Today we mark the 20th anniversary of the death of Bill Hicks.
Best Things Ever #18
Best Things Ever #18
Bill Hicks: Rant in
E-Minor
“Bill Hicks,
blowtorch, excavator, truthsayer and brain specialist, like a reverend waving a
gun around. Pay attention to Rant in E Minor, it is a major work, as important
as Lenny Bruce's. He will correct your vision. His life was cut short by
cancer, though he did leave his tools here. Others will drive on the road he
built. Long may his records rant even though he can't.”
Tom Waits
Twenty years ago this month, the comedian Bill Hicks died of
pancreatic cancer at the tragically young age of 32. Three years later in 1997,
two posthumous album were released by Rykodisc: Arizona Bay and Rant in
E-Minor. In this article I am going to concentrate on Rant in E Minor, which I
consider to be both the greatest comedy album and the greatest spoken word
album of all time.
The material for Rant in E Minor was recorded at the Laff
Stop Comedy Club in Austin, Texas in March and October 1993 and at Coobs, San
Francisco in July of the same year. Unlike the albums Dangerous and Relentless
that were released during Bill’s lifetime, Rant in E Minor, as well as Arizona
Bay, presents the material in the form of chapter points rather than as a
traditional live comedy album. It’s more like a concept album, the live
material interspersed with musical interludes performed by Bill and his
producer and childhood friend, Kevin Booth.
I’ve always found the music on Arizona Bay to be somewhat
intrusive, though it’s still a good album (it’s a Bill Hicks album). With Rant
in E Minor though, the music is pitched perfectly and serves to divide the
seventy five minute album into a series of movements or acts.
The other thing to say about Rant in E Minor is that most of
the material included is unique to this one album. There have been a number of
subsequent albums released, as well as countless bootlegs of other Bill Hicks’s
gigs, which all have significant overlap between them. Yet aside from the
bootleg of his final gig at Igby’s, which does include some of the material
featured on Rant in E Minor, it’s a pretty unique set list. Even the Igby’s set
contains many well-worn routines that you won’t find on Rant in E Minor.
Rant in E Minor is Bill Hicks at his bravest, his angriest,
his most free and his most engaging. The material from the later recordings at
the Laff Stop was recorded when he knew he was ill and any pretence that Bill
was holding back at all is gone. To hear him screaming at his audience, “You
fucking morons, you fucking morons.” is cathartic. As Hicks himself says:
“That’s what this is all about, man. It’s supposed to be a
fucking catharsis, man, you know. It’s supposed to be a release from the
fucking daily grind.”
In that catharsis, Hicks takes aim at the anti-abortion
lobby, Christianity, Billy Ray Cyrus, the perpetrators of the raid on the Waco
complex, including Bill Clinton and Janet Reno, homophobia in the military,
women who defend abusive partners and Rush Limbaugh. One of the reasons that
the comedy of Bill Hicks stands the test the time is both because of the
universality of it content matter, but also, depressingly, because of how
little seems to have changed and how much has come full circle in twenty years.
If Bill was alive today, instead of riffing about hosting a TV show called,
‘Let’s Hunt and Kill Bill Ray Cyrus’ it would be have to be called, ‘Let’s Hunt
and Kill Miley Cyrus (with special guest, Robin Thicke)’. Rush Limbaugh is
still allowed a platform from which to spout his moronic opinions. The show
Cops has been replaced by a thousand and one equally fascistic “reality TV”
programs and rather than senselessly slaughtering women and children in Waco,
Texas, it is instead in Pakistan and the Yemen that women and children are
gunned down with drones by executioners who never leave the comfort of their
armchair in some military base in the desert wilds of the United States, or
have the decency to look their victims once in the eye.
I think Bill Hicks would be appalled at the level to which
soldiers have been elevated to the level of heroes, protectors of freedom, even
as they are used as instruments of brute terror and blunt force to destroy
freedom in favour of corporate profit. He was never one to shy away from
criticism of the military, questioning why a suicide bomber was a coward but
firing Cruise missiles from a ship hundreds of miles away in the Gulf was a heroic
act. In dealing with the issue of gay people serving in the armed forces, Hicks
says:
“Anyone dumb enough to want to be in the military should be
allowed in... I don’t care how many sit ups you can do, put on a helmet, go
wait in that fox-hole, we’ll tell you when we need you to kill somebody.”
Now, I’m sure that Bill didn’t really mean a lot of the
things he said but, like Jonathan Swift, used extreme views to present certain
arguments as reducio ad absurdium, as
well as a way to get laughs. My parents met in the Royal Navy and I exist
because of the armed forces, so I tend to give serving personal the benefit of
the doubt that they are merely following orders and they simply trust that
those orders are given in good faith. Yet I don’t think there is anything particularly
heroic about following orders, especially when the Nuremberg Trials established
that “I was only following orders” is not a valid defence (although Nuremberg
also established the invasion of another sovereign state to be the supreme international crime under
law, but that doesn’t seem to stop us).
For all the supposed threat from Al Qaida in the last decade
or so, the simple fact of the matter is that the most successful terrorist
organisation in the last hundred years is the CIA. More coups against
democratic regimes and more loss of innocent life than Al Qaida could ever even
dream of taking. They kill thousands, we kill hundreds of thousands in
retaliation. In America the repeated mantra is, “Support the troops, they
protect your freedom. “ If you need protecting, you are not free. And all that
all this killing really achieves is to intensify the level of retaliation that
will be visited upon your children after the empire falls. You would think that
the richest country in the world would have at least grasped the basic fact that
all debts get called in eventually. That’s karma, man. It’s also the Second Law
of Thermodynamics.
Bill’s routine on gays in the military manages to correct
one of the niggles I have with his early routines, especially on Dangerous and
Sane Man, where his material is somewhat homophobic (although he did out George
Michael several years before George’s own actions did it for him). Again, this
could simply be a matter of taking things to extremes for deliberate comic
effect. I like when graphic images of gay sex are used as a weapon against
homophobes and other fatheads, so Hicks’s observation that Rush Limbaugh
reminds him of “one of those gay guys who likes to lay in a tub while other men
pee on him.” is especially brilliant. Although it gets too graphic for me when
he comes to the part about Barbara Bush unrolling her flaccid labia, then shitting in
Limbaugh’s mouth. Then I have to skip forward.
I’ve described Rant in E Minor as my favourite spoken word
album, as well as my favourite comedy album, because as funny as Rant in E Minor
is, it also represents Bill Hicks at his most philosophical. The power of
comedy is in its repeatability and yet with Rant in E Minor there are so many
lines that are as much like stanzas from Dylan’s It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only
Bleeding) as anything else and worth listening to whenever you are feeling down
or need a call to action. As well as his comments on catharsis, one further example
will suffice here:
“The argument doesn’t work with me Flapjack. Go back to your
fucking crackerjack lifestyle and I’ll meet you at the evolution bell curve.
I’ll be sitting there awhile, it’s kind of a tortoise and the hare story.”
Many comedians and sitcoms can make me laugh till I cry,
even after I know every word, but there is only Rant in E Minor that can make
me actually cry. To hear Bill talk about thinking about taking his own life,
but not having the balls to do it, and to realise that in that instant he is
facing up to his mortality and the fact that he is going to die is heart breaking
to hear. He’d struggled to build an audience in his home country, but was a
star across the Atlantic. He was about to have his own TV show for real in
Britain and died right on the cusp of major success. On that day, the world
lost a true comedy genius.
In many ways, Bill Hick was a visionary and a man ahead of
his time. Some of his material, like his alter-ego, Pan the Randy Goat-Boy, was
considered extreme at the time. His honest discussions of his use of
pornography were not applauded by all and yet to listen to many comedians these
days, his comedy seems somewhat mild by comparison. The ubiquity of the
internet, it seems, has made us more voyeuristic and more cruel.
If you read Agent of Evolution, the Bill Hicks biography
consisting of interviews with the people who knew him, you see that there were
elements of his life about which he didn’t talk openly (like visiting brothels
and experimenting with just about every drug yet invented, not just the
fashionable ones). He could go too far sometimes, but there was also as much
that he held back. Compare that with, say, the average Doug Stanhope routine,
where very little is censored or held back. I love Doug Stanhope, by the way.
There has been a lot written about Hicks in the media in
this twentieth anniversary week, especially by other comedians. He has been
lauded as a fine comedian, but some question his elevation to the level of
Messiah. I don’t think Hicks was the Messiah, but I do think that some art and
artists transcend the medium in which they exist. Was Shakespeare just another
playwright? Is the Mona Lisa just another portrait? When Billie Holiday sang
Strange Fruit to hushed audiences, was that just another artist singing another
jazz standard?
There’s nothing wrong with being a comedian, making people
laugh is a fine way to make a living, but it doesn’t mean that some comedians
can’t transcend comedy. Bill Hicks wasn’t/isn’t the Messiah but with the
greatest respect to many other comedians that I listen to and love, neither was
Bill Hicks just another comedian. He was somewhere halfway between comedian and
Messiah and his genius in no way devalues the comedy of others, only drags it
up by its bootstraps. If you want to realise the potential of stand-up comedy,
listen to Rant in E Minor.
It’s hard to say what Bill Hicks would be doing if he were
alive today, 52 and grumpier than ever, but I like to imagine him having his
own weekly podcast. Anyone who listens to Greg Proops’s podcast, The Smartest
Man in the World, can get a sense of what that might have sounded like. Proops
has his own style, his own rhythms and way of doing things, but he also
channels the spirit of Bill Hicks, frequently citing Hicks as the bravest
comedian he ever saw. The Smartest Man in the World is one of the highlights of
my week and I can highly recommend it.
It’s useless to dwell on what might have been, only what is.
Bill Hicks died too young, but his comedy lives on through his recorded
material. Rant in E Minor is his crowning achievement and remains a call to
action against hopelessness. If he could be this funny and thought provoking as
he was dying, imagine what we can achieve even as we live.
Get it done.
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