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ALF Songs Q: Have you heard what they're doing to
those poor animals?
A: Yes, it's horrible, and someone should do something about it, and that
someone is us, and tonight's the night.
The album is a collection of nine songs interspersed with a variety of
informative messages. Lyrically, the songs on the album revolve around a single
theme, that animals are not ours to eat, wear or experiment on. Musically, the
album draws from a wonderfully diverse spectrum of talents. Boasting the work of
recording artists such as Shriekback, Captain Sensible, Colourfield, Nina Hagen
and Howard Jones, the album has everything from funky rap songs to melodic
ballads to bouncy dance numbers to jagged experimental tunes.
Don't Kill the Animals, a single from the album, is a duet by the
reigning queens of avant-garde vocals-oriented music, Nina Hagen and Lena
Lovich. The song is being plugged as a dance number, but it's really more of a
fun and funky sing-along. Lashing out against vivisection and meat-eating, the
lyrics are sometimes informative ("A-a-a-animal testing is a dangerous game, our
systems are different, we're not the same. It's a terrible risk so no surprise,
we get wrong results - What about thalidomide?") and sometimes mystical ("Hey
hey, doctor. Reincarnation. Would you like to come back as a laboratory rat?").
The offering by Shriekback is an anti-vivisection song called Hanging
Fire (British slang for death row). Provocative, insightful lyrics are
sometimes spoken, sometimes sung, sometimes hissed and sometimes screeched to
the backdrop of energetic beats. The song calls for a resumption of personal
responsibility when suffering is inflicted on other beings, supposedly for our
benefit ("We share the guilt, carry the blood mark. We are together in this
equality of shame.")
Monkey in the Bin, by the British group Attrition, is preceded by PETA
co-founder Alex Pacheco's announcement, "We want the public to know the truth -
that our government is running concentration camps for animals." An offering of
punk psychadelia, the piece successfully transcends whatever physical barriers
exist, to make the listener actually feel the pathetic isolation of the
animals that are held captive in laboratories. Death, the song suggests, is a
more desirable fate than the various tortures endured by the animals ("Please
let me out, 'cause I'd like to die.").
Silent Cry is a melancholic piece by the British industrial band Chris
and Cosy. Focusing on the individual suffering of individual animals, whose
entire lives consist of hellish brutality and whose only liberation comes
through death, the song mournfully pours out: |
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