When an album is as far from the pack as HUNGRY GHOST’s 11 tracks from the last 3 years things have either fallen way behind or they’re so far ahead they must have taken a short-cut.
For one thing, this is straight down the line smack in your face political music, in the way that Woodie Guthrie and Billy Bragg have been. There’s no post-Black List accommodation and no slick Blairite revisionism. No hippie retreatism and no cute post-modern cowardice.
It’s Tom Paine, it’s Karl Marx and it’s as punk as it gets. My illusions about contemporary US society today tell me are that a band could get lynched for stuff like this. In the UK they would, simply, be ignored. Popular culture has been successfully Murdoched, and anything straightforwardly political attracts sneering ridicule. But no engagement.
So, Hungry Ghost are about the big picture. “Disinformation”, “Bill Of Rights”, “Bush Knew”, “Police State Xmas” are helpful titles. The songs are pretty angry, and pretty punkishly loud. The words get swallowed a bit in the rage and the loudness. And that’s a shame because the music on its own doesn’t really express enough vitality or enough rage to mobilise the comrades to action. The words ought to be clear, sharp and demanding.
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Are they?
Some slogans work OK. “Big Brother Go Away! We’ve Got The Bill Of Rights!” is pretty clear, and nicely shoutable. Not very specific, though.
Sadly, “Bush Knew” pretty well sums up the general approach.. Lacking political coherence or discipline, HUNGRY GHOST would rather peddle scary movie scripts than hard informed analysis. Whether Bush knew about 9/11 or not makes absolutely no difference. As a “cause” it just muddies the water. Like the famous South Park “Chewbacca Defence” it confuse the jury so much that anything could be true. We know that politicians are bad people. What we need from music is a coherent call to pratical action. Breathless pogoing wasn’t on Lenin’s list as far as I remember. But this stuff calls for little else.
http://musicishere.com/artists/Hungry_Ghost/Hungry_Ghost
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