Novelty Babylon

(57 minutes, 2025)

The Blasphemous American Satan Family goes to the Mall.

The basic premise of this album started as an idea for a comix zine called FREEDOM FUNNIES that would have been filled with psychotic political and religious vitriol, drawn in a crude b&w cartoon art style (kind of like if Jack Chick had really, really fucking hated America), and bold, all-caps headlines screaming "SATAN IS OUR GOD" and "A NATION OF ANTICHRISTS." I wanted it to be unclear whether it was ugly satire or the product of genuine mental illness. The zine idea ended up morphing over time into a concept album. This'n here.

The framing narrative for Novelty Babylon is the story of a cartoonist living at the height of American power and prosperity, right at the turn of the millennium. He's a Chick-type religious zealot whose work is filled with vicious attacks on the materialism and vulgar, pornified culture of the USA circa 2000 AD. He extrapolates from there to imagine how much worse things will be after 25 years of the same and creates a series of cartoons featuring the typical American family of 2025 in all its 21st century depravity. Most of the songs take place in this imagined future, where the mega-mall still reigns supreme and the End of History never ended.

In this version of 2025, the world is presided over by a consumer-friendly Antichrist who keeps the gas tanks full and the AC blowing. Any semblance of religiosity has been discarded by a public that is finally ready to admit that the Empire is a Satanic enterprise and that you might as well be OK with that as long as you benefit from it. "We've got more and better stuff than anyone has had / There's a barcode tattooed on our foreheads, but it's not so bad." The cartoonist imerses himself in this fictional world, with its unlimited accumulation of material goods, wanton self-indulgence, and 99 channels of hardcore buttfucking on tv, until he finds that he actually prefers this future over Christ's kingdom of heaven on earth that he's supposed to be looking forward to. Unable to deal with this newfound self-knowledge, he burns himself alive in the Chick-fil-A parking lot and goes screaming down to Hell.

Apart from what's going on in the actual plot, I also wanted this album to be a sort of monument to the brief moment in time, 25 years ago, when it actually seemed reasonable to assume that things were going to keep getting better, bigger, and newer indefinitely...if you were a middle-class American. This good thing we had would just keep on going forever. Or until Jesus came back, at which point I guess the party would be over for anybody who went to the wrong church...Though I honestly don't know how much the average evangelical really believed that the end was nigh in 2000. I'm pretty sure all that Left Behind shit was just an escapist fantasy, one where they would get to be the persecuted victims of the New World Order instead of its beneficiaries. But I digress.

I packed a lot of different y2k-era influences into these songs: the Johnson Smith Company's catalogues of stupid plastic shit, the Spies and Sabs cartoons in Cracked magazine with all their sight gags and small details, the strangely sexy blobby shapes that consumer electronics were taking on in 1999, my embarrassing nu-metal phase in junior high, the novelty t-shirts at the mall. A lot of these are only y2k-era for me personally because that's when I encountered them, but they're probably familiar to anybody in my age demographic.

I think the main idea of the album is probably this: the desire to keep things exactly how they were at the precise moment when they were arranged to your liking is kind of an evil wish. My cohort had it easier than any prior generation of Americans, and by extension, any group of humans ever in history. But this was thanks to living in the heart of a global superpower with dominion over the entire world. Now that we're in decline, maybe the grandkids of the sweatshop slaves who stitched our sneakers will get their turn.