There are a lot of problems in the world today. People are going hungry, nobody can get a job, our schools are falling apart. And don’t even get me started on the environment because when I think of the environment I get sad, and when I get sad I eat a lot and then I can’t fit into my skinny narwhal-hide jeans. Another problem is food: there’s obviously too much of it for those of us who need to be professionally skinny.
But my protest song has nothing to do with any of that. I won’t tell you what I’m talking about. You should already know, you should understand. If you’ve heard of Hatepuppy you know we are completely identified with this issue. This protest song is about problems so big you cannot possibly ignore them. It is about cruel treatment that those on the inside perpetrate on the outsiders, crimes against decency, and the human rights of the disremembered being trod upon.
And you probably didn’t know that, did you? Well you know it now because you are going to listen to my protest song. You say you don’t have fifteen minutes to listen to noise? It’s not noise. It’s a carefully sculpted sonic fugue that is sautéed in feedback. Sometimes you have to think outside what rocks.
And it isn’t just any feedback. It’s the feedback that comes out of my amp when at home watching Ultimate Fighting, and the sound of skin mauling skin enters my guitar through my $30,000 hand made Humbuckers, then travels into the unshielded vacuum tube amp. Feedback that is harmonized by the slightly dirty harpsichord I now happen to own. You’ll come for the peace, then stay for the outrage.
It’s not an instrumental. You can’t hear the vocals? They are buried in the mix? Not true. The vocals are crystal clear, performed by Tuvan throat singers operating at a frequency lower than the human ear can detect. Because it is the frequency of outrage.
The outrage comes from a personal level. It is the outrage of four men in a punk-thrash metal ska-core band that can’t agree about which musical genre we should focus on, because my quote-unquote band mates spent too much time debating the true meaning of Otherness at the food co-op we discovered during our last semester at Brown, even though they all knew I was a physics major and their unending dialectics would not solve my problem sets. The outrage also comes from learning that you accidentally violate the rental agreement when you have sex with the groupie on top of the recording studio’s harpsichord.
What were you going to do with that fifteen minutes anyway? You aren’t going to find a job in the next fifteen minutes. You won’t even find a parking spot in fifteen minutes. You could listen to this song and it’s likely that you’ll find a place to park after the song is over, but you might be so overcome by outrage that you’ll forget how to parallel park or someone will steal the space you just found but couldn’t park in because the tears of outrage have blinded you and then you’ll definitely have something to be outraged about.
What do you mean there’s no message? Maybe you didn’t comprehend the message because you’re confused. Maybe you’re listening to the tracks “Sharpie On Your Skull” and “Fetal Alcohol Party,” which come before our protest song. Of course those songs will distract you from our message. Our message is of peace. You know how you know it’s about peace? Because I just told you it was about peace.
It’s also in the lyrics: A black sun explodes your popcorn soul like the new breath of lamb spring. The lyrics emanate peace, the lyrics hold so much peace they are like Mahatma Gandhi looking at a photo of a Hawaiian sunset while listening to his favorite Jack Johnson CD. There’s some heavy symbolism in my lyrics, because the hate in Hatepuppy’s song of peace runs deep. You’ll find them written in the liner notes of the album, which you can download for free. It’s a 12-gigabyte PDF with original artwork by my adopted nephew Darren. All you have to do is go to our home page to download it. It’s right there, in plain sight, in "home→band info→bio→multimedia→extras→pdf→large. From there just enter the access code, which is posted in the comments in a blog about our guitar tech’s favorite amps on our MySpace page.
Your continued lack of outrage is making me outraged.
It’s not that hard to understand, but if you still can’t figure out why you should be outraged you should call the phone number I have provided on the liner notes. I don’t know whose number it is but they have a particularly annoying voice mail menu.
To channel your outrage there will be a call to action. Without a call to action you are only a human NPR bumper sticker. We will announce our call to action during the upcoming US leg of Hatepuppy’s Derivatives Tour (proudly sponsored by Citigroup). Tickets are still available.