Trout Mask Replica - Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band

The full scope of Captain Beefheart's music is unimaginable. His demented genius is so skewed and manic as to be almost completely incomprehensible. Perhaps the only real snapshot of what the Cap was doing is the following quote by the great rock critic Lester Bangs: "Captain Beefheart is the most important musician to rise in the Sixties, far more significant and far-reaching than the Beatles, who only made pretty collages with material from the public domain, when you get right down to it; as important, as I said, for all music as Ornette Coleman was for jazz ten years ago and Charlie Parker 15 years before that, as important as Leadbelly was for the blues Cap teethed on. His music is a harbinger of tomorrow, but his messages are universal and warm as the hearth of the America we once dreamed of. That's a combination that's hard to beat." The music of Captain Beefheart is a demented deconstruction and reconstruction of virtually all contemporary styles, ranging from blues to jazz to rock to the avant-garde. Trout Mask Replica defines his art. Short blasts of insane crooning permeate the album, fully showcasing his revolutionary style of twisting frenzies and surreal Dadaist mantras. This revolution defies any conventions to the point of completely redefining the mental state of the schizophrenics and psychotics. It is, of course, his vocals which serve as the cornerstone of this effect. His growl blends the melancholy of the bluesmen before him, the twitching insanity of a mental ward and the primitive roar of the cavemen. This violent hurricane is situated in the middle of an impenetrable vortex of sound categorized by the blend of rock's hard edged noise, the intense rhythms of jazz and the ugly humanity of blues. It's superficial to discuss the components of his music however when the effect is what defines his art. His work is simultaneously hideous and mesmerizing, a natural disaster of sounds and moods. Beneath all this though, his circus freak exterior and his anguished calls of wild animals, there is buried an intimately human dissection of our varied phobias and delusions. He becomes less of a musician and instead becomes a tour guide through emotional war zones,a mad scientist carving monstrosities out of humanity and above all a shaman for the dejected and destructive. As a consequence of Beefheart's unwavering disregard for societal custom and tradition, he became a messiah for a generation who desperately wanted to break free. His music became a catalyst for the left-behinds and the discarded, who would go on begin a revolution that would later be known as "punk." His genesis of creativity virtually inspired all rebellion in rock music. This is ultimately his badge of honour and why his music belongs in the annals of rock's history and music as a whole.