« Kleines Magazin » #1

Plot: a collection of songs by recording artists that are dead, with some rants about how this fact can affect your hearing and boost the imagination.

this one is called "death appeal" and is about how music sounds much better when you know the musician is dead, it gives you some kind of a warranty that the product is solid and will last forever

a morbid way to hear things

it might be a morbid way to hear things… but music is best to be heard when you know that the person that you're hearing is already dead… they become instant classics… when John Lennon got shot i was fifteen years old, i really hated John Lennon at the time and i still do, but a compulsive impulse immediately made me buy the single that was out at the time,ironically called "just like starting over" i felt sorry for him, i don't even know why since he wasn't even gonna make any money from my purchase, maybe i did it for yoko, but maybe yoko did him… you could argue that a lot of musicians would be better off dead these days, but that's beside the point, my theory is that death can turn shit into gold.

A slightly more recent example should be Joey, Dee Dee and Johnny Ramone. i really used to love the ramones around the time john lennon got shot, but in recent years i just held them responsible for all the melodic pop-punk-grunge shit that's been flooding the charts, but when Joey died, man, i listened to all the old stuff over and over, reading and watching anything i could find about them, when dee dee died i even started listening to later stuff, solo albums…unobjectively, just because they were dead… or as long as they are dead… would i burn their records if i found out they weren't… probably.

Same for Johnny T., Jeffery Lee, Otis R., Marc B., Jimi H., Elvis P.,Serge G. … So it seems, that the fact that these people don't exist anymore, is very appealing for human beings who, if you push the right buttons can be deeply enclined to necromantic excentricities, that the gap that's been left can be filled with mythological rock'n'roll fantasies, "what if"'s and "how about"'s, when the time has come to sacrify the sacred… while the rock stars who ceased to exist survive through our memories of what we've been made to thing that they were… in the jazz realm of the dead… people like trane and bird have total death appeal… someone like ra went as far to pretend he wouldn't die because he wasn't even born…miles always made music as if it was from beyond… let's look at the story of johnny ace, who "accidentaly" shot himself while playing russian roulette backstage one xmas eve… that kind of information at hand… definitely will influence your sense of hearing… and when i heard about how roy orbison, the big O, lost his wife one year and the next his two kids burned in his house while he was playing a show, it gave "in dreams" a meaning, so much creepier than it's rendition in blue velvet.

Ghazi Barakat

The son of a member of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation, Barakat was born in Germany but spent time living in the Middle East. As a child, he attended Communist summer camps behind the Iron Curtain and weapon training sessions in Palestine, learning how to fire a gun before he learnt how to hold a microphone. His weapon became the art of rock-n-roll. Barakat is a free radical. He robs and steals, rapes and pillages from cultural history to create an inspired pop art collage.