Vinyl Age by Max Brzezinski

Author:Max Brzezinski [BRZEZINSKI, MAX]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Running Press
Published: 2020-11-17T00:00:00+00:00

OUTSIDER, PRIVATE, LONER

The outsider tag comes to records from the visual art world, Irwin Chusid having borrowed the term for his book Songs in the Key of Z and the compilations of the same name. “Outsider” is familiarly used to designate art brut creations made outside the established channels of galleries, museums, patrons, dealers, and academic art history departments.

In both the art and musical world, the term “outsider” has a double valence. This is because it started as a sociological term, rather than an aesthetic one: to call a work of art “outsider,” you are implying the artist, too, is an outsider (art brut, with its emphasis on rawness, is no better) and situate the formal work first and foremost using the identity and situation of its artist. Therefore, the oppositionality of “outsider” art is built into the concept—no matter that outsider art and music widely ranges in style, theme, and intent (let alone social situation). Outsider art assumes naïve intent on the part of the artist.

When carried into the realm of music, the discourse of “outsider” and “loner” music becomes even more murky. Yet they are problematic terms for real musical phenomena, championing outsider status. Some records do deserve the tags “outsider” and/or “loner” because they were made outside the major label system, often privately pressed, and feature genuinely “far-out” labels, packaging, and music.

But the term at its worst, while perhaps a catchy line on a one-sheet, participates in the fetishization of identity—often mental illness, as in the case of Daniel Johnston, Wesley Willis, Wild Man Fischer, Moondog—and a further marginalization through exoticization. Outsider now, like “freak” in the 1960s, functions as a sort of condescending compliment, hovering between genuine appreciation for the work of the outsider and an inevitable exacerbation of whatever marginality the artist already has as a human being. Daniel Johnston’s “Monkey in a Zoo” (Songs of Pain tape, 1980), covered later by Vic Chesnutt, allegorized this issue better than many of his “champions.” The reception of the outsider/Songs in the Key of Z fetish of the 1990s and early 2000s, with its focus on the naïveté of the artist and their songs, in retrospect itself looks incredibly naïve. It was as if the only frame by which to understand true difference from these musicians was an exoticizing one, which emphasized either the music’s strangeness or pathos as accidental—not the willed product of a musician. Rather, the outsider/loner framework ended up finding only unintentional genius or biographical objects of pity. But not formally, as music, or as something that could possibly be equally powerful or better than “real” art.

In this context, the words “champion” and “discoverer,” smacking as they do of a white liberal savior complex, have unfortunately persisted in discussions of contemporary records from “outsider” black musicians, like Lonnie Holley and Abner Jay. It seems that the music industry and fans are still bouncing uneasily between exoticism and pity. The outsider movement at times can come uncomfortably close to what social scientists call “predatory inclusion,”

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