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Introduction
On an obscure one-sided 7" vinyl single released in 1996 on the independent Siltbreeze label (US), a cartoon long-haired dude prepares us for what we're about to hear: 'Turn it off, man. ... What, that's Elvis? It sounds like some nigger dead music' (Figure 1). That most painful and offensive of epithets, nigger, is written but crossed out on the cartoon. Placing the needle on the record, we hear crashing cymbals throbbing against droning, detuned guitars. A half-step interval emerging as a theme, followed by a prominent feedback hum - soon accompanying a series of blood-curdling female screams. The texture flows in and out, with low howling soon in dialogue with the screams as the feedback, cymbals and droning continues. After three and a half minutes, the sounds end.
Figure 1.
Harry Pussy, 'Black Ghost', Siltbreeze, 1996.
The etching on the 'b-side' of the vinyl announces THE HARRY-PUSSY, 'BLACK GHOST' (L. HOPKINS). But if this is indeed a cover of Lightnin' Hopkins' classic 'Black Ghost Blues', as Harry Pussy's Bill Orcutt has indicated in recent interviews (Masters 2010), what is one to make of it, when the connections between the original and the new version have been so obscured? Is this the sound of erasure? The sound of homage? Is it the sound of conflict and contradiction, or the sound of purity (pure anger, pure joy)? Why drop 'Blues' from the song's title? Are the references to Elvis and 'nigger dead music' in the artwork ironic, self-reflective, shocking, funny, offensive? All of the above? A whole new set of questions arises when we add another level of parody, imitation, homage and appropriation: the entire design concept is a copy of Thermidor #10, the single-sided 7" of 'Walking Down the Street' by Nig-Heist (1983), a group that took punk's ridiculous confrontational aesthetic to an extreme that may still be unmatched.1The cover art is the same as Raymond Pettibon's original drawing, with one major change - 'Turn it off, man. ... What, that's Elvis? It sounds like some nigger'.
Harry Pussy's rendition of 'Black Ghost', and the swirling miasma of questions and tangled musical affect it generates, is only one extreme manifestation of a deep tension...