Cabaret Voltaire - Red Mecca

E: Bottle, i'm really lost here. I sort of get the coin flip metaphor, but i don't understand the point.

B: oh, ok, that's sort of an easy one. We're stuck. Instead of doing anything, we're just flipping a coin without calling it in the air. The point is that we are literally ignoring the choice because we are somehow dissatisfied with 50/50. I don't know why, i mean statistics says 50/50 is better than nothing. Still, that's not the real answer to your question. The real answer is that we're afraid of all the consequences, even the good ones.

E: ok, sure, what's your point?

B: let's look at it like binary logic, but with goods and bads. Good + good = good, and bad + bad = bad, right?

E: yes?

B: but that's not the whole story. A good thing that turns out bad is bad, but a bad thing that turns out good is still bad; a different kind of bad, but not everyone has such a discerning palate. The end result is that 3/4 of the possibilities are some form of bad. 75% of the time, everything sucks. We tell a lot of stories to make that suck less terrible and/or inflate how much more awesome that 25% good is, but every once in a while we all pretend to sneeze while saying "horseshit." It's better to keep a mental scorecard, and shuffle the burden around appropriately.

E: but that looks like favoritism.

B: dude looks like a lady, doesn't mean it's true. You have to either figure it out, or make it not an issue.

E: but people are unfair all the time.

B: yes, but only because they don't have good choices available to them. Even if they did, they have so much experience getting shafted by making good choices that they eventually give up. Making a game out of real life is the real unfairness, in my opinion.

E: but that's not fair.

B: nothing is magically fair. 100 times a day people hand me choices to make that don't actually affect me either way. Sometimes i refuse to make them, sometimes i flip a coin, mostly i say "you suck it up today and i'll make it up to you because he's done more than his fair share." Then i remember that and the next time it happens i go the other way. Now, if you don't like the choices i make, stop bringing me garbage that doesn't affect me, i'm not your mom or your dad. I'm not afraid to choose wrong, but i take the consequences into account and try to mitigate them. Context is everything.

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C: Bottle, do you remember that conversation you had with Skip back on Aug. 12?

B: not by date, no, was that about the time he went on his little adventure?

C: yes, and more importantly, are you sure you're not psychic?

B: like 99.2%, why? Oh, yeah his wireless adapter crashed and i joked about being the Transcriptionist of Doom. What's your point?

C: well, now all of a sudden you're moonlighting as a moonlighting transcriptionist. That's a bit iffy, don't you think?

B: nah, total coincidence. I don't mean the two things are unconnected, i just mean it isn't voodoo magic.

C: ok, this time i'd love to hear it, because i'm befuddled.

B: ok, sure, there are a few not at all supernatural forces at work. 1) i've had years of practice manipulating what jumps to the top of my feed tomorrow, 2) facebook is filtering out a fair bit more garbage than they were even 6 months ago, and 3) there's only so many sponsored ads to go around. Writing "transcriptionist" obviously gives those things a bump in relevance. I also read comments, so i had the names of a couple prominent sites that do first pass speech recognition, but need actual brains to correct them. I also need money and hate gibberish computer generated closed-captioning, so i thought it should only take a month or so to decide if i really can make part time job money at it, what's there to lose? The fact that all those things happened to coalesce, not to mention Bottle's mom was a medical transcriptionist, just means i was predisposed to key in on the possibility. See? Not magic, totally mundane human psychology.

C: oh. I guess that makes sense. Not exciting, though. 

B: who said life was supposed to be exciting? Not me. In fact, i often imply i'd like it to be even less exciting than it actually is. I don't get bored, remember?

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S: sorry i was late, i had some business to attend to. This earlier than normal stuff is hard to make happen.

B: no worries, but now that you're all here, are you ready for the real terrifyingly clairvoyant coincidence?

C: i think i see where this is going. How morbid are you going to get?

B: only the minimum. Skip, what did we talk about this morning?

E: oh, the way we perceive the coin flip.

B: exactly. Compy, you and i just talked about coincidence, and how the behind the scenes of facebook play into it, right?

C: yes?

B: ok, so last night i just felt like i needed Rob Zombie, or more generally the Industrial side, but from my dwindling supply of albums i haven't written about. Well, sadly, Richard H. Kirk died today. I can't lie, i like Coil better, but they do rank higher than Atari Teenage Riot, so we're just going to randomly pick their 3rd album to listen to tonight.

C: wowzers.

B: hold that for a moment from now because their 3rd album is Red Mecca, and it's very explicitly a 50/50 split about the rise of televangelism and the Christian Right on one hand, and the Soviet-Afghan War and the Iranian Hostage Crisis on the other. See the difference?

[Chorus]: wooowzeeerrrrs...

B: yeah, that's the kind of intricately nuanced coincidence that keeps me up at night. 1981, if you're keeping a historical checklist. Here it is 40 years later and it's like a recurring theme. Good news, Cabaret Voltaire has that covered with those twisted Henry Mancini bookends. Same dress, different window.

Cabaret Voltaire was pretty out there, more public happening than band at first, but they played a lot of shows with Joy Division, and it was the Punk scene itself that made Cabaret Voltaire shows musically legitimate, rather than just an evening of fist fights and bottle throwing between the band and the audience. Throbbing Gristle was very interested in signing them to Industrial Records, but Rough Trade offered to give them a tape machine instead of an advance, so the rest is history.

Chris Watson left the band after this album, and they followed New Order into a more commercial direction after Ian Curtis's suicide. So, this is kind of their last proper Expirimental Industrial album, and it's really good. You aren't going to have any idea what he's singing when he's singing, but it's probably not optimistic. Instead, what you should focus on is that some kids from Sheffield are trying to make music with found sounds, random pieces of electronic equipment, and only the crappy reality of being teenagers in Sheffield in the 70s, Sheffield being a significant epicenter of innovation during the Industrial Revolution. By the 1970s, however, international competition was tanking the iron, steel, and coal mining industries. When Thatcher came to be Prime Minister in 1979, the bottom dropped out and cities became an "economic problem." No secret i'm not a fan of Thatcherism, and it's because right wing economic policies turn human life into a game of numbers. Larger numbers get larger, smaller numbers get smaller, and only abject stupidity can make that reality different. Great for the people who had enough money to buy their own life raft, terrible for the working class and their children and grandchildren.

Now you might be confused and think i hate cities altogether. I don't. The problem is that economic theories cannot translate from one scenario to another. The economic systems of a city are fundamentally different from the suburbs or rural areas, because each scenario places unique restrictions on the psychology and physical reality of its inhabitants. Add to that the fact that all 3 interact with each other in logistically unchangeable ways and it should be obvious that a blanket definition of economics is deranged.

We have this strange idea that Urban, Suburban, and Rural areas are naturally separate from each other, that all the businesses should be here, and all the houses over there, and the fields and animal poop miles away so we don't have to think about it. We have trucks and trains and boats to move them around, so we don't have to think about that either. Everything we need just exists in a warehouse and someone can bring it to me whenever i want. That's a delusion, and it's the actual source of most modern problems. We forget that right now is a unique time in human history. Right now is the living with our choices stage, and we see all of the expected coping strategies. But, i'm rambling. We were listening to some kids from Sheffield express their lives at the epicenter of a schism between right and left socio-economic ideologied at a 40-year later schism between left and right socio-economic ideologies. Rest in Peace, Richard H. Kirk.

https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_m_OPwZcLQeJ09j4CLlJHuArDiIAoxDs78