Boyd Rice And Friends
Baptism By Fire

If I could choose, I would like to be reborn in 1963 and have hippie parents, to spend my childhood in absolute beauty and innocence, illuminated by the dazzling light of Utopia, pampered by the notes of the Beatles and Jefferson Airplane, and then witness the sad collapse of illusions, experience with full awareness the grayness of the late seventies and the following decade, endure the punk revolution first and then the post-punk and wave ones later, living them as a genuine novelty and not as an encyclopedic retrieval done in retrospect. I would have also liked to grow and mature in a big city, to live the advent of electronics on my own skin, to feel the ferment of certain cultural movements, to frequent the filthiest social centers, and to hang around the dirtiest non-trendy local dives. To put on makeup, dress in black, and take it in the ass when it made sense, under the astonished eyes of my understanding and progressive parents, who had meanwhile become well-off representatives of the bourgeoisie, one a doctor and the other a professor.

Instead, destiny has wanted me to be born quite a few years later, and even in a rather modest city, where the most cultural experience available was an art cinema.

But can you imagine going through adolescence with the Suicide?, buying and listening to "Pornography" upon its release?, seeing CCCP live?, going to school listening to "Funeral Party" and falling in love with "Love will Tear Us Apart"? I rediscovered the history of music, the masterpieces of the late seventies and the following decade later, on my own, I appreciated them, I loved them, but I certainly did not feel they were mine because I did not live them, I did not admire them with the candid enthusiasm and naive eyes of the adolescent who experiences certain events firsthand. And so today, I live with the frustration of not having witnessed live the true glories of the music I love the most. I find myself making up for this void by celebrating contemporary artists just to feel part of something important. But it’s not like that, what I live and breathe is just glitz. The Liars are glitz.

Every now and then, however, I happen to come across albums so raw, uncompromising, and poorly packaged that they take me back to the primordial stage of artistic creation and the evolution of music. Albums that bring me back to childhood, to innocence, to the childishness of consuming it. Albums that somehow convey the stench, the slime of the social centers of the past, not those where only reggae and ska are danced to, but those places that became havens for subcultures, underground movements, a proletarian and marginalized avant-garde that grew in the shadow of a broken amplifier and animated by the sole urgency to express inner chaos, disappointment, uncontainable rage.

One of these albums is "Baptism by Fire" from the famed firm Boyd Rice and Friends, released in 2004. Ignore Boyd Rice and his controversial ideas, ignore the fact that his music is a continuous celebration of violence, hatred, and war, ignore the fact that his philosophical thought is rooted in Mansonian satanism, is tinged with rigid misanthropic elitism, and feeds on a perverse form of social Darwinism that sees the social world as solely governed by the ruthless laws of relentless natural selection. Life as a struggle, the legitimization of brute force, the primacy of overpowering, the dominance of the strongest, "War the mother of us all."

Ignore all this and dive like newborn infants into the primordial chaos of Boyd Rice's art, a guy who has been creating havoc since the mid-seventies (even Scaruffi, despite despising him as an artist, acknowledges him as a pioneer of a tape-manipulating avant-garde that today sees in the forefront people like Merzbow, who, admittedly, is not all that left-leaning either).

Sure, titles like "Total War" or "A Noi!" are hard to misconstrue and constitute a blatant insult to anyone with even a grain of common sense and a minimum understanding of historical course. But ignore all this, I tell you, and surrender for a moment to the schizophrenia of the most elementary electronics, to the roaring of the drums, to the declamatory violence of an obsessed Rice, generous with slogans and invectives that could not be more politically incorrect. Words that whistle and explode like grenades in the midst of a battle.

Rice has been around for more than thirty years, he is the stupid son of John Cage, in thirty years he hasn’t evolved a damn thing, hasn’t learned a damn thing, he is there, behind the machines for thirty years, or with a microphone in hand, making noise and spouting nonsense, today as thirty years ago. And it's this anachronistic condition, this his placement outside of time, outside of the evolution of music, this his beginner’s naivety that makes me feel (as I listen to him in my closed rooms, away from indiscreet ears) right in the middle of the crowd in a smoky venue lost in the deepest suburbs of any metropolitan area in 1978: the art of Boyd Rice is the eternal recurrence of the mental big bang that leads to artistic creation, but then does not evolve into a complete universe.

Yes, because Boyd Rice, who defines himself as a cross between Bambi and Hitler, has all the candor of the former and all the idiocy of the latter. Listening to "Baptism by Fire" is truly like being fifteen years old, cheek to cheek, in contact with a sweaty and stinking brute equipped with a green crest and rotten leather jacket in 1978, and getting excited because the guy on stage says "big things" and makes a hell of a racket. Because being extreme means also being a bit stupid and also a bit of a jerk, because it is stupid and very much a jerk move to leave the electric guitars turned on facing the amplifiers and smashing the audience's eardrums for quarters of an hour (if you’re the first to do it, mind you, you’re a genius, that’s why we normal mortals are just dumber and less jerky than many acclaimed musical geniuses!).

"Baptism by Fire" (also accompanied by a DVD that calling amateur is an understatement!) gathers excerpts from the NoN tour, the main project of Boyd Rice, who for the occasion is accompanied by a couple of very respectable friends: sir Douglas P. and John Murphy, a percussionist by profession. But it's clear that the choice to prominently feature the resounding name of the Death in June leader on the back cover is just a trick to attract some sucker (like me) and scrape together a few more bucks. In fact, Pearce’s guitar, between lazy arpeggios and banal whistles, is really insignificant in the economy of the sounds we are about to listen to.

What we hold in our hands is actually an ultra-essential best of the NoN, a real baptism by fire for those wishing to approach this monstrous "musical" entity. Significant episodes of Rice's recent history are present, not disdaining some incursions into the Boyd Rice and Friends experience, represented here by extracts from "Music, Martinis and Misantrophy" and "Wolf Pact". Sparse sounds and thirty idiots applauding, for a scarce half-hour that couldn't be more underground!

The already mentioned "Total War", "God and Beast" (a hallucinatory sonic invocation suspended in a tragic primordial tension in which beasts and angels copulate greedily at the Dawn of Man), the earthquake-like "Fire Shall Come" (cruelly fused with a dissonant "Everlasting Fire") are examples of genuine sonic terrorism, shards of crazed electronics, real manifestos of Rice’s sonic intransigence, rendered even more threatening by Murphy’s military-parade style percussion assault. And it must be said that it is indeed Murphy, skilled in maneuvering drones, screeches, and assorted sound explosions, who brings a bit of order to the whole and makes the pieces more digestible, pieces that, if left in the bare electronic guise of the official albums (which I wish on no one!), would lose strength both in terms of sound impact and compactness and organicity.

It is also interesting to rediscover the tracks in a changed guise compared to the studio versions, as if, in its approximation, it sufficed for Boyd Rice to shuffle the cards, mix the material at his disposal and simply make noise (since the result is the same!). And so we find traces of "Children of the Black Sun" scattered here and there, while in "The Reign Song" Pearce timidly gives birth to what will become the arpeggio of "An Ancient Tale is Told", which will appear in "Alarm Agents", to date the latest Death in June album.

As for the words, alas, a respectful cover is necessary ("Do you want total war? Yes we want total war!" is the call and response of the resounding "Total War", while in the Mussolini-inspired "A Noi!" we will hear, pronounced in slightly unsure Italian, the motto "Molti nemici, molto onore!" repeated to the point of exhaustion. "The lesson of History reveals to us that War is the mother of us all" intones "History Lesson", an atrocious rereading of history understood as a relentless succession of massacres, massacres, genocides, murders, slaughters, wars and so on and so forth).

But at this point, please, try to understand the reason for this review, try to embrace my purely documentary intent, based on the hope that one day, men and women of the right and the left, from below and above, can call for a pause and shake hands at least before Art. Even before an art with a lowercase 'a,' ethically immoral, poor and elementary as Rice's, nothing more than an electronic idiot, but who has the merit of making us savor the intransigence, the integrity (and also the idiocy) of the most genuine underground.

An archaic, ancient, primordial charm emanates from these compositions of other times, as if from the din of this big bang were born music in its monomolecular stage, in its most destructive and wild form. Like the ape that touches the Monolith and acquires intelligence and then begins to club hippopotamuses. Like the artistic intuition born from the accidental clash of the only two neurons of a brain-damaged musician. Like us who, having turned into children and filled with enthusiasm, witness with the naive eyes of adolescence to a spectacular, wonderful, traumatizing event. Spectacular, wonderful, and traumatizing only in our head.

P.S. In the concluding "People", an acoustic ballad that opens the already mentioned "Music, Martinis and Misantropy", we find at the end the famous phrase "Benito Mussolini, come back, come back, we miss youuuu". Now, there are those who justify this appeal to Mussolini's figure by interpreting it as a willingness to allegorically recall an ideal of strength, rigor, determination, spiritual guidance and example in a world of spineless, leveled, emptied sub-humans.

It is not my intention to enter into polemics, just one thing I would like to add: if one really wanted to talk about strength, rigor, determination, I have the impression that Boyd Rice really chose the wrong person...