Interstellar Discussion, Part Nine

I Love You Now, It’s True

Jandek’s first live appearance, in October of 2004 at the Instal Festival in Glasgow, was met with familiar anxiety, not to mention utter shock. Perhaps the most fitting response was from a member named Bob: ‘hells bells. keep an eye out for the plagues of locusts and the pale gent riding a horse’ (mailing list, October 18, 2004). The next five persons to respond to the list all believed the announcement to be a false rumor, and even after one of the musicians participating at the Festival confirmed that it was Jandek playing that night, several list members remained in a state of disbelief or disappointment: ‘Imagine if Thomas Pynchon started giving interviews and appearing on the Today Show. Someone who has such an aura of genius and mystery about them suddenly becomes just another shmo on the television’ (mailing list, October 18, 2004).

Why do Jandek fans form this myth around the artist? Several particular points of interest caught my eye when conducting my ethnography: I was surprised to find that many Jandek fans do not very much care for each other. I attribute both of these to the fact that Jandek fans desire to have a connection with Jandek outside of the collective identity. That is, Jandek fans very much perceive their relationship with Corwood to be ‘personal’. Therefore, they express themselves territorially, discounting other’s relationships and communications with Corwood, describing other Jandek fans with very undesirable traits, and enhancing their own relationship with Corwood.

One of the questions I submitted to the list, ‘What is your perception of other Jandek fans?’ elicited responses that I was certainly not expecting: Jandek fans on the whole spoke quite negatively of other Jandek fans. The most succinct response I received stated simply, ‘buncha tards’ (questionnaire, April 28, 2006). Kyle’s response, however, was more representative of the overall feeling about other Jandek fans: ‘Most of them seem like annoying, over-educated debaters, passive agressives and know-it-alls’ (questionnaire, April 13, 2006). Of 36 responses to my survey, 33 responded with negative perceptions of other Jandek fans, two responses were neutral regarding other Jandek fans, and only one was positive.

Many of the responses were not only negative, but portrayed other Jandek fans as mentally unstable or deviant. One respondent described fans as ‘borderline art-fags’ (mailing list, April 16, 2006). Brian wrote:

Musicians, depressed people, record collectors, obsessive/complusives, depressed musicians obsessive/complusive record collectors, people who feel they don't belong and found a voice in him (probably depressed musician obsessive/compulsive record collectors). Not people who are suicidal though because the act of constantly putting out albums is completely life affirming.
- questionnaire

Every Jandek fan that replied with a negative perception of other Jandek fans seemed to do so as a way of disassociating themselves from other fans. They are deranged, but I am not. This is particularly interesting in light of the fact that, the day after I distributed the survey, one user completed my questionnaire and mailed it out to the mailing list as a way of encouraging others to participate. After he did so, all but four of the other respondents followed suit and mailed their questionnaires out to the list; even persons that had already emailed questionnaires back to me reposted them online. The three respondents with neutral and positive perceptions of Jandek fans were of the four who did not post their responses to the list. I interpreted this to mean that Jandek fans do not regard each other with hostility, but as they come together on the list modify the aforementioned statement to read: they are deranged, we are not. Given the number of fans who contacted Corwood Industries for reasons other than placing an order, these negative perceptions of other Jandek correspond with their desire to establish a personal connection with Jandek.

All fans uniformly reported on the questionnaire that they preferred listening to Jandek alone. A significant reason for this is that much of their family and friends cannot stand Jandek’s music, however respondents to the questionnaire also reported that they did not especially like to share Jandek’s music with others; for many, listening to Jandek was a personal experience. Pat wrote, ‘Leaving yourself open and feeling the music is more intense and satisfying than simply deconstructing it…I prefer to listen to Jandek when I’m by myself. Early mornings, late evenings, in the car’ (questionnaire, April 13, 2006). Kevin echoed these sentiments: ‘I love the catharsis. I enjoy the tension of the dissonance and bleakness and melody and humor. I love the revelation of pain side by side with the joy of creation’ (questionnaire, April 13, 2006). Listening to Jandek alone intensified the personal connection many fans already felt to the music and the man.

Because Jandek’s albums, ordered direct from Corwood, are always personally packaged and addressed by hand, each record takes on the spirit of an artifact. As an outsider musician, Jandek does not experience a great deal of distribution, and his records are therefore a unique find among fans. Cavicchi wrote about one Springsteen fan who remarked that every time she heard Bruce mentioned, her ears perked up (1998:57); for Jandek fans, hearing about Corwood outside of the Jandek community is nearly mind baffling. The nature of the record as artifact renders it more personal, intensifying the connection some fans feel with Corwood.

Explicitly, Jandek fans will deny that Jandek has an identity. Tisue’s website proclaims on its homepage, ‘Everybody knows one thing about Jandek, that no one knows anything about Jandek’ (A Guide to Jandek 2006). A post on the mailing list in 2000 regarding the relationship of Sterling R. Smith to Jandek wrote, ‘part of the beauty of his anonymity [is that] there's no acknowledged "personality" to build a cult out of’ (mailing list, July 17, 2000). However, the very lack of identity is the identity that fans have projected onto Jandek. The idea of Jandek seems to be one that many fans find seductive: Jandek possesses the ability to be obscure and anonymous, while having enough of a myth surrounding him that people actively seek out his work.

Through generating a myth of Jandek and endlessly debating it on the mailing list, fans have created an identity for Jandek as that of a sought-after recluse. Fans that identify with Jandek perpetuate his myth as a way of enhancing their own connection with him and reinforcing their own identity. As Adorno writes, ‘Reality becomes its own ideology through the spell cast by its faithful duplication’ (2002:63). If a fan identifies with Jandek as a sought-after recluse, then in order to perpetuate this identity fans must continue to see him as a recluse and desire to know who he is ‘in reality’.

These projections of identity continue on throughout discussions of Jandek’s personality and mental stability. Without fail, fans project their own disorders or experiences onto Jandek when interpreting lyrics. One fan began a discussion about Jandek’s a capella album Worthless Recluse as being composed of vocal inflections used in military code, citing his own career in the military (mailing list, March 6, 2006). In a recent discussion regarding a lyrical analysis of Jandek’s music, one fan proposed that Jandek was epileptic, because he shared characteristics that she experiences as an epileptic (mailing list, April 28, 2006). Projecting their own experiences onto Jandek, fans are able to have someone to ‘share’ their experiences with.