Jesus Lizard
Lash - Ep

THE REVIEW

I increasingly think that in art one must learn to unlearn. On a state, social, and popular level, art is always hierarchized as "Knowing How to Play - Not Knowing How to Play - Knowing How to Draw - Not Knowing How to Draw - Knowing How to Act - Not Knowing How to Act - Knowing How to Write - Not Knowing How to Write." But in the end, what does knowing or not knowing mean? Knowing what? The process of streamlining one's individuality spreads thanks to the megaphone offered to state figures, to common teachers who direct and shape towards what is stately and formally recognized as art. Thus, from that beacon that teachers are, lessons on "How to Write/How to Play/How to Draw" in a correct, beautiful, and clear way descend en masse. This, on a personal level, is the most castrating violence toward one's future uniqueness: it boxes writers-musicians-painters into a hypothetical grid of given value. "He's a great musician; he studied at the conservatory" --- "No, he doesn't know how to play at all; he doesn't have the basics."

Millions of mongoloids (with the Genghis Khan metalheads standing out here for their obtuseness) will always be trapped, anesthetized by these never-reasoned, discussed, or abandoned social categories. "He has a beautiful voice" "He's technically prepared" "He's good at drawing." Paintings for restrooms, spastic background music, scholarly songs for academic nerds with blood at rest: this is what the social leads to. This is what the academy leads to if it doesn't forget what is good and bad, right and wrong, this is what you reach without unimaginable injections of personal abandonment and disorientation. Art is the tidal wave that quickly bites the beach where you were carefree sunbathing just before. Art is the dismay of the renowned meteorologist in knowing he has betrayed placid families by driving them towards the rain. Art is clearly dark. David Yow is a non-singer, a recidivist unlearner, one who, in the wake of David Thomas and Captain Beefheart, has built a vocal register aligning it with the fractured frames of urban psychosis in an Abel Ferrara film, or with the neo-realist expressive virulence of a "Mouchette" signed by "Robert Bresson." Jesus Lizard, that is, when moans, sobs, chokings, and off-key notes are elevated to art by an acrobatic, circus-like musical trio. Take a Hardcore song: debone it, humanize it, blow radioactive green smoke over it, and disfigure it into Post with the help of Jazz, of Noise. One of the greatest rock bands in history: among the unlearners par excellence. In order of value: 1) Goat 2) Head 3) Liar 4) Pure 5) Lash (EP).