Week #5

This week, I'm starting to think about how I can frame my outside text presentation project as a piece of trans genre work.  My plan has been to present a Devin Townsend album called Punky Bruster-Cooked on Phonics, because of it's incredibly odd layers and structure.  However, a major nature of why it is so unusual is based on the artist who produced it, which has caused me to continue questioning exactly what constitutes a transgenre project, and what kind of parts of the creation must be taken into account.

Essentially, Devin Townsend is an experimental guitar player.  He got his start as a singer for Steve Vai and his hard rock guitar playing, but Devin eventually struck out on his own.  His first successful project was an extreme metal band called Strapping Young Lad, which was well known for pushing the genre incredibly close to just being noise, while simultaneously blending in very melodic passages.  However, he quickly used the success of Strapping Young Lad to fund a series of increasingly unusual solo albums, which ultimately would expand to cover nearly all genre's of music.  He has created metal albums, noise albums, sound-scape albums, pop albums, rock operas, folk inspired metal, and supposedly even has a country album coming out. 

All this being said, technically his first solo album was this Punky Bruster album, a sort of rock opera in which Devin tells the story of a death metal band who sell out to become the next Green Day. It mainly serves as a vehicle for him to eviscerate the idea of both rich punk stars, and other aspects of the punk scene in general, through a satire that gets increasingly vicious and hateful as the album goes on.

Ultimately, this means that when you listen to this album, what you are listening to is a series of punk rock tracks, made to sound like they were written for popular radio by stripping out much of the edginess the genre carried from its roots.  These sell-out punk songs are then supposedly being played by an ex death metal band, but are recorded mostly by Devin Townsend himself, who at the time was primarily a Metal musician.  So under all the other layers of being punk made for pop radio as made by death metal fakers, the songs are AGAIN influenced by the fact that Devin's skill set is based on something completely different from both death metal AND different from punk, under ground or popular.

Looking back on readings like Dictee,  authors often use much of their personal experience to create these trans genre projects, I am beginning to wonder if this might be the connecting thread that really makes it possible for every aspect of a piece to become trans genre while still having a uniting, connecting thread.  I'm interested to see what other trans genre pieces we will see in the future, and how many of those are also intimately connected to the authors experience.