Month: June 2025

Thou hast sinned, O Jimmy

Evangelist Jimmy Swaggart hospitalized

Televangelist Jimmy Swaggart went into cardiac arrest at his home Sunday morning and is in intensive care at a hospital, his son said Sunday evening. […]
His son Donnie says Swaggart went into cardiac arrest around 8 o’clock Sunday morning and “has never regained consciousness.”
He said paramedics responded to Swaggart’s home and were able to get a heartbeat before rushing him to a local hospital.
“Right now he is in ICU and without a miracle, without a miracle, his time will be short,” Donnie Swaggart told the congregation during a special prayer service held Sunday evening at their church in Baton Rouge.

His time is short? His time has been ninety fucking years, Donnie. Per Wikipedia, he started as an evangelist in 1955, started on radio in 1960, and then on TV in 1971; he’s had DECADES to screw people out of their money (which family business you’ve carried on yourself) and he’s been doing it up to now. Everyone’s time comes, Donnie. Mine will, yours will, and it looks like your fraud of a father’s time is upon him too. I know how hard it to lose family members, I’ve lost too many of mine over the last five decades of my own existence, but… you know. Just… fuck Jimmy Swaggart.

“We’re going to give the Lord an opportunity to work,” he added.

Well, why did you send the old cunt to hospital, then? You could’ve let God prove himself by making him intervene directly, instead of letting the hospital do all the work but giving God the credit if it does in fact go all right. Why yes, I am in thoroughly mean spirits at this news. I really can’t summon up any sympathy for anyone here.

Just say no

Implausible as it may sound, I actually learned something from Mushroom Cock’s infernally silly birthday parade:

This picture comes from the Graun’s photo coverage of the event and the “No Kings” mass protests in opposition to his general existence, and, well, it caught my attention. The caption reads “Soldiers dressed in revolutionary war uniforms march in the parade” and OH how thrilled they all look to be there… but note that some of them are, quite frankly, black. Were there black soldiers in the revolutionary war? Cos there was still something called slavery back then, you may have heard of it, so I wouldn’t have thought there would’ve been many if any… lo, however, for a quick bit of research into a question I’d never previously thought to ask almost immediately informed me there were in fact something like 9000 African-American soldiers in the American army, and twice as many on the British side cos the latter promised them freedom (wonder if they would’ve delivered on that had they won). So there you go, this bullshit actually wound up being educational! Who’d have thought? I don’t really feel like writing much more about the last couple of days; the hideous business in Minnesota before it kicked off was a sufficiently grim prelude that I can’t really bring myself to say anything else. Here’s the Guardian again talking about the protests, which were evidently much better attended than Drumpf’s parade; somewhere Sean Spicer is just glad he no longer has to spin this shit to make Mushroom Cock look good…

Oh not another one

And just a few hours later it’s goodbye Douglas McCarthy from Nitzer Ebb… no word on what took him out, but he was apparently diagnosed with cirrhosis of the liver last year so I’m guessing alcohol caught up with him at last. A damn shame, whatever the case. I was shocked to discover he wasn’t even 60 yet; apparently he was just 15 when Nitzer started, so only 18 when the first single came out.

I never saw Nitzer Ebb live, but I gather they saw me; back in 2006 they were one of the main acts at the Under the Blue Moon festival, performing upstairs at Newtown RSL while I was downstairs with the Inflatable Voodoo Dolls… we were part of the DJ lineup, and also we played a short live set (friends of ours were also playing support upstairs that night), and apparently Douglas and Bon came down to witness our semi-musical shenanigans and enjoyed whatever the hell it was we were doing. So there you go. Lift up your hearts:

And, with rather more hair, here he’s guesting with Alan Wilder’s side-project (as it still was at that time) Recoil on a cover of Alex Harvey’s “Faith Healer”:

We believed you, Mr Wilson

News just breaking that Brian Wilson has left the building. Apparently he was diagnosed with dementia last year, as if the poor bastard didn’t have a life full of problems… one of the biggest of which, of course, was Eugene Landy, who I’m glad Brian outlived and achieved things without (wish he could’ve outlived the scumbag Mike Love too, but we can’t have everything, I suppose). Brian lived a more difficult life than most people in the world of pop music, and he’s at rest at last, and I suppose we can be grateful for that for him.

Thanks but no

This was, apparently, a 1983 flyer for Pantera when they were still glam:

Yeah, there comes a time when “the 80s were like that” ceases to be an excuse. I understand why they’d rather write their 80s period out of their history than be forced to relive Rex Brown’s hair from that time. They used to get played a fair bit on Triple J in the 90s after Phil Anselmo replaced Terry Glaze, but I never particularly liked them then or now and was even less enticed by their earlier glam metal incarnation… but seeing the above flyer for some reason enticed me to finally give Metal Magic a listen for the first time…

None of Pantera’s early albums had good art, but the first one was uniquely cursed…

…and it was… okay? I mean, I hesitate to call it good, but it was mostly tolerable, not as actively terrible as I’d expected it to be, one or two actually tracks actually kind of cut the mustard… just not especially distinctive in any way, which I suppose isn’t too surprising given all of them were still in their teens at that point, Vinnie Paul was only 16 when this was recorded and was a major asset even then… So yeah, that was OK. Mind you, when I do want the best in headbangin’ kick-arse rock’n’roll, I still don’t think I’ll be turning to Pantera as my first choice…

Meanwhile in LA…

Just saw this posted on Bluesky, where the OP also helpfully linked to a source for it. There are a few people in the comments calling it fake, which is understandable given that the government’s got to propagandise about how bad the situation is—and, from what I read by people who are actually there, it’s confined to just one very small bit of LA and the rest of the city is carrying on normally—and have been deploying old photos of riots and so forth from, you know, not even the US never mind LA. Also, in the age of AI, we should be suspicious of images like this… but, given that we are evidently looking at the handiwork of Etienne Laurent from AFP, I think I have to credit this as one of the most immaculately timed photos I’ve ever seen.

Dub housing?

I’ve been listening to this tune a fair bit lately:

“Invasion” by King Tubby from 1975’s Dub From the Roots. You may agree with me that this thing starts off in quite striking fashion with that synth sequencer thing going off, and what it initially put me in mind of the music from Joe D’Amato’s film Anthropophagous (WARNING! You will see scenes from a Joe D’Amato movie):

But it’s clearly not actually that despute the similar skittering synth bass noises, and in any case the record predated that film by about five years. And so, in order to satisfy my own infernal curiosity because I am cursed to want to know about these things, I decided to try and find out more even though I suspected that might be near impossible…

…though I could’ve been wrong about that. This rather helpfully observes the original is this:

However, as you can see, the version on the B-side here is actually by Augustus Pablo, not Tubby. So I’m guessing Tubby’s version was specifically made for his own LP? What complicated things was checking Discogs for more information, which turned up a single by Jackie Edwards called “Invasion” on which Tubby is credited for the dub, but it’s not the same as the one on the album… but whatever. That just left the mystery of the “title card sequence”…

…which, implausibly but evidently, is THIS thing, a “special report” by CBS News from 1967 about homes of the future and what 1967 thought 2001 would look like. Apparently they thought computers would be common by then. That synth thing or whatever it is must’ve seemed suitably “futuristic” to serve as the opening titles music; what I wonder now is, was it conjured up specifically for the program or was it library stock? And none of this explains how Tubby got his hands on it or why, but I may have to leave that mystery unanswered… at any rate, there are a few other tracks on that album deploying these “sci-fi” sounds, so it wasn’t just “Invasion” he was being peculiar with.

RIP Mr Stewart

Sly Stone, pioneering funk and soul musician, dies aged 82

Sly Stone, the American musician who lit up generations of dancefloors with his gloriously funky and often socially conscious songwriting, has died aged 82.
“After a prolonged battle with COPD and other underlying health issues, Sly passed away peacefully, surrounded by his three children, his closest friend and his extended family,” a family statement reads. “While we mourn his absence, we take solace in knowing that his extraordinary musical legacy will continue to resonate and inspire for generations to come.” […]
Among those paying tribute to Stone was musician Questlove, whose documentary about Stone, Sly Lives!, was release earliest this year. “From the moment his music reached me in the early 1970s, it became a part of my soul,” he wrote on Instagram. “Sly was a giant — not just for his groundbreaking work with the Family Stone, but for the radical inclusivity and deep human truths he poured into every note … His work looked straight at the brightest and darkest parts of life and demanded we do the same.”

I’ve got to say, the timing of this news is kind of hilarious, given that it comes only a few months after Sly Lives!, the title of which was supposedly a dig at people who, understandably, could’ve sworn the artist formerly known as Sylvester Stewart had in fact ceased to be with us many years ago. Well, he’s definitely not now… The amazing thing about him dying now, of course, is that somehow he lived long enough to do so; given the amount of drugs he was hoovering up during the 70s (which I suspect contributed to at least some of those undefined “underlying health issues”), I’m surprised he made it out of the decade, never mind this far into this one. The band itself was probably doomed to a short life, especially once the drugs took over, but that was a mightily bright flare-up while it lasted… by way of an example, here they are on TV in 1968 before things started to go downhill: