R. Stevie Moore
Phonography

The final insult.
- In your music (music?), Mr. Moore, can stolen FM transmissions clearly be distinguished, taken from the ether and brought to this filthy medium, am I wrong?
- Ether? The diabolical ether? I've never used ether in my life.

Stevie Moore is a dangerous madman. Every record is a loose cannon. Every song a potential danger for ALL those who strive (in vain) in the art of the ditty.
Gentlemen of the Jury, this man is guilty and must be condemned. He must be condemned for "Explanation of the Artist" where he urinates with open microphones, he must be condemned for "California Rhythm" which incites and encourages repeated group binge drinking, the orgy of joy, the laughing gas intoxication, the use of fast cars, the wrong fuzz, and the perpetual flooding of bathrooms, streets, and homes with colorful balloons and menacing nonsense like soap bubbles or confetti and desecrates, through the distorted use of citation and cut-up, all the country’s light music production.

He must indeed be condemned for a use of the pop format of evidently criminal nature, with illegal reverberations and twists, with those stereophonic leaps that make innocent Wilsonian refrains resemble sneaky declarations of war, for the massive use of occult satanism and tranquilizers: this man and these songs cannot be allowed to be listened to by our children: listen, for example, to "I've Begun to Fall" and you will understand what I'm saying; not to mention "The Spot" which is a bank advertisement played with Ashra Tempel's synthesizers. What about "She Don’t Know What To Do With Herself" which is the ultimate insult, the final raspberry to glam rock, to rock, and to the musical values that constitute national decency.
I won’t even talk at length about the attempted coup d'état of "I Want You in My Life" which is aggravated slander and an illegitimate parody of the West Coast wave.
Playing Pop like a mad scientist is not allowed: mixing these ingredients is strictly prohibited by the Beach Boys Act. Doesn’t Mr. Moore remember?
It is forbidden, it still reads, to use the recording studio as if it were a torture chamber, to use tapes in reverse, to employ refrains that in the angelic perfection they propose offend the listener by reverberating crazily on guitar storms with a suppressed impetus of an evidently drugged nature: listen to the dialogue of "The Lariat Wressed Posing Hour" to get an idea, and you will be mentally abducted by a certain extraterrestrial subsensorial abduction and from there vehemently transported with furious rage to a world (Nda) made of hallucinated Talk Shows, as if Hollywood were in the hands of lost minds and Spiro Agnew was finally vilified and forced to drink Shiraz from a perpetual fountain.

If "I Wish I Could Sing" had been played by anyone else, no problem. But why all that Wah like a thick layer of screaming joy over a depressed lyric? And why the reckless use of synthetic trumpets? What compulsive individual could invent that pa-pa-pa in slow motion? Who would be so crazy as to write radio songs and then violate them with such low quality, with these senseless dialogues, with all this pathos of arpeggiated and wrongly tuned, finished guitars?
Gentlemen, I ask you to condemn the author of the diabolical "Showing Shadow" for outrage against the songbook of the United States of America (uhuhuuhuhuhuhu, it gives me goosebumps, I remember, said a witness, that Moore forced Todd Rundgren to drink an entire barrel of Dextromethorphan and mutilate himself by smashing his songs against a wall, drugged with flanger and unnatural echo. Rundgren stated that he owed a lot to Moore despite not sharing Moore's anarchic approach.)
What do those voices mean? They are clearly subliminal messages advocating individual anarchy, freedom, the autarchic wonder of the little studio to record, ultimately advocating relational shoegazing, closing oneself off, not collaborating, making records and not selling them, building a loner’s life and all this, good god, is contrary to the ideals of Philadelphia that brought about this country.

And if all this evidence is still not sufficient, then you just have to listen to "I Not Listening", its infinite solo and its abrupt interruption given by that monstrous voice, perhaps belonging to an alien entity with which Moore is surely in contact and you will immediately understand why this man on the loose constitutes a serious national security problem.