Customer Reviews

Yip Jump Music

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Yip/Jump Music, the first accessible album from Daniel Johnston, is wonderful and sublime. It may make you sad or really happy or make your skin crawl--probably all three. But you won't be able to quit listening. Never have I heard an album that was so glorious, tragic, spiritual and funny at the same time.

This record is the perfect antidote to endless releases high in production values but with no content and all humanity drained out of them, if they had any to start with. Johnston, in my opnion, is the finest songwriting talent of the last two decades.
One of the few artists I can think of comparing him with is adult child genius Brian Wilson, Beach Boy and creator of Teenage Symphonies to God. Like Wilson, Johnston is remarkable in that he combines a childlike purity and spirit with an instinctive and incredible musical gift. Their is a strong link between Johnston's best work and Wilson's 2nd great masterpiece
The Beach Boys Love You (the first being Pet Sounds). Like Love You this is a masterwork of primitive pop that's not nearly as primitive as it first appears.
Picasso supposedly claimed that by his teens he was able to draw like the most compitent adult and then said he'd spent the rest of his artistic life striving to be able to draw like a child again. Johnston and Wilson are two examples of artists who
never lost their child like purity in their work. In Johnston's songs it can be both wonderful and unsettling...This is music filled to the brim with PURITY, BEAUTY and TRUTH.
Some will find the very basic nature of these home recordings too much for their tastes but their are not many contemporary pop songs as brilliant or individual as Museum of Love, Worried Shoes and Speeding Motorcycle (all found here)... and King Kong, one of Yip Jump Music's most left-field entries, is a song that no one who ever hears it will be able to forget. In recent years Daniel has been taken under the wing and given support from well meaning producers and musicians. Many of the results have been really lovely but there is something uniquely magical about this period of his work.
Please take a chance and invest in Daniel at his most brilliant and extreme.

Were it not for Austin, Texas I doubt if we ever would have known Daniel Johnston's music and art. That town, at that time, was the perfect place for Daniel to be. Had this kid been in L.A. or NYC, Nashville, Portland...hell, even Seattle handing out his home-made cassettes to anyone who would accept it, the corner trash receptacles on every street would've been filled with unheard music. Thank God for Austin! The history of roots music & extremely competitive songwriting scene in that city in the mid-eighties was the perfect catalyst for Daniel's raw, pop brilliance to boil over & get noticed. Anywhere else and he probably would've been dismissed as a lunatic.

It's one thing to be prolific, quite another to be profound. Daniel is both. His songs have an emotional honesty & sly wit that may never be eclipsed. This disc, arguably his masterpiece, starts with the frantic, pulsing "Chord Organ Blues" setting the tone for the wild ride to follow. He takes you on a lo-fi journey through his sweet, touching love of "The Beatles", his tongue-in-cheek "Sorry Entertainer" displaying a grasp of songcraft that can't be taught, he careens into mindboggling tunes like "Danny Don't Rapp", & "Speeding Motorcycle" and swerves with total abandon into odes about "Casper the Friendly Ghost" & "King Kong".

It's a jarring, astonishing listen. To write it off as childish & undisciplined is to completely miss the point. Anyone who has ever hummed a tune that got stuck in their head should be able to recognize the genius in this collection. Daniel has a gift...and I'm so grateful that Austin knew it.

this is a great album, his synthesizer material, much like Hi, How Are You?

i highly recommend this to any daniel johnston fan, or elliot smith fan, or vaselines fan, or anybody who likes indie music.

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