Cap'n B, Nick Cave, Clutch, and Others

Ok, this is where I'm gonna publish my writings about music, since literature is covered on my other under-blogs. This will start mainly with Nick Cave as I've been working on him for some time. Captain Beefheart (from whose lyrics the blog-title is taken) will eventually feature as well as Clutch (because Neil Falon's one of rock's lesser-known great lyricists). Beyond that I'm not sure yet. But those'll keep me fairly busy for now. I'm especially interested in lyrics and the worldviews they en-flesh artistically. That will be the main thing analysed, though the music also will feature, but to a lesser degree. I come from a punk rock background (70s/80s, though I only started listening to it in the late 80s/early 90s as a teenager). But punk led me backwards into 50s/60s rock n roll and pre-rock blues, r'n'b, and country. And punk also led me forward into post-punk developments. I love both the elemental as well as the experimental (and sometimes the just plain 'mental'). I should also mention that lyric-writing led me slowly into that dangerous territory of 'poetry', and I don't just mean Alan Ginsberg and 'beat poets' and what have you. One of my favourite poets is John Milton and I'm not the least bit ashamed or apologetic about it. He's as ballsy and organic (as in 'like a big ol' beast of a pipe organ') as it gets. So my lyrical investigations are blatantly 'literary' - again, without apology. I stopped trying to be punker-than-thou about two decades ago, so I'm not worried either about trying to be what philosopher Roger Scruton called 'prolier-than-thou'. I was reared fairly white-trash and I'm still essentially blue-collar in terms of my income and probably a number of other things. But my tastes range from the trashy to the high brow and though I'm outside the establishment of academia and don't pretend to be an academic, yet some of my central preoccupations are unavoidably intellectual, scholarly, and academic. So let's look at some of this beautiful brutal music and see what happens!