One sign you that you had overbearing egotist parents is that you have “Junior” after your name. Maybe a similar rule applies to rock bands that are titled “[Frontman’s Name] Group”.
Michael Schenker is known for his guitar skills, as well as his turbulent personality. He’s fortunate that he had most of his crack-ups in the days before social media: otherwise he’d be the heavy metal Kanye West: 30% musician, 70% source of amusement.
We’re talking stints in rehab, near homelessness, hunger strikes, feuds with with singers and producers and journalists and his own brother, cancelled tours, and a long list of other bizarre behavior.
Wikipedia advises me that forty-one musicians have played in Michael Schenker Group and have since quit or been fired. Schenker would probably fire himself from his own solo project, were such a thing were possible.
But he’s definitely brilliant. I listened to power metal for years, and one thing I’d always heard was that the style’s guitar playing owes a lot to Schenker. This is correct. There’s a straight line between most of what Schenker plays on this album and Helloween, and in the case of “On and On” – with its harmonized bends and cod-Bach synthesizer lines – it’s not even a line, it’s a dot.
This is one of the best-produced 80s albums I’ve heard, particularly the deep, thudding character of the drums. MSG has a real sense of precision and space in its mix, with everything built on top of each other like layers on a cake. It’s like you can throw a fishing line into the album and find where the vox are, where the guitars are, where the drums are, etc. Listening to MSG is a seriously good time before you even appreciate the notes.
“Ready to Rock” is an okay-ish cock rock anthem. “Attack of the Mad Axeman” seems like more of the same…but then Schenker pulls a drag-chute on the song and turns it into something adventurous and fascinating. His shredding over the final 32 or so bars…you are listening to power metal, at least five years before. Seriously revolutionary stuff.
“On and On” continues down this path, trading ethereal keys for smoldering wah pedal soloing. I’m struggling to think of more hard rock/heavy metal from 1981 that sounds like this. The Michael Schenker Group was an odd band: they didn’t sound out of place on MTV, but on a compositional level they had a quality that nobody else really possessed. Some quality of uncaring naffness and unfocused coolness.
“Let Sleeping Dogs Lie” and “I Want More” are forgettable. “Never Trust a Stranger” is the power ballad, and sounds like Elton John covered by Aerosmith. “Looking for Love” is a burning and agitated uptempo track with some great hooks and guitar moments. The final track is pretty good too, except for when the music drops away and they let Gary Bardem sing unaccompanied. He’s one of those guys who sounds great, but only if he’s located somewhere in a pile of 200 watt Marshall stacks.
Quick question: how many people live in Australia? About twenty-five million?
That’s right, but also wrong. Twenty-five million people don’t live in Australia; they live in Sydney, Brisbane, Melbourne, Darwin, Adelaide, and Perth.
Leave the coastal enclaves and Australia quickly becomes indistinguishable from Mordor: arid bush, thinly grassed plains, and huge expanses of sand that can only be described as wastelands. Australia has ten deserts – new ones were still being discovered two hundred years after white fella made landfall – and they’re every color you can name. The Simpson Desert is blood-red. The Tanami Desert is orange. The Painted Desert (which contains mica) is white streaked through brown. Australians might run out of water, oil, coal, and food, but we will never run out of deserts.
Only fourteen percent of Australians live in remote areas…remote areas that are virtually the entire country. This has engendered an endless and tiresome “cultural dialog” about who the real Australians are – the majority packed into urbanities engineered to look like their European countries of origin, or the minority who actually live in Australia.
Wake in Fright is a particularly nightmarish depiction of life in the Australian outback. The main character is a schoolteacher, posted out to some flyspeck town, who has just received his Christmas pay packet. He obviously intends to return to Sydney. Citydwellers view the outback like astronauts view the vacuum of space: a cool experience, but you don’t stay past the airlock a second longer than you have to.
En-route, he stops for the night at the slightly larger flyspeck town of Bundanyabba (modelled after the real town of Broken Hill). Everyone – police, bartenders, miners – is superficially friendly in a way that’s scary, as though they’re all wearing masks. The town has secrets hidden in plain sight: moral depravity, suicide, and sexual corruption. After nightfall the schoolteacher goes out to gamble, and loses all of his money. He is now dependent on the town’s generosity to survive, and the masks start to slip.
Like Picnic at Hanging Rock, Wake in Fright was written in the 1960s, and achieved international fame through a movie. After this, the similarities end. Picnic was oneiric and hallucinatory, Wake is blunt and stark. Hanging forces you maddeningly far away from itself, In draws you close. Rock is delicately ladylike, Fright is like watching a blood and shit covered tapeworm being pulled out with tweezers from a diseased cat’s asshole.
It’s a really vile book. There’s a scene in the middle as unpleasant as anything I can recall reading, and unlike American Psycho it accomplishes this without becoming a cartoon. Even descriptions of harmless events seem coated in filth and poison. Riding a train. Eating breakfast at a hotel. Innocent acts are seen through an authorial lens that focuses the dust-cauled Australian sunlight on dust, dirt, and unpleasantness.
There’s precisely one scene where Kenneth Cook blurs the writerly camera, obscuring the action on the page. He may have been afraid of censorship. Nevertheless, there are enough clues that you understand what’s happening.
Alcohol is the grease of the story, allowing the action to move. Everyone drinks all the time in Bundanyabba, and refusing to drink is an insult. Several times the protagonist tries to plead off the beers forced on him – there’s the sense that the town is trying to poison him – and the nice bloke offering the beer turns into a spitting viper. You have to be an alcoholic in the ‘Yabba. If you aren’t, you’re an outside.
This “get drunk or else” attitude is an authentic one. Australia is a nation of social drinkers – sometimes without the social. My father used to listen to Australian country musician Slim Dusty, who wrote dozens if not hundreds of songs about alcohol, such as “You’ve Gotta Drink the Froth to Get the Beer”, “Love to Have a Beer With Duncan”, “My Pal Alcohol,” and (most famously) “A Pub With No Beer”. “The maid’s gone all cranky, and the cook’s acting queer / What a terrible place, is a pub with no beer.”
Karl Marx described religion as “the opiate of the masses”. In rural Australia, the opiate of the masses is an actual opiate.
The outback doesn’t come off looking very good in Wake in Fright. It would be considered racist if it was set in a place where the people are black or brown instead of white (as happened with Dan Simmons’ Song of Kali, and Billy Hayes’ Midnight Express). To what extent it’s modeled on reality isn’t for me to say – I’m not sure that Broken Hill was ever the antipodean Gomorrah that Bundanyabba is. But there’s romantic depictions of outback life (“Waltzing Matilda”) that seem equally alien to me, based on my limited exposure to outback towns. Maybe the needle lies somewhere in between. Maybe I am fervently planning on never finding out where.
This book has 155 pages of the largest text I’ve ever seen in a book not for children or blind people, and one argument: everyone is conspiring against you. Your government, your church, your neighbors, your friends, your favorite sitcom star, and your cat. The conspiracy goes to the top, to the bottom, to the sides, and perhaps it even exists inward, inside your flesh. Trust no body. Not even your own.
But when you point at everything, you’re really pointing at nothing, and Jones’ omni-conspiracy makes no sense. This book doesn’t provide a coherent picture of anything except one man’s untreated mental health problems.
I wonder how Jones got Descent Into Tyranny published in the face of a globe-spanning totalitarian dictatorship. It couldn’t have been easy. The One World Government (which really exists and includes the Bush family, Gorbachev, Kissinger, Mao, “Adolph” Hitler, Stalin, Reagan, Osama bin Laden, and every billionaire and member of royalty worldwide) should have caused him to vanish into a black van years ago. Alex Jones’ worldview has no space in it for Alex Jones: he doesn’t realize this or doesn’t care. He’s like a man claiming that evil fairies will kill you if you speak of their existence: an obvious liar just by drawing breath. Jones is impossible to take seriously and his closing request that you wire him money – “The Republic is in great danger of being completely overthrown” – provokes the response “you just told me that every President since Eisenhower meets annually at Bohemian Grove to perform human sacrifice. What’s left to overthrow?”
But logical consistency isn’t important to Jones or his audience. A 2012 study found that conspiracy theories form a positive correlation matrix. Belief in one predicts belief in a second (and a third, etc). This remains true even when the theories contradict each other. In other words, if you answer “yes” to the statement “Princess Diana faked her own death”, you are more likely to answer “yes” to the statement “Princess Diana was murdered.”
I’ve seen Holocaust deniers argue (in message board posts 2 days apart) that Auschwitz had no crematoriums, and also that Auschwitz’s crematoriums would have only been able to burn a few thousand bodies in the time available. I’ve seen 9/11 truthers argue that no plane hit the WTC, and also that the Flight 93 hijackers were CIA patsies.
Sane people want to make sense of the world: they might be wrong about everything, but at least they will be wrong in an internally sensible wrongness. Conspiracy theorists, however, are driven by narcissism of the intellect: they alone know the truth, and everyone else is a sheep. They binge-watch Youtube videos and doomscroll Twitter because this validates them as people: they’re Neo, taking the red pill, committing an unthinkable act of bravery just by sitting in front of their laptop, ingesting nonsense. Theories are like dollars: the more of them you have, the richer you are. The fact that their fortune is in fools gold, counterfeit notes, and rubber checks doesn’t matter to them.
I found Descent into Tyranny to be a slog. Jones has the loud, bullying style of a radio host who’s used to steamrolling over guests and callers, and reading his book makes me feel like I’m being yelled at. I pity whoever has Jones over for Thanksgiving dinner; you couldn’t hold a reasonable conversation with this person about anything.
Sometimes Jones’ gonzo style produces funny results. On page 15 he repeats the story of Nero fiddling while Rome burned, but he gets it mixed up: he has Nero fiddling while setting fire to Rome (was he holding a firebrand between his toes?). Mostly, though, it plunges the book even deeper into its own epistemic quicksand. On page 101, he writes “For years, we warned people about FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency). The federal documents have been around for decades and include round-up plans and concentration camps.” End of section. Begin new section. This handwaving would be acceptable on a radio show, but this is a book. Can we see excerpts from these “federal documents”, or would that bloat Descent into Tyranny‘s length to an unpublishable 156 pages?
Descent Into Tyranny was written in 2002. I was curious to see how Jones’ political outlook evolved over time, as I remember Infowars being a left-libertarian website at the start. The book certainly has time for conspiracies beloved of the left: IMF, the World Bank, David Koresh as a harmless hippie victimized by The Man(tm), etc. It was published by a small outlet called Progressive Press, whose other excellent titles can be viewed online. (Excerpt: “The “Arab Spring” is revealed as part of the scheme to extend the Anglo-Zionist empire and its neo-liberal regime of plunder over the entire planet.”).
Jones was less fond of “Vladymir Putin” (sic) in 2002. In the section entitled “Putin Uses Terror”, he reveals that Putin destroyed an apartment complex using explosive plastique, killing 350 people. Fifteen years later Jones would be on Twitter writing stuff like “Looking forward to Putin giving me the new hashtags to use against Hillary and the dems… “ In fairness, Putin killed 350 people a long time ago. You have to let stuff slide eventually.
Jones runs out of material by the end, so he pads out the book with the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, and the Communist Manifesto (which was written by “global banking cartels”.) It’s gratuitous and farcical. He should have thrown in Huckleberry Finn and Of Mice and Men, then the book could have been a middle schooler’s summer reading list. Infowars’ slogan is “there’s a war on for your mind!” Alex Jones’ personal solution is to not have one.
