From Marc 3 Poirier Sent Sat, Mar 6th 1999, 03:31
I'm going to try my hand at a couple reviews, basically because I've gotten the feeling that several people have wanted to see more reviews of the new V/Vm releases, & V/Vm stuff in general since it's all so limited, expensive, inaccessable, etc. I'll do their "Pig" 7" first. I'll say now that I am a V/Vm fan & I've gotten every record that they've put out, but this is the worst record I've ever gotten by anyone, & the most disappointing one, well, you know, since I've liked everything else so much. It's not that there's some loss in their song-making abilities, since there of no songs on here anyway, but it's what this release is all about. I was honestly pretty excited about it, hearing that it would be a record entirely of pig music, but it's not. It's a short, unintelligible interview with Uncle Ernie followed by about 10 minutes of recordings of pigs being slaughtered. Maybe such horrendous insensitivity on the part of V/Vm could have been expected by me, considering their history of calling themselves butchers & having mutilated little old songs about meat on past releases, but I wasn't really sure if those things were parallels to their mockery (& savoring) of the crassness of the terrible old songs they find & abuse, the meat stuff being a mockery of a sort of crassness in their society. No. And despite V/Vm's history of making themselves out to be readical people, with stuff about evolution, experimentalism, musical pioneering, & so forth littering their record inserts, their not radical people at all in such an extremely fundamental way. They completely support violent, hierarchical society (at least from a speciesist slant) & the institutionalized destruction of the lives of those with less social power than them that goes along with that. Then they have fun with that & make a record reveling in it. Yeah, so this is rather hideous record. I couldn't finish listening to it, it made me cold all over, & now I'm just really depressed. Marc Poirier