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December 28th, 2006 by Eric K (Permalink)
Label: Abduction Year: 2006 Add Comments |
We are all Mohammed now. Mark Gergis, aka Porest has assembled a collage of worldly influences and cut-and-paste spoken word samples that will provoke like no other release in 2006. Pinning down precisely what it is about this records blatant and somewhat crude political grandstanding that has created such antagonistic responses is not so easy to do. Post-modernism pretty much eradicated any hopes for popular music as an effective platform for social and political change and in today’s fear-ridden climate it has become almost impossible to even discuss any political issue without being tagged with the black spot of Anti-Americanism. Political satire, almost entirely excluded from mainstream availability, is confined to a carefully managed few with strict limits imposed on what they may or may not say, whether they do so consciously or not. It’s Steven Colbert at a back-slapping Republican dinner; it’s Borat poking facile fun at the triumvirate targets of acceptable American comedy: rednecks, suburbia and Jews (oh, and occasionally the clinically obese).
So when a record as shockingly offensive as Tourrorists! comes along it creates a furore of McCarthyist proportions that would make Tipper Gore blush. Personally, I find it hard to be offended by anything purporting itself to be Art and am vehemently opposed to any form of artistic censorship believing this only to exacerbate rather than resolve political issues. The tongue-in-cheek nature of Porest’s Cassetteboy-esque sample-salvaging further marks this release out as slightly puerile subversion rather than a genuine political threat. Besides, the music is, for the most part, a joyous riot worthy of any listener’s attention regardless of political convictions. Continental Revolt is the only time I’ll let the words ‘Asian folk shindig’ stand favourably beside ‘righteous hoedown.’ Magic Carpet of the Holocaust Revival is a similarly inventive hotchpotch of non-Western musics. And that is where the true commendation for this record lies. For Gergis does not, as so many of his plunderphonic-compatriots, simply appropriate the music of foreign cultures but weaves from them a decidedly American patchwork that typifies all that is admirable about multi-cultural integration. His crafty plagiarythms are infinitely more enjoyable and enduring than the, usually, unrefined tracks sampling unsuspecting white, middle-class speakers into satiric diatribes. Betraying his studious background as ethnomusicologist extraordinaire, Gergis splices the polar opposites of American and third world culture without debasing the qualities of either.
After a year of wallpaper pretty boys with stick-on guitars, about as edgy as a circle with a Che Guevara poster, should we not welcome anything that’ll shake up the impenetrable mundanity? Porest: It’s not clever (but it’s a damn sight more danceable than Willy Nelson).
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January 16th, 2007 at 6:07 pm
Wow, this review seems to be out of it’s depth, full of contradictions and meandering between sweeping generalizations and subjective associations (willy nelson?). This review does what so many reviewers do instead of discuss the music, it wanders off into private journal land, trying to sort out vague ill informed ideas about “the world” to the extent their aware of it. You’d get the idea the Tourrorists is just smashup samples, not a word about the range of what goes on here from fully orchestrated band to text-to-speech radio dramas, to field recordings. “Puerile” is when you can’t grapple with something unfamiliar so you just post some personal musings on the 20th century and call it a music review. Sad.