The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu
|
|
The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu is one of the two protagonist 'secret societies' in the "Illuminatus!" series of books by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson. In the books, the JAMs are in a seemingly endless struggle for control of human culture, government and power with their enemies, the Illuminati. Whereas the Illuminati's tactics are to restrict, govern and control the populace, the JAMs' aim is to bring about anarchy and an end to any possibility of ultimate control.
The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu was a name adopted in 1987, by Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty, fans of the books, for their intended attack on the institution of the music industry in the UK, mirroring the (fictional) JAMs' gleeful political tactics of causing chaos and confusion by bringing a direct, humorous but nevertheless revolutionary approach to making records. The JAMs' primary instrument was the newly invented digital sampler, with which they would plagiarise the history of popular music, cutting chunks from existing works and pasting them into new contexts. An early and seminal influence in the development of sampling music in the United Kingdom, The JAMs notoriously and wilfully ran afoul of copyright laws when they sampled large portions of the ABBA single Dancing Queen.
After a legal showdown with ABBA and the Mechanical-Copyright Protection Society, their debut album 1987 - What The Fuck Is Going On? had to be withdrawn from sale. They travelled to Sweden in hope of meeting ABBA and coming to some agreement, taking a journalist and photographer with them, and all the remaining copies of the LP. They failed to meet ABBA, and disposed of the copies by burning most of them in a Swedish farmers field and throwing the rest overboard on the North-Sea ferry on the trip home. Some of the copies were secretly kept however and they took out a full-page advert in The Face magazine offering to sell the last five copies for £1000 each. This only served Drummond & Cauty's legendary aspirations and after successive name changes and a plethora of highly-influential dance records, they would ultimately become, as The KLF, the biggest selling singles act in the world (for 1991), still incorporating the work of other artists in less gratuitous ways and, in the main, without legal problems.
The JAMs are associated with the cultural movement which has come to be termed Samplism and which retrospectively bundles together those literary and artistic works which make use of what could be termed 'creative plagiarism'. Other luminous figures claimed unilaterally by the Samplists as 'members' of their movement include writers William Burroughs, T.S. Eliot, Michael Moorcock, artists Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, the video-sampling pioneers, Michael K, X$X, Emergency Broadcast Network and a host of musicians ranging from Beethoven through John Cage, Philip Glass, The Beatles to the more obvious contemporary hip-hop and dance acts.
In Toronto, Ontario, Canada a group calling themselves the Justified Agents of Mummu stage public acts bent on provoking people to pay more attention, and promote mystery.
See also
External link
- The copyright website on the 1987 Abba v the JAMMs case (http://www.benedict.com/audio/klf/klf.aspx)
- Mechanical-Copyright Protection Society (MCPS) (http://www.mcps.co.uk)