If you liked this book, you might also like Bad Wisdom (Bill Drummond, Mark Manning, Penguin books, 1996, ISBN: 978-0140261189), wherein Zen masters Z, Bill and Gimpo set out to the North Pole to sacrifice an icon of Elvis :)
The KLF: Chaos, magic and the band who burned £1M
81–90 of 127 posts
Re: The KLF: Chaos, magic and the band who burned £1M
#82I used to work for Jimmy Cauty and Bill Drummond's record label. This book looks interesting ... but I really wish the focus was on the art and the music, and not the "the guys who burnt 1 million quid" incident. One thing that the media have a tough time recognizing is the fact that Bill and Jimmy are legit experimental artists, and still love making art of all kinds. And they also happened to have some amazing musi…
The white room had a big impression on me. I can still remember the video for 3am eternal clearly. More recently I really started listening to the album more. "Build a fire" has grown on me. Such a great album. Still sounds good today...was amazing then.
The original pressing is a great example of how good pop music used to sound and how shitty it sounds today because of dynamic compression.
“3 a.m. Eternal” sounds huge, and doesn’t inflict pain when turned up LOUD.
I haven’t listened to it on streaming services, but most of their catalogs have been ruined by “remastering;” AKA crushing them into a wall of noise with dynamic compression to make them “louder.” It’s despicable.
Re: The KLF: Chaos, magic and the band who burned £1M
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
Did they piss it away though? That single statement was so powerful it's still causing emotional arguments about it 20 years later. Can you say that about other things people spent £1m on in 1994?
> That single statement was so powerful it's still causing emotional arguments about it 20 years later. I hate this argument, because it's worse than vacuous: It makes out that art is about as meaningful as a gunshot in a crowded room. Is that art? It'll damn well get a reaction, especially from the person who was just shot. Shouldn't we demand more from art? Like actual meaning and maybe, just maybe, a positive impa…
You seem to have missed most of this debate. Is the rapper who bought a $200M mansion also akin to murdering 200 people?
What about the other hundreds of thousands of rich wasting their millions? Why are these guys the target of your anger now, and not the one driving a Bentley you just passed around the corner?
Re: The KLF: Chaos, magic and the band who burned £1M
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is it lost for everyone or is it more like a stock buyback? Did everyone's money become 0.000000001% more valuable by taking that chunk out of circulation? Can an economist tell me please?
It does exactly that. But if you go deeper in the meaning of money, it's even better: when you receive money, what you actually receive is an IOU for a good or a service. E.g. when you receive $40 for fixing a computer, it means the society owes you $40 that you can claim at any time. Burning the $40 means that you fixed the computer for free, and that you don't want anything in return, and at the same time nobody ca…
The point is that in real life (as opposed to an academic textbook) burning those $40 does not do anything useful or positive to anyone, while spending them or giving them away to someone would do something useful.
Re: The KLF: Chaos, magic and the band who burned £1M
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
I never understood the attraction. But then again I didn't understand what all the fuss was about over the Prodigy and "Firestarter" either. Or Underworld after they moved from rock to dance. All seemed vastly overrated to me. There is something I must be missing.
>Both seemed vastly overrated to me. There is something I must be missing. Drugs, probably. Firestarter is an amazing track when it comes on at 3am and you've been dancing for hours. In the cold light of day, not so much. EDM of that era was very much designed to be experienced with MDMA and the KLF in particular really needed a stadium full of people in a similar state to fully appreciate them. All the extra Discord…
Firestarter was way past the "second summer of love", m25 party circuit days that was pure gurning pillheads getting crazy to samples of 80s cartoons.
It's when the Prodigy had become mainstream and this was was dance/indie-rock crossover type track that they used to headline Glastonbury the following year. Pre-teens loved it - energetic and edgy... but really it wasn't subversive, just broadly available pop music that hit the top of the charts. If I went to a mid-90s techno or hard house event and they played this, I would have been as disappointed as if they played 2 Unlimited. Despite this, I still liked and went to Prodigy concerts and saw them at festivals.
Re: The KLF: Chaos, magic and the band who burned £1M
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
They achieved that some 30 years later we are having this discussion about their art. I hope that we all are able to be that creative - that we achieve something that humankind speaks of 30 years later.
I feel this thread is evidence that the question provoked by the performance is actually quite important, certainly more so than the average “but is this art” meta-debate. Someone in this thread was upset that the artists burned more money than the average person sees in their lifetime. Another commenter questioned why this would be more unfair than all the “regular rich” who we know spend many times that amount of m…
> Someone who is understood to not have money by default — like an artist [...]
I'm sure we can all think of a few counter-examples to that one!
Rihanna: net worth: ~ $1.4 billion Paul McCartney: net worth: ~ $1.2 billion Bono: net worth: ~ $700 million
> then gets a sudden windfall is expected to use it responsibly
"Expected" - by whom?
I may be just a bit jaded, but we should perhaps consider the hypothesis that for very successful artists it's a simple commercial decision to signal you're acting responsibly with your wealth, otherwise your much, much less wealthy customers who are buying your output might start to notice, disapprove, and ultimately stop buying your output. One could call this "fiduciary duty to oneself", really.
Re: The KLF: Chaos, magic and the band who burned £1M
#87I used to work for Jimmy Cauty and Bill Drummond's record label. This book looks interesting ... but I really wish the focus was on the art and the music, and not the "the guys who burnt 1 million quid" incident. One thing that the media have a tough time recognizing is the fact that Bill and Jimmy are legit experimental artists, and still love making art of all kinds. And they also happened to have some amazing musi…
Might just be me, I was of that time, but the burning £1M whilst interesting isn't really why I remember them. It's almost the least interesting thing about them. Being Scottish I was more amused by the location being an island in Scotland. To me, they where post-acid house, but still connected to the fun and experimentation that had going for it. A bit like De La Soul they where of themselves. Always wondered if the…
Daft Punk just have the "don't focus on our identities/we stay behind the scenes" vibe shared with KLF.
But they are mostly safe music, never have been daring (and born to wealth to begin with, so their personal journey and connection to the world is less real and gritty). They're basically producers of polished electronic hits -- which is 1/10 of what makes KLF and their pre- and post- adventures interesting!
Re: The KLF: Chaos, magic and the band who burned £1M
#88I used to work for Jimmy Cauty and Bill Drummond's record label. This book looks interesting ... but I really wish the focus was on the art and the music, and not the "the guys who burnt 1 million quid" incident. One thing that the media have a tough time recognizing is the fact that Bill and Jimmy are legit experimental artists, and still love making art of all kinds. And they also happened to have some amazing musi…
>More often than not, it's the one-off act of Burning a Million Quid in 1994. Their ground-breaking music, the books, the anti-establishment statements and art ... it's almost an afterthought. The pain of not having enough is a fundamental human experience, and to see someone who had more than most will ever see in their lifetime literally burn it away hurts. I thought it was deeply selfish stunt then, and still do n…
>The pain of not having enough is a fundamental human experience, and to see someone who had more than most will ever see in their lifetime literally burn it away hurts.
Still, nobody bats an eye when some other celebrity or CEO or socialite throws away 1 million just for a single wedding or even a birthday party, or 10 million to have a large swimming pool. Which happens like every single day. $1m is probably what some Wall Street guys spend on coke for their guests per year those days.
At least these guys earned it through their artwork, and never stole it from anybody, or created huge machines of surveillance and brain-washing like Facebook, or by treating people like disposable shit - like tech bros in companies like Uber.
I'd rather have a role model burning money than cherishing it.
Re: The KLF: Chaos, magic and the band who burned £1M
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
Deeply selfish? There are literally millions and millions of extremely wealthy people who would spend that amount doing nothing, buying a yacht, their 20th property, or do actual terrible things. I don’t resent them for burning their money. They could have bought toys, instead they made a statement. We live in a world where many of us (myself included) have to live with the pain of not having enough. I’m reminded of…
> instead they made a statement What does that mean? I mean really mean? Follow-up question: did they achieve anything .. other than (even more) notoriety?
>What does that mean? I mean really mean?
What does anything "really" mean? We are all going to die anyway.
Keeping it in a less grand perspective, it means they made some people think and discuss the incident, debate the role of money and how we treat it, and made a fine punk gesture in the process...
It might even spoke to some people that money is not some God we should workship, and that being irreverant and having fun might be worth more!
Re: The KLF: Chaos, magic and the band who burned £1M
#90I used to work for Jimmy Cauty and Bill Drummond's record label. This book looks interesting ... but I really wish the focus was on the art and the music, and not the "the guys who burnt 1 million quid" incident. One thing that the media have a tough time recognizing is the fact that Bill and Jimmy are legit experimental artists, and still love making art of all kinds. And they also happened to have some amazing musi…
I remember hearing "What Time Is Love" as a kid and that music sounded like coming from an alien spaceship with virtually no peer anywhere. Then it morphed into/kicked off the trance genre and the main riff was reused by many artists later.