Is it the live concert series? The DVD? The theater movie? The novel?The first and second CD editions? The website? With the totality of Greendale, wehave the mass destruction of the album, but also its re-integration into othermediums. While there certainly is an album (or two), there is also an artisticprocess that both deconstructs and reconstructs the concept of a body of songsthat make sense together.
It’s all the same story, with or without the music, or the visuals, butnow we have Young guiding three artists (Joshua Dysart, Cliff Chiang, DaveStewart) into an illustrated comic book or graphic novel. It is the latter morethan the former because of its length, perfect binding and hard cover. This isall about an exploration of form. In fact, the content is not at allcomplicated; however, the back story, a mysterious and hard-to-pin-downpresence of the devil in a small town, is a page out of Nathaniel Hawthorne.
Were it not for such a brooding and malevolent presence, the division ofGreendaleinto so many different mediums would not be possible. And it is here that Youngjoins an elite group of artists whose transformational art objects leap fromone shape to another with ease. Embedded in matters that torture the Americansoul, the back story relates to William Carlos Williams’ “In the AmericanGrain,” where for there to be change there must first be destruction, literallyand figuratively.
In his introduction to the new book, Young writes: “Greendaleis a nice town, but it has its quirks… There’s a lot going on in Greendale that I don’t know about either. Can youimagine? I mean, I made it up and I don’t know what the hell is goin’ on. Sodon’t feel bad if you feel a little out of it with this. No one really knows…”The work is not open to just any interpretation, but encompasses variant formsthat serve as more of the same back story of a devil in our town who messes upthe environment and takes away the quietude of home and family. Something’s up,but we never consciously know what’s going down.
Greendale seems almost without end,yet, do we have the uncanny finality of the album as immanent work of art orthe beginning of its deconstruction into other idioms? The former certainly isthe case within popular music, no doubt. The latter, though, and more thanlikely the case, is a brilliant chameleon enterprise by which Young keeps analbum-as-art motive but destroys it by virtue of his own artistic vision,withholding the dissolution from the music industry marketers, the passionatefans who just want an anthem.
In this way, one more entry on the Greendale ledger puts Youngdecidedly in control of the loss of a rock album as an entity, and at once thismeaning gains propitious strength. Greendale is the absence and presence of album as art,and this is no devilish detail. Behaving like an industry unto himself, Youngnever gives rust a chance to sleep. Greendaleisan astute, further awakening that the album is not deadit is merely achangeling.
