This Fear of Gods

This -
Tack>>Head’s two best singles, ‘What’s My Mission Now?’ and ‘Mind at the End of the Tether’ uncannily foretold the direction that the American nightmare would take in the following two decades. ‘Mind at the End of the Tether’, which transmuted apocalyptic anxiety into a seething electro pulse, featured a brand of Far Right religious fundamentalism whose influence over the political mainstream in the US we now take for granted. ‘What’s My Mission Now?’, with Leblanc’s drum machine set to migraine, is an ominous audio-snapshot of the US military beginning to stir itself from its post-Vietnam nervous breakdown, bristling with expensive equipment, and itching for its next major deployment (which would turn out to be the ultra-technicized Gulf War, the first phase of what would become the War on Terror).



From colonel K's On-U-Sound piece, is the conjunction that the eventual rework of my My Life in the Bush of Ghosts piece is going to be all about, and the bizarre fact of this becoming accepted as normal- as well as the misbegotten idea of ghosts as numinal, wispy, disappearing wanly into the ether, when more likely they're vindictive, vengeful angry things, hence the sheer bloody Biblical fury of the best dub, and why eg DJ Spooky is missing the point - dub is a politico-religious hauntology. Lee Perry said 'I believe in the Bible because I live in the Bible', and this almost Benjaminian radical rearranging of history is what gives the music it's power.