Rock, Roll, and Raucousness
The Frontier Circus and their Outrageous Theo-Musicality
A JJB Review
A Little Bit Psycho...A Little Bit Western
Do you like craziness? Do you like it when people combine things in completely unexpected and outrageous ways, and then pretend that they are serious, or not serious, or neither serious nor not serious?
Do you think the world would be better if it had more wickedness? Not the bad kind of wickedness that leaves people cold and killed, buried under the ground. But the good kind of wickedness that warms a heart because it is so delightfully irreverent and leaves you saying "What was That?"
Do you think, along with the philosopher Whitehead, that "love is a little oblivious to morals" and that sometimes it's better to be raucous than righteous.
Do you like to question life, to have your reality pulled apart in ways that jolt you into perceptual shifts, propelling you to reassemble yourself and your assumptions?
Then you will like the music and performance of the Frontier Circus. Their music is "a little bit psycho and a little bit western."
Freud would like them. He would like the psycho part and also, more specifically, their humor. Let's proceed with some lines about humor:
Do you think the world would be better if it had more wickedness? Not the bad kind of wickedness that leaves people cold and killed, buried under the ground. But the good kind of wickedness that warms a heart because it is so delightfully irreverent and leaves you saying "What was That?"
Do you think, along with the philosopher Whitehead, that "love is a little oblivious to morals" and that sometimes it's better to be raucous than righteous.
Do you like to question life, to have your reality pulled apart in ways that jolt you into perceptual shifts, propelling you to reassemble yourself and your assumptions?
Then you will like the music and performance of the Frontier Circus. Their music is "a little bit psycho and a little bit western."
Freud would like them. He would like the psycho part and also, more specifically, their humor. Let's proceed with some lines about humor:
Why Humor?
"It may happen that the best achievements in the way of jokes are used as an envelope for thoughts of the greatest substance." (Sigmund Freud)*
"If a humorous piece of writing brings a person to the point where his emotional responses are untrustworthy and seem likely to break into the opposite realm, it is because humor, like poetry, has an extra content. It plays close to the big hot fire which is Truth, and sometimes the reader feels the heat." (EB White)*
"I think many of the poems in this anthology use humor in this way: to question, to pull reality apart in ways that jolt us into perceptual shifts, propelling us to reassemble ourselves and our dearly held assumptions." (Amy Gerst, from Introduction to The Best American Poetry 2010)
The Frontier Circus has lots of humor. But you need to be in the mood. You need to want to be dis-ordered from an overly harmonized life. The Frontier Circus will inspire you, if at all, through ignition not contrition. The members of the group are unapologetically outrageous, pulling the rug out from under an expectations of sanity. They look different, they sound different, they are different. And it is in their difference that they inspire.
Part of their craziness is the sheer combination of different genres which, according to conventional wisdom, conflict with one another: country and western, psychedelic rock, fifties rock and roll, and the kind of music you hear on Christmas specials on television. People who love one or another of these kinds of music often hate the other kinds. Even country and western enthusiasts can be snobbish. But The Frontier Circus is anything but snobbish. Want to hear some?
"If a humorous piece of writing brings a person to the point where his emotional responses are untrustworthy and seem likely to break into the opposite realm, it is because humor, like poetry, has an extra content. It plays close to the big hot fire which is Truth, and sometimes the reader feels the heat." (EB White)*
"I think many of the poems in this anthology use humor in this way: to question, to pull reality apart in ways that jolt us into perceptual shifts, propelling us to reassemble ourselves and our dearly held assumptions." (Amy Gerst, from Introduction to The Best American Poetry 2010)
The Frontier Circus has lots of humor. But you need to be in the mood. You need to want to be dis-ordered from an overly harmonized life. The Frontier Circus will inspire you, if at all, through ignition not contrition. The members of the group are unapologetically outrageous, pulling the rug out from under an expectations of sanity. They look different, they sound different, they are different. And it is in their difference that they inspire.
Part of their craziness is the sheer combination of different genres which, according to conventional wisdom, conflict with one another: country and western, psychedelic rock, fifties rock and roll, and the kind of music you hear on Christmas specials on television. People who love one or another of these kinds of music often hate the other kinds. Even country and western enthusiasts can be snobbish. But The Frontier Circus is anything but snobbish. Want to hear some?
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We Re-Love Songs
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A Bible Study: "Can you raise your voice to the clouds and cover yourself with a flood of water? Do you send the lightning bolts on their way?" So God asks Job in Chapter 38:34-35. When we listen to You're Gonna Miss Me or Fujiyama Mama, don't we hear just a little voice raising? Don't we sense just a little lightning?
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*Quotations from Freud and EB White are offered by Amy Gerst in her introduction to The Best American Poetry 2010.
