Reviews
J., R. Emmett Tyrrell
"Rat Control Bill." Johnson blamed Congress after the Detroit riots for not approving this rat control bill and timourishly cried for more welfare to buy off urban barbarians. George Kennen has...
...In what is now ancient history, the National Conference for New Politics granted the Black Power groups the type of representation they seem to feel is commensurate with their position...
...Whatever the case, this last OINK has received wide acclaim...
...When the Insects began their career they amplified their grunts to the yea-yea advocates of 3.2 music, always slopping ridicule on their fatuous audience, so as to distinguish themselves from the nitwits enthralled at their feet...
...Their remarks on Imperial Britain, viewed by so many as incisive sarcasm merely manifest the Insects' lingering nostalgia for Imperial Britain...
...Distinguished only by even more vaporous relevance the second equally bad song, A Little Help From My Friends, contrasts with the third song, Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds, which is at least less than bad...
...and the SNCC leader's well reasoned reply came, "Yes, and I am the dictator...
...Putatively such dribble indicates great intellectual awareness...
...But the triumphs of such men as Patrick Frawley, Eli Lilly, and Sarkes Tarzian are not the stuff which will appeal to the mobs of maudlin morons who, in an orgy of self-pity, formicate upon record shops for the Insects' latest emotive effusion...
...The "thinkie bopper" intuits all sorts of meaning from this wasted wax, adjudging it a rock-and-roll symphony with movements and themes and stuff (even...
...Verily these three assaults on the ear reveal little more than that rock-and-roll could better be written in padded cells by strait jacketed catatoniacs and that the insects combined attention span could not exceed two minutes...
...today our pusillanimous politicians try to dissolve domestic problems with a check...
...Critics, in reviewing the final song, A Day in the Life, probably confuse appreciation for the album's conclusion with recognition of the song's merit...
...Insect interpreters exercise more creative talent interpreting this pestiferous quartet than the Insects exhibit in being Insects...
...The super-serious cultural idiot who patronized Piggy Logan is more active today than ever...
...R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr...
...Stokely is not the only revolutionary to have had to go abroad to deliver orotund obloquies...
...Their art represents little more than cacaphonic plagiarisms from Woody Guthrie, Buddy Holly, Ray Charles' 1958 Newport performance, Chuck Berry, and Bob Zimmerman...
...To which someone shouted, "Is this a dictatorship...
...It might also suggest insincerity, for though their bank accounts contain millions, they have never attempted to confront these problems — at least not without assuring themselves munificent profit...
...In spite of the regimentation coming from regnant liberaldom's convolution of democracy and equality, some do triumph within "the system...
...Robert Franklin Williams, founder of RAM (Revolutionary Action Movement), now plans to return to America...
...With rare exceptions their latest album manifests this enduring lesson...
...Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band In You Can't Go Home Again Thomas Wolfe spoke of mountebank Piggy Logan, whose offbeat manners and gaudily painted circus of wire dolls, entranced the prop-propelled jet set phonies of the 'thirties and certified these cultural Bedouins' penchant for canonizing what is nothing more than ridiculous, insipid, demeaning, and significant solely for its absurdity...
...The record speaks for itself...
...While Stokely, presently on a world tour of ill will, and Robert Williams, fancying himself as a Communist Chiang Kai-shek preparing to stage a mainland invasion of the United States, were out of the country, one of the most heinous gatherings of stooges ever to meet, assembled in Chicago's Palmer House...
...The fact is, now living in the ghastly shadow of the mangy imperial cadaver, they really believe in Victoria's realm and are pining away for that gilded era where they imagine themselves as sedate members of the House of Lords...
...Since the convention was not in formal session, a white girl delegate rose and called "point of order...
...only the audience is even more ridiculous, since the contemporary Insects are writing for (Continued on Page 11) 9 REVIEWS (Continued from Page 9) that latest evolution of Homo neanderthalensis, the rock-and-roll intellectual...
...In connection with the Negro struggle, such patriotic gambits as, "The only whites we can use in our struggle are those who are ready to pick up guns with us to destroy the capitalist system," just are not compelling to the aggregate America...
...Whether from their limited talent or constipated philosophy, the Insects' new album will appeal only to cultural cave dwellers and the Eoanthropic boomers of Time, the dilettante's delicatessen...
...In "Sgt...
...If it is, it is the art of abasement...
...They are to music as the Japanese are to transistor radios, and still the herd, led by such prestigious bovine as Leonard Bernstein, insist on labeling their product art...
...So, with ethnic power, that's what's happening, baby...
...Today the ridicule lingers...
...If the Insects learned anything from their American tours, it was the American politician's facility for expressing absolutely nothing in the most meaningful terms...
...But an utter absorption (synthetically drug induced) with the fruity sugariness of an arabesque imagery obviates a nice instrumental accompaniment and will elicit nausea from an audience possessing symptoms of civilization...
...Those who know can only hear it...
...418, 46 S.E...
...Shades of Lowndes County...
...Respected critics — save the giddy savants of Time who are respected solely by college pupils and used car salesmen — see in this album at least an attempt to say important things...
...Jefferson Davis REVIEWS Sgt...
...On side two George Harrison, perpetually committed to the most fashionable social deviations, moans Within You Without You and exhorts his audience to socialization of their most private sentiments and collectivization of even their tedium...
...Forman replied, "There are no points of order...
...Surprisingly, She's Leaving Home is a nicely arranged aria whose principal attraction rests in practically any girl's ability to identify it with the serious oiliness of her adolescence...
...This bit of fustion foolishness suffused in faked compassion and concluded by the sounds of the Insects guffawing at their audience represents a last futile attempt to differentiate themselves from the moronic hordes constituting their smarmy audience...
...It should be remembered that it was Williams' RAM followers in the United States who have been charged with attempting to assassinate Negro moderates, as well as planning the poisoning of thousands of Philadelphia policemen and city officials in the event of a racial outbreak in that city...
...in a Liverpool hen house, according to Insect interpreters reveal transcendent genius...
...pro-Communist and professional black nationalists...
...SNCC leader James Forman delivered a fiery Black Power speech to the throng, saying, "we're going to liberate you whether you want to be liberated or not...
...Williams, widely known for his enlightening broadcasts from Cuba preaching black rebellion in the United States, now lives in Communist China...
...Brown and Carmichael were linked directly to the trouble in Nashville and Cincinnati...
...When I'm Sixty-Four, a query into man's situation on the eve of social security payments, Lovely Rita, relating an encounter with a New York meter maid having New York morals — hence dirty fingernails, and Good Morning, Good Morning, recording rape (Gore v. State, 119 Ga...
...It is indeed interesting to see the uses to which the Black Power tribe put their power, once they had gained it at the NCNP convention...
...they will never listen to it...
...Put simply, rhetoric incorporating such references as "white monkeys" and "honky" do not receive favorable audience in America...
...Utilizing the New Philharmonia (a moderately inferior symphonic orchestra), daringly subversive lyrics (about grass, ho hum), and inordinate measures of self pity (who does not pity great Britain), the Insects babble inanely on politics, business, the great open spaces of contemporary spirituality, and of course that most avant-garde concern, alienation...
...Rep...
...Still dressed in African robes, Forman asked for and got voice and standing votes on resolutions he introduced personally...
...That many of the leaders of the Black Power movement are pro-Communist should surprise no one...
...But of what value are fruitless, spiritless, ill-disciplined transgressions into the realms of the Red Cross and Department of Health, Education, and Welfare...
...One can but hear eructations, one can never listen to them...
...It is little wonder that those few who listen will, with aesthetic anticipation, await the grateful silence between songs...
...Why is it the Carmichaels, the minions of domestic Reds, and ideological southpaws must go outside the country to bolster their faith...
...Investigators of the House Committee on Un-American Activities say that many of the riots in the past year were staged by the proPeking Progressive Labor Party (not to be confused with the Bloomington based Progressive Reform Party), SNCC, and other Black Power groups — i.e...
...Is there not reason to worry about the radicals' indulgence in a self-proclaimed right to riot, and should not something be done...
...Police officials from Cincinnati, Nashville and Cambridge, Maryland, testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee, stated that riots in their cities this year were fomented by SNCC...
...Some soar above the artificialities, loneliness, bittersweets, and tensions in which the Insects immerse themselves...
...From a lesser degree of bad the Insects smoothly regress to truly idiotic warblings, the optimistically titled Getting Better and Fixing A Hole (which from all indications exposes gaming at the U.S...
...Namely, this collection of Communists, beatniks, anti-poverty types, and several Indiana University pupils, voted to give the Black Caucus of two-hundred delegates voting strength equal to the twenty-one hundred white delegates...
...Open thus qualifying as an ugh message song...
...He has taken New York for his capital and made the Insects this decade's Piggy Logan by extolling them in a hurricane of ethereal encomiums...
...George Kennen has criticized Americans for trying to dissolve foreign policy problems by writing laws...
...Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" the Insects have interrupted a trend of lyrical tommyrot and recorded several acceptable yodelings, but for the most part the civilized ear will remain wondering if the album's grooves circle in the right way...
...Citing as evidence for this asseveration, the recapitulation of the lead song in an altered form on side two, these thalidomide intellectuals unfortunately mistake symphonic form for mere repetition...
...Actually the lead song's simian melody has all the euphony of a stereophonic coconut battle between the great apes in a New York City Greyhound station...
...671, 100 Am.St...
...Complimenting their squashed sentiments with the squashed and tortured sound of electronic music, the Insects dwell obsessively on defeat and self-pity as if no triumphs existed within "the system" today...
Vol. 1 • October 1967 • No. 2
