Redeeming an Expressway: Sufjan Stevens and the BQE

Sufjan Stevens has released his symphonic suite commissioned by the Brooklyn Academy of Music for performance in 2007. The work takes its inspiration from the Brooklyn Queens Expressway, pictured on the album cover and completed in 1964. The first question to ask about BQE is “What kind of work is this?” The packaging makes the answer clear: it’s a soundtrack to a big visual production. The CD comes with a DVD tucked into one of the sleeves, which contains the movie that accompanies the music. The images revolve around cars, traffic, and the things you might see or encounter along the expressway. At its best there is an effective back and forth between the music and the images.

The music should be evaluated in light of the total work—visual and audio—and only secondarily as a stand alone piece. This is made clear on the page for the BQE on the website for his label:

The official album release of The BQE follows nearly two years after its original performance at BAM, providing the songwriter (and his various collaborators) ample time to wrestle out all the thematic incarnations of the project, and to attempt an appropriation of Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk (“total work”). The resulting album might be best described as a grand creative franchise-incorporating movie, symphony, comic book, dissertation, photography, graphic design, and a 3-D Viewmaster® reel-in which a songwriter’s interrogation of one of New York’s ugliest landmarks expands athletically to forums and formulas outside of the song itself. In fact, the BQE is everything but a song.

Of course there’s nothing remotely Wagnerian in the work of Sufjan Stevens, but the point is well taken: the work of art here is the entire package, and the music is only one part of that big package. I’m laboring at this point because as I read reviews of BQE I see that it’s being treated as some sort of symphony and not as a multi-media project. Thus Pitchfork’s misguided review:

The BQE is essentially a traditional 40-minute orchestral suite, a lightweight showpiece in which the ghosts of Gershwin, Ravel, Respighi, and other standard-orchestra-repertoire crowd-pleasers surface.

That totally ignores the self-proclaimed “soundtrack” nature of the music.

The Asthmatic Kitty website gives another hint as to where this work is coming from when it name drops Koyaanisqatsi (now available in its entirety on YouTube). This film from 1982 has a soundtrack by Philip Glass. Its stop motion camera and hypnotic music made this a crowd pleaser, and Sufjan is trying to get into the same territory. At the end of Koyaanisqatsi we find this definition of the title:
One strategy taken by Koyaanisqatsi to portray modern life in turmoil is time lapse photography of modern scenes such as freeways. At one point we see cars passing along the old Embarcadero Freeway in San Francisco:

from Koyaanisqatsi

There’s a lot here for Sufjan to mine, both in terms of themes and images—and this is the place from which to begin thinking about BQE. Sufjan takes the pattern of Koyaanisqatsi and localizes it. Instead of a global and international perspective on modern life, Sufjan will examine everything in and around this one expressway. In terms of production, Sufjan has all the filming done in old-fashioned 16mm film. It is thus a more home-made feeling project than the smoother and professionally produced Koyaanisqatsi.

Sufjan includes two oddball projects with this album: a comic book featuring the “Hooper Heroes” and a Viewmaster reel. Do you remember these reels too? I had one just like this when I was young:
With the CD/DVD release comes a white circular Viewmaster reel that could be watched on one of these contraptions. Making a Viewmaster reel could be a waste of time, but I’m partial to this willingness to dig up older popular forms and give them a try. The use of 16mm film and the introduction of Hula Hoops as a recurring motif also pushes us backwards into American pop culture.

The immediate effect of this pop-culture antiquarianism would seem to be the locating of the BQE within a matrix of classic American things. We could be entering the territory of a Ken Burns documentary—such as his take on the Brooklyn Bridge. But Sufjan’s BQE is more complex than that.. and he’s aware of the problematic legacy of Robert Moses and his brand of radical urban planning. The BQE is an expression of that modernist philosophy, and Sufjan never forgets that, either in his music or images.

One of the oddest parts of Sufjan’s BQE is the juxtaposition of the Hula Hooping girls with the images of cars, such as “Dream Sequence in Subi”:

The Hula Hoops are explained in Sufjan’s liner notes. They are anti-everything the BQE stands for:

But the hoop couldn’t be more at odds with the principles of modernity. Americans of the 1950s were linear people, hard working, and industrious. They fought world wars, drove big cars, and built mammoth roadways in the name of progress. Their popular sports reflected the same: baseball and football were competitive and strategic games…

This lays out the symbolic structure into which the BQE has been fit throughout this work. It is modern America and our drive for success or power or whatever. Then there is the Hula Hoop:

It required no teams. It wasn’t competitive. It wasn’t linear. It was philosophically personal and metaphysically absurd, a gratuitous recreation built around a simple circular tube of plastic meant for nothing m

re than idle enjoyment and exercise.

The humble Hula Hoop (and other things from American pop culture, like the Viewfinder) are used by Sufjan to point out an alternative way of being. We see these colorfully dressed women twirling and spinning out of sheer pleasure. This is not the emotion associated with driving on the BQE, but it is something that is open to us.

So that’s a way to read this whole thing. The drive for modernity has laid out massive and inflexible rules for us, which we can resist by laying hold of elements that might seem meaningless and forgotten in American culture. This helps to make sense out of the whimsicality cultivated by Sufjan Stevens:

Beauty is what does nothing, and it is what saves us.

Where does this leave the BQE? Is it simply an image of our failure? Yes.. but Sufjan doesn’t leave it there, and we sense here his deeply Christian way of seeing the world. The BQE is in need of redemption, he explains in the liner notes:

…scratch below the surface and you will find the heart of the beast beats as passionately as your own—a sentient creature bruised and battered by abuse and abandonment, a bastard child longing for companionship, searching for love.

The demand felt by Sufjan, and evident throughout the film, is to find ways to appreciate and love the BQE. It represents something fallen and off track, like ourselves, but it can be redeemed by the discovery of what is lying all around us. The BQE with its music, images, Viewfinder reel, and booklet (as a Gesamtkunstwerk) is a package of redemptive material.