#35 - 'Year of the Asthmatic Cat' (Enjoy Your Rabbit, 2001)
The kitten developed pneumonia and passed three weeks later. On her way to Heaven, she was startled to find her company was not the lions, the vultures, the killer whales – those kings among beasts, whose lot in life appeared as if a divine gift, their spoils unending. It seemed that they were the Lord’s eldest children, nearest Him in life as in death; and yet the milky road to paradise that day was flocked with vermin, pests, and innumerable crawling things! No creature stood more than a few hands tall here, and most were absent limbs or organs, mauled as they were by predators. A mouse with a missing leg nuzzled up in the kitten’s fur as they approached the threshold of forever.
Up there, the kitten excused herself from her play to commune with God. She was delighted to receive an eternity of her creator’s love, but the impression that she was undeserving of it crept up on her like a pox. Why could she take an audience with God and not the lions, the vultures, the killer whales? She, a tiny coughing little thing with a drooping eyelid and skinny legs, and they, before whom all of nature lay subjugated? God – jolly and aged, bedecked in purple suspenders, the bald spot on his head glinting with white light – gazed over at a caterpillar playing fetch with a gnat. He then turned his head to the kitten and smiled.
‘It is just as I designed. For them I accord Earth, and for you I accord Heaven.’
—
By 2001, Sufjan Stevens seemed poised to become Sufjan Stevens. If the non-album tracks he recorded and released between 1999-2001 are anything to go by, Sufjan was ready to divert course from the winking experimentation of his earliest material and commit instead to firmer, more tested principles: melody, harmony, theme-and-variations. It wasn’t that the exploratory drive had disappeared entirely from his work, even if you listen to a song like ‘Bushwick Junkie’ and wish that maybe it had – it is better instead to say that this drive was now carefully laced into the songs rather than boisterously drawing attention to itself. ‘Far Physician’s Son’ casts its monastic vocal around a 5/4 skeleton; ‘I Can’t Even Lift My Head’ melds coiling Midwestern guitars to a straightforward downcast melody; even ‘The First Full Moon’, admittedly ‘boisterous’ in every sense of the term, is more or less a digitised variation of a conventional indie rock tune. Michigan was still a couple years away, but by 2001 its arrival more or less felt fated, the climax of a trajectory already set in motion.
And yet squarely in the middle of that trajectory sits Enjoy Your Rabbit: a sprawling, largely electronic, fourteen-track wordless song cycle with lofty philosophical ambitions and a commitment to exploring texture, timbre and rhythm over the songwriting qualities that Sufjan would soon become renowned for. Even in his early career Sufjan was no stranger to projects as ambitious as this one – he had by then recorded concept albums on (so he has revealed in blog posts) the apostles, the days of the week, and the solar system, ultimately choosing to leave them unreleased. Neither was Enjoy Your Rabbit at all stylistically unprecedented in 2001. The electronic ‘All Delighted People’ saw public release in 2000, and early tracks only made available in later years, like ‘Joy! Joy! Joy!’ and the second demo of ‘Love Yourself’, indicate the depths of Sufjan’s synthesiser experiments following A Sun Came and his move to New York. It was more that Enjoy Your Rabbit felt alien to this particular moment, a craggy island puncturing the surface of a surging river.
What, then, drove Sufjan to produce Enjoy Your Rabbit just as he seemed to be finding a voice? Not the voice – Sufjan’s versatility is as renowned as his melodies are, and The Age of Adz really isn’t so far away – but certainly a songwriting mode that he was exceptional in, and that he was weaponizing to gradually increase his profile. Perhaps he wished to close the book definitively on his rigidly structured song cycles of yore. Perhaps he needed a full-length project to sustain his career momentum between A Sun Came and an as-yet amorphous project that would become Michigan. Perhaps he believed this music was exceptional. Was he right? Over the course of the forthcoming fourteen essays, we will look for an answer, and emerge just as puzzled as we once were.
We certainly owe it to Sufjan to take Enjoy Your Rabbit as seriously as he evidently once took it. This is an earnest album with an earnest intent: to create wordless music that vividly captures something of each of the twelve animals of the Chinese zodiac, but then to also capture the why of it all – why an antiquated, trivialised and much-fetishized framework has been, and can still be, so spiritually moving in a culture so riddled with cynicism. The zodiac calendar is simultaneously rooted in bare materiality (the animals it includes can be found in our homes, yards and farms) and in high-concept determinism (your animal is said to influence your characteristics and preferred behaviours). Enjoy Your Rabbit, through its mantric, hypnotic compositions, dares you to imagine that it were all true, that these twelve animals have an impermeable spirit to which you were dyadically linked at birth, and that in this notion one – Christian, Jew, Hindu, Muslim or atheist alike – can find a sort of metaphysical belonging. What would it mean if this were all so? What would it mean to be a horse, a tiger, a rat? What might we learn about ourselves, and about our year-kin?
Truthfully, this does all feel like shadowplay. Though there was an immense quantity of effort invested into Enjoy Your Rabbit on multiple levels, from the music (you don’t produce multiple versions of songs like ‘Year of the Ox’ if you aren’t earnestly committed to their success) to the thought exercise that underpins it, Sufjan seems to routinely downplay its significance. It was, in his words, a “funny little project that won’t die”; he has described “rolling his eyes” when director Justin Peck requested permission to adapt Enjoy Your Rabbit into a ballet, befuddled as to why a project like this deserved re-examination at all. It is clear that Sufjan himself now perceives Enjoy Your Rabbit as slight, unserious, a tangential stopgap between weightier projects.
All this might be so, but it might also be a sentiment coloured (for Sufjan) by the failure of this album to accrue any real popularity. Enjoy Your Rabbit was met with minor critical attention (a supportive Pitchfork review, back when the publication was still nascent, is a notable exception) and few listeners; Sufjan was by then staking a claim as a folk singer anyway; life moved on. But Enjoy Your Rabbit was, for a brief, shining moment, the subject of Sufjan’s unwavering care, attention and effort, the career-defining magnum opus that never was. One of my aims with these writeups will be to call foul on the notion that Enjoy Your Rabbit was in any way half-baked. Hell, take it from Sufjan himself:
“I tweaked and manipulated live tracks, wrote whole songs (with contrapuntal riffs, seven part harmonies, trumpet flourishes and tom-toms) that later became samples for a subsequent song. I amassed hours (months, years) of raw material, rending it in all directions, amending, mixing, extracting, abridging — until I was left with the most minute sample of something (a bravado hum, a digital hiss, a nuance of vibrato) which might somehow, in some abstract way, resemble an ox, or a rooster, or a horse.”
Enjoy Your Rabbit is owed a sincere, high-concept appraisal, and I will do my best not to abandon that duty.
This leads us naturally into ‘Year of the Asthmatic Cat’, a deeply unserious song that deserves little (albeit not zero!) critical thought. Sufjan choosing to place ‘Year of the Asthmatic Cat’ as the opening track on Enjoy Your Rabbit perhaps accounts for his less-than-positive retrospection on this project as a whole. It is one of two compositions here that bear no relation at all to the Zodiac calendar; on its face it seems to pay a wry tribute to Asthmatic Kitty Records, Sufjan’s then-obscure record label, founded by he and Lowell to distribute music created by the Holland, MI underground, of which Sufjan was a member. Making reference to AKR on an album dedicated to the animal kingdom must have been an opportunity too valuable to pass up, and I can’t blame him for taking it. Never deny yourself free promotion! Think of the bottom line!
If nothing else, the music here certainly justifies its title. ‘Year of the Asthmatic Cat’ consists of twenty-four seconds of what I assume represents the belaboured breathing of the pneumatically-challenged feline. AKR’s namesake(s) is/are entirely real: Lowell’s two cats at the time, Sara and Tabby, suffered from chronic asthma, only recovering once Lowell moved to the much drier Wyoming. I can imagine the wheezing of Lowell’s cats was a sound intimately familiar to Sufjan, and it is certainly rendered accurately here, a disquieting whine with the timbre of two sheets of metal grinding against one another. I am grateful for the truncated track length; any more of this would feel like too much.
If we can read ‘Year of the Asthmatic Cat’ as just as much a tribute to the family pets as it is to the record label named after them, then this song begins to feel really rather poignant. To insert your own beloved critter into this millennia-old calendar, one that sees all of existence in the fauna around us; to do so despite, or even because of, the ailments and complications and weaknesses that the cat grapples with; to imagine it sitting at the right hand of God next to the dragons and tigers – that’s love. That’s validation. That’s a paean that can go toe-to-toe with ‘Wordsworth’s Ridge (For Fran Fike)’ or ‘Jamila’. It might even be – if I may make an ambitious point – spiritually Christian, indicative of a Christ that accepts and loves our flaws and asks us only to spread His joy in return. I am sure Sara and Tabby were adorable little furballs, but ‘Year of the Asthmatic Cat’ is not cute in any way. It explores, with good humour, their ugliest characteristic, and makes no apologies for it, for they are still God’s children.
This joy exists in ‘Year of the Asthmatic Cat’ regardless of whether Sufjan conceived of it in so many words. Perhaps this song, unlike most others on Enjoy Your Rabbit, was intended as nothing more than a simple joke. There is certainly a charming, eccentric humour to the last few seconds here: after the sheet-metal grinding concludes, a voice credited as Mannar Wong (who was, a Museum of Chinese in America interview tells me, a resident of the Manhattan Chinatown neighbourhood and presumably a friend of Sufjan’s) delivers a line of Chinese in a deadpan, dispassionate inflection. I am no Cantonese speaker, but a friend who is translates it, roughly, as follows:
“The cat cannot breathe, it needs to drink milk.”
It is nice to have at least some Chinese show up on an album about the Zodiac; a thin atmosphere of authenticity is established on track one, and Enjoy Your Rabbit will henceforth remain wordless. Otherwise this is little but a good example of Sufjan’s early dry-as-a-desert humour. Don’t give a suffocating cat milk, everyone! Take it to a veterinarian.
In some ways ‘Year of the Asthmatic Cat’ is a good tone-setter for Enjoy Your Rabbit; in other ways it feels wildly inappropriate in that position. It primes the listener for an album dedicated to “somehow, in some abstract way” capturing the spirit of twelve Zodiac animals, one pet and one god (although the connection between animal and composition will become increasingly opaque from here.) It anticipates the highly textural and often abrasive nature of the album, a marked contrast from Sufjan’s then-recent material. It suggests intellectual commentary, albeit only subtly. On the other hand, it points to a far more lighthearted album than Enjoy Your Rabbit ends up being. This is a record of elephantine proportions, filled to the brim with grand, sweeping, precipitously evolving barrages of electronica, drawing from Reich, Rachmaninoff and Aphex Twin with po-faced sincerity, none of which is foretold by this thin little scrap of a song. The asthmatic kitten may be going to heaven, but here on Earth, how could it ever possibly compete?
