"I think the Democratic Party is a cult. I call it BlueAnon... She[Hillary Clinton]'s the one who’s the enemy of the worker. She’s the one who is for every war possible. She's the one who keeps healthcare away from people. The extremists are those people, and she. again, has to project that onto other people. She's the one who invented RussiaGate. RussiaGate was a 100% hoax that was proven by Mueller and then by the Durham report. They're the ones who financed Russian disinformation, which is what the Steele dossier was. Where did Christopher Steele get that information? He got it from his contacts inside the Kremlin. They put it in the Steele report. That's 100% Russian disinformation. Nobody talks about it. They lied that they funded it for a whole year. They lied to the FBI. They never have to go to jail for it because they're lying at the behest of the establishment. And they gotta get rid of Donald Trump 'cos Donald Trump wouldn't do the interventions they wanted. He ran on pulling us out of the Middle East. They can't have that. He said there was a Deep State, and he gave away our foreign policy. So that's what this is all about." - Jimmy Dore
I remember the day I left my beloved KISS Love Gun belt buckle on top of my junior high school gym locker. For about three years I had been obsessed with the band, as well as a host of others, like Aerosmith, Bad Company, Zeppelin, etc. You're probably thinking, "oh yeah, he must have heard the Ramones for the first time." Nope. I wish that had been the case. A new friend from school had come over to my house and brought over a stack of records that I didn't have. One of them was Stained Class by Judas Priest, and it kind of changed my life.
Compared to KISS and those other bands, who mostly just sang "baby, baby" rock 'n' roll, hearing Judas Priest for the first time felt like going from reading comic books to Dostoevsky. My favorite song on the album, a ballad called “Beyond the Realms of Death," was one of the first guitar solos I ever properly learned, and to me the song was profound.
Written by lead singer Rob Halford, its lyrics express hopelessness and suffering, depression, and a longing for a release from pain, which is symbolized by the "realms of death." It's similar to the message implied in Benjamin Britten's solo guitar piece, The Nocturnal, which I went on to perform in college and also felt a deep connection with.
One would think the parents who sued the band in 1990 for allegedly inspiring two teens to commit suicide with their music would have picked that song from the same album as their target instead of the band's cover of Spooky Tooth's "Better By You, Better Than Me."
But the judge in the case ruled that the first amendment doesn't protect “non-decipherable sounds below the conscious threshold of awareness,” (or words sung backwards) and that's what the accusation was: That the band deliberately added backward subliminal messages like "Do it," "Try suicide," "Sign my evil spirit," and "Fuck the Lord, fuck all of you." So the prosecution must have spent time playing the album's songs backwards to build their case, and that must have been the one that fit the bill.
In 9th grade, it was my performance of the "Beyond" solo at an audition that got me in my first band. The song became a staple in our set list. My band-mates and I idolized "Priest." An older stoner guy that hung around our practice space used to tell a story about seeing the band in their early days, and how guitarist KK Downing threw his instrument into the air "FIFTY FEET," and caught it, continuing the song without missing a beat. We used to repeat the story all the time, imitating the guy's Tommy Chong-like inflection, laughing our asses off.
Halford was like a sage, or guru to us. Not only was he the greatest singer in rock 'n' roll, he wasn't singing about his dick like all the others we had grown up listening to. He came off in interviews as incredibly articulate, a total intellectual. For years I thought this about him. But as time went on, the more like KISS they became. Their costumes got more and more ridiculous, and the lyrics at times were dumber than any KISS song. It seemed like they went way out of their way to appeal to young kids. It increasingly came off like it was more the business than the music that mattered.
This is the one that lost me. It's called "Heavy Duty," off of their Defenders of the Faith album. (The last one I ever bought on vinyl.)
I know you like it hot
I'd love to writhe and sweat
You think that this feels good
You ain't felt nothing yet
Red-hot licks in the palm of my hand
Feel your body quake
As we hit the promised land
I'm heavy duty
We'll rise inside you
Until the power splits your head
We're going to rock you
Until your metal hunger's fed
Let's all join forces
Rule with the iron hand
And prove to all the world
Metal rules the land
We're heavy duty
So come on, let's tell the world
But there were moments of brilliance. Like the prophetic "Electric Eye," from the album Screaming for Vengeance, predicting our current Orwellian surveillance state with lines like "You think you’ve private lives, think nothing of the kind / There is no true escape, I’m watching all the time." So the qualities we had bestowed onto our hero weren't completely without merit.
Decades have passed, and I've spent two of them reading about history, paying close attention to how much of the darkest and tyrannical of that history is being repeated by the world's "democratic" governments, especially in the 22 years since 9/11. The sort of lyricist I grew up thinking Rob Halford was is the type of lyricist I try to be in my own songs. And upon hearing the new Judas Priest single, "Panic Attack," I was at first delighted by its political overtones. Rob does have a way with words that perfectly matches his devilish, one-of-a-kind operatic delivery, and the unique precision rhythm guitar style that Priest guitarists Glenn Tipton and KK Downing invented in the ‘70s.
Until I watched the lyric video and took a deeper look at what he was actually saying...
Like so many of my childhood heroes, it seems that the band has become a propaganda tool of the Democratic Party, or perhaps more accurately, for the very type of surveillance state that Rob himself warned us about in 1982. (Just two years before the year Orwell used as the title for his most esteemed dystopian novel.)
The song references Russian election tampering via “wild neurotic memes” on the internet; Donald Trump as the doomsday tyrant bringing our "nation to its knees;" January 6th ("While the bitter mobs ramp up their fears / Go creeping 'round those corridors of power”); internet disinformation poisoning our minds to a point where we can't tell what's right from wrong (instead of the propaganda of which he is now guilty); and even advocates for eliminating "those parasites," and turning off the internet to "euthanize" our brains.
Sounds a lot like Hillary Clinton and her "basket of deplorables."
The song fooled me for a minute, with lines like "Dead heads gladly suffer sins" and "The clock is ticking down to doomsday hour." Propaganda is always smattered with bits of truth, and the trick of accusing your opponents of what your side is actually guilty of often helps obscure its objectives.
I can't really blame him, as a gay man having been forced to remain in the closet for so many years in order to protect record sales from a homophobic audience, the "wokeness" of the party probably offers him comfort, and maybe he trusts them as a result.
At the same time, it's my theory that famous artists are forced to do propaganda in a multitude of ways if they want to continue their careers. Or maybe, as many probably learned from the fate of John Lennon, their lives.
Read Weird Scenes in the Canyon to learn about the likely manufactured origins of the rock 'n' roll music industry in Hollywood by the sons and daughters of the intelligence community. Even the stereotypical long hair rock image was probably created by the likes of Frank Zappa to discredit the anti-war left, to shock the American people into supporting the Vietnam War.
Psychedelics were forced on the population during Acid Tests, protests, riots and Grateful Dead shows. Kids were encouraged to "Turn on, tune in, drop out" and forget any ideas they had about dissent. Bands took these drugs too, many also encouraged (or even sometimes unwittingly dosed) by covert intelligence agents that infiltrated their lives, to promote them.
And, as John Potash writes in Drugs as Weapons Against Us, many were murdered when they became clean and turned toward activism.
There have been at least two books on the Lennon assassination that credibly outline, in detail, alleged assassin Mark David Chapman’s links to the intelligence community, and the likely hypnotized state he was in when the murder occurred, evoking echos of the CIA’s MKULTRA program and The Manchurian Candidate.
Author David Whelan is releasing a new book this year about the truth behind Lennon’s assassination, and from the released previews on his Substack, he is proving that just like with RFK, the bullets likely came from a different gun than Chapman’s, and from the opposite direction from where witnesses say Chapman was standing.
Do you think for a second that musicians didn’t get the message? Just like all the Presidents since JFK, as comic Bill Hicks so brilliantly pointed out.
I believe that political songwriting at the rock star level is tolerated, as long as it is partisan in nature. I think that’s why Ministry did a song about the New World Order when George Bush Sr. talked about it, but now that it’s actually happening with his preferred party in power, Al Jourgensen, the project’s mastermind, is silent, focusing instead now on Trump as the enemy.
FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds (the most gagged woman in history) told the story of her attempts to publish her book Classified Woman on her Boiling Frogs podcast years ago. She eventually was forced to self-publish it because she called out members of Congress on both sides of the aisle. She used CIA whistleblower Valerie Plame as an example of someone who played the game, choosing to write a partisan book, and was able to make millions with a major publisher.
Another example of Judas Priest doing obvious propaganda, this time for the Military Industrial Complex (Halford’s husband is apparently an ex-Marine), can be found in the lyrics of the song “Firepower,” from their last album. On one hand, the song brags about our terrifying weapons systems. On the other, it talks about fighting for peace “with open arms.” Is the song critiquing our weapons of mass destruction while advocating for peace, or is it that peace can be achieved through war? Wasn’t it Orwell’s Big Brother who taught us that War is Peace?
At least the song calls war for what it is:
The dye is cast, make no exceptions
We're forged by evil to compel
Come rally 'round this flag of freedom
Our union thrives or go to Hell
Contrary to the idea of turning off the internet advocated for in “Panic Attack,” Halford talked about being anti-censorship in a recent interview with Marc Maron on the WTF Podcast during a discussion of the band being put on trial for backwards speech as an example.
Perhaps he just believes speech has to be backwards to be protected by the First Amendment.