[By Wes Moore (alephegeis@disinfo.net), February 20, 2002]
“Thank you. How you doing folks? Me too. You gotta bear with me, I’m very tired, very tired of traveling, and very tired of doing comedy, and very tired of staring out at your vacant faces looking back at me, wanting me to fill your empty lives with humor you couldn’t possibly think of yourselves. Good evening.”
Bill Hicks: the Nietzsche of comedy, the most legitimate social critic of the 1990s: a renegade messiah who tried to make people laugh, but usually ended up pissing them off, or drawing blank stares.
Born in 1961, Hicks died of pancreatic cancer at the age of 32, just as his career was peaking. He left in his wake a legacy of biting criticisms against American society: no inadequacy or hypocrisy was immune to his scathing satires, but don’t take my word for it. For Christ sakes, if anyone demands our undivided attention, it’s Bill Hicks.
In addition to his libertarian political philosophy, Bill was a deeply spiritual man. He advocated meditation, floatation tanks, and Terence McKenna’s “heroic dose” of psilocybic mushrooms to “squeegee the third eye”. He stressed that we are all one consciousness, so it doesn’t make sense to hurt or lie to one another.
Bill never became popular, mainly because he didn’t exactly endear himself to corporate sponsors (“advertisers: kill yourselves”). He did appear on the Late Show with David Letterman a dozen times, but his final performance (just months before his death) was cut because of “inappropriate material.” The tiff was over one of Bill’s jokes about pro-lifers:
“If you’re so pro-life, do me a favor: don’t block arms and block medical clinics. If you’re so pro-life, lock arms and block cemeteries.”
It was later revealed that one of the Late Show’s most generous sponsors was a pro-life group whose commercial aired during the program Hicks was supposed to appear in. Hicks explains:
“See we just had a misunderstanding. I thought we lived in the U.S. of A., the United States of America. But actually we live in the U.S. of A., the United States of Advertising. Freedom of expression is guaranteed… if you’ve got the money!”
Hicks released two albums (1990′s Dangerous and 1992′s Relentless) and two videos (Sane Man and Revelations) in his lifetime. After his death, two more albums were released, both in 1997. One of these, Rant in E-Minor, is widely considered to be his defining work, by critics and fans alike. The other, Arizona Bay, was his most conceptual offering. Arizona Bay was described by Hicks as “‘The Dark Side of the Moon’ of comedy albums,” and features musical interludes with Hicks on guitar. It was Bill’s metaphor for American society, using Los Angeles (Hell-A) as a microcosm of mainstream culture.
Arizona Bay was the inspiration for Tool’s album AEnima, and if you listen to the song “Third Eye” you will hear a clip of Bill (think: “rrrrrreal fuckin’ high on drugs”). Radiohead’s album The Bends was also dedicated to Hicks.
A fifth album, with material recorded around the same time as Rant In E-Minor, is in the works and should be released soon. Cynthia True and Janeane Garofalo’s biography American Scream: The Bill Hicks Story (New York: Harper Entertainment, 2002) is definately worth checking out. Let’s hope Bill Hicks continues to inspire and enlighten us all.
Bill Hicks on Fundamentalist Christians:
On playing from ones heart:
One Night Stand, 1990:
Revelations, 1993:
Documentary:
