A Hellish Chorus: Social Criticism in Thick as a Brick

December 8th, 2008

At first exposure, Jethro Tull’s 44-minute song Thick as a Brick may seem to be filled with nothing more than a bizarre and incomprehensible string of lyrics. Ian Anderson called it a “spoof” of other concept albums, and the album insert is a mock newspaper whose articles make ridiculous, seemingly accidental references to the song. The fictional back-story of the lyrics—that they were written for a contest by an eight-year-old boy named Gerald Bostock—further downplay their significance. According to the newspaper insert, Bostock’s poem actually won the contest at first, before a “hastily reconvened panel of Judges accepted the decision by four leading child psychiatrists that the boy’s mind was seriously unbalanced and that his work was a product of an ‘extremely unwholesome attitude towards life, his God and Country’” (1).[*] The comically severe traditionalism of their assessment highlights the poem’s atmosphere of satire and self-ridicule. The same article indicates that some who were exposed to Bostock’s work “felt that it was not one poem but a series of separate poems put together merely to appear impressive” (1). Their complaint feels superficial, as does most of the article, because disjointedness is precisely the point. Thick as a Brick expresses generalized social alienation: the semblance of a unified narrative is elusive because Bostock’s disaffection has no monolithic source.