Deep cut from the album that finally, irrefutably kicked the Electric Light Orchestra into the big leagues, 1976’s New World Record. A story song about an alien that comes down to earth, gets taken for a street person, files a negative report back to the home planet. It was a common theme in those days as the afterglow of the big deal moon landings faded and the various grim realities of life on earth got harder and harder to ignore. Same as it ever was.
If We Are The World is the worst record ever released, then it’s entirely plausible to argue that Culturcide‘s assassination of it is the best. It’s certainly the purest response to it. Just take the original, sh** all over it and otherwise make an ugly-beautiful mess of things. Maybe you just had to be there to understand. Ronald Reagan‘s trickle down economics in full effect, the rich getting ever richer, pissing from their penthouses on everybody below, nobody really noticing as they stood in line around the block for Tom Cruise, Arnold Schwartzennegar, Michael J Fox movies. There is an alternative history of the past twenty-five where the revolution did happen. The ravenous masses rose in unanimous disgust and ate the rich. And it all started with Tacky Souvenirs of Pre-Revolutionary America (the album).
The Jimmy Castor Bunch are mostly known for their one-off mega-hit whose sexual politics were dubious even in 1972. The shock is just how good the rest of the album is — a blast of funk fused psychedelic soul that’s as serious as life, truth and death.
“From the earliest, best, least over-played phase of the Steve Miller Band‘s million mile odyssey through the culture (it’s still going on, apparently), three songs that all sort of flow as one. You know it’s still the 1960s when it’s a white guy singing a sort of psychedelic blues and doing a relevant job of it. Somehow that didn’t much manage to survive into the 1970s.” (Philip Random)
In which ex-Beatle John cries foul at the imprisonment of his friend John Sinclair (artist, shit-disturber, manager of the MC5) who was busted for two joints of marijuana, thrown in jail for ten years. Welcome to Richard Nixon’s America. Found on 1972’s Sometime in New York City, an album which was not well received at the time. Or as Philip Random puts it, “Definitive proof that Yoko really can’t sing and John, for all his musical genius, still has to at least try for a album to be even half-way good. Feel free to skip this one, except John Sinclair, of course.”
“In which then still young Neil Young draws the obvious connection as early as 1974 between the vampire’s bloodlust and western man’s need for oil. In other words, we’re junkies, willing to kill for a fix. And kill we mostly blatantly did in 1991. And then again in 2003. No Blood For Oil said all the anti-War posters and placards, but they were missing the point. The oil was blood. It still is. And we’re still killing for it.” (Philip Random)
Randophonic 