Ben Sommer is an angry man.
What's he angry about? What you got?.
On his chronological online bio he names 1997 as the year when he "cultivated a scowling, contrarian world view, suitable for a going-nowhere music career".
This means it has taken him over a decade to organise his libertarian rants into album format. Even then, he can only summon up eight tracks and thirty-two minutes of music; but for this we should be duly thankful.
Some of his targets are legitimate but patience with his loose cannon, mean-spirited world view wears thin very quickly
The opening track, Adult Children, is a mildly amusing piss-take of a pampered generation who don't want to face up to the real world but with a chorus of : "Ichi kichi kichi coo - waa waa" hardly merits being described as edgy, political rock.
There may be a case to say that Pakistanis who move to the US should learn to speak English but Sommer's song (Speekee English) is more like an attack on foreigners who 'speak funny' than a reasoned call for cultural assimilation. For good measure, this song also takes a sideswipe at lapse university standards ("sending out illiterates with PhDs").
Equally, ex-presidential aide Henry Kissinger may seem to be a reasonable target for criticism for his economic handling of the truth but any sympathy with Sommer is lost in the opening line : "He was a goose-stepping son of a fraulein" - a crass reference to Kissinger's German-Jewish background.
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Little Hitlers hits out at anyone who bosses you around in the name of democracy (planned economy and righteous thought control") while Sumerian Proletarian implies you're not even safe from this man's wrath in Ancient Mesopotania. Any foreigner (i.e. non-American) seems to be fair game in his book.
By the time you get to Right Wing Fiend, which rants against leftie liberals ,hippies, the homeless and junkies, it dawns on you that Sommer's political incorrectness is worn as a badge of honour.
The main exhibit for this charge is the closing track Kill The Estrogen in which he adopts the misogynistic role of rapper,MC Plosk, to dish the dirt on women's studies groups and, by implication, any woman with a brain.
All this claptrap is backed by some lame imitation of prog-rock (he plays all the instruments) - an appropriately anachronistic genre for a man who wasn't born for these times.
Ben Sommer's Website
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