The sound of music

Well, it’s been a pretty normal fortnight in the life of your favourite rock ‘n’ roll personality: a few gigs, a few ligs, lots of cigs, a visit or two from the pigs, and lashings of pills, porter and poontang.

Anything else? Oh yeah, I won an Oscar.
You may have heard about it. Out of our heads on pasta and horse tranquilisers one night, a group of us got out the laptop and lashed together the most demented thing we could dream up: an entirely pointless ‘dark’ saga of some mad people on a train and a couple of suicides, the whole thing loosely stitched together with the worst stage-Irishy dialogue we could scrape from the bottom of the barrel. We still felt there was something missing, something that would unmistakably say: hey world, we’ve a live one here. My old friend, the Foghat roadie Manmountain Dense, finally cracked it: “What about a scene with an exploding cow?” he suggested, reasonably enough.
Done. Then we roped in a few old muckers from the worlds of the small and big screens to act it all out, submitted the thing under the name of a revered playwright – just for extra laughs - and waited for the shitstorm.
And whaddya know? Sam is now the proud possessor of the Academy’s gold statuette and a rake of reviews commending him for a “strikingly original film debut”. Which just goes to show that, contrary to popular opinion, there’s more than one born every minute.
Anyway, now that he is officially up there with Orson, Marty, Al The Hitch and all them cats, Sam is pleased to leave Hollywood to its eternal madness and turn to the eminently sensible subject of heavy metal as an instrument of torture.

Mind-numbing Volume

I’m indebted to my old mucker Brian Boyd who wrote about the subject in Friday’s Irish Times. Seems that Uncle Sam (no relation) has taken to blasting detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan with the music of Metallica, Rage Against The Machine, Throbbing Gristle and others, played at what has been described as “mind-numbing volume.”
The army have also used AC/DC to “soften up” the opposition during its assault on Fallujah. Explained Ben Abel, of the US Army’s Psychological Operations department: “Western music is not the Iraqis’ thing. So our guys have been getting really creative in finding sounds they think would make the enemy upset. These harassment missions work especially well in urban settings like Fallujah. The sounds just keep reverberating off the walls.”
Well, sure, that might sound to you or me just like The Bogey Boys on a hot night in The Baggot Inn back in the day, but then we’d usually softened ourselves up pretty good anyway before the band ever hit the stage.
Come to think of it, if the Yanks are using bad music as an instrument of torture then Sam reckons he has a persuasive personal case to take before an international court of law. Surely some redress is due after all my long years exposed to awful demo tapes, bloody battles of the bands and at least the first third of every festival bill that has ever polluted this fair land of ours. In fact, if I didn’t know better, I’d get Amnesty International on my case, but those losers are probably tied up as usual.
Meantime, I liked the response of Metallica’s Lars Ulrich to the news that his band’s lovely work was being used to try to scramble the brains of prisoners. “No one in Iraq has ever done anything to hurt me,” he pointed out reasonably enough, although presumably he was referring to a time before the unfortunate Iraqis had actually heard ’Enter Sandman’. Anyway, the delicate drummer went on: “I don’t understand why we have to be implicated in this bullshit. I feel horrible about this. But what can I do? Get George Bush on the phone and tell him about some Norwegian death metal bands who are far louder than we are?”

Mournful Dirge

Which is not a bad idea, come to think of it. But, ever helpful, Sam has an even better one: stick one of our revered sean nos singers on a tape loop and cut that little baby loose on the enemy. I’d say just about one hour of a mournful dirge about the drowning at sea of some of poor old devil from the Blaskets, should be enough to end the insurrection there and then, and have even the most zealous enemy of the infidel dropping his weapons and lining up to work behind the counter of the first MacDonalds in Kabul or have his ride pimped by MTV in downtown Baghdad. Yeah, after 79 verses of that ferocious wailing – or about the point in the story where our hero’s sturdy little craft begins to get into difficulties – there’s nowhere on earth which wouldn’t happily settle for a little bit of American-style democracy. Including, perhaps, even America.
Failing that, of course, they could always project my Oscar-winning movie onto the bits of the walls still left standing after AC/DC.
Although, admittedly, that might qualify as overkill.