I don’t have to write the thing I mentioned last week anymore and I can share it with you! 

I wrote about Music and what I thought was missing from the discussion about Music for TIME. tl;dr, I don’t appreciate being treated like an activist when I am being a critic and holy shit, this movie sucks. I’m grateful to my editor for giving me the opportunity to work through my ideas with some nuance. And I’m thrilled that I was able to reference The Bob Lamonta Story in this context. 

The podcast I mentioned last week is also live now. You can listen to it here.

And I recorded a serious interview with CBC radio that will probably be available by the time this goes out, but isn’t as I’m writing it. So I’ll link to that next week. 

But enough about my work, let’s talk about the intersection of my childhood dance music preferences and my burial plans. 

Song of the Week: “3AM Eternal (Live at the S.S.L.)” - The KLF

In the early 1990s, Canadian music television station MuchMusic released an annual dance compilation under their X-Tendamix banner. (This series was rebranded as MuchDance in 1997 and is still in production today, but we don’t need to talk about those dance mix shadows on a cave wall.) The X-Tendamix Dance Mix albums were a big deal for my demo in my region, and for good reason. At a time when teens and pre-teens didn’t have many accessible options for procuring music, they offered one-stop shopping for the dance tracks that we watched on Much, listened to on the pop radio station we picked up from Buffalo, and practiced our step-ball-changes to in jazz and contemporary dance classes.

The most popular edition in my cohort — and my personal favourite — was Dance Mix ’93. I was especially partial to the one-two punch of Technotronic’s “Move This” and Snap!’s “Rhythm Is a Dancer” nestled toward the middle of the disc, but there really isn’t a stinker in the bunch. It also features tracks by notable dance and hip hop artists at the time like Bobby Brown, House of Pain, C+C Music Factory, Tag Team, 2 Unlimited, 2 Unlimited, and Arrested Development. And something called The KLF.

As a kid, I didn’t really understand how this song or this group had ended up on my beloved CD. I wasn’t offended by its appearance. I dug the song well enough. I just had no idea who these people were or how they’d snuck into a party full of my beloved artists. I actually spent a couple of years assuming they were an unknown Canadian group who had been thrown in to help the album meet Canadian content regulations. 

As an adult who has been sucked into the world of the KLF, also known as the Justified Ancients of MuMu, furthermore known as The JAMs, I might be even more confused. I get why the people putting the mix together would have wanted the song now that I understand both their musical prowess and mystique better. But I don’t understand how a track by those notoriously industry-averse weirdos wound up on a highly commercial CD put out by a TV station. In Canada.

I am grateful for this miracle, though. An entire country’s dance pop-loving children were exposed to the bizarre exploits and lore of a couple of drugged-out genius iconoclasts and whatever likeminded weirdos they could draw into their orbit. Sometimes I wonder how many of us were corrupted by that introduction. Surely it wasn’t just me. 

I won’t say much more about who the KLF are or why they’re so fascinating and so fucked up in the best way possible. For one, I want to spare myself the time and energy it would take, especially because there’s no way I can do it all justice. But if you don’t already know what I’m talking about, I believe the best way to learn is to go down the rabbit hole of their batshit multimedia oeuvre for yourself. I will recommend starting on their recently created YouTube channel, though, which features high quality versions of music videos I had either never seen before, or never seen as shitty, worn out bootlegs. 

Take one look at this setup and tell you don’t want to throw a robe on and join in. (And also try to picture how fucking hard this would blow a child’s mind.)

Movie of the Week: Welcome To The Dark Ages (2021)

I know I just said that I was going to leave those of you who aren’t already aware of the KLF to your own journey of discovery, but there is one thing that I’m going to have to mention in order for the next part to make as much sense as it’s ever going to: their current venture involves constructing a massive pyramid of 34,592 bricks. Each brick will contain the cremated remains of a dead person who has pledged to be a part of this project. They call this MuMufication, and you can learn more about it here.

Aaron and I are both pretty big KLF people. Enough so that we have been semi-seriously considering MuMufication for a while. (When Mom and I visited Liverpool in 2019, I spent at least half of our trip trying to explain it — and the KLF in general — to her. My poor beloved mother was so happy to be visiting the birthplace of her beloved Beatles, and her weird ass daughter would not shut up about ice cream vans, dead sheep, burnt fortunes, and dead people pyramids.) So of course we had to check out the recently released documentary that covers MuMufication and whatever the hell else they’re getting up to these days. 

“Did we just watch an infomercial for pyramid burial?” Aaron asked me as the credits rolled. “I think so,” I replied. But neither the question nor the answer was issued with much recrimination. Blatantly trying to sell you a brick in a monument that will take lifetimes to build, if it is ever finished at all, is well within the purview and charms of this outfit. And a glorified commercial  for a notorious EDM collective that have learned how to bake human ashes into bricks and build an entire ritual around the process is far more interesting than a lot of proper documentaries that aren’t trying to push anything. 

And beyond the hard sell, Welcome To The Dark Ages does offer a fascinating insight into the minds and pursuits of the KLF themselves. It’s a testament how creativity, genius, and the sheer impulse to fuck shit up can grow and evolve over the years. And how it can survive when both the youth that fuelled the original rebellious flames and the means that funded them are long gone.

The film also features an extended interview with a girl whose parents have signed the whole family up for MuMufication. She loves it. Like a mix of Alia Atreides and a young Sarah Kurchak, this adorably precious monster gushes about the fine details of the physical process itself and the philosophy behind it. Then she talks about trying to get her friends’ families to join in. I haven’t stopped thinking about this kid — or trying to picture her talking up MuMufication to her friend’s unsuspecting parents — since. 

It’s nice to know that The KLF can still corrupt the children. And that I’m apparently not alone in the world.