1987 (What the Fuck Is Going On?)
1987 is the debut studio album by British electronic band The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu. It was produced using extensive unauthorised samples that plagiarised a wide range of musical works. The album was made using an Apple II computer, a Greengate DS3 digital sampler peripheral card, and a Roland TR-808 drum machine.
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1987 is the debut studio album by British electronic band The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu. It was produced using extensive unauthorised samples that plagiarised a wide range of musical works. The album was made using an Apple II computer, a Greengate DS3 digital sampler peripheral card, and a Roland TR-808 drum machine. The JAMs were ordered by the Mechanical-Copyright Protection Society to destroy all unsold copies of the album, following a complaint from ABBA. By 2000, mint condition copies of 1987 were trading for £60. The band later went on to become known as the KLF. The opening song, We Are Not The Monkees, begins with a rhythm arranged as a simulated human sexual intercourse. The song ends with a cryptic and bleak spoken verse from Bill Drummond: “Here we come, crawling out of the mud, out of chaos, crawling to the burned out sun, dragging our bad selves from one end to the other, with nothing to declare but some rhymes from one half of the rhymes” The album is raw and unpolished, the sound contrasting sharply with the meticulous production and tight house rhythms of the duo’s later work. The duo adopted their fictional backstory from The Illuminatus! Trilogy, imbued with social comments and societal targets for their satirical raps. Several songs have specific targets for Drummond’s raps, such as “The Monkees” and “We Are Not the Monkees”, and are often played with a high-pitched rasping accompaniment. The songs are arranged so as to juxtapose with each other as a backdrop for the JAM’s rebellious messages and self-referential statements of the band’s fictional backstory.
They also released a version of 1987 titled 1987, stripped of all unauthorising samples to leave periods of protracted silence and so little audible content that it was formally classed as a 12-inch single. In response to the destruction of 1987, the band disposed of many copies of1987 in unorthodox, publicised ways, including the release of a limited edition version with no samples on the front cover. The group’s debut single, ‘All You Need Is Love’, was independently released on 9 March 1987 as a limited-edition one-sided white label 12- inch. The reaction to “All You need Is Love\’ was positive; the British music newspaper Sounds listed it as the single of the week, and lauded the band as ‘the hottest, most exhilarating band this year’ The duo re-released the single in May 1987. According to Drummond, profits from this re-release funded the recording of their first album, which was completed and pressed by early May 1987, but did not have a distributor. Like the single, the album is built around samples of other artists’ work, with the presence of original material becomes questionable, and several songs were liberally plagiarised. This mashup of samples was underpinned by rudimentary beatbox rhythms and overlaid with raps of social commentary, esoteric metaphors and mockery.
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