Saturday night? time to slap on a 12″ and boogie on down to … the sound of a George W. Bush speech rearranged alphabetically? you betcha!
The 12″ in question is Cornish conceptual artist Lenka Clayton Qaeda Quality Question Quickly Quickly Quiet*, released in 2004. This record does exactly what it says on the tin, taking GWB’s ‘Axis of Evil’ speech, slicing and dicing it, then making it dance.
Remember when we used to wonder how on earth the US had elected a man who was so seemingly intellectually unqualified for the presidency? a man who had managed to fail upwards all his life? a man who seemed like a mere cipher for the entrenched interests of those power blocs who had ensured his controversial election? someone overly prone to reducing the most complex geopolitical problems to dumbass simplistic solutions?
God in retrospect I miss that man’s inherent decency.
Back in 2004 Lenka Clayton used a solemn speech, given on a solemn occasion, to not only poke fun at Dubya, but to mock the whole concept and process of speech-giving. Qaeda Quality Question Quickly Quickly Quiet basically adopts the whole language-as-trampoline concept to a beautiful degree. Essentially, you can make the POTUS’ most portentous potage as meaningless and meaningful as a 5 year-old saying the words ‘big woolly sheep’ a gazillion times; everything blurs and stretches as it approaches the nonsense horizon.
The speech proper is gifted a wonderful intro by our featured vocalist saying the word ‘a‘ 67 times, it does not take long before we stop hearing the words as words, the nonsense horizon is breached and they just become sounds. Later, even as odd words hit, the singular ‘daddy‘ has some impact, the rhythm becomes all. The shorter the word the more percussive it is and the more you notice odd quirks of pronunciation, sibilance and accent.
My favourites are ‘America‘ and ‘Americans‘, which quickly become ‘merkins’ in the Bushosphere, a word I always wanted to use for my punk band name. There are plenty more is you sit and listen, letting your mind play across it all. I am pretty sure that Death, Fight, Destruction, War, Europe, Anthrax and King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard are the only band names mentioned during the speech**. Nice to know he liked it heavy sometimes.
I can’t face listening to the speech properly to work out why he mentions ‘football‘ twice, but it does intrigue. The accidental pairing of ‘Guantanamo guests’ hits^. By the time GWB hits the S’s listening to Qaeda Quality Question Quickly Quickly Quiet feels like the sort of drunk you get from industrial cleaning products, where counting your feet is utterly beyond your capabilities.
I like how this record works as a prank, as much as a serious political comment and also as a means of interrogating how nonsensical words and language can be when you examine them out of all context. Yes it makes a point directly about GWB here but you could equally reduce MLK or JFK to similar levels of nonsense, tuning out all meaning and just bouncing along with the sounds.
After listening to these 19 minutes through 4 times in a row, I have carefully filed Lenka Clayton back between Lemon Jelly and Lenny Kravitz, to be broken out again in another decade’s time. It is a smart, arty, smartarsey 12″ that I am very happy to own and think you should too. I might use it for our first dance next time I get married.
That the lyrics are all printed in gloss on the cover AND there are instructions for making a flick book^^, Accidental Records need commending for everything here. Although that maybe why they only made 500 of these, that and commercial potential.
1314 Down.
*or to give it the full bigly, Qaeda Quality Question Quickly Quickly Quiet – George W. Bush’s State Of The Union Address 2002 (In Alphabetical Order).
**I have ignored Madness, Underworld and Love for not-fitting-my-narrative reasons. I am allowed to.
^as does ‘nuclear nurses‘ but that’s a title I’m keeping aside for my Only Fans channel.
^^are you watching Metallica? we don’t want riff origin tapes, we want the super mega deluxe flick book edition of …And Justice For All
