Dr. Horace Plimwell on Rumpelton Invades Google
In this alarming yet necessary intervention, Rumpelton dares to place his MS Paint Captain Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica before the flat tribunal of Google Images, where it sits—top left, naturally—like a minor saint among the commercially laminated relics of record-shop nostalgia.Captain-Beefheart-Trout-Mask-Replica-IG.jpg
Observe the tall black hat: not merely a hat, but a vertical insistence against reasonable composition. Observe, too, the face, rendered with that distinctly Rumpeltonian instability—part man, part mask, part something one suspects has escaped from the album itself. The raised hand is neither greeting nor warning, but a chromatic convulsion: Beefheart’s anti-melody translated into the blunt, incorruptible language of the computer mouse.
Where the surrounding images offer reproductions, products, and archival obedience, Rumpelton supplies an act of pictorial insubordination. His Trout Mask Replica does not illustrate Captain Beefheart so much as permit the Captain’s strange, braying spirit to briefly occupy MS Paint—a program whose apparent innocence makes it uniquely suited to such ontological mischief.
—Dr. Horace Plimwell
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