I dunno a silly dance party Jandek show getting so much serious virtual ink is really a no-win situation; it’s like complaining that Bill Murray’s Carl in Caddyshack character is daft. Well, yeah exactly! Again I don’t think this was that serious of a show – just fun. There really isn’t that much to grab onto here but “dance party” and I think some Jandek fans can’t deal with that.

I have a question. Has anyone ever actually asked directly who the guys playing bass and drums are? Who have they played with, where are they from, etc… IS it odd to anyone else besides me that nobody cares who those guys were?

I think that what they did, in essence – at least for me anyway – was to take up so much space with their playing that in the process whatever it was that Jandek would ultimately do, and did, is almost entirely swallowed by the rhythm section.

And, by the way, I don’t for a second doubt that this was by design.

The problem I have is that what they are doing is so immediately recognizable as a genre-specific construct vamped into oblivion and played with such fundamental obviousness that it is by its very nature uninteresting.

On top of that is the only reason anyone was in the building that afternoon. Namely: Jandek.

And the man himself contributes very little of actual creative value to an already stretched thin trope (to use one of Ramon’s favorite words).

When I claim, in my terribly powerful and ingenious blog post, that Jandek has engorged himself on his own Kool-Aid, what I mean is that to my ears this man is uninterested in engaging in a musical conversation of any depth, and instead is utilizing a well-tread and instantly familiar language to essentially say almost nothing of novel musical value. By doing this, he is shedding a great deal of not only figurative but literal light on to Jandek the icon. And, I believe, he is doing so intentionally, not because he just wants to party (he may want to party), and not just because he doesn’t give a fuck (because anyone who really believes he doesn’t give a fuck is most-assuredly deluded to the point of being beyond repair), but because it has never really been about the music and has always been about his, for him, to him; and now, more than ever, this remains true.

That in itself isn’t a bad thing, but it does lead to events like this, and it also leads to thirty years of records that don’t meet you anywhere close to halfway, instead delighting in forcing you to chase them all over the globe like a simpering fanatic.

The “fun” argument is a total red herring, because who would ever honestly argue that people shouldn’t go to a show and have a good time? Those of us that care enough to comment at all, as fans of music, culture, people, and using our minds to understand whatever the fuck it is that goes on during this lunatic life, are certainly entitled to regard what happened that day as disappointing without being regarded as a buzzkill or an asshole.

I am most certainly an asshole, but that has little to do with what I see as being problematic about that show.

For that matter, being there is utterly irrelevant to what it is I found wrong with the performance. I suspect that had I been there I might have come away disliking the show even more.

Ya know?

I thought fun = dancing = revolutionary was directed at mopey indie rockers who often can be found in droves hardly moving, displaying the level of social behavior they have acquired from sitting on their couch playing Doom 3 over the internet with like-minded kids in Japan. I’m 40 so that description is a little beyond me but I think some of that is in all of us here so in some regard we poke fun at ourselves.

I am a big fan of conceptual art –at least I don’t instinctively find the ring of it snotty and pretentious. Conceptual art is what Jandek seems to be attempting, maybe now more than ever. However I think maybe he is being pushed. He is not inspired. And it is failing. He is not very focused as an improvisational musician anyway. He’s always sucked pretty hard as a musician frankly…and I’m not being a technical prick about it; I like a lot of improv and amateur stuff.

Anyway I don’t care if he sucks or not. I’m curious to know who roused the beast and why. So Sugar Hill Studios, Dan and bunch, are behind this show? Or is there another promoter who went to Sugar Hill thinking that they’d be able to locate musicians?

I’m actually a non-dancer myself so I know where yr coming from but, hey, even I found myself dancing to UGK one night last week.

Like I said … it was a very very weird week.