I'm going to try my hand at a couple reviews, basically because I've
gotten the feeling that several people have wanted to see more reviews of
the new V/Vm releases, & V/Vm stuff in general since it's all so limited,
expensive, inaccessable, etc. I'll do their "Pig" 7" first.
I'll say now that I am a V/Vm fan & I've gotten every record that
they've put out, but this is the worst record I've ever gotten by anyone, &
the most disappointing one, well, you know, since I've liked everything
else so much. It's not that there's some loss in their song-making
abilities, since there of no songs on here anyway, but it's what this
release is all about. I was honestly pretty excited about it, hearing that
it would be a record entirely of pig music, but it's not. It's a short,
unintelligible interview with Uncle Ernie followed by about 10 minutes of
recordings of pigs being slaughtered. Maybe such horrendous insensitivity
on the part of V/Vm could have been expected by me, considering their
history of calling themselves butchers & having mutilated little old songs
about meat on past releases, but I wasn't really sure if those things were
parallels to their mockery (& savoring) of the crassness of the terrible
old songs they find & abuse, the meat stuff being a mockery of a sort of
crassness in their society. No. And despite V/Vm's history of making
themselves out to be readical people, with stuff about evolution,
experimentalism, musical pioneering, & so forth littering their record
inserts, their not radical people at all in such an extremely fundamental
way. They completely support violent, hierarchical society (at least from
a speciesist slant) & the institutionalized destruction of the lives of
those with less social power than them that goes along with that. Then
they have fun with that & make a record reveling in it.
Yeah, so this is rather hideous record. I couldn't finish listening to
it, it made me cold all over, & now I'm just really depressed.
Marc Poirier