I struggled getting started writing this week's 90MM because I don't actually have the vocabulary to describe The KLF.
I started off trying to write something comparing them to that scene in [insert name of practically any teen movie here] in which the cool kids are pretending to agree with the uncool kid but actually they're just taking the piss out of them - but that didn't quite work.
Then, worrying that I was revealing a bit too much of my not-so-secret enjoyment of trashy teen movies, I thought about Marcel Duchamps and his dubbing of a urinal 'art' and what it meant when one of the leading lights of art starts, if not rejecting the concepts but at least examining the more self-evident absurdities.
Then I started off on a tract about style-vs-fashion and how some people are able to make whatever they do look good no matter what.
What it comes down to though is that Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty in their incarnations as The KLF, The Kopyright Liberation Front/Kings of the Low Frequencies, The Jams, the Justified Ancients of Mummu, The Timelords, The K Foundation, One World Orchestra, 2K etc etc managed to simultaneously mock the whole music and art industry whilst also changing the entire face of the industry and putting out storming, anthemic tracks like this
and this
They practically invented the modern bootleg with "Whitney Joins The JAMs" whcih mashed "Mission: Impossible" samples with Whitney Houstons "I wanna dance with somebody". Then, as The Timelords they deliberately wrote a nauseatingly catchy "lowest common denominator, something that Timmy Mallet would understand" song which took samples from Doctor Who and crashed them into Garry Glitter's "Rock and Roll (Part 2)" and The Sweet's "Blockbuster!" with the explicit intention of getting a number 1 single. Which they did with "Doctorin The Tardis". Then they wrote a book called "The Manual (How to have a number 1 the easy way)" which told you how they did it and gave the guarantee that if you followed the book to the letter and didn't get a number 1 they'd refund the cost of the book.
They 'retired' in the most spectacular form possible - at the 1992 Brit Awards they performed a live "violently antagonistic performance" of "3 A.M Eternal" in front of "a stunned music-business audience" with crust punk group Etreme Noise Terror. Prevented from throwing buckets of Sheep entrails over the audience a bekilted Bill Drummond theatrically limped on stage and fired blanks from a machine gun into the air
After which they burnt their last million pounds on the Isle of Jura and filmed it.
Every time someone tries to tell you that Green Day or Limp Bizkit or Sum 41 or god-forbid Avril Lavigne are punk I want you to think of this. I'm not saying that their music is bad necessarily I'm just saying that if some one tries to straight faced tell you that those or similar artists are "punk" then I want you to cock slap them. I want you to physically either punch them in the penile or vaginal area and/or lay about their face with your penis or other similarly degrading appendage - work with what both you and they have people. Get creative. Make sure they REALLY TRULY understand.
Because it's important.
Except when it's not.
I enjoyed this more than I thought I would...and I really enjoyed the last third as all of the seemingly disconnected bits came together. I haven't read a book this strongly about "identity" since the Auster binge I went on about 15 years ago. (Speaking of which, his new book is next up in the queue...)
House music has always veered between having a sense of humour about itself and being thoroughly up its own arse. Tracks have trodden the very thin line between novelty, kitsch and playfulness - witness the differences between The Prodigy's "Charlie" (which, even at 180bpm, sounds twice as slow now as it did in my head at the time), Urban Hype's "Trip To Trumpton" and plummeting to new depths with Doctor Spin's "Tetris".
Set against this backdrop was N-Trance who are an odd datum on the arc of early to mid nineties techno. Their first demo was an (unreleased?) rave version of the theme tune to kids' tv program "Roobarb and Custard" but in '92 they put out "Set You Free" - a genuine, euphoric, hands in air rave anthem.
and then the slightly less goofy (but only just) with their take on Rod Stewart's "Do Ya Think I'm Sexy?"
But more on that next week ...