What am I about to review is impossible to acquire legally through normal means. One may purchase The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu’s 1987 (What The Fuck Is Going On?) through eBay via second-hand sellers at an exorbitant cost due to its rarity, but it is impossible to buy new. This is because, after a copyright infringement complaint from ABBA, the corporate non-profit Mechanical-Copyright Protection Society (now known as PRS for Music) banned the store sales of 1987 (What The Fuck Is Going On?) after its first couple of weeks in June of 1987, and ordered the destruction of the remaining copies. As such, the only effective way to listen to this album is to download it illegally at torrent sites such as What, Waffles.FM, The Pirate Bay, and Demonoid. The writer himself downloaded the album off What.CD. We at TMT cannot legally even stream it, which is why there is no audio provided. 25 years after its release, in a year that has witnessed a massive political fight against the end-user on copyright through the SOPA/PIPA laws, a question for the artists that The JAMs asked remains unanswered, both legally and logistically: “” Or, by the same token, “When is sampling just plagiarism?”
These questions aren’t without merit. 1987 (What the Fuck is Going On?) was many things at once. It was the first attempt at a mash-up, at a time when sampling as an art form was still in its infant stages. It was two Scottish men sitting in a studio trying to exert all their emotions and stupidity into a form that had only recently acquired an identity that wasn’t theirs, with all the polish of a chainsaw to marble. It was a stark criticism of the late Thatcher era, and the media’s deference to utter banality over actual matters of importance. It was working out samples such as “Hey, Hey, We’re the Monkees” and “Superstitious” at a time when sampling was hard to comprehend to most people, who may have just thought of it as simple playback, and where a system of “clearing” samples had not even existed yet.
Bill Drummond (aka King Boy D) made for the most unlikely and perhaps undeserving rapper: a mid-30s, white, Scottish former A&R man-turned artist at a time when the Beastie Boys had only recently been accepted into the rap mainstream. And at times, he clearly missed his mark, sounding like he was reading off lyrics. But his lyrics, trashing everything from the press’ frothing over Princess Diana’s fashion sense (“The Queen and I (99 bpm)”) to the initial response to what was then the AIDS crisis (“All You Need is Love (108 bpm)”), maintained an honesty and earnestness in line with most rap artists at the time, with a dash of ridiculousness that made it clear he was just kind of bored. There are also a few moments where the lyrics gain a certain rare emotional sentiment for the time, as pointed in “All You Need Is Love (108 bpm),” which addressed the epidemic in chilling terms. More importantly, though, a small, offbeat set of lyrics at the end of the opening track “Hey Hey We Are Not The Monkees (100 bpm)” laid the foundation for what became the theme song of the duo, “Justified and Ancient.”
The sampling and production, the issues which caused the banning and destruction of the album, seems undeserving of its destruction, if only because it was so mediocre and slipshod that it did not merit the kind of drastic measures that the MCPS (and to a lesser extent, ABBA) demanded of it. Much of the production was at par with late 80’s electronic instrumentation, but without the polish or nuance of more accomplished acts. More importantly, it lacked any of the skill and talent inherent in the Cauty and Drummond’s later works as The KLF. The use of “Dancing Queen” in “The Queen and I (99 bpm),” itself the inherent source of the album’s non-existence, was ironically the most forced-in, lacking any and all meshing with the rest of album. That said, The JAMs’ toying with sample manipulation was a strong point, especially in “Next” and “Rockman Rocks (Parts 2 and 3).” The original instrumentation (and intermission-like vocal track “Mẹ Ru Con”) from KLF/JAMs ally Duy Khiem is an odd bend, but it mellows out some of the edge to this album.
And yet, it is this odd bend that is all you’re given (to a certain extent) with what The JAMs replaced it with, 1987 (The JAMs 45 Edits). The disturbing aspect of it is how samples were removed from the now-censored material: Given they were forced to give up the master tapes, and given the editing equipment of the time, the JAMs had to resort in removing the sound outright rather than the sample itself, akin to amputating a limb to remove a tumor. What appears, then, are periods of silence, often abrupt and varying in length (with one three-minute interlude, filled with “Top of the Pops” fragments, completely silenced), which all come across as very unnerving. Only a few samples survive from the original, in particular The Fall’s “Totally Wired.”
Now, were one to judge The JAMs 45 Edits as a piece of artwork outside the realm and the context of 1987 (What the Fuck is Going On?), there may be some merit. One could say that the periods of silence are meant to disrupt a listener’s perception of listening, and to take stock of lyrical value. Another could argue that the silences represent a censorship of a different kind all together, given the acidity of Drummond’s lyrics often between these moments of silence. One could say it’s just a complete joke, given the general silliness of the original album. However, to completely forget that The JAMs 45 Edits represents a “fixed” version of the original album only serves to propagate the goal of corporate censorship: Censorship with no checks, no balances, no recourse, and utter impunity.
