“It seems as if heaven had sent its insane angels into our world as to an asylum, and here they will break out in their native music and utter at intervals the words they have heard in heaven; then the mad fit returns and they mope and wallow like dogs.”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
If Laing had it right when he said madness is simply a defense mechanism one “invents in order to live in an unlivable situation” … then DMZ Press is a plummeting odyssey down the rabbit hole – a deep-fisted, primal scream of outrage, despair, and sheer wonder over the good, the bad, and the just plain ugly in today’s music.
And if Leonard Cohen was on track when he said, “The only moment that you can live here comfortably in these absolutely irreconcilable conflicts is in this moment when you embrace it all and you say, ‘Look, I don’t understand a fucking thing at all – Hallelujah!'” … then DMZ Press is the goddamned Hallelujah choir.
DMZ Press is one of the world’s leading news aggregators for sex and drugs and rock & roll for a simple reason: It is one of the world’s only aggregators for sex and drugs and rock & roll (well, mostly rock & roll – the sex and drugs just seem to come with the party).
Which begs the question: What the hell is a news aggregator?!
Last time we glanced, there were over 1.4 billion televisions, 1.98 billion websites, 2 billion computers, 2.91 billion Facebook users, 5.07 billion Internet users, 7.33 billion smart phones (91.53% of the world’s population), about 9,570,000,ooo Google references to music, and countless “music magazines” claiming to be “Number One.”
DMZ Press is the only one delusional enough to try to scour them all in search of music’s best stories and storytellers, and deliver them to you (or you to them, if you want to get all technical about it).
DMZ Press doesn’t write music news. It ferrets it out for you. DMZ Press is a music news aggregator.
Because rock reporting is not just reporting about rock & roll: rock reporting is the spirit of rock & roll in reporting – you know, that whole “awop bop aloo mop, awop bam boom!” rebel yell thing, with Little Richard, pompadour and all, hurling the gates open for anyone hellbent on celebrating the rapture of being alive … and a Johnny Cash middle finger to anyone standing in the way.
And let’s face it – next to the thunderbolt of a 50,000-volt Police Taser spanking your genitals, nothing gyrates your hips or draws a “sweet goddamn” from your lips like sex and drugs and rock & roll.
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If you’re wondering how DMZ Press does what it does – well, on the surface, DMZ Press appears to utilize a wide range of time-tested and breakthrough technologies and techniques, including:
- a highly classified, military-encrypted, “murder squad”-vetted, digitally divined, proprietary computer algorithm, and
- a protocol of delirium and despair inspired by a gang of batshit-crazy, disillusioned rock reporters (well, maybe just one batshit-crazy, disillusioned rock reporter) lost in the sweet haze of a three-day drunken binge, guided by nothing more than gut instinct, dumb luck, and blind faith(1) while Alabama 3’s “Converted” bleeds out of the speakers.
In short, anything goes, from the scientific to the supernatural(2), from E=MC²(3) to rabid chanting and hoodoo-voodoo, from graffiti in the bathroom to Shakespeare in the Park … which might explain how the three WITCHES showed up in the mix.
“The Scottish play”(4) by William Shakespeare
Act 4. Scene 1.
A cavern. In the middle, a boiling cauldron.
Thunder. Enter the three WITCHES.
“… Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn and caldron bubble.
Cool it with a baboon’s blood,(5)
Then the charm is firm and good…”(6)
– “The Scottish play,” Act 4, Scene 1
(Do we really use baboon’s blood? We’re not saying. But when asked about his night out with retired 20-year Rolling Stone contributing editor Jerry Hopkins (author of the Jim Morrison book-turned-Oliver-Stone-movie, “No One Here Gets Out Alive”), veteran reporter Tom O’Brien replied, “Don’t let the Panama hat or Don Ho stories fool you – this guy IS the Lizard King … We killed a cobra together in a Jakarta Chinatown restaurant and then drank its blood with rice wine. We passed on the monkey but were eyeing it closely by the end of the night.” And that was before things got strange. (See “When you’re strange…”.) Just sayin’.)
And when it comes to the WITCHES – well, as the saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words, and video is worth a million …
Hardly your traditional witches,
but given their power to enchant …
(video)
But if you really want to know what fuels the entire operation, what’s lurking at the bottom of it all – well, that’s where things get a little creepy. Because if you ask TECH, they’ll tell you that the entire organization has been built and is completely dependent upon what they like to call “The Omelas Doctrine,” a protocol of success secrets extracted from Ursula K. Le Guin’s masterwork for attaining and maintaining harmony in business and in life: “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas.” [PDF]
So unless you’re one of the twisted few who, for whatever reason, actually enjoys bolting awake from a dead-sleep, screaming and streaking naked into the night, you might want to lean in and listen up.
Because in the eye of the hurricane or the dead calm of night, in the lull between songs where the rhythm ignites, as one note falls and another takes flight … if you should suddenly hear, on the outer limits of your senses, the whisper of a child’s voice that is so frail, desperate, and terrifying, you can feel it reaching up from the basement, grabbing hold of your spine, and shaking your soul like a baby’s rattle, pleading …
“I will be good. Please let me out. I will be good!”
… do whatever the hell you have to and ignore it! Don’t worry about how – crank up the stereo, board up the windows, nail down the trap door … just do whatever it takes to block it all out, to make it all go away.
And whatever you do, do not go down there!
Because if you do – and don’t say we didn’t warn you, but if you do … well, DMZ Press’s entire operation is dependent on this setup, so whatever the hell else you do, for God’s sake, do not say anything nice to the poor child.
And if you’re smart, just walk away.
[For the record, we don’t like this any more than you do, but as Legal says, “The terms are strict and absolute,” and who are we to argue? (Should you require further details or documentation, please review Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas.”) [PDF]]If you’re wondering why (ie. Project Rationale, etc., for DMZ Press), click here.
footnotes:
(1) The washtub filled with ice and Old Purple Tin (aka “central heating for the homeless”) certainly didn’t hurt.
(2) It’s a thin line that separates the Pre-cogs (“Minority Report”) from the Pods (“The Matrix”), so when it came to our shallow pool of “Empaths” – what the hell, they were just laying around anyway.
(3) “[Archeologist Christos] Doumas had once told me that it was only our art that made all the struggles of civilization worthwhile. “All our science, our technology, our mathematics–nothing is unique about them,” he said. “These things will be repeated by any sufficiently advanced civilization, anywhere in the galaxy. [They’ll] all discover that E =MC². But there is only one golden death mask of Tutankhamen, only one Room of Lilies. It is through our art that we really live and breathe. If I could pick only one thing that could survive on this earth and speak for our species, it would be our art. Now, that’s all you have to remember. Only our art should live forever.” – Charles Pellegrino, “Unearthing Atlantis”.
(4) On “the Scottish play”: According to folklore, Macbeth was cursed from the beginning. A coven of witches objected to Shakespeare using real incantations, so they put a curse on the play. Legend has it the play’s first performance (around 1606) was riddled with disaster. The actor playing Lady Macbeth died suddenly, so Shakespeare himself had to take on the part. Other rumoured mishaps include real daggers being used in place of stage props for the murder of King Duncan (resulting in the actor’s death). The play hasn’t had much luck since….”
(5) From his website: “Jerry Hopkins has published more than 1,000 magazine articles and 39 books, including several international bestsellers – among them, the cult classic ‘No One Here Gets Out Alive.’
(6) For the complete recipe for Omniscience (or a killer guacamole), click here.