KMFDM - WWIII

C: Holy hell, Bottle. You look like you've been through a Jack LaLanne power juicer.

B: It's been a rough couple weeks. 

E: I was starting to get worried, you've barely reviewed anything since we finished the book.

B: no joke, this time of year is rough, everybody magically wants their houses and hotels and office buildings and crap finished before official winter sets in. Nevermind the covid and flu and all the wildlife fleeing the fields. And those rats on stilts. Fun fact, yes you're supposed to just hit the deer and let your airbag do its job. Yeah, no, i'll pass. Everybody already hates me for driving the speed limit, 5mph slower at dawn and dusk isn't gonna cramp my style any.

S: So, should we expect a halloween spectacular, or not?

B: i dunno. I was planning to do White Zombie or maybe have Compy do a real mixtape, but the world is right back to not having a clue how anything actually works, and i just can't care. I'm half tempted to do the official anti-W albums from the collection. Sure, why not? We'll start with WWIII.

KMFDM is part of the firmament of Industrial Rock/Metal. They started out as the kind of performance art that involves vacuum cleaners, and still exist. This isn't a band history though, so we'll just say that there are 3 kinds of people in this world: 1) people who have never heard of KMFDM, 2) people who only know of KMFDM in relation to Columbine, and 3) people who actually listen to KMFDM. I am the 3rd type of people. Musically, they are "ultra-heavy beat." 

They are also highly political, maybe like 1 or two steps down from Rage Against The Machine. Anti-authoritarian, anti-violence, anti-hate, anti-war, anti-fascism. You'd have to have a severe lack of understanding of sarcasm and self-deprecating humor to misconstrue what they are saying. Yes, it's highly critical of US political policy, but so am i and we're still friends, right? All i'm advocating for is a whole lot less authoritarian nincompoopery. I don't want to "retire" on the backs of future generations of the working class. I want to be paid now for being me and die when it's my turn.

E: But the Demonrats are trying to steal from private retirement funds.

B: i love you Skip, but that's moron talk. Yes, there are rules and regulations that keep the balance of your 401ks and IRAs assigned to you, but it's double-spent money. Every penny you contribute to your retirement fund is reallocated to working capital, and only the ledger entry remains. Your retirement payout comes from the retirement contributions of future people. I'm 41 and my 401k is sitting at 1 year's salary. If i don't find 7 times that much money before i'm 60, it'll just go straight to whomever owns my student loan debt. I'll be working the day i die of old age, so I cannot possibly care. The cost of my caring is 200,000.

I suppose i could sit down and do the math to find out if it's better to cash out now and use it to start my own business, but i don't want to just walk away from the people I'm trying to help. I like where i work, but some days i get the unpleasant feeling that everyone else is actually a useless moron and my job is to prevent them from figuring that out. I can't function like that, i need to believe people are malfunctioning from bad instructions, not hiding from their own ineptitude. 

Man, i'm way off track. The official translation of KMFDM is "no majority for the pity" with the German grammatical genders reversed (it was assembled from newspaper headline clippings and Sascha thought it was funny). That's some delicious wordplay right there. Critics say this album is blah, call it butt-rock, and generally act like i care what they think. That's a tough one because KMFDM is not a mainstream band, they just found some tangible mainstream validation in the mid-90s. WWIII is interesting because it's war on war. 

Well, Beefettes, this was not a great review. I'm gonna chalk it up to being sore in muscles i didn't know i had and not feel too bad about it. Plus, the 3rd book of better reviews becomes officially available next Monday, so we should reserve some if what's left of my brain for hyping the crap out of that. There's records inthe future too, they're just taking their sweet time getting here. Imma go to sleep, you guys do you. Oh, yeah, i almost forgot. Compy, we gotta do something about the website. Maybe a proper shop page or something. 

I do feel a bit better, though. That moonshine pouring banjo intro punctuated by gunshot is a real wake-you-up gesture, and putting the intro as the last track never gets not enjoyable for me. Yeah, we'll try again tomorrow. Cheers.