|
|
|
|
|
|
|
[by Stacy Borah] I have been a fan of the late comedian Bill Hicks for 20 years now. I first saw him perform a bit about losing all the great rock musicians on MTV's Half-Hour Comedy Hour in 1986, which I taped and watched over and over again. It was a funny and seemingly innocuous bit; I say seemingly because that was all that particular MTV program could afford to show at the time, being that MTV was still in its toddler stage and was unable to conceive of anything that would or could have pissed off the higher-ups who spawned it. It wasn't until five years later that I truly grasped what actually lay beneath that routine. It was April of 1991, and I was numbing myself to the goings-on in the first Iraq war with a new channel devoted to comedy: Comedy Central. For the first few months of its existence, all it really showed were stand-up comedy clips taken from comedy festivals and HBO's One Night Stand. I was in heaven. Growing up in Alabama in the 1980s, I never really had much of a chance to experience many comics firsthand. So, I glommed onto Comedy Central quickly, taping shows and comedy bits and filling up many VHS tapes along the way. And, what I saw that first day really opened my eyes as to the true nature of Bill's talent and the fickle, fuck-you nature of modern entertainment. One of the first clips I saw that day was Denis Leary doing a bit about losing great rock musicians! The bit was so close to Bill's that it made me search out the original bit and watch it to compare the two. I taped Leary's bit later that night (if you haven't noticed, Comedy Central has a rerun habit) as proof that Bill had been plagiarized, since Comedy Central was so kind as to date all the comedy bits it ran. Days or weeks later, I was able to watch Bill's entire routine (all the bad words censored, naturally, since it's so impolite to say those on TV), and I saw how prophetic the theme and nature of that routine was and how it would come to define his career. The themes of that bit -- that modern entertainment loses more sincerity and worth as it gets closer to mass acceptance, that it is a tool to keep our true spiritual natures separate from God -- also takes up a great deal of Bill's performance in the new Sane Man DVD, recently released by Rykodisc. Bill was an angry man; angry with people who let the mass media trick them into choosing inferior products and entertainment. He wanted people to use their minds to think pragmatically, rather than single-mindedly, and discover the tricks that the corporatized media was playing on them. Sane Man shows Bill doing this before a packed house at the Laff Stop in Austin, Texas, in July of 1989. The performance is dated, as are most great comedic shows that reference that current events of their times, but the points he makes apply to any time frame. He rails against the trappings of the music industry, calling Debbie Gibson, Rick Astley and George Michael as the spawns of evil beings out to make a buck off of the masses. He envisions Dick Clark as an AntiChrist impregnating John Davidson, who then gives birth to Geraldo Rivera. He riffs against Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and Dan Quayle, and how good men (JFK, MLK, Gandhi, et al) are cut down for just wanting to help mankind while “hacks and mediocres and fascists run everything else.” One of the best features of this DVD is that, throughout the performance, you can see the earnestness on Bill's face as he tries to get his point across to the audience, the flashes of pain, fear and disgust that mix with the cocky, self-deprecating humor that made Bill such a volatile comedian. And, then end of the performance features Bill reading a very unfavorable review of his performance that an audience member sent to a local Austin paper, something that surely tickled and terrified Bill all at once. The only distracting elements of the Sane Man DVD are the many double shots of Bill that pop up and layer over each other throughout the film. There are also a couple areas where the sound is deliberately slowed for effect -- whether to accentuate a point that Bill makes or to punch up an otherwise straightforward performance, I don't know. But they're distracting and unnecessary, because the content is more than worth the price of the DVD. Among the extras on the DVD are some outtakes from Sane Man , a couple of early performances with bad sound quality, Bill's biography (although I highly recommend reading American Scream by Cynthia True), and a list of CDs and DVDs containing Bill's material. Most importantly, Sane Man marks the turning point of a career shot down prematurely in its growth, as Bill died in 1994 of pancreatic cancer. It represents another track in what will hopefully be a lasting legacy of ideas and revolutionary thought, one that Rykodisc should preserve and nurture with more great DVDs like this one. January 17, 2006 |
GET MORE MORPHIZM
|
LOAD/STREAM
  THE MARS VOLTA From: Scab Dates STREAM THE ENTIRE ALBUM HERE: REAL WMA LISTEN: "And Ghosted Pouts (Live)" WMA REAL LISTEN: "Take the Veil Cerpin Taxt (Live)" WMA REAL SLEATER-KINNEY NIRVANA KINKSI: THE CONSTANTINES DEATH CAB FOR CUTIE: |
      |
