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The phrase �dank spice magnet� is bandied about so much these days that it has nearly lost all ofit's meaning. However if ever there was a hastily pasted together 4-track home recording projectliterally teeming with pustules and only truly desired by deaf sadists and size queens that deserved to be called that, this is it. In today's world of niche marketing and rampant animal husbandry, it is rare to see things. Rarer still is the opportunity to run through one of those garden hedge mazes in the middle of winter with Jack Nicholson chasing after you with a very pointy toothpick. Listening to Flabby's Excess Baggage takes you back ever so briefly to what it was like in the days before Star Wars created multi-level marketing schemes directed at kids. Before General Electric and the Fox Network turned media into a propaganda arm of the military industrial elite. Before NASCAR, Ryan Seacrest and the horrors of the Reagan presidency came about and destroyed everything that was good about this country.
As our culture slips into a dark racist police state, with injustice for all, squeezing the life out of everyone it touches and churning out brain dead clones incapable of independent or creative thoughts, depressed, diseased and barely making ends meet, and as the good blue collar jobs that truly made America great in its heyday are systematically dismantled; one notices that the only things we are truly good at anymore is eating, shopping, and building war machines and sports stadiums. Because today it's easy, and even fashionable, to say that abortion is bad, and fight to make it illegal. But it is hard to remove the causes of unwanted pregnancies. It's easy to complain that judicial activists are liberalizing the courts, but hard to admit that the right wing Supreme Court illegally carried out a coup de tat in 2000 to install a right wing police state into power. It's easy to say that we want to install our version of Democracy in foreign countries, but hard to admit that we actually live in a one party totalitarian state. It is into this milieu that Excess Baggage arrives, attacking all that neo-fascists and the fundamentalists hold as sacred. Sure the sound quality is questionable, sure the arrangements are pathetic and infantile, sure the use of the sound of someone vomiting at the beginning and end of every song is annoying and disgusting. But by the same tokenism, this project is one of the few musical efforts these days which poses some hard nosed questions like: Where are we going? Is America dead on the inside? And�why aren't I wearing any pants? For in the final analysis, it isn't the size of the prize that counts, it's the motion in the ocean. Listen to the sounds of Flabby Hoffman and you'll see what I mean.
- Groucho Marx, 1974 |
