What is it that when you see an unkempt beard with long hair wearing hippie clothing doing performance poetry, one automatically thinks...'Smartarse'!?
Here we have four Hippie Smartarse's enthusiastically showing us how smart they are.
This includes Steve McCaffery, who went on to do some less showy-offy sound poetry that bordered on minimalism.
This sounds like a bunch of university graduates who thought they were the only persons on the planet to have discovered Hugo Ball's Dada manifesto......hence the Cana-dada title.
Just to rub it in there is a 'dedication to the memory of....' printed on the sleeve.
This is a bad case of Borderline Performance Art Disorder, or B.P.A.D.,as a music Psychologist would abbreviate it.Its up there with 'Contemporary Expressive Dance Syndrome' (C.E.D.S), as the ultimate cringe. After a few years, performance art got its act together and dumped the well-read hippies,and smartened up their approach,dumping the really annoying show-off stuff, and making it into something less about themselves and more about the art......nah!They still exist,but there's certainly less of them.
At least The Four Horsemen were trying something different,and rejected guitars and drums.It was just the approach to it that needed honing somewhat.Like a spot of de-hippification for starters.
Tracklist:
A1 From Beast
A2 Matthew's Line
A3 Allegro 108
A4 Seasons
B1 Coffee Break
B2 Theme
B3 Monotony
B4 Michael Drayton
B5 In The Middle Of A Blue Balloon
Mutant Disco was the big thing downtown,and Giorno wanted a piece of it. The irritating ranting through a delay effect has now gone, and been replaced by irritating ranting in front of a group of session musicians yawning out some over-produced elevator disco. Who said Giorno was a poet anyway?...oh yes...himself!
Even Brion Gysin gets in on the dance poetry act,with some afro-beat nonsense,which drowns out Bri's thoughts on 'Junk'....nothing like a diversity of subject matter in a lifes work is there?
There are other mutant disco poetry attempts,namely the Jayne Cortez track, which features the truly awful trendy instrument of 1982,the dreadful Fretless Bass. If the motive was to get the public to listen to the words, which apparently they can't unless one puts a disco beat behind everything;then adding some fretless makes this member of the public skip to the next track.
There's some ironic country and western,about Gay Cowboys which is...uhm... bearable.But the piece de restistence is the 'you can not be serious' moment by the 'Four Horsemen'. It's this kind of stuff that reafirms the public view of artists as lazy out-of-touch elitest piss-takers. Imagine stumbling into a primal scream therapy session with a middle income household in the suburbs(what you're doing there?I Dunno? Burgling the place maybe?).They break off from the screaming and ecstatic dancing to welcome you aboard.
"Come and Join us", says the one in the ethnicly inspired shawl invitingly.
Being of a polite dispostion, you accept the invitation and start waving your arms in the air awkwardly and emit a repressed,and slightly embarassed yell.They welcome you with eye contact and one of those insipid smiles Jehovah Witnesses have,then invade your personal space with....gulp!..body contact.....ugh!...(shudder)!
After the six hour session,you hand out your fake telephone number and e-mail address and leave.....never to mention this to anyone!..The kind of thing you do when you wake up hung over after a wild night of dancing in a mutant disco,in bed next to a morbidly obese balding shemale,with a memory lapse and your bottom hurts?Maybe the same goes for this album, except for the Billy Burroughs track of course,who can never do any wrong.
Tracklist:
A1 –John Giorno - Everyone Says What They Do Is Right 5:11
A2 –William S. Burroughs - The Mummy Piece 3:55
A3 –Amiri Baraka - Wailers 4:45
A4 –Jim Carroll - Just Visiting 6:30
B1 –Jayne Cortez - I See Chano Pozo 6:20
B2 –Ned Sublette - Cowboys Are Frequently Secretly 4:49
B3 –Brion Gysin - Junk 3:21
B4 –Rose Lesniak - She's So 4:35
B5 –Four Horsemen - The Dream Remain 2:35
