Panta Rhei - Worst Music Video Ever?

Romania has given us much in the way of Bad Prog. Panta Rhei is probably the more notorious addition. This video is a complete guide in how to produce the worst music video of all time. Horrible use of bluescreen compositing, the most arbitrary execution of the dreaded "Hall of Time" After Effects filter, inconceivably abrupt time signatures, awkward editing and closeups that looks like it was done by a team of severely autistic children. Only from Eastern Europe can something be so naive yet mangled beyond hope of correction. From 1996, here is Eye of the Snake.

Otis--Then and Now (Still Hamtaahk After All These Years)

Here's a favorite of ours. Magma's "Otis"--performed in 1981 and 2007. Christian Vander's ultimate scat ballad...a bittersweet limit experience in sound...No holds barred insanity in the name of avant garde free jazz interpretation. Vander may have gotten older and beefier and bad hair-ier...but his mania has only purified like a fine wine. Merci Boucoup!

Welcome Back My Friends...

Dissimilar Cousins: Yes, King Crimson, and Why Some Prog Sucks

The eminent French post-structuralist critic Jean Baudrillard has observed “Perhaps the world's second worst crime is boredom. The first is being a bore.” This is not apropos of very much at all, save the fact that there is a certain intention announced by the writer of any essay that begins with a quote from Baudrillard: the intent to stultify the reader with unremitting arrogance. Old Jean has a certain point, however, though I do wonder how this played out in the original French; it should be noted that “boor” is what I think he was really going for, and who knows how much was lost across the linguistic hedgerows along the way. Regardless, I’m laying down the gauntlet early, and this promises to be the most overwhelmingly sententious essay yet presented for your delectation here within the none-too-humble halls of The Progressive Rock Hall of Infamy.

Why? Very simple. After repeated demands from visitors to the Hall that I actually explain what “Prog” is, a working definition from The Curator is going to be entwined into this essay to provide much needed context on why some bands are Prog and some aren’t; far, far more importantly, by analysing the two albums I’ve chosen to represent the triumph and catastrophe of Prog, I will at last have an opportunity to explain why I think Prog is, above all other forms of rock, open to catastrophic depredations and eschatological foul-ups because of the very nature of the music. What allows it to triumph, in short, can also render it asunder in the hands of over-ambitious dolts who really don’t know where their ideas are heading. This essay also will allow me to elevate my personal Prog Hero- Robert Fripp- while dealing what will hopefully be a death-blow to the incomprehensibly overrated and beloved 70’s Arena Prog staple, Yes. Not that I set out for such things, but I must say: if this doesn’t warrant a few death threats, then I’m really getting off of my game here at the PRHOI.

Because I hate Yes. Just absolutely fucking despise them. I blame them for allowing Jon Anderson to sing, I blame them for Rick Wakeman’s rampant ego and late-career preening sentimentality (some curmudgeon- he plays like Richard Clayderman plugged into a wall of amplifiers, only more treacly and GAY!) , I blame them for bands like Albatross who made a memorable mess of things during the first Prog-O-Caust broadcast several weeks ago, I blame them for Jimmy Hotz and men wearing brooches and concerts performed in horrible pants and bad bouffant Prog-dos and repetitive solos and inspiring Dream Theater to live their miserable fantasies and any other excess that killed Classic Prog which can not be directly attributed to pipsqueak Keith Emerson and his gargantuan ego. This is a love-fest of hatred, a deep yearning to despise and loathe what other men adore, to set me apart by sheer vitriol and vengeance from the mass of suckers who have taken this crass hokum down to the vein-laden root. Eat that "Roundabout", you curs, and while you're down there wallowing on knee-pads of indignity, here it comes- A Taste of My Hate.


I hate Anderson’s bitchy-ness, Squire's 25-pound bass, Howe’s increasingly-epicene appearance whilst singing about wizards, that dude from the Buggles with his big glasses and their boy-toy guitarist Trevor Rabin who made them go pop, and I’d like to hang Rick Wakeman upside down over hot coals and put a bag of rats on his head. I hate the song "Wondrous Stories" like I hate people who recruit child soldiers in Africa, and I’d rather listen to audio from the Great Guyana kool-aid acid test of Jim Jones for eternity than hear "Starship Trooper" even one more time before I die. I hate their fans, their cult, their standing in the Prog world, all of their albums and their goddamn families, too- down to the last little Wakeman from any of his four perversely fecund unions. Yes is more despicable than AIDS and more annoying than the entire Osmond clan; I literally cannot listen to them without wanting to go out and hurt baby animals.

And of all their records, the one I find most unlistenable is the one I just was listening to for the purposes of this essay. Relayer. 1974, modest-sized hit, a just-before-Christmas release after the monstrosity of Tales from Topographic Oceans was sprung upon the world like a zombie plague in January; Yes literally bookended the year with heaping piles of faeces thrown into their fans’ faces, doing god knows what in the months between, other than loading up their bowels with more platinum scheisse, that is. A year of overwhelming excess and ego perhaps not seen since Napoleon crowning himself Emperor, a scabrous and indefensible assault by a band who had something approaching rabid contempt for their public. The murder of Prog began with these two albums, completely out of control, tuneless, meandering like a wet-brained derelict and as bloated as a Gabor sister loosed upon a Vegas prime rib buffet. TFTO is justifiably loathed by most sensible music fans, but Relayer has somehow got a pass; I’ve reviewed it elsewhere (and that should have ended it), but my point today is to compare this mess to the near-perfection of an album with similar artistic designs and made by musicians of a similar caliber, and within one year of Relayer’s release. I’m talking about King Crimson’s stunning 1973 release Lark’s Tongues in Aspic, an album I’ve been listening to for thirty years and what I still consider to be the definitive statement of ambitious and arty Prog, both abstract and concrete.

So much in common, as I’ve just said above; nobody denies that Steve Howe can play guitar (he’s easily the best thing going on Relayer) and there is a veritable Rickenbacker cult that has sprung up around Chris Squire, and while I don’t like his style Patrick Moraz is more than capable, and blah blah blah. All the accommodations and apologies made, no one can deny the Yes-men learned to play, and play (technically) very well. Yet the Yes effort is a catastrophe, totally unlistenable, and Crimson’s is probably the greatest Prog album of all time. It’s not like Fripp and Co. weren’t letting fly with whatever they felt like: the opening cut is almost fourteen minutes long, and other than the surprisingly tender ballad which follows, every other track clocks in at over seven. The Mellotron is still part of the Crim’s arsenal, but it is relegated to a far smaller role; this album is rife with Jamie Muir’s frantic percussion giving a slightly Eastern feel to the proceedings, and David Cross all over the production with an at-times flat-out-evil-sounding violin. Wetton and Bruford do what that pair does, which is keep themselves under control but drop in the occasional tasteful notion reminding you that there are multiple ways to listen to a King Crimson composition, a multiplicity of experience virtually unheard of outside of Prog and only very rarely attained within. Each composition is full, unique, and perfectly realized; and it is that key word composition which defines why the over-the-topness of Larks’ succeeds brilliantly and Relayer makes me want to steal a car and go on a cross-country killing spree. Of baby animals in petting zoos.

There’s a lot going on in both Larks’ and Relayer, but the latter just seems like a mess. The reason is that there is absolutely no focus to the most ambitious tracks. Album opener "The Gates of Delirium" is noisy, obstreperous, disjointed, slapdash and sounds like it was cobbled together from a thousand takes with the band never actually ever in the same room for any of them. The second track is so worthless I’m not even going to name it, the only reason for it existing seemingly Howe’s fucking Grade-A solo that is delightfully sloppy, rough-hewn, with nasty tube distortion and modulated perfectly in the true style of a classical rondo. But, no matter how good the solo, the rest of the production is, again, utter chaos and heading nowhere at breakneck speed. It’s pointless to even mention the last track, which is more of the same, or the unconscionable gall of the record company to include several “bonus” tracks on the CD release, as if having more bamboo shoved under your fingernails is some kind of treat once you’ve accommodated yourself to the sensation of utter agony that makes up this majestically incompetent bit of narcissistic effluvium.

Now, back to the pure joy and beauty of Larks’. A real psychedelic-prog experience, there’s a host of sound effects and production virtuosity going on throughout the record, but not one track on this masterpiece ever drifts away from the central idea guiding it: these are compositions, not puerile excuses for solos wrapped around studio-bound noodling, and wherever Fripp as bandleader wants the songs to eventually go, they get there with dignity and fervor, tremendous introspection and punctuations of fantastic noise. The superb solo on "Easy Money", for instance, is an organic part of the song, not something thrown in for Fripp to masturbate with, and the Mellotron, percussion, Bruford’s drumming and Wetton’s wonderfully tasteful bass line move things along as much as Fripp’s pensive, frankly melancholy guitar work. I dislike trying to describe in words what something “sounds” like- for god’s sakes go get this album and a decent pair of headphones and prepare for a real fucking experience- but in order to separate Larks’ humility and mastery from the farrago of Relayer’s vulgarity and entropy, this one time I have decided to forgo my reticence and do what I can to point out how much effort went into the Crim’s masterpiece, and how little thought went into the latest entry in the Yes junkpile. Pretentious, precious, orotund, distasteful, garish, incredibly noisy and ultimately silly, albums like Relayer are why the average music listener hates Prog and why the mere mention of the word in public usually earns one a series of sneers. And never- and let me repeat NEVER- an offer of a phone number or a quickie make-out session with the girl just having to know what this band was Peter Gabriel was in when he was younger. And with good and goddamned clear reason. I honestly think it would be easier to explain things to a girl if she was poking around my computer and found child pornography than if she investigated the dread "PROG" folder on my Docs and found all eleven versions of Kohntarkosz I have. Eleven, man- can you dig it? There's therapy for pedophiles, but Magma fans are in it for the long haul.

So, why does Prog end up failing so often and in such a disastrous fashion when it does? The reason, I think, begins with the problem most people have in even defining what the music is. Everything from Black Widow to Queensryche is called Prog, and there is an unending debate in the halls of the respectable Prog establishment about whether a band is symphonic or crossover, true folk prog or merely Harry Potter music. In short, there are an endless list of influences that can make up something “Prog”; fusion, noise, metal, psych-style guitar-driven rock or keyboard-dense electronics, the classical influences of the ELP-wing of the genre or the outrageous eclecticism of the wholly unclassifiable Van der Graaf Generator. It would be very difficult to do a series of “Bad Punk” shows, since for one thing the entire idea is a bit of a redundancy, and for two these bands have at their disposal a mere three chords and two time signatures and you can be boring and repetitive but it’s very difficult to make bricks without straw and build a gas chamber, if you follow me. But I’ve had absolutely no problem rounding up three entire shows worth of Bad Prog, with a fourth on the way and this one perhaps the most shocking and horrifying of all. And anyone who has listened to the shows, I would hope, would have to acknowledge the true diversity of the monsters put together in The Curator’s infernal Prog lab, DJ Micah and I playing music from many different bands, countries, and from across even differing social systems. And yet still Bad Prog reigns. It’s a tough beast, this Bad Prog, and to be honest, looking at my notes and tracks I’ve meant to play but haven’t got to, there’s enough material here already for at least six more shows, and keeping to the fantastic standard of incompetence established early on with the playing of the Albatross and Paul Gaffey records; you just fucking wait ‘till you hear what we’ve found from the amateur and home-brew Prog community, for you have heard nothing yet.

Prog is of such vast inclusiveness that it is probably best to limit the word to describing the almost-wholly-British group of bands who emerged from the Psychedelic scene of the late 60’s and listened to Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band and decided to really just freak out and make music that would get on Top of the Pops only by blessed accident. Literary, musically vast, containing more than a little of the Canterbury scene’s whimsy and humor, this “real” Prog also had a far darker side; Genesis records were about little girls being molested by disembodied Jack-in-the-Boxes and Armageddon taking place in a quiet London living room, and Peter Hammill’s vocals were so histrionic and disturbing that there was no way to hear them and not understand that this was a tortured man writing very, very personal songs of loss. But the moment you go that route, all of a sudden French bands like Atoll and Magma aren’t Prog- which is just fucking ridiculous, as Magma may be the most “progressive” and best Prog band of them all- and of course the entire Scandinavian scene has to go since Day of Phoenix, though sounding very British, were from Copenhagen and not Manchester. So I really don’t know what to tell you, to be quite honest.

All I can say is that if there is one word which sums up Prog, it is ambitious; bands producing Prog seemed always to be doing anything but worrying about making the pop charts, which explains why the fall of Collins-era Genesis and Wetton projects like Asia are such miserable, unequivocal failures. The moment the money was more important than the music, even great bands and players could turn to shit.

Of course, bands like Yes- who always were shit- went this road too, and at least very little was lost to the world in that Anderson confined his Eastern blathering to one track on the monumentally execrable Big Generator, hosting the stupidest song ever written, “Holy Lamb (Song for the Harmonic Convergence)”. The full torments of Tormato (I can’t believe I’m writing that every time I write it, no matter how many times I do it) are legion, but the end of Yes, and therefore of the last classic Prog band making “hit” records, came only with an album so insufferably lame that no Yessie I know will publicly defend it. Why they defend utter garbage like Relayer is another question, one I hope I have offered an answer to here. But as for what Prog is, what it isn't- it's one of the most subjective questions I've ever investigated; one of such personal taste and definition that, like sexuality or one's opinion of Baudrillard, it's best kept to oneself and only allowed vent amongst friends. - TR

MAJOR ADDENDUM: Having had time to think about it, I have note of a much-more-than-glaring omission that is terribly common when discussing the amorphous transition from Psych to Prog. I mentioned Sgt. Pepper's in the above text because it is the most obvious and oft-cited example of the wholly British attempt to make drug music more "serious", and the fact that none other than Bill Bruford mentions it as the most important album as far as "where Prog came from". I would like to add an extremely important second to that list, hardly my own idea of course, but to leave Pink Floyd's Piper at the Gates of Dawn out of this discussion is beyond criminal. Listening to it as I type, this is clearly a proto-Prog album, at the same time as it exists as probably the best British Psychedelic album ever made. Sometimes you really have to go back to the classics and be humbled- what an amazing album.

As far as I can tell, the loss of Syd Barrett is a rock casualty matched only by Jimi Hendrix and far, far more devastating to the future of the music than relatively inconsequential deaths like Janis Joplin or Kurt Cobain. "Interstellar Overdrive", while being also a triumph of production, is more importantly a kick-ass freak-out of epic proportions, leaning far more in the direction of where Crimson would eventually go than the rather straight-up blues rock of contemporaries Pink Fairies or The Deviants. This is not a knock on those two hugely important bands, or Edgar Broughton's trip blues, either; it's simply an acknowledgment that the Floyd was very, very special, transitional and evolutionary, and that Syd Barrett was a fucking genius. I welcome comments on this, as I'd like to know more about the subject myself as to the "birth" of Prog, and of course am very open about the lacunae in my own knowledge. I still think Piper is every bit as important as Pepper's though, and absolutely its equal in terms of music and transcendental genius. - TR

Bad Yid Prog-- Menachem Herman Orchestra

Rick Wakeman - Worst Standup Comic Ever!

PL Projekt - Scary Xian Prog

"PL Projeckt" a group composed of israels and philipinos living in israel, tel aviv/jaffa, presenting an arrangement of psalm 86. Patrick leads the group and the composition is his own work.

Saga- Generation 13

Saga- Generation 13

My recent attempts to find positive things to say- even in the midst of unmitigated Prog catastrophes and artistic debacles the equivalent of France’s collapse at Sedan in 1870- are coming to an end. Yes, there were things that deserved a nod of approbation this past week- the Christian band can play, Rush are fine musicians, even the Kaplan Brothers are at least sincere in their monumental ineptitude. Huzzah, huzzah, huzzah- the meanest critic alive, who hates with the perfect beauty of a Sicilian blood feud, looked in Prog’s toilet and found that at least the shit had been flushed. But then yesterday, while writing about Rush, I investigated more fully what some have called their “little brother”- Canadian power-pop progsters Saga, who, many years after their obsolescence had been reached, decided to record their first flat-out “concept” album in their entire career. And let me tell you, it is an effort of such stunning horror and unrelieved incompetence that preparing to review this wretch made me think of none other than that miserable French general himself surrounded at Sedan- “Nous sommes dans un pot de chambre, et nous y serons emmerdés.”

I feel sorry for fans of Saga. I really, truly do. As said yesterday, while I do not concur and feel it is somewhat juvenile for otherwise competent adults to still listen to Rush, I “get it”, and what purpose they serve- for those of taste decidedly louche, 2112 or Hemispheres is a guilty pleasure, a secret indulgence in a tacky bedizenment which, nonetheless, rocks. And for all those “Analog Kids” out there suffering the tortures of adolescent reindeer games, I certainly understand why they respond which such felicity to Peart’s platitudinous musings- he’s speaking for every teenaged chronic-masturbator who has ever lived! Rush fans have suffered enough, I'm getting off their back.

But what the fuck with Saga, man? I never liked these guys- even in my musically impoverished youth, Saga belonged to a grouping of pseudo-pop-progsters like Aldo Nova or Triumph whose music I just found annoying. And there were other things as well- like Michael Sadler’s knee- pads for his acrobatic traipsing about on stage. Clearly visible in the attached screen shot from my Mac (see below, the only way I could present evidence for their existing on this blog- PLEASE CLICK IMAGE FOR GREATER RESOLUTION!), the knee pads are a very personal irritant to me. This guy is so frenzied in his frontman calisthenics that he has to have special body armor attached to his white jeans? Oh for fuck’s sakes, what a jackass. But personally those ridiculous knee-pads evoke still more powerful disgust- because of a childhood friend whom I will refer to here as “Tazz Razzberri”, which was, in fact, the name given to him by the promoter who hired him for work as a male stripper many years later (this is, sadly, all very true). Before he was a stripper working for a man who obviously despised him, “Tazz Razzberri” was a teenaged loser and lover of really bad music- and my best friend- and he had a special yen for Saga, and wanted to buy protective pads for his body so he could “just take off running into the woods with wild abandon”, as I seem to remember him saying. We grew up in a horrible little town, and life was hard on both of us- many nights were spent listening to Grace Under Pressure in Tazz’s bedroom, if that helps you understand the misery of our shared youths in a town where the only blacks who ever lived there were literally burned out of town when I was about eight. Still, the misery suffered at the hands of gearhead Klansmen and the like does not justify wanting to be more like Michael Sadler with his ridiculous knee-pads, and I no longer speak to Tazz Razzberri, off as he is somewhere with a very large wife and probably still listening to “Dreamline”-era Rush in his convertible Miata. What a dumbass.

But enough about Tazz, let’s return to the even more stultifying issue of Saga. These guys had a nice run for about eighteen months in the very early 80’s, producing jazz-tinged Arena Prog of tepid musicianship and overly-pristine production. Sounding smoother than whale shit and having less substance than a Paul Auster novel, Saga should have segued gracefully to retirement after their bright-dancing-star moment of an era of power pop so insignificant that Disco seems positively reverential by comparison. But they didn’t. Like an athlete who just doesn’t know when to walk away, Saga has Favre-d it up for the next twenty years, releasing a horde of albums that not even their mothers can tell apart, with one incredible and significant exception: 1995’s mesmerizingly obnoxious copro-fesitval of pure shittiness, Generation 13. This, dear friends, is a very, very special album, and you must be aware the language is about to get very, very rough in describing it.

For starters: this fucking album flat-out fucking sucks. I mean it really fucking sucks. It sucks like a trailerpark granny desperate for one more bag of meth. It sucks like a Steven Soderbergh film festival emceed by Brett Ratner. Of all the miserable, execrable, intolerable and unlistenable fucking experiences I’ve had in my goddamn life- and I’ve had plenty of late, that is for good and goddamned sure- Generation 13 is such an insufferable exercise in tuneless futility that if this album were an ethnic minority, I would urge a campaign of genocide against it. We’re talking Hutu-on-Tutsis level of annihilation here- unmitigated tastelessness demands unmitigated slaughter. For all of the pretentious and loathsome attempts at creation that Prog has ever inspired, this boorish monstrosity is devoid of virtue and replete with excreta to such an extent that I’d rather listen to Queensryche songs sung in an eerie falsetto by David Surkamp in a sauna with Emerson, Lake and Palmer, all of whom forgot to bring their towels and are going “commando” for the day. Wimpy, whiny, saccharine-tinged like a crate of Diet Dr. Pepper and so poorly executed that I’m convinced the record company released it out of pure sadism, Generation 13 is to concept albums what Mark Kostabi was to painting: insincere, derivative, fraudulent, piss-poor and likely to evoke violence in any poor sap likely to hear it who doesn’t think “On the Loose” was the greatest rock song ever written. This is an absolutely Stygian experience of hellish invention, of Satanic maladroitness bordering on criminal, mindless as a Mormon and perverse as a Templar. In short, I really don’t want to think about an album possibly being worse than this, because if it exists, surely it is now being used in cruel laboratory experiments designed to make chimpanzees into perfect and remorseless killers, soon to be unleashed upon man by some diabolical corporation after having completely gone insane listening to the worst piece of shit ever conjured by a faulty human mind. Someone needs to pay for this fucking shit.

For one thing, how can you make a concept album where the concept is almost impossible to discern? I spent almost an hour yesterday searching the Internets for some kind of explanation that made ANY sense as to what possible story line these Canadian fucks had in mind with this garbage. An hour of my life, gone forever! And STILL I’m not entirely sure what all of this crap is supposed to mean. To be as succinct as possible, apparently there was a “cultural studies” book released in the early 90’s about “Generation X” (yep, that’s me and mine!) who were the 13th generation born in the United States. Oooh, spooky! ‘Cos, like, “13” is cursed and stuff, right? Star-crossed from our inception, no wonder we all voted for Obama- we’re fucking EVIL, after all, we’re number 13!!! Oh what unmitigated bullshit- for starters, what the hell is a Canadian band doing worrying about what generation is doing what in America? Excuse me, you judgmental bastards, but you killed your share of Indians too, and I’m getting sick of having this “healthcare” shit lorded over me by a nation that has given the world Loverboy, Snow, Nickelback (!) and...SAGA!!!!!!

And what a gift! Generation 13 purports to tell the story of “Jeremy” (oh fuck you and your Pearl Jam reference- how LAME!) who is, I guess, really upset about growing up to be like his father. Yep, more tortured-adolescence fairy tales from pompous Canucks, and this one the most inscrutable of all- because Jeremy apparently has a split personality, and the other side is “Sam”, who speaks like Tony from The Shining and directs Jeremy to self-destructive behavior. This goes on through twenty-five tracks, some of them spoken and the lyrics of the sung ones almost impossible to discern through all the noise and histrionic emotion of Michael Sadler’s voice. And the only thing I can tell you for sure is that Jeremy fucking vows, goddammit, that “I’ll never be like you”. And people wonder why infanticide is so popular in cultures that have any sense.

The music is pure symphonic-rock, that dreadful synthesizer sound of the 90’s that bands who’d been listening to too much Enya on the tour bus affected with such galling regularity. There seems to be a criticism of media culture somewhere in the bowels of this beast, but frankly I don’t care to discuss it because the writing is on the level of a high schooler who dismisses everything he doesn’t like in terms of “this is fucking bullshit, dude”. Of course there is an anthem that erupts in the middle of the story, and it is rife with horrible rhymes and soaring vocals and power chords of such earnestness that The Scorpions would blush. About the only thing that can be said positive about this “work” is that, like rape, it will inevitably end. Though at the end of the assault, I can honestly say I wish it was just my ass that was hurting. I Spit on Your Grave, Saga.

I don’t know. I just don’t know anymore. This all started for me several months ago when, one sleepless and unemployed night, I stumbled onto Pavlov’s Dog on The Pirate Bay, having been assured by the torrent creator that “if you like King Crimson, you’ll love this!” I was so blown away by the Dog- a band so insanely bad that I’m shocked that they’re not Canadian- that I had to tell the whole world, and in the process decided to deal with a long-cherished hatred of Yes in the process. Thus, the original Facebook Progressive Rock Hall of Infamy group was born. With the incredible and invaluable help of my partner, DJ Micah, a little republic was founded on principles of slaying those groups who have had such a reaming coming for many, many years. Over the months, there have been three radio shows, two stalkers, a death threat, and the identification of the International Cabal (PRIC) who conspire to see to it that Prog remains the most hated form of music ever invented by man. It’s been fun, and appalling in the way only a philosophical Masochist can appreciate. I feel the joy of the flagellant, and hope you've enjoyed your whipping, too.

But Saga has taken me to a dark place, friends. That murder, mayhem, torture and rapine occur in the world is a given- man is a cruel animal, after all. But you can usually chalk all of that up to a “lone nut”, or a good man who ignored the warning signs so as not to cause trouble. Saga, however, are a group of men who have committed a crime so foul (Generation 13) that it demands swift and severe punishment, yet...still they walk this Earth. People own this album, and like it, as one can see by a visit to the Saga discussion forum maintained by some German guy as a virtual shrine (the main Pavlov’s Dog fan site is German, too- curious, isn’t it?). Instead of being about as loved as small-pox and as avoided as a hypodermic needle sitting on a toilet seat, Saga has a wildly loyal fan base who bemoan only that Michael Sadler has left the band and moved on with his “art”. And I just don’t know how I can continue in a jocular vein dealing with these wretched records, trying to pretend that they’re just a small part of an overall mosaic called Prog that is wonderfully creative and uniquely fulfilling. I feel like Saga is just as capable of sucking beauty out of the world as Peter Hammill is of putting beauty into it; and there is no question whose output has been more vast of recent years. Malignant and fecund, Bad Prog is a galloping tumor of mediocrity birthed from inferior minds with superior ambitions; just because they fail and suck doesn’t mean bands like Saga aren’t trying. And I can’t stop them. I have finally decided...I just can’t stop them.

If this is the last review at the PRHOI, thank you for visiting. I’ve enjoyed the correspondence, the approbation, the hate mail perhaps even more. But this may be the limit, and could be, alas, a Saga come to end. Bad Prog doesn’t sleep; and this Curator is very, very tired today. - TR

Rush- Hemispheres

Rush- Hemispheres

Oh god...Rush. Why even bother to work up a dudgeon, whether high or low, about such a preposterous cultural relic as the meretricious Canadian Power Trio who have been making exuberantly-musicianed hokum for thirty-five years now? This is kid’s stuff, surely, and I should know because my mother probably still maintains a box of cassettes at home with copies of every record up ‘till Hold Your Fire; and why pick on kids, when anyone who knows anything about Rush realizes that the kind of youth who gravitates towards this pastiche philosophizing is troubled, lonely, introverted and...different. And more than likely abused or marginalized to some extent in whatever Subdivision he’s growing up in. Don’t these kids need their own music? Surely, they do, and I’ll go one better: Rush fills an important need for these lonely boys and one I find to be decidedly positive. When the outcasts and misfits started listening to utter garbage like Slipknot that urged mindless rage instead of, say, Permanent Waves that at least had “intelligent” lyrics and cautioned a kind of principled stoicism in response- well, this culture has been nursing psychopaths for many years now, and, yes, I blame the record industry for Columbine and I could give a fuck who thinks this makes me sound like Dan Quayle.

So why bother, then, to heap scorn and abuse on three talented musicians who unfortunately have chosen to live a permanent adolescence and make music that is the endless equivalent of Catcher in the Rye (because let’s face it, it’s a pretty tiresome book after a while)? The reason is simple, and summed up graphically in the slatternly mien and rebarbative, puerile philosophy of the group’s un-official guru: Ayn Rand. For no one in history has been more insidiously successful in popularizing that wizened cunt’s loathsome solipsistic ravings- and thereby ensuring the continued madness of Libertarianism and the resultant destruction of the world’s economic system- than that Plato of the skins, Mr. Neil Peart. In the history of the world, Peart ranks right up there with Alfred Rosenberg and Andrei Zhdanov for popularizing a disastrous philosophy that swamped the world in its baleful fog and choked out reason from the brains of many an inquisitive young person; Nazism, Stalinist Dialectics and Objectivism are the three pearls of metaphysical pretense to The Curator’s sorrowing mind, and Peart’s poetic grasping of Rand’s insipid Nietzsche-for-dummies rhapsodizing means he’s going to answer for his crimes, at least on my fucking blog he is.

The problem is apparent from the start: who would ever listen to a drummer when it comes to what books to read? For Christ’s sakes, drummers have a well-earned reputation for being dim as dorm-fridge bulbs and about as comfortable with abstract thought as the Bush Twins in a semiotics lab. I’m not sure I’d let the typical drummer clean my pool (those filters can cause a world of hurt) let alone proffer insight on the mysteries of the brain, and the complicated interplay between the Dionysian and Apollonian in the aesthetic struggle raging in the supplicant and seeker’s mind. Which brings us, neatly, to the subject of this review, an album even most Rush enthusiasts would allow is a near-total fiasco due to the overwhelming failed ambition of the title track: Hemispheres.

Behold, the God of Pretense has arrived! A concept album about...The Birth of Tragedy! Oh, the drugs must have been very good in 1978, Mr. Peart, very good indeed...

Any analysis of the album is, essentially, redundant and extraneous; it’s the same old Rush story, you know it very well if you know the band at all: superb musical passages suddenly interrupted by cheese-ball synth work, Lifeson’s classic-rock-monster riffs making you wonder “what if”, Geddy Lee’s vigorous and tasteful bass work and, yes, Peart’s outstanding drumming undone by some of the most preposterously overwrought and insensate lyrics ever written. And I don’t care that they’re “Canadian”, that’s no excuse; I’ve known plenty of Canadians who aren’t this lame, or this...befuddled. Lee has never been at higher, testicle-cringing altitude than the “singing” done on this album, indeed, it almost sounds like he’d heard this dude named "Surkamp" was out there and he really needed to ratchet things up to keep his title of Falsetto Rex the Shrill. I’ve always felt Lee was somewhat unfairly maligned for his vocal work; this is rock n’ roll, after all, and Robert Plant got away with some serious helium-sucking excess on Houses of the Holy and is worshipped like a god. But there are times on Hemispheres that Mr. Lee sounds like the air horn the Germans used to put on the nose of a Stuka dive-bomber to scare the hell out of hapless refugees. Volume is one thing, but a gaggle of rioting macaques can’t match the sheer insanity of Geddy’s nefarious ululating, done to a pitch that is generally only heard in music when a tube-amp has exploded or a serialist composer has gone mad. Fortunately, what he’s singing about is even more ridiculous, so some of the pressure is taken off of Geddy’s shoulders and returned to the Randian epigone who is personally responsible for half the political arguments I get into when I go to bars.

Again, what is there to say? If Allen Greenspan were a rock band, he would be Rush and Hemispheres is the band’s sub-prime loan. Superlatives are in mean supply when the fantastic catastrophe of Atlas Shrugged comes up, but I must admit, Peart matches that vicious old crone pomposity for pomposity, and brings back in 5/4 time all of the festering rage I nurse for that fascist slut with the loving care of a murderer – for Ayn Rand is the single greatest argument that I know of that Lenin didn’t kill enough.

Which leads us to the meat of this essay: are Rush fascist, and if so, should children be protected from them? Well, I find it significant that in the All Music Guide review of Hemispheres (which the dazzlingly obsequious reviewer feels is a “masterpiece”; who wrote this crap, Mrs. Maury Weintraub of Toronto, ON?) mentions that "The Trees", quote, “deals with” racism. Okay, this is a bit of a stretch, but let’s say it does; if so, a cursory perusal of the lyrics would seem to indicate Peart would be in favor of keeping the lesser elms in their place. This is one of the most violently anti-egalitarian songs ever written, and while it is fine to tout the superiority of the individual and the pressing need of the tallest tree to preen most keenly and take the most light, this kind of anthropomorphism is fantastically deterministic; for trees are only a product of their genes, can neither learn nor think, and only man himself can even prune them for their own more- efficient survival. A Freudian analysis of the lyrics unveils a host of priapic demons rife in Peart’s flowering metaphor, a Lacanian one more menacing eugenic fantasies that betray a perhaps more closely-cropped moustache than the Rollie Fingers look he sported ca. 2112. But all of this posturing misses a central point: the lyrics are, of course, strictly Randian, a woodsy re-telling of the John Galt fantasy and the struggles of a man used to practicing “situational ethics”, and, therefore, preposterous, laughable, essentially fraudulent and pure Romanov-diaspora kitsch. I return to a point made much earlier in this essay: kids didn’t kill each other when they listened to Rush (though some of us sure as hell thought about it) and that, after all, is the final proof that Ayn Rand is just a phase like acne, parachute pants and premature ejaculation during furtive sexual experiences (not that I would know anything about that, mind you) that some overly-Romantic dreamers pass through on the way to an adulthood of massive conformity and literary fantasies lingering in sobering desuetude. And The Curator finished his paragraph, and yea, did he weep...

Thus, what is there to say about Rush, in conclusion? A youthful trifle, a bagatelle of adolescence, perhaps if all goes well a gateway drug to more challenging and beauteous Prog; and I must admit, while the album version falls short, Lifeson’s magnificently emotional live solo on "La Villa Strangiato" (from 1981’s Exit: Stage Left) still can produce a frisson of envy that I could never make music like that. But when one transitions from pimply-conjecture to wrinkle-browed wisdom...perhaps it is time to put Rush in the toy box along with many other discarded pastimes, segue gracefully to books somewhat-less-horrific than The Fountainhead, and realize that paying your taxes is a downpayment on civilization. Because, as said, I still blame Peart for this plague of buffoons who look at Somalia and see the happy fate they wish upon my poor United States of America. You pack of tea-bagging cocksuckers, anyway.

And if you think I’m being typical in my bludgeoning exaggerations...below, perfect Randian wisdom from those ideological scalawags at the Cato Institute. Enjoy. (Skip down to the part about Somalia with the “Find” feature in Firefox; simply, absolutely must be read to be believed) - TR

http://tiny.cc/NTUUU

My Curious Correspondence with a Christian

Fans of the PRHOI may be aware of an ongoing dialogue I’ve had with one Mr. Batholemew Boge, head genius behind the neo-Classic Xian-Prog outfit Divine In Sight, and largely responsible for their 2001 magnum opus Sorrow and Promise. Mr. Boge, with great courage- for he was well aware of my loathing for certain strains of Prog, as well as my writing style which manages to match in virulence the vituperation of my hatreds- offered a gratis copy of his record with a direct challenge to review the thing and do my damnedest. True to his word, a package arrived last week, delivered by my landlord and opened with heart-a-palpitating by your humble Curator; upon opening the package, there it was, lovingly wrapped in a protective layer of toilet paper (and I am not kidding) and me barely able to get the thing open for my excitement of the Sorrow and Purulence I felt lurked within.

There was just one problem; this may not be to my exact taste musically, but Boge’s outfit is not that bad, other than his singing, which is so awful that if I was his wife I would leave him. (To his credit, Bart has fired himself and hired what sounds to be a rather large closested homosexual (nobody can sing that high and be straight) to practice his own brand of Mercury-poisoning, and who will be able to handle those insane Xian mosh pits that break out when the spirit doth move them.) Other than that- and an unfortunate penchant for a very dated Scholz Rockman distortion-in-a-box guitar sound (which Bart has assured me is a thing of the past as well)- there are moments on this album which actually flat-out rock; the first track takes eight minutes to get there, but the break (superbly introduced by a frenzied two-fingered assault on his Rickenbacker by the extremely talented bassist- sounding far more like Steve Harris than Chris Squire, BTW) allows Bart plenty of room to lay down an intricate arpeggiated guitar lead with his drummer showing it is possible to play very aggressively while not acting like a Portnoy and mucking everything up with unnecessary pyrotechnics when a clever fill will do. Incredibly, and almost unheard of for a contemporary Christian rock band, Boge also seems to know the value of a minor chord, instead of basing all of his emotion on the ecstatic power chords which these other bands utilize with the punishing insincerity of a used car salesman with a roll of quarters shoved in his polyester slacks. These guys have virtually nothing in common with other “Prog” Xian acts, which will probably doom them to curiosity status amongst the cognoscenti of such rubbish, but allows even the perpetually hate-addled Curator a moment of complimentary indulgence, as the sheer audacity of not sounding like these other horrible fucking bands demands at least a nod from this insomnia-plagued Palinurus.

For, as must be clear, this review is not really about Divine In Sight; I wanted to say a few things about this record because Mr. Boge has been a tireless correspondent and commenter here, but this blog isn’t going to turn into some kind of cheerleading section for followers of the single most destructive narcissist and plagiarist the world has ever seen- Paul of Tarsus, fabricator of the Nazarene legends and, like Mr. Boge, tireless letter-writer to indifferent pagans quite frankly dumbfounded by the intensity of their touching attachment to somebody who is, after all, dead. Between Paul’s bizarre emphasis on the cross and Mr. Boge’s obsession with Rush, I’m not sure who comes out more to be pitied but, regardless, these insensate idee fixes are not going to ruin my reputation as the nastiest and most defiant anti-Christian this side of H.L. Mencken; for, to borrow from Dennis Miller back when he was funny and not insane, when it comes to being “born again”, you’ll have to pardon me for getting it right the first time.

So Divine in Sight is talented and knows how to rock out; I’d prefer to talk about some other bands, like Young Earth, who are- are you even remotely ready for this?- an Xian Prog band devoted to making music about the literal interpretation of Genesis, to the point that they denounce Darwin on the homepage of their website and really, truly seem to believe the Earth is 6,000 years old. I’m sorry, but- Mother of fucking Christ, are you fucking kidding me? The dazzling stupidity of Fundamentalists is so awe-inspiring as to invite pure whimsy and fantasy; surely, if their savior is as gullible as his flock, should Jesus actually come back my first impulse would be to approach the returned Semite and play “got your nose” with Him. The image of a cruelly disoriented Christ, undone by the same credulousness that has made him such a superstar lo these last 2,000 years, grasping hither and yon for a snout robbed as if from a Gogol story, gives your Curator silent, yet bountiful, heaving fits of mirth; the idea of his joyless epigones being allowed to inflict their “creation science” (sic) on impressionable children gives me anything but. Like the struggle of the Workers against the Bosses, there is no middle ground in the burgeoning war of the clusterfuck boob-boisie against the oppression they face from a rational world which has no place for fairy tales in biology texts; indeed, in this war, no one has the luxury of “going to Canada” to avoid the draught coming from between the ears of this baying rabble who long only to be siphoned off to Heaven in a fanciful mid-air naked jamboree that isn’t even in the goddamn Bible. And they’ll cut your throat, infidel, if they think it will bring Junior back one day sooner. Which side are you on, then- which side are you on?

What, then, could be the alternative for an Xian band trying to spread the message of their Lord, but without resorting to the criminal idiocy which plagues modern Fundamentalism like the rampant stench of putrefaction in a slaughterhouse? I’m glad you asked, because Mr. Boge also directed me- in one of his earliest letters- to offer any “advice” I might have for his next music project, which (surprise) will be some kind of epic about some kind of Christian thing. What Bart may not be aware of- for how could he, dealing with such an obviously evil man?- is that The Curator has a very deep knowledge of Scripture and can navigate the OT and NT with all the shoe-horning peregrinations of a preacher; for you didn’t think I came to my atheism by mere cussedness, did you? No, I learned disbelief the old fashioned way- I moved away from home, did some drugs and slept with some girls, decided this was better than betting the farm on an itinerant sky spook to come back and give me a transcendental hand-job, thought some things through and then the Nietzsche got hold of me and that was pretty much all she wrote. (And by the way, I’d like to make an offer to all proponents of “creation science” (sic): you can teach your young Earth nonsense to my (non-existent) kids if I can lecture your happy brood on Zarathustra and the Anti-Christ; we’ll see whose Idol is Master and whose is Slave, and with the inherent urge to belief of the typical fundy-youth, I will soon have the cult I have always wanted and unleash these reformed believers upon the world with bile, frenzy and dynamite; and yea, I shall be acclaimed a god.)

So, getting back to my point, let’s address the Christian Prog concept album that I guarantee will never be made, though it has quite a defensible basis in the scripture I know. For one, let’s imagine a savior tormented by his burden (LK 4:1-4) and only gradually realizing what must happen for his father’s plan to be fulfilled (MT 16:21) He is familiar with the OT prophecies, and sets out to fulfill them (JN 12:14- see Isaiah and Micah for all of these various prophecies, sometimes amusingly misinterpreted by the Gospel writers- “an ass, and yea, a foal of an ass” (MT 21:5). Sorry, Christian humor.) But when he arrives in the holy city- perhaps the very first victim in history of the “Jerusalem Syndrome”- he is so overcome by the surroundings, especially the magnificent Temple (2CHR 3:3) , that he loses sight of what is supposed to be his father’s plan...and remembers the Beatitudes (MT 5: 3-12) so recently uttered now that he is so close to the corruption of Annas and Caiaphas, quisling vassals of the ruthless Pilate. The trade in fowl for filthy lucre upon the very grounds of God’s house enrages him; having already made clear his ability to tear the place down to the last brick (JN 2:19) and with the fire of righteousness only a man convinced of his own destiny can posses, he makes the fatal mistake of kicking over the money changer’s tables (JN 2: 12-25) and thereby inviting the whole of authority in Jerusalem down upon his merely-human back. It is during Passover, after all; and the Romans know the full political implications of this festival honoring another time the Chosen had been released from a cruel bondage.

Thus: a caring, passionate, truly human liberator, a nationalist, a Rabbi who respects and honors the traditions of his people...but also a revolutionary, a communist (or at least a socialist!), an early crusader for the rights of women, one who slummed with the lowest orders of the society in which he lived- oh, it’s a hell of a story, Christian. Could be straight out of Weil and Brecht to be honest- but we’ll never see it, because instead of proffering guidance for man to liberate himself, the current moribund Christianity offers only a dire choice between living on one’s knees or burning for all eternity in a lake of fire that didn’t exist until Dante imagined it- 1,500 years after the life of Christ. It demands fealty, acceptance, copious public displays of smug propriety, endless denunciations of “the world” while prospering in a society that has benefited like no other in history of the wonders of science and technology, is paranoid, militant, conspiracy-minded, hidebound, insular, intolerant, insulting, meticulous in its prejudices and slovenly in its curiosities; in short, the Fundamentalist is the perfect dupe for a cadre of Caligari’s so perfect in their manipulation that their sleepwalkers are blessed with life and revere only death, waiting for that magic day when they can be done with the troubles of the flesh and get massive amounts of revenge on the likes of The Curator, who so delight in pointing out the criminal failings of a philosophy that rises just above a suicide cult. My disbelief alone is worthy of a summary burning; in the name of Baal himself if they only knew what went on when I conned a lovely bird into nesting in my bed for an evening! But the obsession with any sex that doesn’t involve an immediate apology to Jesus upon ejaculation has always intrigued me; for a group that seems to think gays and lesbians want to get married just to piss them off, their leaders sure do seem to know where to get a blow-job in Kansas City at three in the morning; Christ, I don’t even know where to buy head in a strange town, and I’m obviously a degenerate of near-mythical proportions! And as for homosexuality...it astonishes me that a group of people who literally worship a guy who ran around the desert for two years with twelve “disciples” all wearing dresses and Birkenstocks are so worked up about a couple of queers who want to play house in Iowa. One look at Ted Haggard told me who was the “bottom” during his little soirees with American hero Mike Jones, and that the good Pastor had felched more of Onan’s seed (GE 38:9) than Elton John at a Theater District karaoke bar. This kind of murky hypocrisy isn’t exactly what I’d call living “in the light”. How much worse can I do going to Vietnam with my buddy Mike and buying a 12 year-old for a carton of cigarettes and some “Lime-taste” Jell-O (apparently, they’re nuts about it over there)? Saved, you want me to be? Christian, if this titanic fraud is what you call being “saved”, then damned I shall remain, proudly, even if the Man himself floated down from the Seattle heavens and had Mel Gibson with a crate of Zyklon-B for back up. I’ll not bow to madmen, no matter how much cache they register with my more credulous neighbors.

Thus, once again I have managed to “review” an album while really using it as an excuse to attack a segment of society that has had it way too fucking easy for way too fucking long; Bart, you’re a good guy and a talented musician, but I can’t let up for even a minute on the true purpose of my life: the destruction of all known values and the endless tyranny of tradition, eradication of all age-of-consent laws and the establishment of an enlightened dictatorship consisting of me and guided by my intimate knowledge of the folly of man and the desirability of the principle of Anthrocide, which is the one truly original contribution to Western philosophy that I have been able to make in my 37 years.

But that is for another time. For now, keep on rockin’ in the free world, and maybe sit down this week and try to write a song about a car. Jesus can be in the car, man- it’s cool. Think Red Barchetta, only less lame. You and Junior, out for a drive, kickin’ it Old Testament style- you gun the engine too hard, and break down in the desert and Jesus gets out, pops the hood, and smoke is flying everywhere and he says “The one thing I can’t save is this engine”. And everybody has a nice, life-affirming, laugh. But the car has to be the focus, and it’s gotta be fast and there has to be metaphors and stuff about getting the hell out of somewhere. Just my two cents. Cheers, Belial. - TR

New Link for Fans of Bad Prog

The Curator is pleased to announce his linking to a splendid novel available on-line, here:

http://oldmanmisery.blogspot.com/

It is called Old Man Misery and deserves a wide audience. Link is also available in the "Our Friends" section of this page, to the right.

"Anonymous" has written a fierce denunciation of the moral nothingness that was the Bush years by addressing the forced retirement of Donald Rumsfeld, told from the perspective of his final minutes in office and then off to an uneasy obsolescence at his estate upon "Mount Misery". All is not as seems upon said woeful plantation, once the propoerty of a notorious "slave breaker" who claimed a particularly gifted orator among his many "breakings". A fine and gripping dark comedy with a Gothic ghost story lurking in the margins, Old Man Misery is offered by The Curator for your pleasure, thanks to his dear friendship with the author. Enjoy. - TR

Prog-O-Caust 2009! Part Two

Timothy and Micah continue their investigations into bad prog. Kaplans cover Crimson. Leonard Bernstein by way of Kieth Emerson by way of Chakra. Insane hungarian oompa loompa prog. Greg Lake ejaculates in a groupies mouth...and more!
Listen here

The Kaplan Brothers: Nightbird, An Electric Symphony

The Kaplan Brothers- Nightbird, An Electric Symphony

Rarely has an album struck me with the force of this Proustian epic conjured- perhaps with assistance from Mephistopheles himself- by Mrs. Kaplan’s three boys, somewhere in suburban Chicago during the blistering Summer of 1978. So much heart- and so much Bar Mitzvah money- went into this project that all one can do, as a reviewer, is honor the epic scope and vision of a lounge act that dared dream of nothing less than the summing up of all of life’s mystery, woe, joy, tragedy, sorrow, glee and death itself in one stupefyingly grandiose record, such that words like “pompous” and “ambitious” simply fail so miserably to encapsulate the strivings herein as to render them and all language itself extraneous and pathetically shallow. I’ve seen a lot in my life and come face to face with many failures, but none of them has ever arose, fell, burned and died in such a fantastic and joyously ridiculous manner as these genius Mellotron-wielders who came from what surely must be the most wonderful womb in the history of the world. For facts are facts: the sad and wandering Jewish race has given the world more artistic greatness than it deserves considering the treatment meted out to this Chosen people, but not just epic genius but also something else- kitsch- has been the West’s reward for its intimate relationship with the displaced Khazar hordes chased from the Pale and into the barbed-wire and libelling-ire embrace of Christian civilization. Responding by both suborned attempts at assimilation and defiant keeping of traditions dating to a time when Europeans were living in caves and howling at the moon, Jews have kept their identity whether they wanted to or not, and with that has come a voice so sorrowing and unique that you hardly need to see the artist in profile to tell if he descends from the tribe of Shem.

For make no mistake about it: Nightbird is a Jewish record. In fact, I have never heard one more poignantly Jewish, and I mean that to be read as an endorsement of the remarkable contemplation of life in all its variations that seems to be inseparable from the Talmudic and Rabbinical tradition. While we have played most of the album the last two weeks during Prog-O-Caust 2009, if you have missed these shows or simply have no idea what I am talking about regarding the Kaplans, I urge you to get a copy of the album via Rapidshare, and listen to the whole thing (I have included a link in the title, above). I’ve laughed my ass off at the insuperable earnestness and insufferable melancholy that waxes and wanes through this record like an ongoing tide of tacky flotsam and dolorous jetsam, but I do not doubt for a moment the rank sincerity of the Kaplan’s as they plow through material so sentimental that Isaac Bashevis Singer would have screamed “Enough!”, thrown up his arms in despair and downed a pint of Manischewitz at a go. Because for sheer chutzpah of mawkish overload, this is a Jerry Lewis Telethon multiplied by a Barbara Streisand concert and raised exponentially by a factor of Billy Crystal roasting Don Rickles. Every Hallmark card ever printed for every Mother’s Day since the dawn of time is a postage stamp of nothingness compared to the registered letter of maudlin phantasmagoria that is Nightbird. Oy vey, the Kaplan Brothers know their tsuris...

Why is this Nightbird unlike any other? Because listening to every track is the equivalent of hearing Zero Mostel read the Kaddish and weep and wail through the misery and travails of every orphan; it's like the subtle, charming hypocrisy of every knocked-up yenta wearing white to her nuptials while her father drinks a toast to the son-in-law he'd secretly like to murder; it’s like having Rabbi Loew come over and bring Maimonides for back-up to have a klatsch about the mysteries of the Kabbalah and why Abraham’s pact is not a burden, but a blessing. This album is Yom Kippur and Purim combined, in one mega-dose of cheese, atonement and revelry served like Kosher and Parve, separate but equal, and if you listen closely, you can hear the Kaplan boys building their open-roofed huts in time for the Sukkot; all the joys and energies and the true blessings that must come from that tradition are heard in every lilting whistle which suffuses Listen to the Falling Rain, or the unfathomable depth of joie de vivre in Vodka and Caviare. This is more than an atrociously bad album; the Kaplan Brother’s opus is an epitaph for an entire world (pay attention to my usage). Taken as such, their insensate cover of King Crimson’s most tender ballad seems not nearly as appalling in this context of tradition-in-decay.

Nightbird is the inevitable 20th Century product of a society-within-a-society that used to be referred to as Krawattenjuden before the language that gave birth to that title turned murderous, insane, pathological, and spoke instead of untermenschen and vernichten. About as far from Zionist as you could get, this was a cultural representation of ancient religious neuroses born of Ezra’s return from the Captivity and finding the people practicing “abominations”; the ancient dread of assimilation goes far deeper in the books the Kaplan Brothers were forced to read as children than, say, the pitiful concern the Christian feels for the “ways of the world” (1JN 2:15). Without a nation of their own, Jews sought to fit into the Christian society while keeping a cultural connection to what was purported to be “their” ancient history; Nightbird is thus a product of les juif, as opposed to the meteque. The inevitable result of such a cultural balancing act is miscommunication, mistranslation, and copious amounts of kitsch; the Kaplans are merely the optimistic flipside of the same dark coin on whose obverse is the work of Kafka.

This is no endorsement of the record on aesthetic grounds; I think it might very well be the most tasteless and horrible record ever made. But like everyone else to whom I’ve spoken regarding the enervating sincerity that went into this masterpiece, I, too, rejoice in the full folly of this hugely entertaining record, and find it to be such a perfect counterpoint to the relentless misery and injustice of Christian music as to finish off any doubt in my mind as to the relative merits of the two religions.

For the Kaplan’s, there is no bloody savior striped for our benefit, no cross fetish, no threats of people disappearing by Rapture-whim and planes crashing as a result, no good-hearted men burning forever in the Lake of Fire because they didn’t take a dip in the prescribed way within some church’s scum-encrusted magic pool, no cloud-dwelling Santa Claus taking notes in his Big Book of Doom about every time somebody curses or jerks-off...there is none of this torpor of resignation, this maelstrom of injustice the Christian god hands down to his flock like maggot-ridden manna. For the Kaplans- for Jews- there may be kitsch and tackiness not seen since Hugh Hefner’s “Grotto Parties”, but there is also love, true blessed joy at simply being ALIVE, hope, contemplation, dancing and song and...friendship. Yes, the final track "He" is one of the most preposterous things I’ve ever heard; but I wonder if, when I die, any man will stand over my grave and say to himself “We never had much but...he truly was my friend”. For all my misanthropy, I betray my suspect commitment to the philosophy by the simple act of getting out of bed every morning; if I truly hated man to the extent I wanted to, it would have been check out time long, long ago. There is joy in life, and there are friends you have (if you are lucky) who will be there to toss that dirt upon you when all is finally for nought. This horrible, indefensibly bad record captures the longing all men have for the comfort of knowing that they will not die alone and unloved. I have never heard a Christian sing with anything approximating the feeling these three brothers have for the truth that, truly, no man is an island.

In comparison, lift your voices on high, Christian! All the redux-born-capitulators with their weak and preposterous mewing can do is make the solipsistic point ad infinitum that all you need is Jesus...and even if you have everything else, without him, you shall burn for all ages and there is no hope of overcoming said damnation. No fucking thanks, you batch of Pauline hucksters and Revelation-mandragore-root-tripping charlatans; if you’re looking for me, I’ll be off with my horrible music, comforted fully by the knowledge that I’ll never have to confront your slovenly sky spook when I breathe my last and slip the coil. Because if I did...man, what an EPIC ass-kicking I’d give to this “loving” absentee landlord you believe has so much power to kill but almost none to spare. When I think of Christians imagining persecutions and stockpiling weapons for when President Obama finally comes to usher in the “New World Order” and ban their precious and pernicious book of fables and ill-tempered guidance, I realize, finally, what is the endless fascination with the Chosen by these second-rate Law Keepers; they’re jealous. Only someone who truly hates life could look at the remnants of a people freed from the insanity of the Lager and think “lucky them; the Lord has blessed them more for His chastisement is True Love.” What absolute and insane sickness! Perhaps if the typical Christian knew what it was like to have half of your family a pile of ashes in an anonymous pit somewhere in Poland, they would stop worshipping death so much and sing every so often about the joys of Life.

I’ll not hold my breath for that anymore than I hope for any other reckoning with rationality in the blinkered transom of the thought-addled religionist; I register merely my protest, so that when society finally does collapse in the ruins of “Dominion Theology” and the hail of gunfire from those so psychotic they refused to be Left Behind...well, if the Internets are still working, evidence will exist that ***I TOLD YOU SO*** and there will even be a little soundtrack for my warnings, which you may imbibe in full pleasure, at your leisure, in that blessed link, above.

Now, Believers, if you’ll excuse me...I have some thinking to do. An alien concept, I’m sure, but one you might look into before the Big Heavenly Payback comes down from above. The Nightbird nests on knowledge, as well as sentiment... - TR

***Bounty Announced***

The Curator is announcing the creation of a bounty on a privately-pressed item lost to him for many years. It was the work of the brother of some guy I used to know, and surely there must be a copy of it out there in world...somewhere. Thus, if anyone possibly reading this is acquainted with Mike Lillis (last I knew he lived in Pittsburgh) or went to North Allegheny high school sometime in the early 1980's, please contact me through the link available at this site. Mike's band was called "Ubermensch", and they were a typical high school band...except they were Prog, and as I remember them, talented but incredibly derivative. The lone release of Ubermensch (savor the word) was an S/T cassette, and the only lyrics I recall are these, sung by a splendidly flat-sounding baritone who made everything he sang sound like a variation of the "Volga Boat Song":

And is the world round or flat?
And does the world revolve around us?
These are the questions we must ask
These are the answers we need to know

These are reasonably accurate lyrics as far as I remember; and I assure you the rest of the cassette went on in a similar vein and, due its unique character and The Curator's current obsession with the subject, The Curator is thus willing to offer $100 American dollars to whomever can deliver this prize, with the assurance that your identity will forever be kept secret. I'm not sure it can get any more obscure than this, but all the same it is Prog and really bad and thus a natural for inclusion here at the PRHOI. Thanks. - TR