Sufjan Stevens 1: The 50 State Project

CONCEPT

IN THE BEGINNING...

Like so many things in my life, I didn't think much about Sufjan Stevens when I first heard about him, and would've missed the phenomenon if it hadn't bit me in the ass. I "first heard" from at least two or three friends who described a musician who had planned on making an album for each state, and that the first state he had chosen was Michigan. I should have been all over this given, first, my obsession with my home state, and second, the similarities in processes... my First Family Project Euphemism calls for a story from each and every neighborhood of Flint, Detroit, and Chicago.

But, of course, every two days someone recommends I read or see or hear something, and so I'm forced to take most recommendations with a grain of salt, and I've overlooked some real gems.

Not too long after my wedding, my friend Matt visited New York (he lives here now), and when he met up with Jess and me, he gave me Sufjan Steven's Michigan album, which I recently followed up with Illinois. I've found the music to be both intoxicating and very addictive, but just as with Smashing Pumpkins in High School, I'm uncovering all sorts of uncanneries.

Uncannery #1. Sufjan Stevens grew up in Michigan. He also is obsessed with his state. That's why he did the Michigan album before he announced the 50 states project.

Uncannery #2. He's a deeply religious Episcopalian and he does not write without undertaking the nuances and implications of this aspect of his life.

Uncannery #3. He studied at the New School's MFA program in Creative Writing for fiction.

In short, this is all very strange for me... even while I'm enjoying his music and scrutinizing him, and not altogether buying what I'm hearing and reading, I'm in awe that we coincidentally seem to have moved along a similar trajectory, albeit separated by about three years. I wouldn't be disappointed if the next three years brought me such a measure of success.

A BRIEF BIO

I was originally thinking of posting the bio from Stevens' own website, but it's both self-congratulatory and ironic, and I don't buy one with the other so I'm just going to report some of the more basic facts. You can read the whole thing here.

Sufjan Stevens was born in Detroit but grew up in the northwest of Michigan's lower peninsula. Music was part of his life from an early age, and by college he "became proficient on the oboe, recorder, bajo, guitar, vibraphone, bass, drums, piano," and so on. He could also sing. He went to college at Hope in Grand Rapids, and during his senior year he recorded and released A Sun Came on Asthmatic Kitty Records, a label he started with his stepfather.

Following college, Stevens moved to New York City and attended New School's MFA program in fiction writing. He returned to music as a career, and after persuing more experimental projects for awhile he developed and recorded Welcome to Michigan, the Great Lakes State intended as a musical exploration of his memories and his home state. The record was a commercial success beyond expectations, and set the stage for a 50 States Project; to release an album for each of the nation's fifty states.

He then researched and recorded material for Sufjan Stevens invites you to come on, Feel the Illinoise. He is currently touring following his second album. He has announced that subsequent projects will explore Oregon and Rhode Island. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

THE 50 STATES PROJECT

Despite sometimes the very best of intentions, art has veered away from religion while it should have been moving toward... Clarification: it is the function of religion that needs filling, not the content. When Artaud spoke of literal sacrifice on stage, he wasn't (or perhaps he was, but if so it's beside the point) arguing that we adopt the Aztec gods, but that artistic enterprise could fulfill the theological functions that had been usurped from organized religion by the advent of technology, capitalism, and so forth.

Instead, art (by which I mean the institutions that inform and support artistic practice, rather than those practices themselves) followed the lead of captalist enterprise because, like everyone else, artists are interested in making a profit. The result was that arts were made over as businesses: a marketable product that was exchanged for money and assets. A better direction, that is, one that would make the arts as a whole more relevant to society at lage, give them more cultural capital, and as a result, ironically, make them more profitable, would be to pursue a line of engaged (as opposed to distant/theoretical) philosophical inquiry.

The artists should be like monks and ministers, not businessmen.

And that is fundamentally what makes Stevens 50 states project so galvinizing. I'm obsessed with geography, but his field of inquiry is on some level just an eccentricity. What is invaluable about the enterprise is the effort it exacts and the effort, discipline, and demands of faith it must make to be successfully undertakes. Consider: Stevens first album was "researched" in terms of his childhood, but his second album was strenuously "researched" in terms of colleting anecdotes, experiences, and observations of a state where he has never lived. To research and release one album for each remaining space at a pace of one per year, Stevens will not finish until the age of eighty.

His reward in the undertakign is conspicuously spiritual.

He will be spending the majority of his life traveling to places (many of them less glamorous than Michigan and Illinois, which might give some of us pause), and if he achieves fame and fortune, this will be occluded by the task at hand. It is a task that is possible, but only barely possible, and so conspicuously difficult that it invites his audience to consider the rewards in such a process.

How much might someone hear, learn, to listen spending a life traveling among those states?

END OF POST.