Gay Rabbi


Genre: irreverent homophobic offensipop

Era: 2000s - present

Country of origin: UK

In November 2001, with My Vegan Holiday riding high after a year of touring and the release of their album The Mung Bean Sessions, lead singer Nathan Fretch decided that he needed a change. He promptly parked a caravan behind a derelict Little Chef on a dual carriageway just outside Nantwich with a Bontempi organ, a crate of Tennent’s Super and a dozen copies of Vegetarian Wives and, just six weeks later, Fretch’s alter-ego Gay Rabbi was born.

Gay Rabbi is a piquant, simmering bouillabaisse of pop. With two albums under his hempen belt – the 2002 debut Hot Fudge Mystery and 2007’s Chutney Farm, both hotly condemned by the relevant authorities – Fretch has boldly taken the crumpled melodies and effervescent, rogery guitars that we have come to expect from My Vegan Holiday and paired them with an alarmingly hyperactive brass section to provide a delightful harmonic soufflé over which he drapes his zeitgeist-defying brand of insouciant anti-semitic homophobia.

Whilst it is true that Gay Rabbi has barely troubled the UK charts – the best selling of his singles, Homo Bar Mitzvah, peaked at a flaccid #126 – this lack of domestic pop success has been no bar to notoriety: Uli Falmstein of Jew Pop Weekly described Gay Rabbi as "an abomination to both God and my ears", and Kerrity Gradge of Music Casserole said of it that "even Hitler would not have done this". Indeed, only Iranian leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, writing in the Sharia Music Express, has spoken positively of Fretch’s side project, provocatively naming Chutney Farm as his "album of the year".

Fretch is unrepentant, however, and says that he intends to continue to use Gay Rabbi as a way of unwinding from the pressures of leading My Vegan Holiday in their joylessly sincere musical crusade to convince people to eat less meat. "Of course the vegan issue is of utmost importance to me," he says, "I just like to make jokes about Jews and queers now and then."


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Rasta Obliterator


Genre: criminal reggae

Era: 1970s

Country of origin: Jamaica

In 1972 a crack commando unit was sent to prison by a military court for a crime they didn’t commit. These men promptly escaped from a maximum security stockade to the Los Angeles underground. Today, still wanted by the government, they survive as soldiers of fortune. The man who actually committed the crime, however, was far more fortunate, using the confusion that surrounded the wrongful arrest and subsequent escape to flee to his native Jamaica, where he used the proceeds from the robbery to build a recording studio and set up the group Rasta Obliterator.

Levi Ratchet initially started Rasta Obliterator as a front for his various criminal activities – what he referred to as "arm robry", "peddlin ganja" and the delightfully vague "a lickle runnin an shootin" – but as time went on he realised that making music was safer and more lucrative than crime, and so he floated his crime empire on the Jamaican stock market (RudeBoyCrimeCorp: RBC) and turned his full attention to Rasta Obliterator.

Of course, it should be noted that Rasta Obliterator was not the only group to emerge from the reggae crime subculture – Prince Ruffian & The Homiciders, Papa Shank and Natty Paedo all contributed to both Jamaica’s music charts and its crime rate – but it was one of the most successful. Albums such as Jah Machine Gun and Wanted, Dread Or Alive dominated the Jamaican charts in the mid-70s, and even reached charts as far away as Europe (though Polish-Jamaican artist Barrington Kraszewski had already laid the groundwork in the Eastern Bloc with his 1974 album Stasi Hotsteppin’).

Ultimately, Levi Ratchet was unable to escape the legacy of his chequered past, and in 1978 he was murdered by a hitman who put cyanide in his cannabis – a process known in Jamaica as a Kingston Cough – an event immortalised by The Kneecappers in their 1979 hit Bad Ganja Mek You Sick. Then, to add insult to injury/death, in a grim twist of irony the board of RudeBoyCrimeCorp plc merged the company with Global Pharmabiotics, changed its name to CrimePharm, then TechnoBioCom, then ZeneBioLogica, and became a major manufacturer of medicinal cannabis substitutes.

On Levi Ratchet’s grave the following words appear: "Life is reggae, reggae is life. Steal any flowers an rude boy come mess you up an ting". They seem somehow appropriate.



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Prussian Perverts


Genre: sexdance, europerve

Era: 1990s

Country of Origin: Germany

Prussian Perverts began life in Dresden in 1990 as Mickey Sex Mouse, one of the more prominent of the countless bands that formed in the wave of liberative euphoria that washed across the country after David Hasselhoff took a break from filming Baywatch to tear down the Berlin Wall and kill Communism. Despite a residence in Dresden’s Ministry of Sound (the former Stasi phone-tapping bureau) they saw little initial success until 1991, when the threat of legal action from the Disney Corporation forced them to change their name.

The name change proved to be a blessing: one month after the letter from Disney’s lawyers, Gerhard Bunt of Fourth Reich Rekords received a demo tape from the newly minted Prussian Perverts and he signed the band immediately.

They didn’t look back. No mulleted East German clubber jemmied off his glands on disco marmalade in Dresden’s sadly now defunct Blitzkrieg Klub can have failed to miss Prussian Perverts and their aural-erotic disco monuments. With the sonically enormous club assault U Make Me Perve and the needlessly offensive Sexdance Hitler, in which the Nazi leader’s Nuremberg speech is sampled over a grindingly urgent soundcrunch of rhythmic sexual noises and highly charged electrobliss, the band provided the soundtrack for an entire liberated generation (though it should be noted that the generation in question is now suffering from ear damage, memory loss and severe paranoid episodes).

The success was not to last, however. Despite strong opposition from weird, sex-starved loners, the late 90s saw the introduction of draconian public decency laws in Germany, and in 1997 Prussian Perverts were banned from performing in public after a concert that
Der Däly Mäl described as “grossly, mesmerisingly indecent”. They were dropped by Fourth Reich Rekords soon after.

Ten years on they enjoy a weekly residency at Amsterdam’s Den Kokkenkluub brothel, where they provide a lumpy, filth-sodden soundtrack for countless acts of unspeakable depravity. Deep down, this is probably all they ever wanted.


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