DETERGE – One for the Gipper CS

Packaged in double butterfly case; includes two full-color 4 panel j-cards with extensive lyrics, 1 American flag lapel pin, 1 Deterge button, and 1 color poster.

Edition of 100

Ronald Reagan was president from 1981 to 1989. I was born in ’89. Growing up, he was a boogeyman to me, a villain in punk songs, responsible for the AIDS crisis running unchecked for too long, for the war on drugs, and for many of the economic policies that ultimately led to the recession that happened the year after I became an “adult.”

One night early on in Trump’s term, I was up late drinking and fell into a youtube hole, watching old inaugural addresses, wallowing in my own sadness, mourning Obama’s departure and the absence of his eloquence. I watched a bunch of Democratic ones, and then I watched Reagan’s speech from ’81. I was amazed by his skill as an orator. I understood for the first time how he was able to convince people to believe in him, and why he’s still lionized and beloved by the right. I want to be clear, I haven’t changed my mind on what I believe were disastrous policies. But what was impressed upon me by listening to his old speeches was the clarity of purpose within them, and that firmly differentiated him from Trump. (He also actually won the popular vote.)

I realize that this an aesthetic point, to mourn the demise of the art of public speaking; but I have an aesthetic appreciation for the dying art making an impassioned, clear, eloquent case for one’s ideology; even if that ideology is diametrically opposed to my own.

This tape draws heavily on Reagan’s speeches, and subverts them by putting them in the sonic language of power electronics. This release is genre defining, in the sense that it accomplishes what the genre is capable of at its best; twisting the lens of perspective to point menacingly at ourselves and see the reflections of the unexpected.