I was writing a short review of San Francisco Friday by Jandek, and I was distracted by this incredibly ignorant and rude review on the RateYourMusic page for that particular album. Over the months I've spent looking for Jandek content in the depths of the Internet, I've found that a fair amount of people write criticisms of Jandek's cult following - about as many people write about this as there are Jandek fans themselves, it seems. They tend to be ridiculously trollish and wordy and focus on the fact that Jandek can't play guitar and seem to ignore any other aspect of his music. They criticize Jandek for the amount of albums he has and how his fans continue to buy them and go to his shows, giving him more money to continue making music and playing live more.
My actual review of San Francisco Friday, a surprisingly bluesy Jandek live performance, was quite short, and I'll post it later. But I quickly went into a rebuttal to these horrible criticisms of Jandek fans because I was so angered by their tremendous ignorance and rudeness, so here is what I wrote. This writing is kind of very messy and clunky but I just really wanted to get my thoughts out. But I honestly hope the person who wrote that review doesn't find this because I'm not really ready to get into a fight with someone over the Internet again (those give me anxiety).
I don’t know why a person on RYM chose this particular album (San Francisco Friday) to write a headass review where they talk about how Jandek keeps making sh*tty music and his fans eat it up, because this is definitely one of his most musical and most artistically valuable live albums. It’s okay not to like his music but it doesn’t make sense to say it doesn’t have artistic value and that his fans are wasting their time. It’s honestly rude and quite pathetic that someone could be that pissed about people simply enjoying the work of a musical artist and wanting to support them.
The amount of creativity that goes into his lyrics and the variety of the instrumentation among the live shows is obviously enough to demonstrate the appeal of his music. On his live albums, he does everything from noisy rock to ambient spoken word to experimental acoustic folk to avant-garde jazz to accessible chamber folk to bluesy rock like this. Even if it’s mostly other musicians doing the work for his music, Jandek still shows a lot of creativity by assembling those musicians, writing the lyrics and making the foundation for the show, and allowing them to improvise and bring their own personality to his music. Jandek also writes about extremely personal subjects like depression, loneliness, and broken heartedness, and it would be ignorant to disregard that fans might seek solace in his artistic expressions regarding those topics.
Obviously it’s subjective and you don’t have to say you enjoy any of it, but you can’t criticize his fans for going to his shows, buying his albums, and analyzing his music. The Jandek project is one of the most unique musical experiences in general because of his idiosyncratic musical and lyrical style and the evolution of his genres, and that’s pretty hard to doubt - are there any artists that truly sound like Jandek? Could you ever call anything a “Jandek copy”? And it’s pretty hard not to see any appeal at all to the depths of his live albums, especially when they include accessible bluesy gems like San Francisco Friday, and they include other hidden greatnesses like all those genres I just mentioned, and his lyrics. To boil down the content of Jandek’s music to “he can’t play guitar and no one told him to stop” is incredibly ignorant all those creative qualities/sources of appeal that I just mentioned, and shows that you just want to criticize people for enjoying something that you’re too lazy to look any deeper into.
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