Why this awful sounding album is a masterpiece

This is Trout Mask Replica. On the album cover is Captain Beefheart, a fish on his face and a top hat on his head. The image is surreal, it's grotesque, and it's the perfect visual depiction of the music you're about to hear. My smile stuck. I cannot go back to your frownland. the 80 minutes of music on Trout Masks Replica by Captain Beefheart and his magic band have been compared to rusty barbed wire, and the New York Times once said that Captain Beefheart's voice makes Tom Waits sound like Julie Andrews. But, here's the thing, 41 years after its release in 1969 this cacophonous double album was inducted into the Library of Congress's National Recording registry right alongside Al Green's classic "Let's Stay Together" and the American standard "Take Me out to the Ball Game". Not only that, a number of iconic musicians, visual artists, and creative thinkers have named Trout Mask Replica a shining point of inspiration for their work. How can an album that sounds like the musical equivalent of barbed wire be recognized as such a significant piece of American culture? Let's start with Don Van Vliet known as Captain Beefheart. He grew up in California on the edge of the Mojave Desert and by the age of 10 was an incredible sculptor. Growing up he became captivated by the blues perfected by musicians like Muddy Waters and Howlin wolf some 2,000 miles away in the Mississippi Delta just as much he was entranced by the free jazz of Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane by the late 1960s he had an album and a small-time hit a cover of Bo Diddley's "Diddy Wah Diddy." For his next project he signed to his former high school classmate, Frank Zappa's, label with the clear request for unbridled creative freedom to do whatever the hell he wanted for his next project. By 1969 Trout Mask Replica was created and those years were a glorious mess for everyone involved in its making. This is Samuel Andreyev. He's a composer who studied composition and music analysis at the Paris Conservatory. A number of things, first of all it's an album that I'm personally obsessed with. I think it's a phenomenal work of art. it is mind-bendingly creative and honestly pretty difficult to listen to, but its uniqueness can be discovered within its songs, especially Frownland. Well the purpose of Frownland as an album opener is to just plunge you headfirst into a maelstrom of just absolute strangeness. Here's something interesting you can do as an experiment: compare it to a piece like "You really got me" by the Kinks. Okay so the main guitar riff in that song da da da dum da da da da that's two notes okay and that's what the song is built out of. The most important thing is at the rhythm guitar, lead guitar, bass, drums, and vocals are all locked into one rhythm - they are playing in sync. So contrast that with "Frownland" where in minute 40 seconds you have no fewer than I think like 23 individual motifs - it's actually 21 but that's still a whole lot - and these 23 motifs are all individually rather complex. Added to that is the fact that they're all heard stacked on top of each other all the time. Not only that the traditional roles of rock instrumentation found in songs like you really got me we'e just completely thrown out the window. Just listen closely to the first five seconds of the track. You'll immediately notice that the rhythm is off-kilter. That's because the rhythm guitar and the lead guitar are playing a five over seven polyrhythm. That means one guitar is playing five beats per measure at the same time the other is playing seven. Okay so try clapping five beats in one hand and the same time you clap seven. Not only is a piece polyrhythmic, it's also polytonal. Both guitars are playing in different keys throughout the piece against each other and often they're changing keys. Typically the bass would ground the harmony and the rhythm but here it's treated like a third guitar so it lives in its own world as well. And, it's playing chords which just rarely happens in rock music. And on top of that you have these insanely virtuosic drums that have another function altogether. The drummer is trying to take elements of what the guitar is doing and what the bass is doing and basically glue them together so that the piece coheres. In the end you have a really condensed song with multiple instruments constantly changing keys tempos and time signatures and across the entire album this happens. Trout Mask Replica is a masterpiece because it does something that is almost impossible hard to do, it comes from a very rare place of art making. So art scholars talk about the sentimental versus the naive. On one end of the spectrum you have sentimental art - art that comes from a place of a lot of formal training. At the other end you have naive art - art that is almost childlike. It exists purely because the compulsion to make it was so strong. The great thing about Trout Mask Replica is that they literally splice together naive impulses into a structure. So it sounds totally improvised it sounds like they're making it up on the spot but they rehearsed these pieces, that's really hard. So how do you teach these musicians to play your music? A kind whip. A kinda quip. A kind well hell you know tape with the piano. A tape. Captain Beefheart was the singular creative force behind Trout Mask Replica and he composed every song on the piano without knowing how to play it. He pretty much didn't play any instrument, but he had his magic band which consisted of remarkable young musicians like Zoot Horn Rollo, Drumbo, Antennae Jimmy Semmens, and Rockette Mornton. Their job? translate Captain Beefheart's avant-garde approach into a blues and free jazz inspired rock album based on the music he created on an instrument he really didn't know how to play. Let that sink in for a second. A piano has 88 keys and with two hands you can easily play the lowest and the highest keys at the same time if you wanted to. Don Van Vliet expected those same sounds from his two guitarist and a bassist who's instrument ranges were just vastly different. Here's Bill Harkleroad, you might remember him as Zoot Horn Rollo. Oh I think it was just that there were parts and then well why can't you play those notes what's wrong with you? Why can't you play that note that's not on the guitar or seven notes at a time? So there was no choice but to do it. He used to say you think you got a hard job man I got a sing to that shit. And that is John French, the drummer. He had the arduous task of helping other members of the band learn everything that came out Don's piano. Sometimes I wondered I wondered if he knew that it was in a different time signature you know, but he didn't know what time signature was. They painstakingly rehearsed over the course of a year until they were able to record the entire double album all the way through in just a few hours. When I first came across Trout Mask Replica, I was instantly captivated by the sound of those three words strung together. Every song title made me laugh and so I listened to it and it instantly expanded my understanding of what music could be. For some people it can be offensive it sounds like they're deliberately flaunting the rules I don't think I don't view it that way I don't think anyone's deliberately flaunting the rules I think I don't think it's contrarian for the sake of being contrarian I think rather what it is is its artistic for the sake of being original. Hey all thanks for watching first I want to give a huge shout out to Samuel andreyev he was sort of the inspiration for this video he made a 30-minute video about the music theory of frownland that's linked below you should really really check it out if you want to know more about that specific song in addition he's the one that conducted the two interviews with John French and Bill Harkleroad they're also on his YouTube channel thanks so much for watching and I'll see you in a couple of weeks

Channel: Vox

Views: 2,686,710

Rating: 4.7740502 out of 5

Keywords: trout mask replica, captain beefheart, zoot horn rollo, john peele, safe as milk, john coltrane, muddy waters, howlin wolf, free jazz, rock, ornette colman, blues, mississippi, jazz, guitar, music theory, earworm, vox pop, vox, culture, news, animation, stop motion, radar station, samuel andreyev, susan rogers, berklee college of music, interview, magic band, experimental music, tom waits, red hot chili peppers, don glen vliet, frownland, fast and bulbous

Id: 58nPEe-TU-w

Length: 10min 3sec (603 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 28 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/Smonkbigweed]

I would love a video that breaks down this album track by track like how they did Frown Land here. Just talking about and pointing out the motifs and time signature changes and whatnot.

[u/skoodle_um]

Troutmask replica was more of a group project than this video suggests - Van Vliet would certainly give his instructions on the piano, but as John French says (in the video), these instructions were not always achievable, hence (though not emphasised in the video) there was a lot of interpretation by the band.

[u/AllAbilities]

When you go to a job interview, you wear a suit and tie, you try to look smart and respectable. You are polite, and you try to provide the best and most meaningful answers to match your smart and preened appearance. That's the standard everybody expects, the one everybody is comfortable with.

If you turned up to a job interview wearing sandals and a fez, it would clearly be an absurd move. Well Trout Mask Replica is turning up to a job interview wearing sandals and a fez, being impolite and yelling loudly at your potential employer, but still providing answers with as much meaning as the guy in the suit. Problem is the interviewer is so focused on that fucking fez he doesn't even hear your answers, and 9 times out of ten, you don't get the job.

While this applicants bizarre choices will certainly appear nonsensical to most, in a certain sense, wearing sandals to a job interview is only marginally more absurd than wrapping a piece of silk around your neck to make yourself seem respectable. Trout Mask Replica eschews the tie, it ignores the rules and opts for wilful absurdity. The key here is that music on its own is built on absurdity in the first place, meaningless sound given meaning only by the mind. If the tie around your neck means something to you, there's no reason why the fez on your head can't mean something to.

Here I've attempted to explain why Trout Mask is laudible as an artistic statement, as a virtuous experiment, not why you should personally enjoy it. I know this thread has been most complimentary, but it really saddens me the extent to which I see serious music fans dismissing it as some kind of emperors new clothes, nothing more than a scout badge for the pretentious.

John Peel said it best :

"If there has been anything in the history of popular music which could be described as a work of art in a way that people who are involved in other areas of art would understand, then Trout Mask Replica is probably that work"

You make think it's the most rotten piece of art possible, but it's most definitely art. It's a fuck load of art.

But even if you understand the point of the fez as I've tried to lay out here, its perfectly fine if you don't like it, if it annoys you or makes you feel uncomfortable, or if it just looks to silly for you to ever take seriously, but there are those of us for whom the fez fits perfectly. I, inexplicable as it may be to some, find the album thrilling. I'm not exaggerating when I say I get goosebumps when listening to some of those tracks at full volume.

[u/[deleted]]

Trout Mask Replica is the strangest album considering all these music publications critics and scholars point to it as this huge achievement but when I hear it it sounds like a kid smearing his own shit on the walls. Like the fact that this was rehearsed and beefheart allegedly abused his band to ‘get it Right’ makes no sense to me. I’ll never understand this album and it’s existence is alien

[u/Markual]

So is the answer basically: "because it's intentionally 'bad', it's actually good"?

[u/[deleted]]

Honestly I prefer Safe as Milk. I would say I find Trout Mask Replica perfectly listenable though. It always clicked with me, at least somewhat.

[u/jbal695]

i get that clicks are clicks and that the person who titled the video probably didn't actually work on it, but i don't think tmr sounds "awful". goddamn bizzare and tuneless but that doesn't necessarily equate to bad in my book.

[u/wafflepouch]

7 against 5 might technically be valid music theory but it doesn't sound particularly good. My peasant ears might be to blame. I do like the lyrics to Frownland for what it's worth.

[u/Big-Swifty]

Trout Mask reminds me of Christmas lights, in that each colour itself is nice, but when they entangle, they look like a pretty aggressive ball of barbed wire. The individual strands are pretty coherent, mostly diatonic melodies, but when these conflicting layers are stacked against each other, they create a mess which is strangely satisfying to unpick. Some of it you could maybe liken to how Ferneyhough layers very different parts, only Trout Mask is less extreme in this regard.

So much stuff going on, there's something new to notice with each listen - and it's even better live, hope the Magic Band come back for a post-farewell tour.