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1987 (What the Fuck Is Going On?)

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1987 (What the Fuck Is Going On?) was the debut album by The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu (The JAMs) and a landmark release in the early history of sampling.

Context

On New Years Day 1987, Bill Drummond decided to make a hip-hop record under the pseudonym The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu.[1] Knowing little about the current technology, he invited Jimmy Cauty, formerly of the band Brilliant, to join him. Cauty readily agreed, and The JAMs' debut single "All You Need Is Love" was independently released on 9 March 1987 as a limited edition one-sided white label 12".[2] The reaction to "All You Need Is Love" was positive, with the record being made single of the week in Sounds Magazine[3]. However, its blatant reliance on deliberately uncleared—and hence illegal—samples made commercial release impossible. Sounds, for example, rhetorically asked: "How have [The JAMs] produced a record more powerful than [John] Lydon/[Afrika] Bambaataa's 'World Destruction' without laying a finger on a synthesiser or guitar? THEFT! By stealing all the various beats, noises and sounds they've wanted, and building it into their own stunning audio collage, [The JAMs] are making a direct assault on the way records are put together."[3]

The JAMs re-edited the single, removing or doctoring the most antagonistic samples. An MC5 sample was replaced, as was all but a snatch of The Beatles' "All You Need Is Love"), while recurring samples of Samantha Fox's "Touch Me (I Want Your Body)" were left intact. The result, "All You Need Is Love (106bpm)", was released in May 1987.[4] "All You Need Is Love (106bpm)" would later feature on 1987 (What the Fuck Is Going On?) and, according to Drummond, profits from sales of the single funded the recording of the album:

As you will have read in your friendly rock paper, the record could not be bought as nobody would distribute it for fears of prosecution. John Peel couldn't play it and we had no money left. Then a couple of major companies threatened to sue. Fuck them. So we edited the record in such a way that brought us inside the "law" but still got up peoples noses, and got the record out. With the money from the single we booked five days in a cheap studio and recorded 1987-What the fuck is going on?. We made it, not giving a shit for soul boy snob values or any other values, we just went in and made the noise we wanted to hear and the stuff that came out of our mouths. We lit a bonfire and put what we could get hold of, on it and then recorded the sound of the flames licking up the pyre. Not a pleasant sound but it's the noise we had. We pressed it up and stuck it out. A celebration of sorts.[5]

File:The JAMS - 1987 (What The Fuck Is Going On?) .jpg
The back cover of 1987, depicting the typeface used throughout Drummond and Cauty's work.

1987 (What the Fuck Is Going On?) was released in June 1987. Like "All You Need Is Love" before it, the album was made using an Apple II computer, a Greengate DS3 digital sampler peripheral card, and a Roland TR-808 drum machine.[6] Also as before, The JAMs liberally plagiarised from the history of popular music, cutting chunks from existing works and pasting them into new contexts, underpinned by rudimentary beatbox rhythms, and overlayed with Drummond's raps, of social commentary, esoteric metaphores and mockery. Drummond:

We'd just got ourselves a sampler, and we went sample-crazy. We just ... went through my whole collection of records, sampling tons of stuff and putting it all together, and it ... was a real rush of excitement, when we were doing it.... When we put that record out, we knew what we were doing was illegal, but we thought it was gonna be such an underground record, nobody would ever hear about it. So the first thing that shocked us is that British rock papers gave a big review.[7]

People did indeed hear about it, including the management of Swedish pop group ABBA: The JAMs had sampled large portions of the ABBA single Dancing Queen on the track "The Queen And I"(sampleⓘ). A legal showdown with ABBA and the Mechanical-Copyright Protection Society (MCPS) followed, 1987 was forceably withdrawn from sale, and The JAMs were ordered to "deliver up the master tape, mothers, stampers and any other parts commensurate with manufacture of the record".[8] Drummond and Cauty travelled to ABBA's home country of Sweden, taking an NME journalist and photographer with them, along with most of the remaining copies of the LP. Of these LPs, some were disposed overboard on the North Sea ferry trip across, more were burned in a Swedish field at 3 a.m. (as shown on the cover of their next album, Who Killed The JAMs?), yet more were giving to a Swedish prostitute, and the remainder were set adrift on a fjord using a makeshift raft. The JAMs also played a recording of "The Queen and I" loudly outside the offices of ABBA's record label, Polar Music.[9] In a December 1987 interview, Cauty maintained that they "felt that what [they]'d done was artistically justified."[10]

The JAMs secretly withheld some copies of 1987, of which "the last five" were offered for sale at £1000 each in a full-page advertisement in The Face.[11] This served Drummond & Cauty's legend-making aspirations well.

Composition

1987 is raw and unpolished, the sound contrasting sharply with the meticulous production and tight house rhythms of the duo's later work as The KLF. The beatbox rhythms are basic, samples often cut abruptly, and distinctive plagiarised melodies (such as ABBA's "Dancing Queen") are often played with a high-pitched rasping accompaniment. The plagiarised works are arranged so as to juxtapose with each other as a backdrop for The JAMs' rebellious messages and social comments. Many of the songs are self-referential statements of The JAMs' agenda and outlaw methods, embued with the fictional backstory adopted from Illuminatus!. Other songs have specific social targets for Drummond's satirical raps.

The album's opening song, "Hey Hey We Are Not The Monkees", begins with simulated human sexual intercourse noises arranged as a rhythm. The album's first plagiarism is a sample "Here we come..." from The Monkees' theme. It progresses into a cryptic and bleak spoken verse from Drummond: "Here we come, crawling out of the mud, from chaos primeval to the barnyard sun, dragging our bad selves from one end of time, with nothing to declare but some half-written rhymes". A cacophone of more samples from The Monkees' theme and an abrupt cut take the track into an original a cappella vocal line that later became The KLF's "Justified and Ancient". The track ends with a long sample of a London Underground train arriving at and leaving a tube station, with its mechanised warning to passengers, "Mind the gap...".

"Don't Take Five (Take What You Want)" (Audio file " The JAMs - Don't Take Five (Take What You Want) (excerpt).ogg" not found) follows, featuring The JAMs' associates Chike (rapper) and DJ Cesare (scratches). Built around Dave Brubeck's "Take Five" and Fred Wesley's "Same Beat",[6] the cryptic song has anti-consumerist and anti-colonial overtones: "I was pushing my trolley from detergent to cheese when I first saw the man with antler ears. I tried to ignore but his gaze held my eyes when he told me the truth about the basket of lies".

"Rockman Rock (Parts 2 and 3)" is a homage to Jimmy Cauty that plagiarises from a wide array of sources, including the "Bo Diddley Beat" and "Sunrise Sunset" from the Fiddler on the Roof soundtrack.

The more outward-looking second side of the LP begins with "Me Ru Con", an emotive traditional Vietnamese song performed a cappella by The JAMs' friend Duy Khiem. The track contrasts with the rhythms and Western cultural satire which permeate the record. According to Drummond, it was a spontaneous recital by Duy Khiem, who was in the studio contributing clarinet and tenor sax to the album.[6]

"The Queen and I" (sampleⓘ) features long samples from throughout ABBA's "Dancing Queen", often overlain with a rasping detuned accompaniment. These lead into Drummond's satirical and discontent rapping, a fictional account of his march into the British House of Commons and Buckingham Palace to demand answers. After nearly three minutes of pure sample from the television show "Top of the Pops", Drummond cries "Fuck that, let's have The JAMs!". The acerbic "All You Need Is Love (106 bpm)" (sampleⓘ) follows, using an AIDS public information film, glamour model Samantha Fox's "Touch Me (I Want Your Body)" and the nursery rhyme "Ring a Ring O'Roses" to deliver comments on the British public's attitude to sex and the British media's reaction to the AIDS crisis.

The final song is "Next", which Drummond describes as "the only angst-er on the album", with "imagery of war and sordid sex".[6] The track uses Stevie Wonder's "Superstition", Scott Walker's "Next" from Scott 2, and "The Lonely Goatherd" from The Sound of Music, alongside Khiem's original melancholy clarinet and tenor sax contributions.

Reviews

Q Magazine had criticisms of 1987: that there are "too few ideas being spread too thin", with some songs "overlong" and some questionable sample choices leaving "the impression of a random hotchpotch"; and that The JAMs' "use of the beatbox is altogether weedy". However, "there are some wickedly amusing ideas and moments of pure poetry in the lyrics while some of the musical juxtapositions are both killingly funny and strong enough to stand repeated listenings".[12]

A reviewer for Melody Maker found 1987 "inspirational", and "the most exciting, most original record [he'd] heard in years". However, he too thought that: "Some snatches [of plagiarised music] rather outstay their welcome, tugging tell-tale glitz away from the clifftop and dangerously close to smug obviousness, but when the blows are kept short, sharp and very bloody, they make anything else you're very likely to hear on the radio dull and desperately humourless."[13]

In awarding 1987 the maximum five stars, Sounds—a publication that offered the duo's work consistent approval—mused, "Taking the sound of the moment (hip hop) as a backbone, 1987 steals sound artefacts from anywhere ... and meshes them together with King Boy's hysterical 'Clydeside' rap method with bewildering effect. ... [Y]ou could call this sampling technology's answer to T.S. Eliot's arch cut up work, The Wasteland. "[14]

A retrospective review by The All Music Guide said that 1987 is "a hilarious record" filled with "comments on music terrorism and [The JAMs'] own unique take on the Run-D.M.C. type of old-school rapping."[15]

Giving a retrospective review from across the Atlantic, Trouser Press described 1987 as "energetic" and "a loopy dance album that isn't unlike a lot of sampled records, but proceeds from an entirely different cultural understanding."[16]

Track listing

  1. "Hey Hey We Are Not The Monkees" (6:00)
  2. "Mind The Gap" [unlisted] (1:02)
  3. "Don't Take Five (Take What You Want)" (3:59) Audio file " The JAMs - Don't Take Five (Take What You Want) (excerpt).ogg" not found
  4. "Rockman Rock" (Parts 2 and 3) (6:29)
  5. "Why Did You Throw Away Your Giro?" [unlisted] (0:20)
  6. "Me Ru Con" (2:23)
  7. "The Queen And I" (4:43) sampleⓘ
  8. "Top of the Pops" [unlisted] (2:51)
  9. "All You Need Is Love (106 bpm)" (4:55) sampleⓘ
  10. "Next" (7:15)

1987: The JAMs 45 Edits

Following the enforced deletion of the 1987 album, the Justified Ancients of Mu Mu promptly released an edited version as a 12" single, unauthorised samples substituted by periods of silence. The sleevenotes explain to the purchaser in a rather tongue-in-cheek fashion how to recreate the original album for themselves:

File:The JAMS- 1987 (The JAMS 45 Edits).jpg

This record is a version of our now deleted and illegal LP '1987, What The Fuck Is Going On?' with all of the copyright infringing 'samples' edited out. As this leaves less than 25 minutes of music we are able to sell it as a 12-inch 45. If you follow the instructions below you will, after some practice, be able to simulate the sound of our original record. To do this you will need 3 wired-up record decks, a pile of selected discs, one t.v. set and a video machine loaded with a cassette of edited highlights of last weeks 'Top of the Pops'. Deck one is to play this record on, the other two are to scratch in the missing parts using the selected records. For added authentic effect you could use a Roland 808 drum machine (well cheap and what we used in the original recordings) to play along behind your scratching.[6]

Personnel

Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty were responsible for its concept and production of 1987, its lyrics and the TR-808 beatbox rhythms. Drummond provided rap, and an additional rapper introduced as 'Chike' appears on "Don't Take Five (Take What You Want)" and "Rockman Rock (Parts 2 and 3)". Duy Khiem contributed lead vocals to "Me Ru Con", as well as clarinet and tenor sax to "Rockman Rock (Parts 2 and 3)" and "Next". Uncredited female vocalists appear on "Hey Hey We Are Not The Monkees", "Rockman Rock (Parts 2 & 3)" and "All You Need Is Love (106 bpm)".

Notes & references

  1. ^ BBC Radio 1 "Story Of Pop" documentary interview with Bill Drummond. First BBC broadcast believed to have been in late 1994, and was transmitted by Australian national broadcaster ABC on January 1 2005.
  2. ^ Longmire, Ernie et al (2005). KLF discography Compiled by Ernie Longmire, this has been the authoratative KLF discography on the internet for some 10 years or more and has been the subject of long-term scrutiny and peer review by KLF fans and collectors. It is now maintained by the fan site klf.de.
  3. ^ a b "All You Need Is Love" review, Sounds, 14 March 1987.
  4. ^ Musicmatch
  5. ^ Drummond, B., "KLF Info Sheet", October 1987 (link). This was the first of many "Information Sheet"s that KLF Communications would send out to fans and the press.
  6. ^ a b c d e KLF Communications, sleevenotes, "1987: The Edits" JAMS 25T (link)
  7. ^ Transcript of a Bill Drummond interview on "Bomlagadafshipoing" (Norwegian national radio house-music show), September 1991 (link).
  8. ^ Davage, I., letter from the MCPS to The JAMs, reproduced in "The KLF 1987 Completeist List", an insert to Who Killed The JAMs?, KLF Communications JAMS LP2, 1988.
  9. ^ "Thank You For The Music", New Musical Express, 17 October 1987.
  10. ^ Smith, M., "The Great TUNE Robbery", Melody Maker, 12 December 1987 (link)
  11. ^ KLF Communications, advertisement, The Face, April 1988.
  12. ^ Cranna, I. 1987 (What the Fuck Is Going On?) review, Q Magazine, July (?) 1987 (link).
  13. ^ 1987 (What the Fuck Is Going On?) review, Melody Maker, 20 June 1987.
  14. ^ 1987 (What the Fuck is Going On?) review, Sounds, 20 June 1987.
  15. ^ Bush, J., 1987 (What the Fuck Is Going On?) review, All Music Guide (link). Retrieved 8 April 2006.
  16. ^ Ira Robbins, Trouser Press (link). Retrieved 19 April 2006.
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