DEAD KENNEDYS AND VIDEO NASTIES: FUCK THE CENSORS, LONG LIVE THE NEW FLESH!

"The preachers and lecturers deal with men of straw, as they are men of straw themselves. Why, a free-spoken man, of sound lungs, cannot draw a long breath without causing your rotten institutions to come toppling down by the vacuum he makes. Your church is a baby-house made of blocks, and so of the state...The church, the state, the school, the magazine, think they are liberal and free! It is the freedom of a prison-yard.”- Henry David Thoreau.

OK, let's just set the scene with a little visual mood music. This is how modern Scotland is starting to feel like, metaphorically, to anybody with half a working brain and a sense of outrage at creeping state intrusion into personal business, and Free Speech:

You know, for nearly my entire life somebody has been trying to tell myself, and others, what we should watch or listen to or read. It started when I was a kid. I grew up during the 70s and 80s. They were both great decades for horror films, which I used to be into. The start of the latter decade heralded the great video recorder era. You could go into any video shop (Certex, short for 'Certificate X,' was my fave) in Falkirk, of which there were many (some charging a membership fee), and get whatever sleazy gory stupid crap you wanted: Driller Killer, Zombie Creeping Flesh, Cannibal Holocaust, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Mad Foxes, Zombies: Dawn of the Dead (the UK title for the 1978 Romero classic undead magnum opus), and on and on.

I used to go in with my dad (parents were much more liberal back then, or maybe just plain crazy, as myself and my lifelong friends can attest to) and he would take films out for me cos I was (way) too young. It's how I saw stuff like The Burning and Shogun Assassin and Prophecy and The Last House on the Left (original version) and The Deadly Spawn and any other amount of adult horror films as a preteen, and into my teens. Some were cut, most weren't. My story is not particularly unique; a lot of kids of all ages used to watch that mad stuff back then, and then go back to school after watching whatever gory piece of nonsense they had viewed to boast to their breathlessly excited pals about all the sanguinary-spilling madness in it. “Ye've goat tae see Zombie Flesheaters, man! A zombie fights a shark! N a woman goat her throat bit oot by a zombie! Blood pishing oot! Cool is fuck, man!” And then kids would hotly trot off to the local video shop, armed with new playground info on what splatter platter to look for and forward to.

Now, whatever your views on this, it was a long time ago in a gory galaxy far, far away. We saw films I would not show my own child these days. Never did me any harm, mind you, except for the decades in prison for crimes against humanity. (Laughing) But there's no point in looking back and crying over spilt fake blood. Besides, that golden era was soon going to come to a decades-long end anyway. In their infinite wisdom, the Tory scum down in London decided that it was high time they scored some (English) vote-winning 'morality' points and put an end to this horrifying video phenomenon endangering the poor impressionable minds of our innocent, pristine kids. Cos Thatcher the Milk Snatcher just cared so much about children. Just ask her pal Jimmy Savile.

Led by an insane, cobwebs-between-the-legs-and-ears fundamentalist Christian loony called Mary Whitehouse,

our Morally Pure Tory Overlords decided they were going to bring the recalcitrant video industry into line, to stop them polluting the minds of kids with with their vile vicious violent videos. Amazing how repressive shit is often done in the name of 'children' or 'family values,' eh? So they decided that they were going to ban some films, and severely censor others, so they could get a British Board of Film Censorship (which changed to 'Classification,' to try and obscure their true agenda) certificate, and thus widespread shop distribution. There was a huge deranged, hyperbolic moral panic about it. I can also remember when fucking Life of Brian was banned in Glasgow (ludicrous religious reasons), and when a midnight screening of The Exorcist was banned in Falkirk, because dumb cunt councillors here said they didn't want people coming out of the screening with “strange thoughts on their minds.” Self-projection is a fucking terrible thing, eh? I am not going to go too deeply into this whole thing, as it's comprehensively documented on the net, but here's a primer (random) documentary (one of many) you can watch, if you're at all interested in the subject:

Needless to say, all this psychotic hysteria and paranoia had moments of unintentional hilarity. The ironically-named Graham Bright, the slimy, ineffectual-male-sounding Tory lunatic who introduced a Private Member's Bill in 1983 to the House of Commons on the subject, believed that 'video nasties,' as the explicitly gory films had become pejoratively know, could actually affect DOGS. Yes, you read that right, violent horror films could affect CANINES. Here's the mad cunt gibbering his lunatic pish; you couldnae make this shit up:

As might be expected, this censorship annoyed the Hell out of us eyeball-poking-deprived depraved kids, raising wails of mockery and lamentation from us before bedtime. It taught us from a very young age to completely distrust and despise censorious governmental authority, which is an invaluable lesson that all children should be taught from an early age. In the late 80s and early 90s, my friends and I would trade uncut VHS tapes from all round the world with other underground and horror film fans, in open defiance of draconian government repression, hoping the tapes would not get caught by customs and confiscated. It was great fun, made all the more so by being illegal, and cemented in our young minds that no way in Hell would we ever be dictated to by censorious right-or-left-wing chimps for any reason whatsoever.

Ultimately, all that video nasties shite was just a total waste of time anyway. Nearly all the films they banned or cut back then (and as I said, I am only giving a very, very brief overview of this, hardly scratching the surface) are now freely available uncut on this island on DVD or Blu-ray. Or if you still can't find it on legal release here, like the deranged anti-classic Fight For Your Life, a hilariously nihilistic all-races hatefest (cautious viewing definitely required, though I am sure, as an adult you will survive if you watch it; I'm not treating you like a child):

you can just buy it from someplace, or go online and download a torrent of any piece of underground or horror or sleaze rubbish you want to see in minutes. So Slaggy Thatcher Canute

and her braindead parliamentary cohorts could only hold back the splatter tides for a few pointless decades. After Nekromantik (one of the most notorious late 80s, customs-confiscated banned releases; I did the first ever review of that sleazy classic in the classic American splatter mag Deep Red in 1988) got a BBFC certificate in 2016, after a mere 28 years of being banned, I knew the censorship game was up. I still despise censorship of any kind to this day because of that whole pathetic time. My friends and I hated the middle class condescension implicit in it all, as if the boorish unthinking proles were going to go mad and kill people through watching films we knew were fake anyway, and often not very good to boot. Some of these films, like, say, Anthropophagus: The Beast were so shite they deserved to be banned! Laughable and disgusting.

Anyway. Flashfastforward to 1987. In the interim period since the video nasty debacle, I had discovered indie and punk music. A pal gave me a loan of the first classic Dead Kennedys album Fresh Fruit For Rotting Vegetables for a loan of the classic first The Jesus and Mary Chain album Psychocandy. I took the album home from high school and sat, shocked (I distinctly remember thinking “You can't sing about that!” and am laughing at the memory), as they sang about killing children, sabotaging rollercoasters, killing the poor, and nerve-gassing golfers. The band quickly became my favourite, and I got into them just as their tinny last album came out in 1987, Bedtime For Democracy. Just my luck! Got into The Smiths just as they were permanently shutting up sonic shop, too. Nightmare!

Anyway.

In 1985, the subtly-named Dead Kennedys released their classic third album, Frankenchrist. In December of that year, some 14-year-old Californian dilettante debutante-type bought a copy of the album. This would have been fine, except for the fact that the album contained an insert with a painting by the now-deceased Swiss surrealist-cum-biomechanical artist genius H.R. Giger. Jello Biafra, the band's singer, saw the work as a grotesque portrait of modern America, with everybody looking to fuck everybody else over. Called Work 219: Landscape XX, aka Penis Landscape, it kicked off a massive shitstorm for the band, that would help change the American music industry forever.

I hope you're not too traumatised by looking at that.

Sue me if you are.

Incensed at, and disgusted by the painting (Christ, does anybody remember when people would actually go out and look for stuff that tested and challenged them, as opposed to hiding from it, and trying to get it banned?), Debbie Debutante's mother whined and whimpered to the California Attorney General, and Los Angeles prosecutors, to do something about the horribly-named band with the sick music and artwork that had intolerably indelibly corrupted her poor ingenue daughter. I don't know if she made any mention of the painting in question having any negative effects on dogs. Suffice to say, she started off a witch hunt, and the band had to undergo an obscenity trial in August 1987. Tipper Gore, the wife of vice-prez-at-the-time Al Gore (he of the 'save the world through eco-friendly lightbulbs or we're all fucked' fame), got in on the act, hideously bleating about (here we go again) family values.

It was a right old stooshie, with the band facing a year in jail and a $2,000 fine. Jello Biafra's home was raided by the feds. I was working on a Youth Training Scheme (YTS) at the time. It was basically a Tory unemployed-numbers-massaging trick. You did two years of incredibly low-paid work to see if you 'liked' a position then, if you did, and if your employer wanted to, they took you on. Or not. They got cheap labour, and the Tories got to claim you were in 'employment.' Everybody was happy. Except you, of course, for getting farmed out into some shit job, then possibly dumped at the end of two years of low pay, whereupon they would just start the whole slave labour scam anew with some other poor conned teen. You got £27 the first year, and £35 the second. 17 years old, I sent £7 from my 'wages' to the No More Censorship Defense Fund, to help pay the band's legal costs for the trial.

The music and band and Free Speech were so important to me. I, like many other youngsters, wanted to help out in any way I could. In the end the band thankfully got off with it, though it did kick in the era of Parental Advisory Warning stickers. Biafra said he found it “touching” that kids who had clearly never donated to anything in their lives (bringing tears to my eyes thinking about it; salute from Scotland, Jello! Yer welcome!) had kicked in cash to help keep Free Speech alive, and he and others out of jail. My name, along with many others, is on the back of the first Biafra spoken word album, No More Cocoons. Don't have a copy of the album (memo to self; buy one online), and the scans online are too small (the names were tiny on the back, but still there), or I would post it here. I also contributed some weird stories from newspapers that Biafra included in his spoken word album in a collagenikov satiric newspaper called Fuck Facts. It was a mix of real and fake stories; basically a forerunner of the net a decade or so before it kicked off. I will always be proud I gave money to that, and will never forget it. Ironically, I just found this story I have never seen, online, in researching this piece; better late than never, I suppose:

http://www.mtv.com/news/613/belated-apology-from-attorney-who-prosecuted-dead-kennedys/

I have also donated money to Martin Keatings' Peoples Action on Section 30 case a couple of times:

http://www.crowdjustice.com/case/pas30/

and to the For Women fundraiser to stop the SNP redesignating 'sex' as 'gender' in their current scummy unwell Orwellian phrase-phase:

http://www.crowdjustice.com/case/stop-scottish-government-redefining-woman/

I would urge anybody who has not done so to donate to both, for Scotland's future. And you know, it's funny, I had not even drawn the correlation between my teenage Dead Kennedys donation, and my middle-aged donations here. It's ridiculous that I should even have to make them in the first place.

"I can feel the heat closing in, feel them making their moves, setting up their devil doll stool pigeons...” - Naked Lunch.

So why am I writing this? Well, the atmosphere in this half-ruined, somewhere-evolving country is clearly getting more deranged and censorious by the day, and it disgusts and disturbs and bores me. When I sent money to San Francisco in 1987, I never could have predicted that 34 fucking years later I would be financially fighting, along with others, for Scottish Free Speech and Freedom of Country. And yes, I am just one person, a nobody, and my contribution here means little, but it's still not nothing, and at least lets others know they can think and speak a certain way, or alerts others to certain censorious dictatorial drifts in Scotland.

The last couple of days have seen the SNP start making ludicrous noises about how reading the investigative journalistic website Wings Over Scotland (though you can bet it will not stop there) should be an offence that could be punishable by expulsion from their party. Fir pity's fucking sake, huv ye ivir heard sae much utter shite in aw yer life? Imagine having the gall, the balls, the fucking temerity to tell people – people who have paid a membership fee, and who are ostensibly your supporters - what they should read, and what links they should pass on, or they will get chucked out of the party! Well, just because they are saying not to, here's a link to the site:

http://wingsoverscotland.com/the-scorched-earth/

It's genuinely incredible, though. I am actually shaking my head here. I would not have the fucking nerve to try something so vile and hilariously ludicrous. Imagine having such cast-iron belief in the infallibility of 'your' blurred, brainwashed, incomplete, America-copied views, and such condescension towards the views of others, that you would dare to tell them what to read and think and say and believe! Just like the mainstream unionist media these days as well. Or maybe those stone-set SNP New Fundamentalist Tenets aren't quite as safe and secure as they might seem, eh?

It's weird and horrible. All I am seeing now more and more online is calls to censor 'questionable' views and voices from the One True Scottish Queen SNP faithful. And my response to this dogshit is: who the FUCK do you people think you are, and what the FUCK gives you dumb cunts the right to try and tell me anything about my own reading habits, or thought processes, or artistic expression? Cos that's what this dumbfuck Hate Crime Bill from our legal degree-free (in)Justice Minister boils down to, a licence to prosecute and persecute anybody saying anything outside the New Approved Orthodoxy (TM SNP 2021), and it will be used at vindictive sexist censorious discretion. Makes me glad I am not an SNP member (I have voted for them consistently since coming back from America five years ago, but never again, not if this shower of lunatics are in power), but this willed hysterical paranoid madness has wider, damaging effects for the country at large as well, so I am free to comment. 

So far.

You know, I think it's about time these sneering, censorious, sniffy, snippy, shitty SNP fucks were brought back down to ground again with a well-earned net-rabbit-hole-filling-in crash. They're only a tiny, tiny fraction of the population of this country, against a far huger number who support independence without supporting a party losing members at a rate of knots. So they're ostensibly the only party who can deliver independence, eh? Aye, well, whatever. As things stand, I wouldn't want to be anywhere near a Scotland with these freakshow censorious loons in control, and it's not looking likely the party even think much about their mandate for existence anymore anyway. Maybe we should say the country wants to self-identify as a woman, and the only way for it to be able to do that is to break free from English colonial oppression. Sure S-----n would be all over independence like a rash were that the case.

I dunno, I'm just...I still...I'm almost at a loss for words. I still cannot get my head around the fact that somebody would want to censor somebody else, fuck them over, stop them speaking, potentially destroy their future, just to prove...what? That they have power over them? That they are 'right?' Or that the world is a much better place than it was and that they, as the middle class (cos this is where this dogshit is coming from, it's not working class people waving this worthless shit around in a morality-clit-length contest), can tell the racist, sexist, 'ableist,' (ludicrous made-up word) whateverthefuckist proles, what's what? 

As I keep saying, I find it hilarious they are spouting American pious platitudes and attitudes. Aping the most violent, biggest-arms-selling, destructive country on the planet, and thinking you're 'hip' and 'educated' and 'moral'...is just an unbelievably sick joke. Talking like yanks is the way the Brave New Scotlanders (TM) differentiate themselves from the Scottish common vulgar herd; slang has often been used to shut out outsiders, and as a verbal identifier; a rainbow badge and the use of intersectionalist gibberish are the 21st century version of "Whit fit ye kick wi?" I mean, this shit is bad enough coming from sniffy yanks, but when it comes from ostensibly Scottish wanks playing at being sniffy yanks...it takes the cake. And eats it. And pukes it all back up in the face of sanity and logic and debate and Free Speech.  Just ask Fuad Ramses and his pretend-human cow's tongue from worthless video nasty Blood Feast:

And all this talk of censorship only comes from one side here: the SNP/ostensible left. As usual, too, they're just copying America. Since the senile hawk Biden and his psycho sidekick Harris got elected, the USA has started cracking down on 'dangerous' 'right wing' speech. This basically translates as anybody they don't agree with, or whose voices they don't want heard: anybody working class and (not necessarily) white and in pain, basically. So they're starting to get into Fundamentalist Christian-Alike Censor-All Mode, to make sure the elites over there don't get a scare like they did with the election of the Trump chimp and its crazed farty babblings.

They decided then that they, as the omnipotent wonderful elites, couldn't be wrong, and the masses must be wrong in rejecting their wonderful self-serving worldview. So they set out 'remaking' America in fuck-the-racists mode, now fetishise black lives in the media, and are basically just pulling a reverse of the post-Civil-War tenets that held that black people were inferior to white people. Now white people are inferior to much-lionised black people, and the whole racial-divide-and-conquer scam can continue unabated, stopping white and black people from looking upwards to see who they should both be fighting against. Fuck it. There is hardly even a point to articulating all of this. People, especially younger people, or middle-aged SNP MSPs, seem to be having such a fine old time telling everybody older than them that they're racist, sexist, homophobic, whateverthefuckophobic...that it almost seems a shame to get in their cunty self-righteous way with some not-left-or-right lippy gobservations. Cos the way I see it, it looks exactly like this:

I am way beyond fucking sick of hearing all juvenile, asinine, troll-patrol he-said-she-said-they-said-we-said-me-me-me-said online dogshit from all sides. There is no real communication, no middle ground, no sanity, no sense, no dignity, no common cause. It's all just revenue-generating clickbait anger and arseholery from everywhere all the time. Nothing ever gets solved or debated; all this shit seems to do is let people let off steam, or get their 'moral' rocks off (“Trying to make some sense of it all/but it can see that it makes no sense at all”) by screaming at the heretics, the mavericks, the see-all-and-end-alls, the freethinkers and freedrinkers, the twisted-tongue-straighteners, the moron-frighteners, the left-versus-right-versus-wrongers, the intersectionalist stinking singsongers, the peace-longers, the we're-strongers, the closed-minders, the wearing-rainbow-blinders, the all-things-minders, the always-offended, the never-defended, the spindoctrinated, the media-masturbated, the can't-believe-they-said-that irate, the ideology pirates, the celeb politician idolators,
the minority-pleasers,
the white-skin-attackers,
the sanity-slackers,
the grubby gravy train trackers,
the bot and sold snotty-snout-troughers,
the rough-and-tumble tough-and-rumble
bored keyboard warriors, 
the laughers at the 
rattle and bang and batter and clang 
of the prison doors 
crashing coldly closed
behind the accused seditious
accused old-Scotland never-traitors.

(Sound of electronic-crickets chirruping in cyber-innerspace)

Eh...sorry about that, I do that sometimes. Go where I want writing-wise: always have done, always will . See, that's the thing about the wee tongue-twisters-and-cutters on both sides of the Atlantic: they are missing one fundamental American element I have always respected: Freedom of Speech. America-lover worshippers and preachers, here's something from their First Amendment you might want to take on board:

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

And aye, this does not cover hate speech, and that is something I need to research more, and will be doing so. Or maybe I don't have to worry, cos wee Humza Yousaf is going to spell it all out for us in his toilet paper Hate Crime Bill. But I doubt it. Look at, say, this article, from yesterday's National, where Stuart Cosgrove, a long-term fixture on the Scottish media scene (and ripping off Matt Taibbi here), is basically arguing for censorship:

http://www.thenational.scot/news/19106102.rush-limbaughs-death-reminder-toxic-views-deserve-no-platform/

Well excusez-moi, Mr. Cosgrove, who died and made you Prince of the Paragraphs, Seer of the Approved Speech, the Arbiter Artbiter? Everybody's views are anathema (hate that yank adjective 'toxic') to somebody else's! These days I have about as much trust in the modern SNP and (what is left of the) left in this country to safeguard Free Speech, or to tell me who I should or shouldn't listen to, as I would have of Dennis Nilsen as a Boy Scout leader. I mean, Cosgrove's looking to America to provide a lead, as usual, overtly or covertly admitting to our own fixation with that dump, and ramming a parable of some exploding-heart fatfuck cocksmoker shockjock (I know about Limbaugh, unfortunately) whose views did not deserve to be aired or listened to or rammed crammed slammed jammed down our uncaring throats. This is clearly a set-up for censorship of the wrong, 'unapproved' modes of thought and media consumption in Scotland, probably to be one of many 'censor the evil white supremacist' (a shitty term I fucking despise, that has gone from meaning neo-Nazis to basically any white person the 'left' feel like spitting on and 'cancelling') type of pieces coming. Well, they can all save it, and shove it up their self-righteous bahookies, cos I sure as Hell will not be reading them, or bowing before anti-intellectual anti-artist con artists. 

And having today (22/02/2021) read a hit piece on Stu Campbell by a simpering, whimpering agitprop-spilling clown who writes for The National (not naming the horrible wee cunt; and his paper is a dubious-agenda piece of Pravda shit I will never in my life read again after today), attempting to smear Stu and his supporters/readers as Qanon-type cultist loons who need looking out for, I am becoming more and more convinced that there is some sort of concerted censorship effort underway here. I am beginning to wonder what American elements are at work in our government, because the smearing, censorious methodologies are just too similar and coordinated (no random group of people just suddenly comes up with a way to smear their opponents overnight in lockstep concerto) at the exact same time this is going on in America. This insane ideology is taking place round the world, mind you, so...fuck knows. Could just be the dumb cunt Scottish government copying America as usual. Not going to attempt to analyse it too deeply. Down that rabbit hole lies complete insanity, or being some sort of Twitter shut-in. And neither of those fates worse than death is going to happen.

"Thankful to live in a place
 Where I can say the things I do 
 Without being taken out and shot
 So I'm on guard against the goons
 Trying to take my rights away" - Dead Kennedys

I must admit, I couldn't care less what the SNP say, or what laws they make. They are a rogue party, a busted flush, a birthday cake left out in the insanity-dissolving reality rain. They mean less than fuck all to me. I will not have people with no real understanding of art or Freedom of Speech try to dictate to me, or to my country. It's a joke, a sweet sick joke. But, to quote Morrissey, which I know isn't done anymore, who fucking cares: “That joke isn't funny anymore.”

One other illustration of the general concept under crazed razing soliloquy for you. I lived in a Chicago suburb called Skokie for six months in 2010/11. It used to be a heavily Jewish area post-WWII, and was the only place where I ever saw a concentration camp victim, an old man with the number on his arm, in a supermarket. My blood ran cold, because I knew what it meant. But in 1977, neo-Nazis wanted to march through the village. This caused distress, for obvious, calculated reasons. Eventually, the march got moved to another area. But at the time, the American Civil Liberties Union were prepared to defend the right of the neo-Nazis to march – and assign them a Jewish lawyer at that! If you ever saw The Blues Brothers, the Illinois Nazis bit was based on this disgusting proposed march.

http://www.aclu.org/issues/free-speech/rights-protesters/skokie-case-how-i-came-represent-free-speech-rights-nazis

I mean, can you even conceive of such a thing happening today, on either side of the Atlantic? You practically get arrested just for saying the word 'Jewish' in the wrong tone of voice! Just ask Grouse Beater (whom the SNP owe an apology; hope you're feeling better, Gareth!) or the disgustingly persecuted and prosecuted uninteresting shitposter Mark 'Count Dankula' Meechan about that one. But it just goes to show the extent to which America used to stand up for Free Speech, and to show what is under attack and threat now. Scotland is too parochial and our parliament too young and halfwits-run to understand the wider ramifications and impacts of homegrown extremist legislation like this Hate Crime Bill rubbish. Then again, if they're (note I did not say 'we're,' cos this has fuck all to do with me, and never will have) copying America, and America is going backwards on one of the few things I still find admirable about it...why not? Fuck it. Let's just see what happens. “I say evolve, and let the chips fall where they may,” as Brad Pitt put it in Fight Club. And the first rule of SNP Fight Club is...

...you do not talk about SNP Fight Club, or you get thrown out of the party. But N----a, hen, no amount of panicked attempts to cover up the net truth are going to work. The jig is up. And good luck to Alex Salmond going in to speak for himself at the inquiry when he does. About time the vile truth about this whole horrible case came out. Let's amputate, cauterise, and move on. We have better things to do.

THE BEGINNING...SORRY...END...SORRY...FUCK KNOWS ANYMORE...

PS: Let's leave on a note of sonic levity; let there be light entertainment. A bit of gay satiric multilingual Norwegian death metal, mixed with Puerto Rican reggaeton, did you say? Here you go! Just what the doctor ordered! "Profanar la tumba, al ritmo de la rumba" ya bas! Burn down churches and sing and swing and along!   

PPS: The second half of the title of this article comes from the final line of the first ever article I had published, as a teen. It was about censorship, and was for Deep Red magazine. I had a bee in my bonnet back in the 80s about censorship (the more things change) and had written an article about it. I wanted to swear in print (oooh, crazy! Teen anarchy, maaan!) and make a final 'statement' about Thatcher and her scum cabal. "Long live the new flesh" is a line from the 1983 David Cronenberg film Videodrome. I told Chas Balun, the now-deceased Deep Red editor, he could take the line out if he wanted. He didn't want to. He was totally against censorship, and didn't give a fuck. RIP Chas, and thank you for giving me my start in writing. Never forgotten. You would never have put up with any of this worthless censorshit. For one single second. Long live the new flesh. Forever.