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Ever notice how the plethora of "cultural commentators" currently
populating the media shy away from offering any kind of cogent
critique of "early 21st Century culture?" Many of them are still
pretending it's the 1990s. And what ever happened to all those
millenarian theories of apocalypse? Well, maybe it happened and we
haven't noticed yet — or are just too scared to look. Ask
yourself: have the times ever been more boring than they are right
now? Watch a sportscast, and the main stories, usually of
mega-mega-bux contract signings, could just as easily be presented on
Moneyline.
Rock stars? The main news there is of all the heady, business-minded
young men (like that limp luminary Frederick Durst), who are becoming
CEOs of their own boutique record labels. In the days of late
capitalism, then, everything is about money, and money is indeed
everything.
Killing Joke — who once heretically sang "Money is not our God"
— saw all of this coming way back at the dawn of the Age of
Greed, with the ascendance of neo-conservatism and its high priests
Reagan and Thatcher. "Man watching video/ The heart keeps on ticking/
He doesn't know why/ He's just cattle for the slaughter," they opined
in 1980 on "Requiem," which is reprised in blistering fashion on this
live disc from 1985's Nighttime tour.
While 16 years isn't really that long a time span, the kind of
ferocious attitude and no-holds-barred musical attack found here
anticipates many post-punk musical genres from industrial to grunge,
but seems much further removed; as arcane, yet compelling and
potentially life-altering in this age of Britneyfication, as the Nag
Hammadi texts. Just watch the insane glint in post-(Jim) Morrisonian
singer Jaz Coleman's eyes on the accompanying CD-ROM video here, as,
fired up by his reading of black-sheep Romantic philosophers from
Nietzsche to Aleister Crowley, he turns what was just another outdoor
rock festival into a neo-gothic tribal ritual.
By the time the band hits the halfway point of the set with the
magnificent "Love Like Blood," before pounding on like a runaway
train to a searing finish, you'll either be transfixed or flee in
horror. No, Killing Joke were never a band for the weak at heart,
never ones to worry much about "target markets." And now consider
again our enervated culture, and the words of Jaz Coleman from
"Requiem": "When the meaningful words/ When they cease to function/
When there's nothing to say/ When will it start worrying you?" Ah
yes, a killing joke, indeed — and the joke's still on us all.
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