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Showing posts with label music. Show all posts
Showing posts with label music. Show all posts

Saturday, 29 November 2025

A REAL CONSPIRACY

Out of all the "conspiracies" I've looked into over the past quarter of a century, some appear to me so pathetically obvious it's mind boggling that anyone ever fell for them. The moon landing would be a prime example of one of those ones. 

Eventually I'm thinking of doing a post ranking the past century of psyops from most to least obvious. I'll probably start with the moon landing, because it's pathetic. But what is the least obvious? 


Yesterday I was listening to "Strawberry Fields" by The Beatles. Yes I do think the Beatles story is a psyop on many different levels, and have done some blog posts about them.

https://sift666.blogspot.com/2025/04/the-beatles-were-illuminati-creation.html

  https://sift666.blogspot.com/2023/07/how-tavistock-institute-invented-rock.html


But nevertheless, whoever really wrote their music, and whoever really played it, some of their songs, like "Strawberry Fields" (1967) are so cutting edge, and so ground breaking, that even if they were done by the entire Tavistock Institute, along with George Martin, and dozens of the top session musicians, it is still an impressive achievement. 

So if I ever do that ranking list, The Beatles will be in top spot as my pick for the best psyop of the past century.


Wednesday, 30 July 2025

TAVISTOCK ROCK

Stones Logo: Sticking your tongue out against the Establishment

“The Rolling Stones were mastered by a Order of Malta member by the name of Prince Rupert Loewenstein who sponsored the ‘Sympathy for the Devil‘ track back in 1968. This Prince was also a member of the very powerful Sacred Military Constantinian Order of St George which is close in power to the Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem, both being higher than the Order of Malta. (The Order of Malta, SMOM, is the military arm of the Vatican here)

It was called the “British Invasion” . The 60’s began a time of “question authority”, grow your hair long, hippies and flower power and morphed in with the Anti War gang of “hell no we won’t go!”

All by design, all by planning to mind control and manipulate what the Baby Boomer (Doomer) generation thought, the language and slang used and the behavior control of the masses.

Yes, it is interesting to note that the Tavistock Institute of Human Relation, as well as, it’s child organization: The Stanford Research Institute, developed The Grateful Dead, among other things.

You can see that Alan Trist, a social engineer for the Tavistock Institute, became the shadow manager of the Dead. His father, Eric Trist, was one of the principle founding members of Tavistock.

It was part of the development of a dynamic psychological warfare model to be used on foreign and domestic populations, modeled, ultimately, on the Lord Gordon Riots in London and the Jacobin Terror of the French Revolution. The purpose was to mobilize mobs in ideological opposition to the state, as a mass destabilization operation. (Source)

250px-LightningBoltSkull

Rebellion against society, let your hair grow…turn on, tune out, as millions of tabs of LSD appeared into the hippie scene from CIA laboratories and promotion provided by Harvard CIA asset, Timothy Leary and distribution aided by the likes of the Grateful Dead. (source)

The men buried in the think tanks and research institutions, whose names and faces are still not known to but a few people, made sure that the press played its part. Conversely, the media’s important role in not exposing the power behind the future cultural shocks made certain that the source of the crisis was never identified.

Thus was our society driven mad through psychological shocks and stress. “Driven mad” is taken from Tavistock’s training manual. From its modest beginnings in 1921, Tavistock was ready in 1966 to launch a major irreversible cultural revolution in America, which has not yet ended. The Aquarian Conspiracy is part of it.

The Beatles (good, bad boys) and the Stones (sympathy for the Devil) were two sides of a same coin that was minted by the Tavistock Institute to introduce a new generation to a new language and a new cultural upbringing around alleged freedoms to thing for yourself and liberties to take drugs and become counter-culture.

….and it was all manufactured. The lyrics form the Beatles, the covers for the Rolling Stones albums, their managers (or handlers) were all derived from the Tavistock Institute as is their name is for the control of “Human Behavior”

http://thinkorbebeaten.com/Library/T/Tavistock%20Institute%20of%20Human%20Relations.pdf

The Tavistock Institute was founded in London in 1946 with the aid of a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation[1] It is a not-for-profit think tank, policy and consulting organization. It publishes “Human Relations and host Evaluation: The International Journal of Theory, Research and Practice, a scholarly journal. According to their website, they assist organizations.

Three elements combine to make the Institute unusual, if not unique: it has the independence of being entirely self-financing, with no subsidies from the government or other sources; the action research orientation places it between, but not in, the worlds of academia and consultancy; and its range of disciplines include anthropology, economics, organizational behavior, political science, psychoanalysis, psychology and sociology.

Tavistock Institute is headquartered in London. Its prophet, Sigmond Freud, settled in Maresfield Gardens when he moved to England. He was given a mansion by Princess Bonaparte. Tavistock’s pioneer work in behavioral science along Freudian lines of “controlling” humans established it as the world center of foundation ideology. (source)

Today the Tavistock Institute operates a $6 Billion a year network of Foundations in the U.S., all of it funded by U.S. taxpayers’ money. Ten major institutions are under its direct control, with 400 subsidiaries, and 3000 other study groups and think tanks which originate many types of programs to increase the control of the World Order over the American people.

The Stanford Research Institute, adjoining the Hoover Institution, is a $150 million a year operation with 3300 employees. It carries on program surveillance for Bechtel, Kaiser, and 400 other companies, and extensive intelligence operations for the CIA. It is the largest institution on the West Coast promoting mind control and the behavioral sciences.

One of the key agencies as a conduit for secret instructions from Tavistock is the Ditchley Foundation, founded in 1957. The American branch of the Ditchley Foundation is run by Cyrus Vance, former Secretary of State, and director of the Rockefeller Foundation, and Winston Lord, president of the Council on Foreign Relations.

And they have controlled and manipulated what we think, what music we hear and what cultural identities the past several generations have identified with.

Without going into the technicalities of the Club of Rome, (hereinafter referred to as “the Club,”) its purpose was to act as a counterweight against post-industrial agricultural and military expansion, a so-called “post-industrial agricultural zero growth society,” which was meant to halt America’s burgeoning manufacturing industries and growing
mechanized farming food production capability. Memberships
of the Club and NATO were interchangeable.

Stanford Research, the Tavistock Institute and other centers of applied social psychiatry joined it. In 1994 Tavistock signed a major contract with NASA to evaluate the effects of its space program. The Club itself was only founded in 1968 as part of the call for a New World Order inside a One World Government.

What the Club became was an instrument to enforce limits of growth on industrial nations, and the United States was the first country to be targeted. (source)

The introduction of four “mop-top” dudes with incredible talent from Liverpool England to continue to influence generations even today was a scientifically planned, well executed agenda to steer the youth of the 70’s to a counter-culture they could identify with by giving teenagers the false choice and influence their culture through music.

More on Theodor Adorno:

Adorno left Germany in the spring of 1934. During the Nazi era he resided in Oxford, New York City, and southern California. There he wrote several books for which he later became famous, including Dialectic of Enlightenment (with Max Horkheimer), Philosophy of New MusicThe Authoritarian Personality (a collaborative project), and Minima Moralia. From these years come his provocative critiques of mass culture and the culture industry. Returning to Frankfurt in 1949 to take up a position in the philosophy department, Adorno quickly established himself as a leading German intellectual and a central figure in the Institute of Social Research.

Founded as a free-standing center for Marxist scholarship in 1923, the Institute had been led by Max Horkheimer since 1930. It provided the hub to what has come to be known as the Frankfurt School. Adorno became the Institute’s director in 1958.

Conflict and consolidation marked the last decade of Adorno’s life. A leading figure in the “positivism dispute” in German sociology, Adorno was a key player in debates about restructuring German universities and a lightning rod for both student activists and their right-wing critics. These controversies did not prevent him from publishing numerous volumes of music criticism, two more volumes of Notes to Literature, books on Hegel and on existential philosophy, and collected essays in sociology and in aesthetics.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/adorno/

There is a great online meme, suggesting that Theodor Adorno was the brains behind the Beatles. Picture the scene. It’s 1963 and Lennon and McCartney are struggling with the composition of ‘She Loves You’. “She loves you,” says Lennon. “What comes next?” “Yeah, yeah, yeah?” chips in Adorno. “Brilliant, Teddie, just brilliant,” says McCartney. And , as a result, the song becomes a transatlantic smash, the Beatles’ all-time best-selling single. True story. In fact, of course, Adorno, as you might expected, despised the mop-topped Scouse beat combo and everything they stood for. “What can be urged against the Beatles,” he said during a discussion in the magazine Akzente in 1965, ” is simply that what these people have to offer is something that is retarded in terms of its own objective content. It can be shown that the means of expression that are employed and preserved here are in reality no more than traditional techniques in a degraded form.” Adorno was also scathing about 1960s protest music, arguing in this interview that it was corrupted by its association with commodified popular musical tropes as he explains. The high mindedness of Adorno’s critique loses its potency when you realise it was expressed by a philosopher who, during the 1960s, used to enjoy watching the safari drama Daktari, with its hero Clarence, the cross-eyed lion.

http://thequietus.com/articles/21004-frankfurt-school-adorno-music

The Tavistock Institute’s projects were a follow-up on the work of the German scientists, known as Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, or the Frankfurt School; which focused on the study and criticism of culture developed from the thought of Freud.

Here’s a little side info on something You know nothing about most likely and note the NAMES:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_Project

The Radio Project was a social research project funded by the Rockefeller Foundation to look into the effects of mass media on society.

In 1937, the Rockefeller Foundation started funding research to find the effects of new forms of mass media on society, especially radio.

Several universities joined up and a headquarters was formed at the School of Public and International Affairsat Princeton University. The following people were involved:

Among the Project’s first studies were soap operas, known as radio dramas at the time.
The Radio Project also researched the 1938 Halloween broadcast of The War of the Worlds.
They found that of the estimated 6 million people who heard this broadcast, 25% thought it was real.

Most of the people who panicked did not think that it was an invasion from Mars that was occurring, but rather an invasion by the Germans. It was later determined that because of the radio broadcasts from the Munich Crisis earlier in the year, the masses were prone to this.

A third research project was that of listening habits. Because of this, a new method was developed to survey an audience – this was dubbed the Little Annie Project. The official name was the Stanton-Lazarsfeld Program Analyzer.

This allowed one not only to find out if a listener liked the performance, but how they felt at any individual moment, through a dial which they would turn to express their preference (positive or negative). This has since become an essential tool in focus group research.

Theodor Adorno produced numerous reports on the effects of “atomized listening” which radio supported and of which he was highly critical. However, because of profound methodological disagreements with Lazarsfeld over the use of techniques like listener surveys and “Little Annie” (Adorno thought both grossly simplified and ignored the degree to which expressed tastes were the result of commercial marketing), Adorno left the project in 1941.

Adorno was highly influential and later went on to work for the Crown Corporation and in his real cynicism, he got to have a Field Day with Tavistock MK’s Rock Bands and write tacky simple music to PROVE his concepts and HOW easy people are to clone off with timed and repeated massages in music…

See Also:

Manufacturing the Deadhead: A Product of Social Engineering… by Joe Atwill and Jan Irvin

Same as the Rolling Stones.

“Dr John Coleman mentioned in the past that the Black Nobility favored ‘The Rolling Stones’ pop culture band. What he did not tell you was who exactly was it that were controlling the band at the very top higher than the Tavistock Institute for Human Relations.

Well as usual I am here to help fill in the dots that others cannot or those who simply fear to tread close to the line with these powers.

12. To introduce new cults and continue to boost those already functioning which include rock music gangsters such as the Rolling Stones (a gangster group much favored by European Black Nobility), and all of the Tavistock-created rock groups which began with the Beatles.

It’s not mentioned here, but the Rolling Stones were created from the same source and with the same purpose. Beatles were supposed to be the “good guys” while the Rolling Stones were the “bad guys”. Also, Rolling Stones were experts in creating repeating “riffs”, meaning a musical phrase that’s looping over and over again (like in “Satisfaction”, “Jumping Jack Flash” etc.). These repeating riffs trigger the mind and make one receptive to whatever sub-message you want to transfer into the minds of the listener. In the case of the Rolling Stones we have satanic messages in their lyrics, and they have repeated that over and over through the years (a more recent example is the”Bridge To Babylon” album) (source)

The Rolling Stones were mastered by a Order of Malta

….member by the name of Prince Rupert Loewenstein who sponsored the ‘Sympathy for the Devil‘ track back in 1968. This Prince was also a member of the very powerful Sacred Military Constantinian Order of St George which is close in power to the Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem, both being higher than the Order of Malta.

Fab Four with Jimmy Saville, Mass Pedophile, Sex Pervert and close friend of Prince Charles

The Tavistock Institute also Engineered Beatles

An outstanding example of social conditioning to accept change, even when it is recognized as unwelcome change by the large population group in the sights of Stanford Research Institute, was the “advent” of the BEATLES. The Beatles were brought to the United States as part of a social experiment which would subject large population groups to brainwashing of which they were not even aware.

When Tavistock brought the Beatles to the United States nobody could have imagined the cultural disaster that was to follow in their wake. The Beatles were an integral part of “THE AQUARIAN CONSPIRACY,” a living organism which sprang From “THE CHANGING IMAGES OF MAN,” URH (489)-2150-Policy Research Report No. 4/4/74. Policy Report pre-pared by SRI Center for the study of Social Policy, Director, Professor Willis Harmon.

The phenomenon of the Beatles was not a spontaneous rebellion by youth against the old social system. Instead it was a carefully crafted plot to introduce by a conspiratorial body which could not be identified, a highly destructive and divisive element into a large population group targeted for change against its will. New words and new phrases–prepared by Tavistock(1)– were introduced to America along with the Beatles. Words such as “rock” in relation to music sounds, “teenager,” “cool,” “discovered” and “pop music” were a lexicon of disguised code words signifying the acceptance of drugs and arrived with and accompanied the Beatles wherever they went, to be “discovered” by “teenagers.” Incidentally, the word “teenagers” was never used until just before the Beatles arrived on the scene, courtesy of the Tavistock Institute for Human Relations.

As in the case of gang wars, nothing could or would have been accomplished without the cooperation of the media, especially the electronic media and, in particular, the scurrilous Ed Sullivan who had been coached by the conspirators as to the role he was to play. Nobody would have paid much attention to the motley crew from Liverpool and the 12-atonal system of “music” that was to follow had it not been for an overabundance of press exposure. The 12-atonal system consisted of heavy, repetitive sounds, taken from the music of the cult of Dionysus and the Baal priesthood by Adorno and given a “modern” flavor by this special friend of the Queen of England and hence the Committee of 300.

Tavistock and its Stanford Research Center created trigger words which then came into general usage around “rock music” and its fans. Trigger words created a distinct new break-away largely young population group which was persuaded by social engineering and conditioning to believe that the Beatles really were their favorite group. All trigger words devised in the context of “rock music” were designed for mass control of the new targeted group, the youth of America.

The Beatles did a perfect job, or perhaps it would be more correct to say that Tavistock and Stanford did a perfect job, the Beatles merely reacting like trained robots “with a little help from their friends”–code words for using drugs and making it “cool.”

The Beatles became a highly visible “new type”– more Tavistock jargon–and as such it was not long before the group made new styles (fads in clothing, hairstyles and language usage) which upset the older generation, as was intended. This was part of the “fragmentation-maladaptation” process worked out by Willis Harmon and his team of social scientists and genetic engineering tinkerers and put into action.

The role of the print and electronic media in our society is crucial to the success of brainwashing large population groups. Gang wars ended in Los Angeles in 1966 as the media withdrew its coverage. The same thing will happen with the current wave of gang wars in Los Angeles. Street gangs will wither on the vine once media saturation coverage is toned down and then completely withdrawn. As in 1966, the issue would become “burned out.” Street gangs will have served their purpose of creating turbulence and insecurity. Exactly the same pattern will be followed in the case of “rock” music. Deprived of media attention, it will eventually take its place in history.

Following the Beatles, who incidentally were put together by the Tavistock Institute, came other “Made in England” rock groups, who, like the Beatles, had Theo Adorno write their cult lyrics and compose all the “music.” I hate to use these beautiful words in the context of “Beatlemania”; it reminds me of how wrongly the word “lover” is used when referring to the filthy interaction between two homosexuals writhing in pigswill. To call “rock” music, is an insult, likewise the language used in “rock lyrics.”

Tavistock and Stanford Research then embarked on the second phase of the work commissioned by the Committee of 300. This new phase turned up the heat for social change in America. As quickly as the Beatles had appeared on the American scene, so too did the “beat generation,” trigger words designed to separate and fragment society. The media now focused its attention on the “beat generation.” Other Tavistock-coined words came seemingly out of nowhere: “beatniks,” “hippies,” “flower children” became part of the vocabulary of America. It became popular to “drop out” and wear dirty jeans, go about with long unwashed hair. The “beat generation” cut itself off from main-stream America. They became just as infamous as the cleaner Beatles before them.

The newly-created group and its “lifestyle” swept millions of young Americans into the cult. American youth underwent a radical revolution without ever being aware of it, while the older generation stood by helplessly, unable to identify the source of the crisis, and thus reacting in a maladaptive manner against its manifestation, which were drugs of all types, marijuana, and later Lysergic acid, “LSD,” so conveniently provided for them by the Swiss pharmaceutical company, SANDOZ, following the discovery by one of its chemists, Albert Hoffman, how to make synthetic ergotamine, a powerful mind-altering drug. The Committee of 300 financed the project through one of their banks, S. C. Warburg, and the drug was carried to America by the philosopher, Aldous Huxley.

The new “wonder drug” was promptly distributed in “sample” size packages, handed out free of charge on college campuses across the United States and at “rock” concerts, which became the leading vehicle for proliferating the use of drugs. The question that cries out for an answer is, what was the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) doing at the time? There is compelling circumstantial evidence that would appear to indicate that the DEA knew what was going on but was ordered not to take any action.

With very substantial numbers of new British “rock” bands arriving in the U.S., rock concerts began to become a fixture on the social calendar of American youth. In tandem with these “concerts,” the use of drugs among the youth rose in proportion. The devilish bedlam of discordant heavy beat sounds numbed the minds of listeners so that they were easily persuaded to try the new drug on the basis that “everybody is doing it.” Peer pressure is a very strong weapon. The “new culture” received maximum coverage from the jackal media, which cost the conspirators not one single thin dime.

In much the same way the Committee of 300, (~ Ed. who was overseer of the Tavistock Institute and coordinated with the Jesuits) used “The “Beatles” to popularize “social drugs” with the youth of America and The Hollywood “in-crowd.” Ed Sullivan was sent to England To become acquainted with The first Tavistock Institute “rock group” to hit the shores of the United States. Sullivan then returned to the United States to draft the strategy for the electronic media on how to package and sell the group. Without the full cooperation of the electronic media and Ed Sullivan, in particular, “The Beatles” and their “music” would have died on the vine. Instead, our national life and the character of the United States was forever changed.

Now that we know, it is all too clear how successful the “Beatles” campaign to proliferate the use of drugs became.

The fact that “The Beatles” had their music and lyrics written for them by Theo Adorno was concealed from public view.

Back when Michael Jackson bought the Beatles’ catalogue of songs it belonged to the Estate of Theodor Adorno who owned most all their sings and lyrics HE wrote. Adorno also wrote a LOT of Hits in the British Invasion for bands a number who were VERY famous and MK’d at the Tavistock Institute in London that created them as “Stars” like Beatles=Good Cop, and Stones=Bad Cop in images and sounds…

The Beatles as most of us remember them at the beginning.

Theodor W. Adorno (Tavistock Institute) was the brains behind the ‘Beatles’ as he held the rights to the music and eventually his estate sold those rights to Michael Jackson.

Adorno a classical musician wrote their music and it was all filtered down through MK’s John then Sir Faul FAKE Paul who could not read a note of music by the way. In fact the only half way real musician in the band was George Harrison. John was a poet who could strum a few chords and Ringo a hack drummer at best. George often wondered why they never wanted to use his songs.

The Beatles were introduced to the public as a means to spread youth culture which led to the spreading of the ‘New Age’ culture and this was all geared to setting up a nihilistic culture that is all to present today. It’s called divide and conquer but this gets into a whole different ‘Pandora’s Box’ if you will. Things are not what they seem.

 

Theodor W. Adorno (Tavistock Institute) in 1964.

That explains why The Beatles ‘broke up’ when they did, because Mr. Adorno died after writing the songs and music for the Abbey Road album.

The Beatles ascension to the top rung of the Rock and Roll Pantheon, displacing Elvis Presley and American rock legends who had a LOCK on the reins of Rock and Roll, was rigged and engineered into place by the British Crown and British Military Intelligence

The prime function to “The Beatles” was to be discovered by teenagers, who where then subjected to a non-stop barrage of “Beatle music,” until they became convinced that they liked the sound and adopted it, along with all that accompanied it. The Liverpool group performed up to expectations, and with “a little help from their friends,” i.e., illegal substances we call drugs created a whole new class to young Americans in the precise mold ordained by the Tavistock Institute.

For instance, in August 1963, at their first major television appearance at the London Palladium, the newspaper reported that police had to hold back “1,000 squealing teenagers”, but the story was fabricated. The newspaper photo actually only tightly cropped three screaming teenagers and claimed it was a thousand. One reporter who was there later said there were less than eight girls present. There was no “riot” by frenzied teenage girls.

Similarly, “Beatle mania” hysteria was manufactured at JFK Airport in February of 1964 when the Beatles arrived in the USA to perform for the Ed Sullivan Show.

Busloads of girls from a Bronx school were PAID by Beatles promoters to scream hysterically when the Beatles got off the plane and went into the terminal.

It was a manufactured publicity stunt, but it paid off in priming the pump for the Ed Sullivan Show appearances, which did create a frenzied attitude among many American teenagers and set the stage for a looser rein on moral boundaries and open the door for kids from “decent”, middle class families to start using drugs, which is precisely what British Intelligence, Tavistock, and the CIA had in mind all along.

And George Martin the “5th Beatle” did ALL the orchestral arrangements with Adorno on later Beatles and British bands they were assigned to

The Frankfurt School converged on the thesis that mass media could be used to induce “regressive mental states, atomizing individuals and producing increased liability”, in other words, creating passivity by fostering alienation as in the Teen Rebel Without A Cause” or punk juvenile delinquents glorified in “Blackboard Jungle” in 1955. Do YOU honestly think those 2 mass media movies that changed the entire Western Hemisphere were just products of some Hollywood Producers in the 50’s???

The word “teenager” wasn’t even used until that time, and Youth Culture was born to break families in the highly oppressive Cold War Era of the 50’s after WWII the biggie step to Globalist Agendas.

Following the Tavistock Institute’s study of war psychosis, and its breakdown of individual personality, as Wolf describes in “Brainwashing: How The British Use The Media for Mass Psychological Warfare”:

“From their work, an evil thesis emerged: Through the use of terror, man can be reduced to a childlike and submissive state, in which his powers of reason are clouded, and in which his emotional response to various situations and stimuli can become predictable, or in Tavistockian terms, “profitable.” By controlling the levels of anxiety, it is possible to induce a similar state in large groups of people, whose behavior can then be controlled and manipulated by the oligarchical forces for whom Tavistock worked.”

There You have the “alienated teenager” who never grows up stuck in his own petty little world as a plastic manufactured “outcast” who never grows up in non-stop Peter Pan Syndrome arrested development.

That IS the occult Principle of ECI = Erotic Crystalization Inertia meaning

Inertia is the resistance of any physical object to a change in its state of motion or rest, or the tendency of an object to resist any change in its motion.

So the non stop barrage of Programming on people after WWII with Radio then TV plus Movies and Music through that technology was an assault on people UNAWARE they were being programmed and cloned off even “Rebels” who were feeling “alienated” from Society and their parents and old ideas… Alienation is part of Divide and Conquer. Wake Up. (source)

Birth of Hard Rock n’ Roll in America and the Hippie Movement

From there the Stanford Research Institute, aided and abetted by the Tavistock Institute, introduced the Rock n’ Roll Hippie Culture movement to counter the anti war activists who were disrupting political life and financial expansion of the wealthy elite.

Dave McGowan was a criminal investigator when in 2007, he turned his focus on Laurel Canyon and why so many rock stars of the day (The Doors, Mamas and the Papas, Frank Zappa, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, etc.) all became known worldwide out of this one little canyon, at the same time. His book, “Weird Scenes in Laurel Canyon” is a must read by all.

(Dave McGowan was “suicided” for writing this book and other material on the truth about the Lincoln Assassination and NASA Hoax..as you can read about here and here)

“It is the first week of August, 1964, and U.S. warships under the command of U.S. Navy Admiral George Stephen Morrison have allegedly come under attack while patrolling Vietnam’s Tonkin Gulf. This event, subsequently dubbed the ‘Tonkin Gulf Incident,’ will result in the immediate passing by the U.S. Congress of the obviously pre-drafted Tonkin Gulf Resolution, which will, in turn, quickly lead to America’s deep immersion into the bloody Vietnam quagmire. Before it is over, well over fifty thousand American bodies – along with literally millions of Southeast Asian bodies – will litter the battlefields of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia

One of the earliest on the Laurel Canyon/Sunset Strip scene is Jim Morrison, the enigmatic lead singer of The Doors. Jim will quickly become one of the most iconic, controversial, critically acclaimed, and influential figures to take up residence in Laurel Canyon. Curiously enough though, the self-proclaimed “Lizard King” has another claim to fame as well, albeit one that none of his numerous chroniclers will feel is of much relevance to his career and possible untimely death: he is the son, as it turns out, of the aforementioned Admiral George Stephen Morrison.

And so it is that, even while the father is actively conspiring to fabricate an incident that will be used to massively accelerate an illegal war, the son is positioning himself to become an icon of the ‘hippie’/anti-war crowd. Nothing unusual about that, I suppose. It is, you know, a small world and all that. And it is not as if Jim Morrison’s story is in any way unique.

One of the earliest on the Laurel Canyon/Sunset Strip scene is Jim Morrison, the enigmatic lead singer of The Doors. Jim will quickly become one of the most iconic, controversial, critically acclaimed, and influential figures to take up residence in Laurel Canyon. Curiously enough though, the self-proclaimed “Lizard King” has another claim to fame as well, albeit one that none of his numerous chroniclers will feel is of much relevance to his career and possible untimely death: he is the son, as it turns out, of the aforementioned Admiral George Stephen Morrison.

And so it is that, even while the father is actively conspiring to fabricate an incident that will be used to massively accelerate an illegal war, the son is positioning himself to become an icon of the ‘hippie’/anti-war crowd.

Nothing unusual about that, I suppose. It is, you know, a small world and all that. And it is not as if Jim Morrison’s story is in any way unique.

Making up the other half of Laurel Canyon’s First Family is Frank’s wife, Gail Zappa, known formerly as Adelaide Sloatman. Gail hails from a long line of career Naval officers, including her father, who spent his life working on classified nuclear weapons research for the U.S. Navy. Gail herself had once worked as a secretary for the Office of Naval Research and Development (she also once told an interviewer that she had “heard voices all [her] life”). Many years before their nearly simultaneous arrival in Laurel Canyon, Gail had attended a Naval kindergarten with “Mr. Mojo Risin’” himself, Jim Morrison (it is claimed that, as children, Gail once hit Jim over the head with a hammer). The very same Jim Morrison had later attended the same Alexandria, Virginia high school as two other future Laurel Canyon luminaries – John Phillips and Cass Elliott.

“Papa” John Phillips, more so than probably any of the other illustrious residents of Laurel Canyon, will play a major role in spreading the emerging youth ‘counterculture’ across America. His contribution will be twofold: first, he will co-organize (along with Manson associate Terry Melcher) the famed Monterrey Pop Festival, which, through unprecedented media exposure, will give mainstream America its first real look at the music and fashions of the nascent ‘hippie’ movement. Second, Phillips will pen an insipid song known as “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair),” which will quickly rise to the top of the charts. Along with the Monterrey Pop Festival, the song will be instrumental in luring the disenfranchised (a preponderance of whom are underage runaways) to San Francisco to create the Haight-Asbury phenomenon and the famed 1967 “Summer of Love.”

Anyway, let’s move on to yet another of Laurel Canyon’s earliest and brightest stars, Mr. Stephen Stills. Stills will have the distinction of being a founding member of two of Laurel Canyon’s most acclaimed and beloved bands: Buffalo Springfield, and, needless to say, Crosby, Stills & Nash. In addition, Stills will pen perhaps the first, and certainly one of the most enduring anthems of the 60s generation, “For What It’s Worth,” the opening lines of which appear at the top of this post (Stills’ follow-up single will be entitled “Bluebird,” which, coincidentally or not, happens to be the original codename assigned to the MK-ULTRA program).

Before his arrival in Laurel Canyon, Stephen Stills was (*yawn*) the product of yet another career military family. Raised partly in Texas, young Stephen spent large swaths of his childhood in El Salvador, Costa Rica, the Panama Canal Zone, and various other parts of Central America – alongside his father, who was, we can be fairly certain, helping to spread ‘democracy’ to the unwashed masses in that endearingly American way. As with the rest of our cast of characters, Stills was educated primarily at schools on military bases and at elite military academies. Among his contemporaries in Laurel Canyon, he was widely viewed as having an abrasive, authoritarian personality. Nothing unusual about any of that, of course, as we have already seen with the rest of our cast of characters.

Before arriving in Laurel Canyon and opening the doors of his home to the soon-to-be famous, the already famous, and the infamous (such as the aforementioned Charlie Manson, whose ‘Family’ also spent time at the Log Cabin and at the Laurel Canyon home of “Mama” Cass Elliot, which, in case you didn’t know, sat right across the street from the Laurel Canyon home of Abigail Folger and Voytek Frykowski, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves here), John Edmund Andrew Phillips was, shockingly enough, yet another child of the military/intelligence complex. The son of U.S. Marine Corp Captain Claude Andrew Phillips and a mother who claimed to have psychic and telekinetic powers, John attended a series of elite military prep schools in the Washington, D.C. area, culminating in an appointment to the prestigious U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis.

Another of those icons, and one of Laurel Canyon’s most flamboyant residents, is a young man by the name of David Crosby, founding member of the seminal Laurel Canyon band the Byrds, as well as, of course, Crosby, Stills & Nash. Crosby is, not surprisingly, the son of an Annapolis graduate and WWII military intelligence officer, Major Floyd Delafield Crosby. Like others in this story, Floyd Crosby spent much of his post-service time traveling the world. Those travels landed him in places like Haiti, where he paid a visit in 1927, when the country just happened to be, coincidentally of course, under military occupation by the U.S. Marines. One of the Marines doing that occupying was a guy that we met earlier by the name of Captain Claude Andrew Phillips.

But David Crosby is much more than just the son of Major Floyd Delafield Crosby. David Van Cortlandt Crosby, as it turns out, is a scion of the closely intertwined Van Cortlandt, Van Schuyler and Van Rensselaer families. And while you’re probably thinking, “the Van Who families?,” I can assure you that if you plug those names in over at Wikipedia, you can spend a pretty fair amount of time reading up on the power wielded by this clan for the last, oh, two-and-a-quarter centuries or so. Suffice it to say that the Crosby family tree includes a truly dizzying array of US senators and congressmen, state senators and assemblymen, governors, mayors, judges, Supreme Court justices, Revolutionary and Civil War generals, signers of the Declaration of Independence, and members of the Continental Congress. It also includes, I should hasten to add – for those of you with a taste for such things – more than a few high-ranking Masons. Stephen Van Rensselaer III, for example, reportedly served as Grand Master of Masons for New York. And if all that isn’t impressive enough, according to the New England Genealogical Society, David Van Cortlandt Crosby is also a direct descendant of ‘Founding Fathers’ and Federalist Papers’ authors Alexander Hamilton and John Jay.

Another shining star on the Laurel Canyon scene, just a few years later, will be singer-songwriter Jackson Browne, who is – are you getting as bored with this as I am? – the product of a career military family. Browne’s father was assigned to post-war ‘reconstruction’ work in Germany, which very likely means that he was in the employ of the OSS, precursor to the CIA. As readers of my “Understanding the F-Word” may recall, U.S. involvement in post-war reconstruction in Germany largely consisted of maintaining as much of the Nazi infrastructure as possible while shielding war criminals from capture and prosecution. Against that backdrop, Jackson Browne was born in a military hospital in Heidelberg, Germany. Some two decades later, he emerged as … oh, never mind.

Let’s talk instead about three other Laurel Canyon vocalists who will rise to dizzying heights of fame and fortune: Gerry Beckley, Dan Peek and Dewey Bunnell. Individually, these three names are probably unknown to virtually all readers; but collectively, as the band America, the three will score huge hits in the early ‘70s with such songs as “Ventura Highway,” “A Horse With No Name,” and the Wizard of Oz-themed “The Tin Man.” I guess I probably don’t need to add here that all three of these lads were products of the military/intelligence community. Beckley’s dad was the commander of the now-defunct West Ruislip USAF base near London, England, a facility deeply immersed in intelligence operations. Bunnell’s and Peek’s fathers were both career Air Force officers serving under Beckley’s dad at West Ruislip, which is where the three boys first met.

We could also, I suppose, discuss Mike Nesmith of the Monkees and Cory Wells of Three Dog Night (two more hugely successful Laurel Canyon bands), who both arrived in LA not long after serving time with the U.S. Air Force. Nesmith also inherited a family fortune estimated at $25 million. Gram Parsons, who would briefly replace David Crosby in The Byrds before fronting The Flying Burrito Brothers, was the son of Major Cecil Ingram “Coon Dog” Connor II, a decorated military officer and bomber pilot who reportedly flew over 50 combat missions. Parsons was also an heir, on his mother’s side, to the formidable Snively family fortune. Said to be the wealthiest family in the exclusive enclave of Winter Haven, Florida, the Snively family was the proud owner of Snively Groves, Inc., which reportedly owned as much as 1/3 of all the citrus groves in the state of Florida.

And so it goes as one scrolls through the roster of Laurel Canyon superstars. What one finds, far more often than not, are the sons and daughters of the military/intelligence complex and the sons and daughters of extreme wealth and privilege – and oftentimes, you’ll find both rolled into one convenient package. Every once in a while, you will also stumble across a former child actor, like the aforementioned Brandon DeWilde, or Monkee Mickey Dolenz, or eccentric prodigy Van Dyke Parks. You might also encounter some former mental patients, such as James Taylor, who spent time in two different mental institutions in Massachusetts before hitting the Laurel Canyon scene, or Larry “Wild Man” Fischer, who was institutionalized repeatedly during his teen years, once for attacking his mother with a knife (an act that was gleefully mocked by Zappa on the cover of Fischer’s first album). Finally, you might find the offspring of an organized crime figure, like Warren Zevon, the son of William “Stumpy” Zevon, a lieutenant for infamous LA crimelord Mickey Cohen.

Tavistock Institute in the United States

Flow Laboratories Gets contracts from the National Institutes of Health.

Merle Thomas Corporation Gets contracts from the U.S. Navy, analyzes data from satellites.

Walden Research Does work in the field of pollution control.

Planning Research Corporation, Arthur D. Little, G.E. “TEMPO”, Operations Research Inc. Part of approximately 350 firms who conduct research and conduct surveys, make recommendations to government. They are part of what President Eisenhower called “a possible danger to public policy that could itself become captive of a scientific-technological elite.”

Brookings Institution Dedicates its work to what it calls a “national agenda.” Wrote President Hoover’s program, President Roosevelt’s “New Deal”, the Kennedy Administration’s “New Frontiers” program (deviation from it may have cost John F. Kennedy his life), and President Johnson’s “Great Society.” Brookings has been telling the United States Government how to conduct its affairs for the past 70 years and is still doing so.

Hudson Institute This institution has done more to shape the way Americans react to political and social events, think, vote and generally conduct themselves than perhaps any except the BIG FIVE. Hudson specializes in defense policy research and relations with the USSR. Most of its military work is classified as SECRET. (One idea during the Vietnam War was to build a moat around Saigon.) Hudson may be properly classified as one of the Committee of 300’s BRAINWASHING establishments. One of its largest clients is the U.S. Department of Defense which includes matters of civil defense, national security, military policy and arms control.

[Editor, Tim Aho: This is the same <http://watch.pair.com/Hudson.html>Hudson Institute which gave us GOALS 2000 and authored the Freedom From Religious Persecution Act, which became the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998. This law required the creation of a federal commission to monitor religion chaired by a presidentially-appointed Ambassador-at-Large on International Religious Freedom under the mandates of the United Nations’ covenants and authority of the International Criminal Court.]

National Training Laboratories One of the key institutions established for this purpose in the United States was the National Training Laboratories (NTL). Founded in 1947 by members of the Tavistock network in the United States and located originally on an estate in Bethel, Maine, NTL had as its explicit purpose the brainwashing of leaders of the government, educational institutions, and corporate bureaucracies in the Tavistock method, and then using these “leaders” to either themselves run Tavistock group sessions in their organizations or to hire other similarly trained group leaders to do the job. The “nuts and bolts” of the NTL operation revolves around the particular form of Tavistock degenerate psychology known as “group dynamics,” developed by German Tavistock operative Kurt Lewin, who emigrated to the United States in the 1930s and whose students founded NTL.

In a Lewinite brainwashing group, a number of individuals from varying backgrounds and personalities, are manipulated by a “group leader” to form a “consensus” of opinion, achieving a new “group identity.” The key to the process is the creation of a controlled environment, in which stress is introduced (sometimes called dissonance) to crack an individual’s belief structure. Using the peer pressure of other group members, the individual is “cracked,” and a new personality emerges with new values. The degrading experience causes the person to deny that any change has taken place. In that way, an individual is brainwashed without the victim knowing what has taken place.

This method is the same, with some minor modification, used in all so-called “sensitivity groups” or “T-groups,” or in the more extreme rock-drug-sex counterculture form, “touchy-feely groups,” such as the kind popularized from the 1960s onward by the Esalen Institute, which was set up with the help of NTL.

From the mid-1950s onward, NTL put the majority of the nation’s corporate leaderships through such brainwashing programs, while running similar programs for the State Department, the Navy, the Department of Education, and other sections of the federal bureaucracy. There is no firm estimate of the number of Americans who have been put through this process in last 40 years at either NTL, or as it is now known the NTL Institute for Applied Behavioral Sciences, which is based in Rosslyn, Virginia, or its West Coast base of operations, the Western Training Laboratories in Group Development, or in various satellite institutions. The most reliable estimate is in the several millions.

One of the groups that went through the NTL mill in the 1950s was the leadership of the National Education Association, the largest organization of teachers in the United States. Thus, the NEA’s outlook has been “shaped” by Tavistock, through the NTL. In 1964, the NTL Institute became a direct part of the NEA, with the NTL setting up “group sessions” for all its affiliates. With funding from the Department of Education, the NTL Institute drafted the programs for the training of the nation’s primary and secondary school teachers, and has a hand as well in developing the content of educational “reforms,” including OBE.

Also known as the International Institute for Applied Behavioral Sciences. This institute is a brainwashing center in artificial stress training whereby participants suddenly find themselves immersed in defending themselves against vicious accusations. NTL takes in the National Education Association, the largest teacher group in the United States. While officially decrying “racism”, it is interesting to note that NTL, working with NEA, produced a paper proposing education vouchers which would separate the hard-to-teach children from the brighter ones, and funding would be allocated according to the number of difficult children who would be separated from those who progressed at a normal rate. The proposal was not taken up.

University of Pennsylvania, Wharton School of Finance & Commerce Founded by Eric Trist One of the “brain trusts” of Tavistock, Wharton has become one of the more important Tavistock in so far as “Behavioral Research” is concerned. Wharton attracts clients such as the U.S. Department of Labor—which teaches how to produce “cooked” statistics at the Wharton Econometric Forecasting Associates Incorporated. This method was very much in demand as we came to the close of 1991 with millions more out of work than was reflected in USDL statistics. Wharton’s ECONOMETRIC MODELING is used by every major Committee of 300 company in the United States, Western Europe, the International Monetary Fund, the United Nations, and the World Bank. Institute for Social Research Among its clients are The Ford Foundation, U.S.Department of Defense, U.S.Postal Service and the U.S. Department of Justice. Among its studies are “The Human Meaning Of Social Change”, “Youth in Transition” and “How Americans View Their Mental Health”.

Institute For The Future This is not a typical Tavistock institution in that it is funded by the Ford Foundation, yet it draws its long-range forecasting from the mother of all think tanks. Institute for the Future projects what it believes to be changes that will be taking place in time frames of fifty years. So called “DELPHI PANELS” decide what is normal and what is not, and prepare position papers to “steer” government in the right direction to head off such groups as “people creating civil disorder.” (This could be patriotic groups demanding abolition of graduated taxes, or demanding that their right to bear arms is not infringed.) This institute recommends action such as liberalizing abortion laws, drug usage and that cars entering an urban area pay tolls, teaching birth control in public schools, requiring registration of firearms, making use of drugs a non-criminal offense, legalizing homosexuality, paying students for scholastic achievements, making zoning controls a preserve of the state, offering bonuses for family planning and last, but most frightening, a Pol Pot Cambodia-style proposal that new communities be established in rural areas, (concentration camp compounds). As can be observed, many of their goals have already been more than fully realized.

INSTITUTE FOR POLICY STUDIES (IPS)

One of the “Big Three”, IPS has shaped and reshaped United States policies, foreign and domestic, since it was founded by James P. Warburg and the Rothschild entities in the United States. Its networks in America include the League for Industrial Democracy. Lead players in the League for Industrial Democracy have included Jeane Kirkpatrick, former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Irwin Suall of the ADL, Eugene Rostow, Arms control negotiator, Lane Kirkland, Labor Leader, and Albert Shanker. IPS was incorporated in 1963 by Marcus Raskin and Richard Barnett, both highly trained Tavistock Institute graduates. The objectives of IPS came from an agenda laid down for it by the Tavistock Institute, one of the most notable being to create the “New Left” as a grass roots movement in the U.S. Its been said that Barnett and Raskin controlled such diverse elements as the Black Panthers, Daniel Ellsberg, National Security Council staff member Halprin, The Weathermen Underground, the Venceramos and the campaign staff of candidate George McGovern. No scheme was too big for IFS and its controllers to take on and manage.

Through its many powerful lobbing groups on Capitol Hill, IPS relentlessly used its “Big Stick” to beat Congress. IPS has a network of lobbyists, all supposedly operating independently but in actual fact acting cohesively, so that Congressmen are pummeled from all sides by seemingly different and varied lobbyists, In this way, IPS was, and is still, able to successfully sway individual Representatives and Senators to vote for “the trend, the way things are going.” By using key pointmen on Capitol Hill, IPS was able to break into the very infrastructure of our legislative system and the way it works.

IPS became, and remains to this day, one of the most prestigious “think tanks” controlling foreign policy decisions, which we, the people, foolishly believe are those of our law makers. By sponsoring militant activism at home and with links to revolutionaries abroad, by engineering such victories as “The Pentagon Papers,” besieging the corporate structure, bridging the credibility gap between underground movements and acceptable political activism, by penetrating religious organizations and using them to sow discord in America, such as radical racial policies under the guise of religion, using establishment media to spread IPS ideas, and then supporting them, IPS has lived up to the role which it was founded to play.

[Editor, Tim Aho: See Watch Unto Prayer report on <http://watch.pair.com/FreedomHouse.html>Freedom House: “Grants (for the IPS) came from the Samuel Rubin Foundation and the Stern Family Fund. Samuel Rubin was himself a member of the elite Comintern of the Communist Party, founded by none other than Lenin himself. Billionaire Armand Hammer assisted Rubin in making the fortunes which helped launch IPS. Philip Stern, an IPS trustee, was the president of Stern Fund. The executive director of the Stern Fund, David R. Hunter, was previously an official of The National Council and the World Council Of Churches. (Dr. James W. Wardner, Unholy Alliances, p.125)]

STANFORD RESEARCH INSTITUTE

Jesse Hobson, the first president of Stanford Research Institute, in a 1952 speech made it clear what lines the institute was to follow. Stanford can be described as one of the “jewels” in Tavistock’s Crown in its rule over the United States. Founded in 1946 immediately after the close of WWII, it was presided over by Charles A. Anderson, with emphasis on mind control research and “future sciences.” Included under the Stanford umbrella was Charles F. Kettering Foundation which developed the “Changing Images of Man” upon which the Aquarian Conspiracy rests.

Some of Stanford’s major clients and contracts were at first centered around the defense establishment but, as Stanford grew, so, did the diversity of its services:

Applications of Behavioral Sciences to Research Management Office of Science and Technology

SRI Business Intelligence Program

U.S. Department of Defense Directorate of Defense Research and Engineering

U.S. Department of Defense Office of Aerospace Research

Among corporations seeking Stanford’s services were Wells Fargo Bank, Bechtel Corporation, Hewlett Packard, Bank of America, McDonnell Douglas Corporation, Blyth, Eastman Dillon and TRW Company. One of Stanford’s more secret projects was extensive work on chemical and bacteriological warfare (CAB) weapons.

Stanford Research is plugged into at least 200 smaller “think tanks” doing research into every facet of life in America. This is ARPA networking and represents the emergence of probably the most far reaching effort to control the environment of every individual in the country. At present Stanford’s computers are linked with 2500 “sister” research consoles which include the CIA, Bell Telephone Laboratories, U.S. Army Intelligence, The Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI), Rand, MIT, Harvard and UCLA. Stanford plays a key role in that it is the “library”, cataloging all ARPA documentation.

“Other agencies”…..one can use one’s imagination here, are allowed to search through SRI’s “library” for key words, phrases, look through sources and update their own master files with those of Stanford Research Center. The Pentagon uses SRI’s master files extensively, and there is little doubt that other U.S. Government agencies do the same. Pentagon “command and control” problems are worked out by Stanford.

While ostensibly these apply only to weapons and soldiers, there is absolutely no guarantee that the same research could not , and will not be turned to civilian applications. Stanford is known to be willing to do anything for anyone.

[Editor, Tim Aho: See Watch Unto Prayer report <Lambert” rel=”nofollow”>http://watch.pair.com/dolphin.html>Lambert Dolphin & the Great Sphinx, which documents the connections of SRI’s Lambert Dolphin with the Edgar Cayce Foundation and The Discernment Ministries.]

MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY (MIT), ALFRED P. SLOAN SCHOOL OF MANAGEMENT

This major institute is not generally recognized as being a part of Tavistock U.S.A. Most people look upon it as being a purely American institution, but that is far from the truth. MIT- Alfred Sloan can be roughly divided into the following groups:

Contemporary Technology Industrial Relations NASA-ERC Computer Research Laboratories Office of Naval Research Group, Psychology Systems Dynamics

Some of MIT’s clients are:

American Management Association

Committee for Economic Development GTE Institute for Defense Analysis (IDA) NASA National Academy of Sciences National Council of Churches Sylvania TRW U.S. Army U.S. Department of State U.S. Navy U.S. Treasury Volkswagen Company RAND RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT CORPORATION

Without a doubt, RAND is THE think tank most beholden to Tavistock Institute and certainly the RIIA’s most prestigious vehicle for control of United States policies at every level. Specific RAND policies that became operative include our ICBM program, prime analyses for U.S. foreign policy making, instigator of space programs, U.S. nuclear policies, corporate analyses, hundreds of projects for the military, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in relation to the use of mind altering drugs like peyote, LSD (the covert MK-ULTRA operation which lasted for 20 years).

[Editor, Tim Aho’s note: The founder of the Rand Corporation, Herman Kahn, also founded the Hudson Institute in 1961. In Educating for the New World Order, B.K. Eakman tells of a training manual for “change agents” developed for the U.S. government by Rand Corporation: “. . . a how-to manual with a 1971 U.S. Office of Education contract number on it entitled ‘Training for Change Agents’; seven volumes of ‘change agent studies’ commissioned by the U.S. Office of Education to the Rand Corporation in 1973-74; scores of other papers submitted by behaviorist researchers who had obtained grants from the U.S. Office of Education for the purpose of exploring ways to ‘freeze’ and ‘unfreeze’ values, ‘to implement change,’ and to turn potentially hostile groups and committees into acquiescent, rubber-stamp bodies by means of such strategies as the ‘Delphi Technique.’” (p. 118)]

Some of RAND’s clients include:

American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T)
Chase Manhattan Bank
International Business Machines (IBM)
National Science Foundation
Republican Party
TRW
U.S. Air Force
U.S. Department of Health
U.S. Department of Energy

There are literally THOUSANDS of highly important companies, government institutions and organizations that make use of RANDS’s services. To list them all would be impossible. Among RAND’s specialities is a study group that predicts the timing and the direction of a thermonuclear war, plus working out the many scenarios based upon its findings. RAND was once accused of being commissioned by the USSR to work out terms of surrender of the United States Government, an accusation that went all the way to the United States Senate, where it was taken up by Senator Symington and subsequently fell victim to scorn poured out by the establishment press. BRAINWASHING remains the primary function of RAND.

These institutions are among those that fund The UNIFORM LAW FOUNDATION, whose function is to ensure that the Uniform Commercial Code remains the instrument for conducting business in the United States.

Why did they put the infamous black magician Aleister Crowley on the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band?

Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967):

So, lets see here. The wonderful and innocent Beatles put the following three nefarious characters on the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band :

1. Aleister Crowley (b. 1875 – d. 1947) – infamous English black magician and honorary 33° Freemason. Crowley and his adherents practiced all forms of sexual debauchery, including sexual intercourse with animals. Crowley was an admitted hedonist, bisexual, and drug experimenter. Crowley referred to himself as “the Beast” and “the most wicked man alive”.

2. Aldous Huxley (b. 1894 – d. 1963) – Author of Brave New World. Advocated using hallucinogenic drugs. Brother of infamous eugenicist Julian Huxley.

3. Karl Marx (b. 1818 – d. 1883) – Co-wrote The Communist Manifesto in 1848, which has been called “one of the world’s most influential political manuscripts”.


Aleister Crowley EXPOSED

The cover of the Sergeant Pepper’s album by the Beatles showed a background of, according to Ringo Starr, people “we like and admire” (Hit Parade, Oct. 1976, p.14). Paul McCartney said of Sgt. Pepper’s cover, “. . . we were going to have photos on the wall of all our HEROES . . .” (Musician, Special Collectors Edition, – Beatles and Rolling Stones, 1988, p.12). One of the Beatle’s heroes included on the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s was — the infamous Satanist, Aleister Crowley.

“Our society is run by insane people for insane objectives. I think we’re being run by maniacs for maniacal ends and I think I’m liable to be put away as insane for expressing that. That’s what’s insane about it.” – John Lennon

John Lennon explained to Playboy magazine that “the whole Beatle idea was to do what you want … do what thou wilst, as long as it doesn’t hurt somebody” (Lennon, cited by David Sheff, The Playboy Interviews with John Lennon and Yoko Ono, p. 61). This was precisely what Crowley taught.

LSD guru Timothy Leary was a Crowley enthusiast. He said: “I’ve been an admirer of Aleister Crowley. I think that I’m carrying on much of the work that he started over a hundred years ago … He was in favor of finding yourself, and ‘Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law’ under love. It was a very powerful statement. I’m sorry he isn’t around now to appreciate the glories he started” (Late Night America, Public Broadcasting Network, cited by Hells Bells, Reel to Real Ministries).

The Satanic Roots of Rock

Under the the strict guidance of EMI’s recording director George Martin, and Brian Epstein, the Beatles were scrubbed, washed, and their hair styled into the Beatles cut. EMI’s Martin created the Beatles in his recording studio.

Lockwood and EMI

EMI, led by aristocrat Sir Joseph Lockwood, stands for Electrical and Mechanical Instruments, and is one of Britain’s largest producers of military electronics. Martin was director of EMI’s subsidiary, Parlophone. By the mid-sixties EMI, now called Thorn EMI, created a music divison which had grown to 74,321 employees and had annual sales of $3.19 billion. EMI was also a key member of Britain’s military intelligence establishment.

Sunday, 20 July 2025

MY FAVOURITE ALBUMS

ROCK OUT AND GO OFF LIKE A FREAK

Music is a very personal thing, and this is a list of some of my own favourite albums, not an attempt at definitive music history. I need to add a few more, including Joy Division Unknown Pleasures,  and Pixies Doolittle, but this will have to do for now.

All the descriptions here are copied from the music site All MusicThe only original thing about this list is that it’s sorted by year. (Apart from the fact that it’s the best list of albums ever compiled!)

My guess before compiling this post was that my favourite albums would all come from the 70’s, 80’s, and 90’s, with the peak era of awesomeness being the 20 years from 1977 to 1997. And that there would be very few albums from this century. And indeed there was only one…

This is probably because modern music sucks, and here is why: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVME_l4IwII



1967

THE JIMI HENDRIX EXPERIENCE – ARE YOU EXPERIENCED?

One of the most stunning debuts in rock history, and one of the definitive albums of the psychedelic era. On Are You Experienced?, Jimi Hendrix synthesized various elements of the cutting edge of 1967 rock into music that sounded both futuristic and rooted in the best traditions of rock, blues, pop, and soul. It was his mind-boggling guitar work, of course, that got most of the ink, building upon the experiments of British innovators like Jeff Beck and Pete Townshend to chart new sonic territories in feedback, distortion, and sheer volume. It wouldn’t have meant much, however, without his excellent material, whether psychedelic frenzy (“Foxey Lady,” “Manic Depression,” “Purple Haze”), instrumental freak-out jams (“Third Stone from the Sun”), blues (“Red House,” “Hey Joe”), or tender, poetic compositions (“The Wind Cries Mary”) that demonstrated the breadth of his songwriting talents. Not to be underestimated were the contributions of drummer Mitch Mitchell and bassist Noel Redding, who gave the music a rhythmic pulse that fused parts of rock and improvised jazz. Many of these songs are among Hendrix‘s very finest; it may be true that he would continue to develop at a rapid pace throughout the rest of his brief career, but he would never surpass his first LP in terms of consistently high quality.

1969

LED ZEPPELIN

Led Zeppelin had a fully formed, distinctive sound from the outset, as their eponymous debut illustrates. Taking the heavy, distorted electric blues of Jimi Hendrix, Jeff Beck, and Cream to an extreme, Zeppelin created a majestic, powerful brand of guitar rock constructed around simple, memorable riffs and lumbering rhythms. But the key to the group’s attack was subtlety: it wasn’t just an onslaught of guitar noise, it was shaded and textured, filled with alternating dynamics and tempos. As Led Zeppelin proves, the group was capable of such multi-layered music from the start.

Although the extended psychedelic blues of “Dazed and Confused,” “You Shook Me,” and “I Can’t Quit You Baby” often gather the most attention, the remainder of the album is a better indication of what would come later. “Babe I’m Gonna Leave You” shifts from folky verses to pummeling choruses; “Good Times Bad Times” and “How Many More Times” have groovy, bluesy shuffles; “Your Time Is Gonna Come” is an anthemic hard rocker; “Black Mountain Side” is pure English folk; and “Communication Breakdown” is a frenzied rocker with a nearly punkish attack. Although the album isn’t as varied as some of their later efforts, it nevertheless marked a significant turning point in the evolution of hard rock and heavy metal.

1969

LED ZEPPELIN 2

Recorded quickly during Led Zeppelin‘s first American tours, Led Zeppelin II provided the blueprint for all the heavy metal bands that followed it. Since the group could only enter the studio for brief amounts of time, most of the songs that compose II are reworked blues and rock & roll standards that the band was performing on-stage at the time. Not only did the short amount of time result in a lack of original material, it made the sound more direct. Jimmy Page still provided layers of guitar overdubs, but the overall sound of the album is heavy and hard, brutal and direct. “Whole Lotta Love,” “The Lemon Song,” and “Bring It on Home” are all based on classic blues songs — only, the riffs are simpler and louder and each song has an extended section for instrumental solos. Of the remaining six songs, two sport light acoustic touches (“Thank You,” “Ramble On”), but the other four are straight-ahead heavy rock that follows the formula of the revamped blues songs. While Led Zeppelin II doesn’t have the eclecticism of the group’s debut, it’s arguably more influential. After all, nearly every one of the hundreds of Zeppelin imitators used this record, with its lack of dynamics and its pummeling riffs, as a blueprint.

1970

THE WHO – LIVE AT LEADS

Rushed out in 1970 as a way to bide time as the Who toiled away on their follow-up to Tommy, Live at Leeds wasn’t intended to be the definitive Who live album, and many collectors maintain that the band had better shows available on bootlegs. But those shows weren’t easily available whereas Live at Leeds was, and even if this show may not have been the absolute best, it’s so damn close to it that it would be impossible for anybody but aficionados to argue. Here, the Who sound vicious — as heavy as Led Zeppelin but twice as volatile — as they careen through early classics with the confidence of a band that had finally achieved acclaim but had yet to become preoccupied with making art. In that regard, this recording — in its many different forms — may have been perfectly timed in terms of capturing the band at a pivotal moment in its history.

There is certainly no better record of how this band was a volcano of violence on-stage, teetering on the edge of chaos but never blowing apart. This was most true on the original LP, which was a trim six tracks, three of them covers (“Young Man Blues,” “Summertime Blues,” “Shakin’ All Over”) and three originals from the mid-’60s, two of those (“Substitute,” “My Generation”) vintage parts of their repertory and only “Magic Bus” representing anything resembling a recent original, with none bearing a trace of their mod roots. This was pure, distilled power, all the better for its brevity; throughout the ’70s the album was seen as one of the gold standards in live rock & roll, and certainly it had a fury that no proper Who studio album achieved. It was also notable as one of the earliest legitimate albums to implicitly acknowledge — and go head to head with — the existence of bootleg LPs. Indeed, its very existence owed something to the efforts of Pete Townshend and company to stymie the bootleggers.

The Who had made extensive recordings of performances along their 1969 tour, with the intention of preparing a live album from that material, but they recognized when it was over that none of them had the time or patience to go through the many dozens of hours of live performances in order to sort out what to use for the proposed album. According to one account, the band destroyed those tapes in a massive bonfire, so that none of the material would ever surface without permission. They then decided to go to the other extreme in preparing a live album, scheduling this concert at Leeds University and arranging the taping, determined to do enough that was worthwhile at the one show. As it turned out, even here they generated an embarrassment of riches — the band did all of Tommy, as audiences of the time would have expected (and, indeed, demanded), but as the opera was already starting to feel like an albatross hanging around the collective neck of the band (and especially Townshend), they opted to leave out any part of their most famous work apart from a few instrumental strains in one of the jams. Instead, the original LP was limited to the six tracks named, and that was more than fine as far as anyone cared.

And fans who bought the LP got a package of extra treats for their money. The album’s plain brown sleeve was, itself, a nod and nudge to the bootleggers, resembling the packaging of such early underground LP classics as the Bob Dylan Great White Wonder set and the Rolling Stones concert bootleg Liver Than You’ll Ever Be, from the latter group’s 1969 tour — and it was a sign of just how far the Who had come in just two years that they could possibly (and correctly) equate interest in their work as being on a par with Dylan and the Stones. But Live at Leeds‘ jacket was a fold-out sleeve with a pocket that contained a package of memorabilia associated with the band, including a really cool poster, copies of early contracts, etc. It was, along with Tommy, the first truly good job of packaging for this band ever to come from Decca Records; the label even chose to forgo the presence of its rainbow logo, carrying the bootleg pose to the plain label and handwritten song titles, and the note about not correcting the clicks and pops. At the time, you just bought this as a fan, but looking back 30 or 40 years on, those now seem to be quietly heady days for the band (and for fans who had supported them for years), finally seeing the music world and millions of listeners catch up.

1971

THE DOORS – LA WOMAN

The final album with Jim Morrison in the lineup is by far their most blues-oriented, and the singer’s poetic ardor is undiminished, though his voice sounds increasingly worn and craggy on some numbers. Actually, some of the straight blues items sound kind of turgid, but that’s more than made up for by several cuts that rate among their finest and most disturbing work. The seven-minute title track was a car-cruising classic that celebrated both the glamour and seediness of Los Angeles; the other long cut, the brooding, jazzy “Riders on the Storm,” was the group at its most melodic and ominous. It and the far bouncier “Love Her Madly” were hit singles, and “The Changeling” and “L’America” count as some of their better little-heeded album tracks. An uneven but worthy finale from the original quartet.

1975

LED ZEPPELIN – PHYSICAL GRAFFITI

Led Zeppelin returned from a nearly two-year hiatus in 1975 with the double-album Physical Graffiti, their most sprawling and ambitious work. Where Led Zeppelin IV and Houses of the Holy integrated influences on each song, the majority of the tracks on Physical Graffiti are individual stylistic workouts. The highlights are when Zeppelin incorporate influences and stretch out into new stylistic territory, most notably on the tense, Eastern-influenced “Kashmir.” “Trampled Underfoot,” with John Paul Jones‘ galloping keyboard, is their best funk-metal workout, while “Houses of the Holy” is their best attempt at pop, and “Down by the Seaside” is the closest they’ve come to country. Even the heavier blues — the 11-minute “In My Time of Dying,” the tightly wound “Custard Pie,” and the monstrous epic “The Rover” — are louder and more extended and textured than their previous work. Also, all of the heavy songs are on the first record, leaving the rest of the album to explore more adventurous territory, whether it’s acoustic tracks or grandiose but quiet epics like the affecting “Ten Years Gone.” The second half of Physical Graffiti feels like the group is cleaning the vaults out, issuing every little scrap of music they set to tape in the past few years. That means that the album is filled with songs that aren’t quite filler, but don’t quite match the peaks of the album, either. Still, even these songs have their merits — “Sick Again” is the meanest, most decadent rocker they ever recorded, and the folky acoustic rock & roll of “Boogie with Stu” and “Black Country Woman” may be tossed off, but they have a relaxed, off-hand charm that Zeppelin never matched. It takes a while to sort out all of the music on the album, but Physical Graffiti captures the whole experience of Led Zeppelin at the top of their game better than any of their other albums

1977

THE SEX PISTOLS – NEVER MIND THE BOLLOCKS

While mostly accurate, dismissing Never Mind the Bollocks as merely a series of loud, ragged midtempo rockers with a harsh, grating vocalist and not much melody would be a terrible error. Already anthemic songs are rendered positively transcendent by Johnny Rotten‘s rabid, foaming delivery. His bitterly sarcastic attacks on pretentious affectation and the very foundations of British society were all carried out in the most confrontational, impolite manner possible. Most imitators of the Pistols‘ angry nihilism missed the point: underneath the shock tactics and theatrical negativity were social critiques carefully designed for maximum impact. Never Mind the Bollocks perfectly articulated the frustration, rage, and dissatisfaction of the British working class with the establishment, a spirit quick to translate itself to strictly rock & roll terms. The Pistols paved the way for countless other bands to make similarly rebellious statements, but arguably none were as daring or effective. It’s easy to see how the band’s roaring energy, overwhelmingly snotty attitude, and Rotten‘s furious ranting sparked a musical revolution, and those qualities haven’t diminished one bit over time. Never Mind the Bollocks is simply one of the greatest, most inspiring rock records of all time.

1977

WIRE -PINK FLAG

Perhaps the most original debut album to come out of the first wave of British punk, Wire‘s Pink Flag plays like The Ramones Go to Art School — song after song careens past in a glorious, stripped-down rush. However, unlike the Ramones, Wire ultimately made their mark through unpredictability. Very few of the songs followed traditional verse/chorus structures — if one or two riffs sufficed, no more were added; if a musical hook or lyric didn’t need to be repeated, Wire immediately stopped playing, accounting for the album’s brevity (21 songs in under 36 minutes on the original version). The sometimes dissonant, minimalist arrangements allow for space and interplay between the instruments; Colin Newman isn’t always the most comprehensible singer, but he displays an acerbic wit and balances the occasional lyrical abstraction with plenty of bile in his delivery. Many punk bands aimed to strip rock & roll of its excess, but Wire took the concept a step further, cutting punk itself down to its essence and achieving an even more concentrated impact. Some of the tracks may seem at first like underdeveloped sketches or fragments, but further listening demonstrates that in most cases, the music is memorable even without the repetition and structure most ears have come to expect — it simply requires a bit more concentration. And Wire are full of ideas; for such a fiercely minimalist band, they display quite a musical range, spanning slow, haunting texture exercises, warped power pop, punk anthems, and proto-hardcore rants — it’s recognizable, yet simultaneously quite unlike anything that preceded it. Pink Flag‘s enduring influence pops up in hardcore, post-punk, alternative rock, and even Brit-pop, and it still remains a fresh, invigorating listen today: a fascinating, highly inventive rethinking of punk rock and its freedom to make up your own rules.

1978

BLONDIE – PARALLEL LINES

Blondie turned to British pop producer Mike Chapman for their third album, on which they abandoned any pretensions to new wave legitimacy (just in time, given the decline of the new wave) and emerged as a pure pop band. But it wasn’t just Chapman that made Parallel Lines Blondie‘s best album; it was the band’s own songwriting, including Deborah Harry, Chris Stein, and James Destri‘s “Picture This,” and Harry and Stein‘s “Heart of Glass,” and Harry and new bass player Nigel Harrison‘s “One Way or Another,” plus two contributions from nonbandmember Jack Lee, “Will Anything Happen?” and “Hanging on the Telephone.” That was enough to give Blondie a number one on both sides of the Atlantic with “Heart of Glass” and three more U.K. hits, but what impresses is the album’s depth and consistency — album tracks like “Fade Away and Radiate” and “Just Go Away” are as impressive as the songs pulled for singles. The result is state-of-the-art pop/rock circa 1978, with Harry‘s tough-girl glamour setting the pattern that would be exploited over the next decade by a host of successors led by Madonna.

1979

THE B52’S

Even in the weird, quirky world of new wave and post-punk in the late ’70s, the B-52’s‘ eponymous debut stood out as an original. Unabashed kitsch mavens at a time when their peers were either vulgar or stylish, the Athens quintet celebrated all the silliest aspects of pre-Beatles pop culture — bad hairdos, sci-fi nightmares, dance crazes, pastels, and anything else that sprung into their minds — to a skewed fusion of pop, surf, avant-garde, amateurish punk, and white funk. On paper, it sounds like a cerebral exercise, but it played like a party. The jerky, angular funk was irresistibly danceable, winning over listeners dubious of Kate Pierson and Cindy Wilson‘s high-pitched, shrill close harmonies and Fred Schneider‘s campy, flamboyant vocalizing, pitched halfway between singing and speaking. It’s all great fun, but it wouldn’t have resonated throughout the years if the group hadn’t written such incredibly infectious, memorable tunes as “Planet Claire,” “Dance This Mess Around,” and, of course, their signature tune, “Rock Lobster.” These songs illustrated that the B-52’s‘ adoration of camp culture wasn’t simply affectation — it was a world view capable of turning out brilliant pop singles and, in turn, influencing mainstream pop culture. It’s difficult to imagine the endless kitschy retro fads of the ’80s and ’90s without the B-52’s pointing the way, but The B-52’s isn’t simply an historic artifact — it’s a hell of a good time.

1979

THE CLASH – LONDON CALLING

Give ‘Em Enough Rope, for all of its many attributes, was essentially a holding pattern for the Clash, but the double-album London Calling is a remarkable leap forward, incorporating the punk aesthetic into rock & roll mythology and roots music. Before, the Clash had experimented with reggae, but that was no preparation for the dizzying array of styles on London Calling. There’s punk and reggae, but there’s also rockabilly, ska, New Orleans R&B, pop, lounge jazz, and hard rock; and while the record isn’t tied together by a specific theme, its eclecticism and anthemic punk function as a rallying call. While many of the songs — particularly “London Calling,” “Spanish Bombs,” and “The Guns of Brixton” — are explicitly political, by acknowledging no boundaries the music itself is political and revolutionary. But it is also invigorating, rocking harder and with more purpose than most albums, let alone double albums. Over the course of the record, Joe Strummer and Mick Jones (and Paul Simonon, who wrote “The Guns of Brixton”) explore their familiar themes of working-class rebellion and antiestablishment rants, but they also tie them in to old rock & roll traditions and myths, whether it’s rockabilly greasers or “Stagger Lee,” as well as mavericks like doomed actor Montgomery Clift. The result is a stunning statement of purpose and one of the greatest rock & roll albums ever recorded.


1989

BEASTIE BOYS – PAUL’S BOUTIQUE

Such was the power of Licensed to Ill that everybody, from fans to critics, thought that not only could the Beastie Boys not top the record, but that they were destined to be a one-shot wonder. These feelings were only amplified by their messy, litigious departure from Def Jam and their flight from their beloved New York to Los Angeles, since it appeared that the Beasties had completely lost the plot.

Many critics in fact thought that Paul’s Boutique was a muddled mess upon its summer release in 1989, but that’s the nature of the record — it’s so dense, it’s bewildering at first, revealing its considerable charms with each play. To put it mildly, it’s a considerable change from the hard rock of Licensed to Ill, shifting to layers of samples and beats so intertwined they move beyond psychedelic; it’s a painting with sound. Paul’s Boutique is a record that only could have been made in a specific time and place. Like the Rolling Stones in 1972, the Beastie Boys were in exile and pining for their home, so they made a love letter to downtown New York — which they could not have done without the Dust Brothers, a Los Angeles-based production duo who helped redefine what sampling could be with this record.

Sadly, after Paul’s Boutique sampling on the level of what’s heard here would disappear; due to a series of lawsuits, most notably Gilbert O’Sullivan‘s suit against Biz Markie, the entire enterprise too cost-prohibitive and risky to perform on such a grand scale. Which is really a shame, because if ever a record could be used as incontrovertible proof that sampling is its own art form, it’s Paul’s Boutique.

Snatches of familiar music are scattered throughout the record — anything from Curtis Mayfield‘s “Superfly” and Sly Stone‘s “Loose Booty” to Loggins & Messina‘s “Your Mama Don’t Dance” and the Ramones‘ “Suzy Is a Headbanger” — but never once are they presented in lazy, predictable ways. The Dust Brothers and Beasties weave a crazy-quilt of samples, beats, loops, and tricks, which creates a hyper-surreal alternate reality — a romanticized, funhouse reflection of New York where all pop music and culture exist on the same strata, feeding off each other, mocking each other, evolving into a wholly unique record, unlike anything that came before or after.

It very well could be that its density is what alienated listeners and critics at the time; there is so much information in the music and words that it can seem impenetrable at first, but upon repeated spins it opens up slowly, assuredly, revealing more every listen. Musically, few hip-hop records have ever been so rich; it’s not just the recontextulations of familiar music via samples, it’s the flow of each song and the album as a whole, culminating in the widescreen suite that closes the record.

Lyrically, the Beasties have never been better — not just because their jokes are razor-sharp, but because they construct full-bodied narratives and evocative portraits of characters and places. Few pop records offer this much to savor, and if Paul’s Boutique only made a modest impact upon its initial release, over time its influence could be heard through pop and rap, yet no matter how its influence was felt, it stands alone as a record of stunning vision, maturity, and accomplishment. Plus, it’s a hell of a lot of fun, no matter how many times you’ve heard it.

1991

NIRVANA – NEVERMIND

Nevermind was never meant to change the world, but you can never predict when the Zeitgeist will hit, and Nirvana‘s second album turned out to be the place where alternative rock crashed into the mainstream. This wasn’t entirely an accident, either, since Nirvana did sign with a major label, and they did release a record with a shiny surface, no matter how humongous the guitars sounded. And, yes, Nevermind is probably a little shinier than it should be, positively glistening with echo and fuzzbox distortion, especially when compared with the black-and-white murk of Bleach. This doesn’t discount the record, since it’s not only much harder than any mainstream rock of 1991, its character isn’t on the surface, it’s in the exhilaratingly raw music and haunting songs. Kurt Cobain‘s personal problems and subsequent suicide naturally deepen the dark undercurrents, but no matter how much anguish there is on Nevermind, it’s bracing because he exorcizes those demons through his evocative wordplay and mangled screams — and because the band has a tremendous, unbridled power that transcends the pain, turning into pure catharsis. And that’s as key to the record’s success as Cobain‘s songwriting, since Krist Novoselic and Dave Grohl help turn this into music that is gripping, powerful, and even fun (and, really, there’s no other way to characterize “Territorial Pissings” or the surging “Breed”). In retrospect, Nevermind may seem a little too unassuming for its mythic status — it’s simply a great modern punk record — but even though it may no longer seem life-changing, it is certainly life-affirming, which may just be better.  

1991

PEARL JAM – TEN

Nirvana‘s Nevermind may have been the album that broke grunge and alternative rock into the mainstream, but there’s no underestimating the role that Pearl Jam‘s Ten played in keeping them there. Nirvana‘s appeal may have been huge, but it wasn’t universal; rock radio still viewed them as too raw and punky, and some hard rock fans dismissed them as weird misfits. In retrospect, it’s easy to see why Pearl Jam clicked with a mass audience — they weren’t as metallic as Alice in Chains or Soundgarden, and of Seattle’s Big Four, their sound owed the greatest debt to classic rock. With its intricately arranged guitar textures and expansive harmonic vocabulary, Ten especially recalled Jimi Hendrix and Led Zeppelin. But those touchstones might not have been immediately apparent, since — aside from Mike McCready‘s Clapton/Hendrix-style leads — every trace of blues influence has been completely stripped from the band’s sound. Though they rock hard, Pearl Jam is too anti-star to swagger, too self-aware to puncture the album’s air of gravity. Pearl Jam tackles weighty topics — abortion, homelessness, childhood traumas, gun violence, rigorous introspection — with an earnest zeal unmatched since mid-’80s U2, whose anthemic sound they frequently strive for. Similarly, Eddie Vedder‘s impressionistic lyrics often make their greatest impact through the passionate commitment of his delivery rather than concrete meaning. His voice had a highly distinctive timbre that perfectly fit the album’s warm, rich sound, and that’s part of the key — no matter how cathartic Ten‘s tersely titled songs got, they were never abrasive enough to affect the album’s accessibility. Ten also benefited from a long gestation period, during which the band honed the material into this tightly focused form; the result is a flawlessly crafted hard rock masterpiece.

1993

BJORK – DEBUT

Freed from the Sugarcubes‘ confines, Björk takes her voice and creativity to new heights on Debut, her first work after the group’s breakup. With producer Nellee Hooper‘s help, she moves in an elegantly playful, dance-inspired direction, crafting highly individual, emotional electronic pop songs like the shivery, idealistic “One Day” and the bittersweet “Violently Happy.” Despite the album’s swift stylistic shifts, each of Debut‘s tracks are distinctively Björk. “Human Behaviour”‘s dramatic percussion provides a perfect showcase for her wide-ranging voice; “Aeroplane” casts her as a yearning lover against a lush, exotica-inspired backdrop; and the spare, poignant “Anchor Song” uses just her voice and a brass section to capture the loneliness of the sea. Though Debut is just as arty as anything she recorded with the Sugarcubes, the album’s club-oriented tracks provide an exciting contrast to the rest of the album’s delicate atmosphere. Björk‘s playful energy ignites the dance-pop-like “Big Time Sensuality” and turns the genre on its head with “There’s More to Life Than This.” Recorded live at the Milk Bar Toilets, it captures the dancefloor’s sweaty, claustrophobic groove, but her impish voice gives it an almost alien feel. But the album’s romantic moments may be its most striking; “Venus as a Boy” fairly swoons with twinkly vibes and lush strings, and Björk‘s vocals and lyrics — “His wicked sense of humor/Suggests exciting sex” — are sweet and just the slightest bit naughty. With harpist Corky Hale, she completely reinvents “Like Someone in Love,” making it one of her own ballads. Possibly her prettiest work, Björk‘s horizons expanded on her other releases, but the album still sounds fresh, which is even more impressive considering electronic music’s whiplash-speed innovations. Debut not only announced Björk‘s remarkable talent; it suggested she had even more to offer.

1993

SMASHING PUMPKINS – SIAMESE DREAM

While Gish had placed the Smashing Pumpkins on the “most promising artist” list for many, troubles were threatening to break the band apart. Singer/guitarist/leader Billy Corgan was battling a severe case of writer’s block and was in a deep state of depression brought on by a relationship in turmoil; drummer Jimmy Chamberlin was addicted to hard drugs; and bassist D’Arcy and guitarist James Iha severed their romantic relationship. The sessions for their sophomore effort, Siamese Dream, were wrought with friction — Corgan eventually played almost all the instruments himself (except for percussion). Some say strife and tension produces the best music, and it certainly helped make Siamese Dream one of the finest alt-rock albums of all time. Instead of following Nirvana‘s punk rock route, Siamese Dream went in the opposite direction — guitar solos galore, layered walls of sound courtesy of the album’s producers (Butch Vig and Corgan), extended compositions that bordered on prog rock, plus often reflective and heartfelt lyrics. The four tracks that were selected as singles became alternative radio standards — the anthems “Cherub Rock,” “Today,” and “Rocket,” plus the symphonic ballad “Disarm” — but as a whole, Siamese Dream proved to be an incredibly consistent album. Such compositions as the red-hot rockers “Quiet” and “Geek U.S.A.” were standouts, as were the epics “Hummer,” “Soma,” and “Silverfuck,” plus the soothing sounds of “Mayonaise,” “Spaceboy,” and “Luna.” After the difficult recording sessions, Corgan stated publicly that if Siamese Dream didn’t achieve breakthrough success, he would end the band. He didn’t have to worry for long — the album debuted in the Billboard Top Ten and sold more than four million copies in three years. Siamese Dream stands alongside Nevermind and Superunknown as one of the decade’s finest (and most influential) rock albums.

1996

BECK – ODELAY

Unlike Stereopathetic Soul Manure and One Foot in the Grave, the indie albums that followed his debut Mellow Gold by a mere matter of months, Odelay was a full-fledged, full-bodied album, released on a major label in the summer of 1996 and bearing an intricate, meticulous production by the Dust Brothers in their first gig since the Beastie Boys Paul’s Boutique. Odelay shared a similar collage structure to that 1989 masterpiece, relying on a blend of found sounds and samples, but instead of lending the album its primary colors, the Dust Brothers provided the accents, highlighting Beck‘s ever-changing sounds, tying together his stylistic shifts, making the leaps from the dirge-blues of “Jack-Ass” to the hazy party rock of “Where’s It’s At” seem not so great. Like Mellow Gold, Odelay winds up touching on a number of disparate strands — folk and country, grungy garage rock, stiff-boned electro, louche exotica, old-school rap, touches of noise rock — but there’s no break-neck snap between sensibilities, everything flows smoothly, the dense sounds suggesting that the songs are a bit more complicated than they actually are. Most of the songs here betray Beck‘s roots as an anti-folk singer — he reworks blues structures (“Devil’s Haircut”), country (“Lord Only Knows,” “Sissyneck”), soul (“Hotwax”), folk (“Ramshackle”) and rap (“High 5 [Rock the Catskills],” “Where It’s At”) — but each track twists conventions, either in their construction or presentation, giving this a vibrant, electric pulse, surprising in its form and attack. Like a mosaic, all the details add up to a picture greater than its parts, so while some of Beck‘s best songs are here, Odelay is best appreciated as a recorded whole, with each layered sample enhancing the allusion that came before.

1996

THE BRIAN JONESTOWN MASSACRE – TAKE IT FROM THE MAN!

Take it from the man! is an awesome album from retro psych masters BJM. This album has the bluesy swagger of the Stones, melodic tightness of the the Byrds, the whimsical psychedelia of the Beatles and folksiness of Dylan and this combination comes enveloped in the typical BJM style.

The Brian Jonestown Massacre‘s obsession with the Rolling Stones continues unabated on the brilliant Take It From the Man!; where the group resurrected psychedelic-era excesses on the previous Their Satanic Majesties’ Second Request, here they jump further back in time to the Stones‘ mid-’60s period, with even more superlative results. From the opening “Vacuum Boots” onward, Take It From the Man! is gritty, swaggering R&B-influenced rock, delivered with remarkable assurance and attitude; singer Anton Newcombe is half madman and half shaman, and he commands each delirious moment with absolute mastery, emerging not so much a disciple of Mick Jagger but as a serious threat to the throne. Tracks like “Who?,” “(David Bowie I Love You) Since I Was Six,” and the epic finale, “Straight up and Down,” are simply amazing, evoking rock’s golden age without ever disintegrating into slavish devotion – clearly, the BJM is a group that believes in killing their idols, and their intensity begs the question: just who is the World’s Greatest Rock & Roll Band again?

1997

PRODIGY – THE FAT OF THE LAND

Few albums were as eagerly anticipated as The Fat of the Land, the Prodigy‘s long-awaited follow-up to Music for the Jilted Generation. By the time of its release, the group had two number one British singles with “Firestarter” and “Breathe” and had begun to make inroads in America. The Fat of the Land was touted as the album that would bring electronica/techno to a worldwide audience (Of course, in Britain, the group already had a staggeringly large following that was breathlessly awaiting the album.) The Fat of the Land falls short of masterpiece status, but that isn’t because it doesn’t deliver. Instead, it delivers exactly what anyone would expect: intense hip-hop-derived rhythms, imaginatively reconstructed samples, and meaningless shouted lyrics from Keith Flint and Maxim. Half of the album does sound quite similar to “Firestarter,” especially when Flint is singing. Granted, Liam Howlett is an inventive producer, and he can make empty songs like “Smack My Bitch Up” and “Serial Thrilla” kick with a visceral power, but he is at his best on the funky hip-hop of “Diesel Power” (which is driven by an excellent Kool Keith rap) and “Funky Shit,” as well as the mind-bending neo-psychedelia of “Narayan” (featuring guest vocals by Crispian Mills of Kula Shaker) and the blood-curdling cover of L7‘s “Fuel My Fire,” which features vocals by Republica‘s Saffron. All those guest vocalists mean something — Howlett is at his best when he’s writing for himself or others, not his group’s own vocalists. “Firestarter” and all of its rewrites capture the fire of the Prodigy at their peak, and the remaining songs have imagination that give the album weight. The Fat of the Land doesn’t have quite enough depth or variety to qualify as a flat-out masterpiece, but what it does have to offer is damn good.

2003

THE WHITE STRIPES – ELEPHANT

White Blood Cells may have been a reaction to the amount of fame the White Stripes had received up to the point of its release, but, paradoxically, it made full-fledged rock stars out of Jack and Meg White and sold over half a million copies in the process. Despite the White Stripes‘ ambivalence, fame nevertheless seems to suit them: They just become more accomplished as the attention paid to them increases. Elephant captures this contradiction within the Stripes and their music; it’s the first album they’ve recorded for a major label, and it sounds even more pissed-off, paranoid, and stunning than its predecessor. Darker and more difficult than White Blood Cells, the album offers nothing as immediately crowd-pleasing or sweet as “Fell in Love With a Girl” or “We’re Going to Be Friends,” but it’s more consistent, exploring disillusionment and rejection with razor-sharp focus. Chip-on-the-shoulder anthems like the breathtaking opener, “Seven Nation Army,” which is driven by Meg White‘s explosively minimal drumming, and “The Hardest Button to Button,” in which Jack White snarls “Now we’re a family!” — one of the best oblique threats since Black Francis sneered “It’s educational!” all those years ago — deliver some of the fiercest blues-punk of the White Stripes‘ career. “There’s No Home for You Here” sets a girl’s walking papers to a melody reminiscent of “Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground” (though the result is more sequel than rehash), driving the point home with a wall of layered, Queen-ly harmonies and piercing guitars, while the inspired version of “I Just Don’t Know What to Do With Myself” goes from plaintive to angry in just over a minute, though the charging guitars at the end sound perversely triumphant. At its bruised heart, Elephant portrays love as a power struggle, with chivalry and innocence usually losing out to the power of seduction. “I Want to Be the Boy” tries, unsuccessfully, to charm a girl’s mother; “You’ve Got Her in Your Pocket,” a deceptively gentle ballad, reveals the darker side of the Stripes‘ vulnerability, blurring the line between caring for someone and owning them with some fittingly fluid songwriting.

The battle for control reaches a fever pitch on the “Fell in Love With a Girl”-esque “Hypnotize,” which suggests some slightly underhanded ways of winning a girl over before settling for just holding her hand, and on the show-stopping “Ball and Biscuit,” seven flat-out seductive minutes of preening, boasting, and amazing guitar prowess that ranks as one the band’s most traditionally bluesy (not to mention sexy) songs. Interestingly, Meg‘s star turn, “In the Cold, Cold Night,” is the closest Elephant comes to a truce in this struggle, her kitten-ish voice balancing the song’s slinky words and music. While the album is often dark, it’s never despairing; moments of wry humor pop up throughout, particularly toward the end. “Little Acorns” begins with a sound clip of Detroit newscaster Mort Crim’s Second Thoughts radio show, adding an authentic, if unusual, Motor City feel. It also suggests that Jack White is one of the few vocalists who could make a lyric like “Be like the squirrel” sound cool and even inspiring. Likewise, the showy “Girl, You Have No Faith in Medicine” — on which White resembles a garage rock snake-oil salesman — is probably the only song featuring the word “acetaminophen” in its chorus. “It’s True That We Love One Another,” which features vocals from Holly Golightly as well as Meg White, continues the Stripes‘ tradition of closing their albums on a lighthearted note. Almost as much fun to analyze as it is to listen to, Elephant overflows with quality — it’s full of tight songwriting, sharp, witty lyrics, and judiciously used basses and tumbling keyboard melodies that enhance the band’s powerful simplicity (and the excellent “The Air Near My Fingers” features all of these). Crucially, the White Stripes know the difference between fame and success; while they may not be entirely comfortable with their fame, they’ve succeeded at mixing blues, punk, and garage rock in an electrifying and unique way ever since they were strictly a Detroit phenomenon. On these terms, Elephant is a phenomenal success.