoley, Noelle Kocot, Sierra Nelson, Hoa Nguyen, D. A. Powell, Mary Ruefle, James Tate, Joe Wenderoth, and his brother, and turned them into lyrics.
"The poets are such badasses," Zapruder says, when asked if he sees the project as a way to deliver poetry to the masses. "Most of them are better known than me. The idea that I could give something to them, introduce people to their work, that's incredible."
As musician-writer Scott Pinkmountain says in the book's introduction, "these are poets who understand that the big grabs — Love, Family, Confession, Death — can no longer be approached directly in a convincing way. Today's audience is too savvy, too wary of manipulation and sentimentality. These poems instead stake their foundation on the minutia of accidental revelation, trusting the details of life to point out the bigger picture."
We, as the music listener, hear this in the subtlety of a track like "Book of Life," created from Noelle Kocot's story about a monk and a phoenix meeting in the woods. At one point, the monk gives the phoenix a squirming worm — hence the shellacked bowl of gummy worms portmanteau at Curiosity Shoppe.
There are slightly more literal interpretations in songs such as the deceptively upbeat string-heavy "Storm Window," based on the poem by Mary Ruefle, which tells a story of a sedentary couple — "She sat writing little poems of mist/he in his armchair/reading blood-red leather novels/their three-legged white cat wandering between them/24 champagne glasses sparkle on a shelf/never a one to be broken." It's about empty domestic harmony, so Zapruder created the portmanteau with that cheery Ebay bear holding an empty bowl. The found object is eerily revealing.
The project's title came from Zapruder's brother's poem "Opera," which ends with the line,"still riding your bike under pink hi-fidelity thunder." (The object represented here is a red bicycle reflector.)
One of the more arresting combinations is for the song "John Lomax: I Work With Negroes." The object is an old voltage meter. The poem, written by award-winning African-American author Tyehimba Jess, and subsequently the song, are about John Lomax, who "discovered" fabled blues musician Lead Belly in the 1930s.
The theme throughout is of the racism of exoticism, the way Lomax exoticized Lead Belly. "Racism that's couched in admiration, this condescending accolade," as Zapruder describes it. "So the idea [for the voltage meter] was that he's constantly measuring and evaluating — but also, Lomax brought all this stuff in his car on tour, hundreds of pounds of equipment, so I thought maybe he had one of those."
The piano-driven song is brief, just a minute and 35 seconds, but shifts from quiet plea to deep gravelly question mark, and back again, using multiple vocal backing tracks.
The songs often deviate, in tone, and in tempo. As a whole, it's an impressive, if difficult listen. There are so many layers, so many twists and turns. They don't have expected pop hooks, there isn't a whole lot of repetition. Zapruder lets the songs wander, as if he's creating a melodic new method of storytelling, occasionally dipping into child-like wonder. He builds songs in a Jon Brian-esque style, with Elliot Smith-like sensitivity and raw ache in his vocals, treading ever-so-lightly over tracks of electric guitar, drums, synthesizers, and in some cases, marimba or brass horns.
The actual songwriting process was quick. He wrote half of the them during a solo 10-day residency in a Napa cabin. The recording of said tracks took considerably longer — nearly three years, beginning in December of 2008. The Oakland resident hopped around with the songs in mind, recording some vocals in his own studio, some instruments at Closer Studios in San Francisco, and New, Improved in Oakland (where tUnE-yArDs and her ilk record), and mixed at Tiny Telephone.
He sang and played many of the instruments, but got backup musical help from dozens of fellow musicians, including Nate Brenner (aka Natronix) of tUnE-yArDs, bassist Mark Allen-Piccolo, and multi-instrumentalist Marc Capelle. An aside: Allen-Piccolo and his father are the ones who designed the music player circuit in all the wooden bases of the portmanteaus, as they have a circuit design business.
So Zapruder pieced together recordings from different studios and time periods in a situation he describes as a "free for all."
"It took years," Zapruder says with a shrug, "That's what it's like when you do something you've never done before. You make a lot of mistakes."
And it is a relatively unique idea — there isn't much to compare this project with. Zapruder mentions Tristan Perich's 1-Bit Symphony on Bang on a Can Records, an electronic composition in five movements on a microchip in the jewel case. Also, a release from German ambient-experimental label tomlab that featured an album with an object (though the music wasn't inside the object as with Pink Thunder).
In his own career, Zapruder's recorded three well-received albums; Spin Magazine once called his work prolific, and described his compositions as "in the mold of Sufjan Stevens or Andrew Bird," a pretty weighty and favorable comparison in the indie music world. But so far, he's never done anything quite like Pink Thunder. The stunt for which he's perhaps most well known is 1999's 52 Songs, in which he wrote, recorded, and posted one new song a week for a full year; and this was back before the ease of the modern web with ubiquitous sites like Youtube, Bandcamp, or Soundcloud.
So while he's dabbled in the avant garde, this was certainly the first time he Ebay'd and thrift-shopped physical items (he went to Urban Ore in Berkeley) to display and interlock with his music.
And now he's back to his other undertakings. The married father of two also works part-time at Pandora (where he was the curator of the music collection for seven years), is in graduate school for music composition at California State University East Bay, and is making another record. He's a third of the way through recording, and hopes to put it out next year. "I have a lot of songs that didn't come out because I've been working on this," he explains. He plans to release that in object form as well.
And he'll be taking Pink Thunder on the road in the next year as well, stopping by the Mission Creek Festival in Iowa City, lecturing at New York University, and making an appearance with Wave Books and Black Ocean at the AWP (Association of Writers and Writing Programs) in Boston, which is "the SXSW for writers." AWP is also where he first premiered Pink Thunder.
As he describes all this, he wonders aloud if he has dark circles around his eyes, worn from the general life trajectory, and perhaps from explaining his vision for the last hour plus while standing in the diminutive Mission store. He doesn't have raccoon eyes today, munching on a health bar as he first describes the portmanteaus, but I can see why he'd be tired.
On the same day the Curiosity Shoppe installation closes — Nov. 18 — Zapruder will also perform Pink Thunder live at Amnesia. Earlier in the day, there will be a closing party at the store; that will be followed by the live performance down the street.
At Amnesia, it'll be a duo with backing tracks and audience participation. "Honestly, I think it can be hard to listen to these one after another if you've never heard them before," he explains. "It's a lot of new information. Without the help of familiar forms, you're dealing with new sounds but also like, 'where is this thing going?'" To help with that, there will be samples and audience members will likely be invited to come up and trigger different sounds during the show. A mad scientist approach to live music.
"Even with everything that's going on, the main thing is that I'm a musician, and that's why I did this," says Zapruder. "It's to clear the way for these songs to get through to people. The music is the center. I want people to hear it and be affected by it. But that probably goes without saying." -
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