‘I Have a Crush on Your Skeleton’: Ecophobia, the Blues, and Captain Beefheart’s Lewd(ic) Ecology

In this article, I show that, tactfully aware of the artificiality of the gender norms that inform the logic of desire and devilish violence of the blues, Captain Beefheart makes purposed use of that genre’s simplistic sexual framework as a means to negate masculinist and anthropocentric discourses of control and explore the more demonic territory of nature “in-itself.” Unlike the Lovecraftian heroes that traditionally investigate “inhuman” environments, Beefheart does not recoil in terror before their darkness, performing, rather, a masochistically ludic exploration of the human-nature gap, the reconsideration of which remains an ecological imperative.