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.

God’s “Boss’ Life”: Humor in the Book of Job

April 15th, 2008

Job is a tale of power. It features numerous hierarchical relationships amongst God, Satan, Job, and Job’s friends, and it is dominated by long, repetitive discourses about these relationships. God’s culminating speech is an acerbic rant about how mighty he is—one which parallels some modern rap performances, such as Snoop Dogg’s narration of his supposed “Boss’ Life.”[*] God is undoubtedly the divine boss of Job’s world, but the tale portrays him as humanlike in his mannerisms to frame his seemingly senseless disregard for Job’s well-being in terms that a human audience can comprehend. For example, the audience might conceptualize this God’s apparent need to prove himself to Satan as rooted in self-consciousness. Even if such a view is an oversimplification, it gives the audience a “motive” to imagine while considering the other issues raised by the story. The juxtaposition of omnipotence and human traits thus serves a pragmatic purpose in driving the narrative forward, and an essential tool in producing the appearance of humanness is humor.