Captain Beefheart Radar Station

You know, I've found Frank Zappa's music to have a very similar property. Namely that there's a deep creative structure that winds through Zappa's music, especially across entire his longer compositions. For example, in "Willie The Pimp", there's a massive guitar solo towards last half of the song, that gets continually teased and played with earlier in the track. There have been other examples where I've caught "teases" to guitar solos on a track early in an album, that doesn't actually show up in full maturity until later inthe album.

I can only imagine that what I recognize as a singular theme is in reality much more broad (in so much as we can even define it), given Zappa's composition ability and musical prowess. There's so much to discover that lies under the surface of result of his creative process. I think Zappa gets a lot of credit because in general his music is more approachable (but still has plenty of weirdness across his almost 100 album discography).

Anyway, where I'm going with this is that Zappa and Captain Beefheart went in together on Zappa's "Willie the Pimp", on the "Hot Rats" album which is one of my favorite albums of all time. Interestingly enough it's the only song on the entire album that features vocals, which is noteworthy on its own. The vocals are provided by none other than Captain Beefheart himself. The vocals are kind of strange and certainly provide a unique component to the track.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xr256gta2Qw (Willie The Pimp) -- if you listen to that guitar work, there's so much to unpack just in that one track. It's self referential on many levels, and I'm sure I'm missing most of it.

Well, it's fun to notice and appreciate those kinds of things, and to the analytical mind of a rational optimist, that wants to believe everything as carefully planned and premeditated, and released as profound craftsmanship and perfected design, to uncover something like that is probably profoundly enthralling.

There's an alternative reality, known to anyone who has made art for art's sake though, and especially if you've spent years making purposeless art with no consequence in the outcome of whether a work declared as "finished" actually needs to be "good."

When you sit around all day, pouring and extruding your unfiltered stream of consciousness into realized tangible forms that you can pick up and hold, or record and play back, you're left with this huge backlog of scrap left on the cutting room floor. Taken out of context, some of it is artful, and "good enough" to stand on it's own, but doesn't belong in the "finished" piece.

But when you find a couple of rhyming chunks, you can take that leftover flotsam and fold it into a subsequent piece, recycling throwaway outtakes as part of some other whole, to enrich it.

In that sense, those kinds of matching details aren't actually planned. It's just opportunistic reuse of leftovers to enrich and go along with something that was planned.

Example: sometimes you're forced to produce "things," and so due to external expectations you make a bunch of "stuff" but because you weren't motivated, 90% of it is trash. But you don't throw it away, because it still possesses recognizable style. So you throw it in a box and let it collect dust. Then weeks or months or years later, when you need filler, you dig some matching trash out of the dustbin, and cobble together some cruft to patch some holes and gaps, where the daylight is peaking through on your finished piece. Now, that illusory facade enriches your intended work all the more.

This is a technique common in "art" that impresses people who've never had a chance to make a thing for it's own sake, without said thing having to require practical utility or actually "work" in any appreciable way.

It's the art student's corollary to the academic version having to write 1000 words for a grade, and 900 of those words are rambling drivel, or having to publish N research papers a year, so you throw together a backlog of p-value hacks that seem interesting but prove nothing and indulge in pointless, speculative editorialization as science.

At the core of all the work, you either like the sum total of everything, or you don't, and in general, you're picking up what that guy is putting down overall.

But as with all disciplines, in every field, people have to make frankenstein monsters out of filler bunny all the time. Any artist worth their salt is always trying to operate from the space where they can unspool as much of their style as possible, with total freedom and unlimited resources, because they know that even on the days when they aren't hot, some of the junk they make, can still serve as decorative paper mache fodder.