I love writing for hilobrow.com, where the coverage usually takes the form of a multi-author series on a loose yet narrowly conceived theme. Most of these series are pop-culture-ish, though I also contributed the opening chunk of a novel-in-progress during the first year of the pandemic: “Zeffirelli Wand Shop.”
My most recent piece for the site is just out. The series this time, titled Stooge Your Enthusiasm, is about “proto-punk records from the Sixties (1964–1973).” There’s an incredible list of participants, like Jonathan Lethem (on the Monkees’ “Your Auntie Grizelda”) and Mike Watt (on the Stooges’ “Shake Appeal”). I mention Watt’s early band, the Minutemen, in my piece, which is on “We Now Interrupt for a Commercial,” off an old Ornette Coleman album, New York Is Now!, from 1968. The album features Coleman with a trio: bassist Jimmy Garrison, drummer Elvin Jones, and saxophonist Dewey Redman.
I have mixed feelings about punk, feelings I wasn’t particularly interested in exploring at this time. I don’t generally care to yuck people’s yums, and the arguments about the politics of punk are a key part of the self-conscious ouroboros that I find unappetizing about punk and, more to the point, punk discourse — at this point, punk discourse and punk being virtually identical — in the first place. I just wanted to take the best — or most-appealing-to-me — aspects of punk to heart, and write about a song that predated punk and satisfied them.
I had in mind the activities of two mavericks, the unbridled delirium of Yoko Ono and the self-direction of Pauline Oliveros, but both of them were already claimed by the time I was invited to participate (by Nicholas Rombes and Stephanie Burt, respectively). I’d already written about punk once before for Hilobrow, on the topic of thee great Billy Childish’s early work, and I wanted to push into the topic from a different aesthetic angle.
Where that thinking took me was Ornette Coleman, who could be, as I write in the piece, “proto-punk every which way.” In the case of this particular song, it comes down to “the frenzy, the anti-consumerism, the snarky humor.”
Here’s the first paragraph of my piece:
There are various milestones in the early discography of the late Texan saxophonist Ornette Coleman where you can hear him pushing firmly back at jazz convention and using the resulting elastic tension to propel himself toward something bold, something new, and, to borrow the title of his debut album as a band leader, Something Else!!!! (1958). His was, from the start, a perpetual outward-bound event horizon deserving of no fewer than four exclamation points. You can recognize in these discordant instances a precognition of the more difficult and intractable approach Coleman would eventually become synonymous with: cacophonous, angular, vivacious — which is to say: punk.
Read the full thing at hilobrow.com.