Don Van Vliet, better known as Captain Beefheart, was born on this day in 1941, and died in 2010.

I’ve featured his music a lot here, so I’ll try to mix it up a bit today. Here he is performing “Dirty Blue Gene” in 1980. “She’s not bad, she’s just genetically mean.”

YouTube video

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Ed Kilgore is a political columnist for New York and managing editor at the Democratic Strategist website. He was a contributing writer at the Washington Monthly from January 2012 until November 2015, and was the principal contributor to the Political Animal blog.