The other day Seán Lennon posted this on X.
There’s no context to the above post beyond what Seán wrote so I wouldn’t presume to know what inspired it. But if you put it through a 2024 lens it’s not hard to see where he’s coming from.
A lot of current art, music, films and advertising deliberately leave no room for interpretation. It’s to the point where I’m surprised that certain artists aren’t including a fully-written essay explaining their exact intentions as part of their press release.
Like his father, Seán’s discography straddles both mainstream and experimental projects. His current album Asterisms falls in the experimental camp, bending a lot of genres, invoking different influences within the same song. It’s prog rock, it’s jazz, space rock, it’s none of the above, it’s all of the above, it’s everything.
The opener, “Starwater” goes from light but queasy Wish You Were Here-era Pink Floyd to the charging heaviness of King Crimson’s Red.
The title track taps the Mahavishnu Orchestra vein but continues traversing a lot of sonic ground without pausing for too long, which makes this an incredibly exciting listen. It’s a sonic exploration of the zodiac.
As an instrumental album, Asterisms is as wide open to interpretation as you can get. I could let it play and write a short story to at least one of the songs. And I might do just that. Music has inspired more than one book from me and will keep doing so.
Asterisms sounds nothing like The Lounge Lizards’ album Voice of Chunk (which I consider to be one of the last great post-modern jazz albums) but it shares some qualities, namely the dedication to both lightness and intensity.
Take “Bob the Bob,” from Chunk. It’s transcendent. Hear the refrain once and it stays with you forever.
“Sharks” on the other hand, falls into the dare-you-to-keep-listening camp. Like Sun Ra, if you took the entire Arkestra and put them in different sound-proof rooms on different continents and asked them to play whatever. It only briefly coalesces.
Perhaps using only using instrumental music isn’t a sufficient way to explain this.
Take Gil Scott-Heron. Everyone knows “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” and no one is going to argue that power (and the ironic humor that he didn’t get enough credit for) but it’s easy to know where the song is going from the first verse. You’re not going to watch the revolution on TV. You’re not going to be a passive witness. You’re either in or out because it’s happening despite you and probably in spite of you, too.
“Pieces of a Man,” which I’ve written about before, is a much harder statement. I discover something new in the song every time I hear it. Unlike “The revolution will not be televised,” this song’s lack of bombast compels the listener to take it in.
And the story, told from the POV of a son watching his dad fall to pieces with one more piece of bad news is as heartbreaking as it is sadly precocious. The child is wild beyond their years but only because of all the shit that’s happened.
And yet the line that jumps out at me as I write this is the scene (because this is cinematic) where the mailman hands the father a letter and says to him “Now don’t you take this letter too hard now, Jimmy, ‘cause they laid off nine others today.”
We don’t know what the man’s job was, so we are free to imagine it. But what we miss in specifics, we make up for in the man’s relationship to the community. Presumably the mailman knew the name of the company that addressed the layoff letter to him. The mailman also knows the man by his first name.
The “nine others today” lyric suggests the mailman might be having a bad day as well, because with each new delivery, he has to watch the suffering happen all over again. Ten people laid off in one day by unknown employers who do it by mail. The unjustness is palpable and the music only heightens this sensation.
Contrast this with art that announces its intentions with every note and lyrics (and article and interview) and there are no surprises in store. No need to use your imagination. We’ve want you to receive it as we intended.
This isn’t necessarily good or bad. It’s just a different approach. But no one would (or should) suggest that things that are open to interpretation are bad. If done right, they keep the viewer or listener coming back every time.
A random example off the top of my head of the open to interpretation method in visual art is Matthew Barney.
The random example of a direct method is Banksy.
Directness is powerful. But with the power of directness comes the risk of shutting the viewer down by leaving no wiggle-room for interpretation. This often the point.
On the other hand, art that is open to interpretation runs the risk of being seen as inscrutable to the point of pretentious. And that is also often the point, at least the inscrutability part.
Obviously this is all subjective, too.
But some people prefer ice cream to lectures and some people want to wander in the unknown forest instead of having a message spelled out in bright lights.
As long as something reaches through it ultimately doesn’t matter.
But if I have to choose, I’ll stay in the unknown forest. Which is why I highly recommend Asterisms.