There are some artists in relation to whom our world changes. Or perhaps not the world so much as ourselves who stand at the centre of the world. Or perhaps not even ourselves, but something like our condition – the subjectivity of the subject rather than the subject itself, to put it another way. Something changes, then, about the world, and about who we are.
A scene in the film Diner has always haunted me: a young man insists his fiancee listen to his favourite records. As though they were a piece of him – as though if she loved him, she would have to love them, too. But perhaps it’s not the particular artist you like that is important – the particular album, say, or the particular genre, as the relationship of affinity, of liking.
There are some artists who change our world; but what matters is not the artist so much as that change itself – what we become by listening to them, or what we have already become. As I like to say to W., if I’d heard Jandek sooner, I’d be a different person. Or, if only I’d heard Jandek when I was nineteen; everything would have been different. It is what listening to Jandek would have enabled that is important here, rather than Jandek itself. In truth, the position of Jandek could be substituted by other people, other music lovers, by any number of other artists. The fact that it is Jandek is not particularly important. But is this the case, I wonder?
You might say Jandek was created for the kind of person I am – they make a morose music, an isolated music, a music that has taken some wierd turn into itself. A music across 50 LPs that can be collected and obsessed over – there’s a whole oeuvre to map and to periodise, a sublime task. Then there is the withdrawal of Jandek, or more exactly, Sterling Smith, who is the heart of the group (but it is scarcely a group; Smith plays alone for the most part) and the marvellous website that swirls around the black hole of his absence.
He’s been interviewed only twice – the first time, perhaps, unawares (a telephone conversation was taped), the second time, reluctantly (a journalist tracked him down); and we know when he plays live, he always asks for an exit that will not take him through the audience. Playing festivals, he refuses to stay in the same hotel as the other acts, and (in a gig in Belgium) refuses his fee: he wants to be beholden to no one, and perhaps a lifetime of dayjobs has granted him financial security enough to achieve this independence. Yes, it was as though he was invented to fascinate, and that this fascination threatens to overshadow the music itself.
Happily, I can say I heard the music before I knew the legend. And I think I can also say the latter did not surprise me: a kind of withdrawal already seemed to haunt the music, as if the performer had shut a door against us. Commentators on the Jandek discussion list have noted the way in which his performances seem to hold his audience at a distance; that his lyrics do not only invite identification, or at least that roleplay by which we put ourselves in the narrator’s place, but also push us away.
The music of Jandek remains remote. But I think I heard this withdrawal, too, in the way Jandek occupies an idiom. Like so many others, it is to Skip Spence I link Jandek – hearing a song for the first time, I thought it must be an outtake from Oar; that is, Jandek seems to occupy a lineage, a kind of tradition. To Skip Spence, and perhaps to other outsiders working in the blues/folk idiom … but there was a context for me that made sense of Jandek’s music, an idiom from which it seemed to arrive.
That first night, I went straight to the computer to see what was playing. I looked at iTunes: it was Jandek, but who was that, and how had I arrived at his music? No matter. Everything began that night, only two months ago. I listened, and then found the website …
Why wasn’t I surprised by Jandek’s withdrawal? Because the way he occupied his idiom was already that of an outsider. Here was an outsider’s music, and didn’t the outside also demand a distance from the recording industry? As though the outside might be experienced as a kind of demand, as implying a certain ethos, a way of not only of performing or releasing recordings, but also of living.
As Jandek, inhabiting the group Jandek, Sterling Smith would no longer be what he was. As Jandek, he experienced a demand that turned him aside from himself. Who was he, now? Who had he become? The one who was bound in a relation to the outside, no longer to any particular idiom, but to the outside of which each idiom was in some way a fold, an implication.
Difficult thought. But I suppose it is by playing with open strings, each tuned askew according to conventional tuning, plucked or strummed or left to rattle retaining only the barest structure of folk and blues in the sung lines that accompany the playing. A dissonant music – a music that has only a family resemblance to others in the same idiom. A wierd uncle, a child savant – this is a music that is turned to the edges of an idiom, that tests those edges, suspending them without transgressing them entirely. But does so not wilfully, in deliberate provocation, but by seeming to inhabit music, to live it, in a manner unprecedented.
Drawn to there where musicians and listeners are uncomfortable – but by what kind of necessity? One that makes sense to Jandek, and to those who listen to this unfamiliar music. I suppose dissonance is nothing unusual. I suppose we are well versed in the avant-garde. But here, what is strange about the music is so in relation to a particular idiom (or schema of idioms); it must be understood in contrast to its context, even though for some listeners (I am one of them), it makes perfect sense; it seems absolutely right, and that right away, from the first Jandek we hear.
There are those for whom Beckett’s writings are the end of something, and others for whom it is a beginning, not because one need imitate Beckett, but because something is permitted henceforward because of Beckett’s example. And I think this is what I mean when I tell my friends that it would all have been different had I heard Jandek earlier: that a kind of courage would have been given me – a kind of tenacity. The example of Jandek would have been everything; it would have watched over me as I went to the outside of some other idiom. (Is this a kind of friendship? Blanchot’s dedication: ‘to all my friends, known and unknown.’ Friends by virtue of his work …)
I wonder if you can think friendship as a relation without, in some way, thinking of its terms. Of a relation that somehow precedes or escapes its terms, and lets those terms escape with it, so that friendship – this relation – transforms everything. Foolish thought. But now consider a relation of amity that exists between you and a particular artist. A relation that exists only in view of their work, of what lets them be an artist. Not them as individuals, not the person who works all today so as to have money to finance his releases, pressing up his records – but as the artist they become once these records exist.
I imagine this as a kind of friendship – a relation that with one who changes as artist – who is an artist insofar as he changes, and is no longer, in this case, plain old Seymour Smith. A friendship that is, perhaps, a double of the one Smith feels for Jandek, to the extent, as he will insist very movingly in his interview with the journalist, that Jandek doesn’t need him. (Doesn’t Heidegger eventually say being does not need the human being …?) This is because Jandek is there where Smith changes; Jandek is only the alteration of Smith, and Smith relates to him in a manner analogous to that amity I will claim for myself.
Then both of us, Smith and I, show a friendship for Jandek. A dissymmetrical one – since Jandek is away from us, perhaps higher than us, and a unilateral one – Jandek does not show friendship for us. Even as he watches over us in some way. Even as his presence – the presence of his albums – already testifies to a great, benign force for which God would be one name (God without God).
Then this friendship, this amity, is a kind of shelter. It encloses us, and hides us. And perhaps it shows us, too, a way of inhabiting life in a different way, a new way. At the edge of ourselves, somehow. Changing somehow, just as Jandek – the totality of Jandek – changes with each album released (and the 50th album has just been released).
Kundera says he knew, from his childhood on, the exact sequences of works by his favourite musicians. He knew the continuity of their oeuvres, how they changed. I would like to have followed the course of the albums Jandek released. To have been there early on, twenty years ago, or twenty-five. To have known the continuity of those releases accompanied me in some way, that elsewhere, there was an exemplar. Elsewhere, but also close to me, as though Jandek was closer to me than I was.
But all this without identifying with Jandek. All this because of the refusal of the music of let me identify with it. It does not express in any simple way what I feel. And what does it tell me about my life? But it is what it does not tell me that is the clue. As though by withdrawing it also drew the future ahead of me. As though as it refused me, it opened a way. ‘Discover your legitimate strangeness’, says Char. Occupy life, I tell myself, as Jandek occupies an idiom. Or rather, let your life be in some way occupied as Jandek occupies the life of Sterling Smith.
Orson Scott Card has a story about a future humanity, where musicians are allowed to spend their lives performing undisturbed, and where listeners are allowed to come to the groves where the musicians play. Sterling Smith, I know, is a listener to Jandek. He comes to hear Jandek play just as I do. But how then to listen yourself (but it is not yourself) in the same way?
Then it is not that the place occupied by Jandek could have been taken by others, and that liking the music or disliking it is a matter of what we call taste. It is also that the relation to Jandek lets something else appear – something outside any particular idiom. Or rather, that draws the inside towards the outside, letting it be seen by its dark light. That wears the inside very thin, as though you could hear something else beyond it. And that calls out a demand that is ethical in some sense, that asks you to change your life, and to inhabit that change.
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