Even if eighty percent (by my rough estimate) of what has been said about how Trout Mask Replica was made is not true (including most of what its auteur ever said about it), that detracts absolutely nothing from its achievement. Which raises the question of what all the mythopoeia was actually for. Did it answer any genuine need for empirical evidence that these 28 tracks comprising such ruthlessly engineered collisions of allusive wordplay and musical strokes (like the painting kind) were intentional, as we understand the word? No, because we do not understand the word. “Dali’s Car” is a polytonal instrumental guitar duet lasting barely a minute and a half, smack in the middle of this two-LP behemoth. The music is beautiful, grim, and in tone utterly unlike any of the other tracks, except for the only other instrumental, “Hair Pie” which is presented in two different renditions (or “Bakes”) just to show that it was “intentional.” Two “Dali’s Car”s would be redundant, because it is a challenge like Gertrude Stein's riposte to a journalist with the temerity to ask her why she didn’t write the way she talked (i.e. “normally”): “Why don’t you read the way I write?”
Note: For Advent, 25 secular essays about 25 songs, one per day from Dec. 1 through Dec. 25. Each essay is exactly 200 words long.
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