Animal Liberation tunes to furry friends' rights
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Courtesy of Q. Harar*
German divas Nina Hagen and Lene Lovich promote animal
rights on their rap song “Don't Kill the Animals, ” included on
the “Animal Liberation” LP.
By Scott Harrah
Senior Editor
“Animal Liberation,” various
artists, Wax Trax Records
Each year, millions of animals are
used in laboratory experiments for
cosmetics, household products and
medical research. The experiments,
practiced on everything from the pro
verbial guinea pig to beagle puppies,
have incensed animal-rights activists
who claim adequate testing can be
done on computers.
Record
Review
Several of Europe' s new-wave and
pop artists like The Colour Field, Nina
Hagen, Shrickback, Lenc Lovich and
Captain Sensible have joined with
Howard Jones on “Animal Libera
tion,” an animal-rights LPdesigned to
get the word out on what they consider
cruel, inhumane animal treatment.
Politically, the musicians’ mes
sage is questionable.
Would a halt to all lab animal
experiments truly work? Would sci
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enlists be able to use computers on all
research? But there are, of course,
moral questions. Is it ethical to per
form a painful bum experiment on a
puppy culled from the bargain bin of
some dog pound?
Those are some of the issues lyri
cally discussed on “Animal Libera
tion.”
Politics aside, the LP contains cuts
from musicians we haven’t heard
from in some time, namely Nina
Hagen and Lcnc Lovich, the two
kooky, wonderfully absurd perform
ance artists who make up the better
half of Germany’s punk royally.
Hagen and Lovich seem unlikely
candidates for a political cause.
Hagen, one of the original members of
the late 1970s punk movement, later
went on to make off-beat dance pop
peppered with her multi-octave,
schizophrenic voice and flaunt her
“Pebbles Flintstonc as a Hamburg
Whore” wardrobe. Lovich become
popular in underground circles in the
early 1980s with her warped vocals
and Olive Oyl appearance.
Neither has released a full length
LP in years, so their rap duct, “Don't
Kill the Animals.” is welcome but
disappointing new material.
As always, Hagen is so satirical
that it’s difficult to believe she’s seri
ous about animal rights. Remember,
Hagen is the one who’s always in
fanzines talking about UFOs and her
17-year-old punker husband, Iro
quois. Her lyrics mirror her absurd
image, making her message seem less
rhetorical than snidely ludicrous:
“Life is for living/Thc animals
agrcc/If they were meant to be eaten
they’d be growing on trees/So no more
torture of our furry friends/In the
name of food or scientific ends.”
I think schlock poet Rod McKuen
would agree with you, Nina.
Hagen and Lovich rap trashy poli
tics over and over as their wonderfully
annoying voices battle it out to sec
which one can be more obnoxious
while the beatbox whines with atonal
dy. . J
Fortunately,theLP versiondocsn t
contain the bad disco clccto-beat
mixed in on the 12-inch “club” ver
sion.
LOvicn nounces puck on me mmu
number “Supemature,” a more cogent
argumeni for the cause in which she
docs some of her best work since the
“Stateless” LP.
By far, the best cuts arc
Shrickback’s “Hanging Fire” and
Colour Field’s “Cruel Circus.”
The problem with the album is the
inculcation of vegetarian rhetoric
disguised as anti-vivisection mani
festo. For example, Colour Field’s
sentiments about the issue:
“If you could talk to the animals/
Could you justify your reasons/With
the animals/Why the animals/isn’t it
enough to cal them?”
In the transitions between many of
the songs, recordings of cattle being
slaughtered arc added for melodra
matic shock value.
Howard Jones, who came up with
the concept of “Animal Liberation,”
displays the most anger, whining
under a layer of keyboards: “The lives
were taken for feasts at the lablc/A life
See CRITTERS on 15
^—cLi___x_JmSHv* ■
Courtesy of Simon Fowler
Howard Jones, the creator of "Animal Liberation."