The fragrant album reviewed in the NME, 14 February, 1981.
Various Artists
Bullshit Detector (Crass)
If the Crass/real punk/anarchy axis represents the new hippiedom, then there’s one important difference between the groups on this album and their spiritual predecessors. At least “dropping out” carried the implication of choice. These new advocates of an alternative lifestyle didn’t so much jump as were pushed.
The ‘Bullshit Detector’ compilation would never have been released by a commercial company or, more crucially, by any altruistic independent that cares about the course of modern music. It’s muddy, monotone grind is composed of home-made tapes recorded by groups in the very first stages of an amateurism that is only endearing if it’s linked to inspiration or the spirit of musical adventure. One of the worst legacies of Punk ’77 has been the enshrining of incompetence as an aid to credibility that’s fully reflected on this record. And there’s no experimentation past the most helpless of “real” punk scratchings, unless you count the ample evidence of the worst kind of unselfcritical conceits.
Even at £1.35, it’s still an insult to ask for money for a collection of such ill-conceived and under-rehearsed material. Despite its token pretence of solidarity with the listener, “Bullshit Detector” fundamentally shares the same patronising attitude to its audience as the creatively wasted super-group who carelessly commit their latest indulgences to vinyl, regardless of any merit or effort in their construction.
Since musically ‘Bullshit Detector’ is excruciating, one can only assume that its purpose is political. And there’s plenty of politics thrown about in the lyrics and graffiti reproduced on the fold-out cover, with the circled A particularly prominent. The sentiments expressed resemble the despairing state of early adolescence when the concept of responsibility for your own actions hasn’t yet entered the arena and the whole world seems a gigantic conspiracy by “them” to prevent the individual achieving anything at all.
It’s an impotent parody of anarchy that, stripped of its essence of self-determination, looks like a hopelessly empty option. And although the album is full of references to “them” there is no alternative expressed and no solutions except in scrawled slogans like “Anarchy Peace”, “Stay Free”, “Everything Is Possible”, and “Punk Is Dead, Long Live Punk”.
AS political communication it’s worse than useless, since by calling yourself The SPG Murders or Fuck The CIA, singing songs with titles like ‘Napalm’, ‘Nagasaki Mon Amour’, and all the rest of the indiscriminate schoolboy sloganeering that’s sprinkled over this album, you run the real risk of reducing vital issues to the empty shell of a rock group’s name and the shallow subject of their lame rantings. Sloppy, ill-understood cliches are particularly infuriating and inexcusable when used to describe political issues of these dimensions.
Purely as an unconscious portrait of depression and easily-manipulated incomprehension, ‘Bullshit Detector’ would make salutory listening for a government whose policies are deliberately creating the kind of economic climate in which this sort of hopelessness thrives.
Lynn Hanna
standupandspit 