Thursday, March 20, 2014

'Soul Mining' & 'Infected'

The The is basically Matt Johnson and a revolving door of special guests and musicians including The Smiths' guitarist Johnny Marr and Jools Holland.

Outside of a relatively clever band name, this is not remarkably better or worse than most pop-electronic music from the 1980s. 

One note that is worth mentioning is that Matt's brother, Andrew, did some of the artwork for The The under the name of Andy Dog. This included the original cover for Infected, which featured a demon masturbating and apparently completing. The album was pulled and an edited version was released. You can see the unedited version here. 

I would love someone to interview the Johnson brothers and just ask them what exactly they were trying to do. I don't know if the controversy helped with album sales. It probably didn't hurt, but that seems like a pretty shallow reason for doing something. 

Furthermore, was the record label thinking the same thing assuming that repackaging would cost less than the free advertising they'd get for having a demon ejaculating on himself? 

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