In Praise Of Stupidity

Some people are born stupid. Others have stupidity thrust upon them. The rest of us have to work at it. We spend a lifetime chipping away at the learning which turns us into solid citizens. Although it's one of the rare zones where stupidity is privileged, popular music has found itself trapped on the same learning curve. Indeed, it has travelled so far up the curve that it has crossed over from something that makes us feel good into something that tries to be good for us. The danger zone opens up at the point where the curve intersects with the career ladder of rising or risen stars - sitting ducks like Elvis Costello or David Byrne or Bono or Peter Gabriel - whose status flatters them into believing that they should do something really useful with their lives. Stupidity is the prophylactic that protects pop from the good work of others. Faced with the ecological pieties of Sting or - worse - born again humanitarians like Lou Reed, glorying in stupidity is the more inviting option.

Stupidity means being too stupid to read the rules. Stupid is pop uninhibited by others' disapproving glances. Stupid never knows when to stop, like a Neil Young guitar solo pursuing that one note to the very end of the world. Stupid is Jungle dancing in a corner, unconcerned by the disdain of others, left alone to do exactly as it pleases. Stupid recognises no hierarchies in art or pop. Stupid blithely steals from high and low; it'll try on cheap trinkets and jewels, fit anything to its great, gaudy colour schemes. Stupid is early Sonic Youth, trashing aesthetics, making it all too clear that conventions of beauty have no place here. Faux naif, Stupid is characterised by hyperbole, intuition, insolent cunning. Crude, rude and in you face, it speaks when it is impolitic to do so. Stupid is The Butthole Surfers pointing out the emperor's new clothes while thinking it might be fun to try them on.

Dirty detour

Ah, The Butthole Surfers... No other group has ever been so terrifyingly, exhilaratingly and unrelentingly stupid. The release of their new official bootleg, The Hole Truth... And Nothing Butt, brings it all back: the queered theatrical pitch of early Buttholes appearances, when vocalist Gibby Haynes, in a grubby mini-dress, used to smash blood capsules into his groin and menstruate over the front rows, who of course lapped it up, while guitarist Paul Leary let rip the blasts of feedback that transformed their ghastly spectacle into a skull-scraping psychedelic experience. Then and now, this is the crux of the group's stupid appeal: they're rock insensate; rock restored to its raw, churning, gurning, molten state: hot, stinking, sulphurous and overwhelming.

The holy route

The Buttholes' representation of stupidity is the ugliness and pain of a bloody new-born babe arrived at through an excess of drugs that peeled away the layers of learning one by one, from Haynes's unaccountable decision to train as an accountant all the way back to their potty training. Their dialectical twins are those holy fools of contemporary classicism, John Tavener and Arvo Part, who prostrate themselves before God seemingly in the fixed belief that anything more than the most simple confluence of melody and hushed harmony would constitute a direct affront to His autonomy as the sole Creator of the Universe. If it's meant to quietly exalt, the music is often just pretty and banal. A truer form of holiness is the rigorous training the great improvisors put themselves through to bring themselves to that transcendent state where thought and feeling dissolve in the moment of creation.