Traffic Jams: Sufjan Stevens, 'The BQE'

WHEN SUFJAN STEVENS first claimed in 2003 that he planned on undertaking the “50 States Project,” in which he would record an album for each of the nation’s 50 parts, critics and fans never thought that would include architecture.

But with his latest multimedia project, “The BQE,”Stevens branches out to include bridges, traffic and the beauty of human movement in his discography.

Unfortunately, the results of the album and film, which were commissioned by the Brooklyn Academy of Music and performed as part of their Next Wave Festival in 2007, aren’t always great. In fact, it’s mostly repetitive — if you don’t have any specific fondness for or familiarity with the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, Stevens’ visual and instrumental ode to the road is basically just a drag.

Sure, Stevens has gone through a lot of effort to put this package together. Back in 2007, he used Super 8mm and 16mm film to capture comings and goings on the expressway — or, as he calls it in the package’s 40-page booklet of liner notes and artwork, “a battered and beaten urban roadway, baffling to drive, plagued by relentless construction and inexplicable traffic jams, dilapidated in form and function,” and then set it all to 30 minutes of music. Legend goes (or, at least press materials claim) that one week later, Stevens, “feeling disenfranchised by the magnitude of the universe,” decided to shelve the project.

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Now, two years later, Stevens supposedly “found inspiration” to put the multimedia set together and included are a DVD of the film and a CD of the project’s 13 tracks. However, each meanders along at a tedious pace — and although they share a few enjoyable moments thanks to Stevens’ smart editing and use of a lush-sounding, 35-piece orchestra, there are too many other disjointed elements that throw the whole thing out of whack.

Bizarre much?

But according to Stevens’ liner notes, it all makes sense: After all, didn’t you know that the hula hoop is really as “reincarnating, ambiguous, and recursive” as the BQE, which is really “diffused and consumed by its own ghastly saturation (like a snake eating its tail)”?

Yeah, we didn’t either.

Yet Stevens somehow links the hoop and the expressway together, stating that although they are at odds in terms of what they represent for society and what they bring to the average person, “we are all cosmically connected by vast circular motions in time and space.” (There’s a lot more where that came from, if you’re willing to read through Stevens’ eight pages of Unabomber-like musings.)

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And then there’s Stevens’ half-hour film, which includes shots of the expressway itself; surrounding rowhouses, townhouses and apartment buildings; McDonalds‘ golden arches and billboards advertising Jay-Z’s latest album; decrepit, abandoned buildings; community murals; sneakers hanging over telephone lines; countless cars zooming by at sped-up speeds. While it starts out intriguingly enough, it soon seems like you’re watching the same footage over and over again, just with different camera angles and effects (a fish-eye lens, perhaps?) that eventually become trite and unnecessary. How many mirror-imaged lines of cars do you need to see driving into each other without crashing before you get frustrated? Here’s your answer: Not that many.

The set does have some redeeming qualities, though — shots of a carnival near the BQE are charming in their portrayal of youthful innocence, and the scenes of the Statue of Liberty during a particularly beautiful sunrise are also awe-inspiring. Most beautiful, though, are the sequences of the city lights and its traffic at night; as the hazy night sky is illuminated and reflected in the water surrounding the city, the most fragile, playful part of Stevens’ soundtrack comes in (track 11 on the CD, “Isorhythmic Night Dance with Interchanges“) and proves good background for the city that never sleeps.

Overall, however, “The BQE” isn’t all that special unless you’re buying into Stevens’ advice that you “give it a try” and “be the hoop.”

Our advice? We wish Sufjan would have stuck to states — and included Washington, D.C., too. Just sayin’.

Written by Express contributor Roxana Hadadi
Photo courtesy Sufjan Stevens

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