Pitchfork

"I've been on what I call my flying saucer tour which means like flying saucers. I, too, have been appearing in small southern towns in front of handfuls of hillbillies lately, and uh... I've been doubting my own existence," lamented Bill Hicks in his unmistakably rueful Texas drawl. Speaking about the perils and inherent loneliness of life on the road as a nomadic stand-up comic, there wasn't a member of the audience capable of ignoring the arrant honesty of his words.

Bill Hicks is our planet's most oft-revered, imitated, plagiarized and anonymous comedic talent. For as many people whose lives were impacted so indelibly by this man's genius, wit, and irreverence, he remains shrouded in mystery to the general public. When his life was tragically snatched away by pancreatic cancer at the age of 32, Hicks hovered precariously on the precipice of superstardom. Having attracted national attention as the first act banned from a CBS television program since Elvis Presley, and with a legion of obstreperous followers behind him, Bill Hicks' untimely passing served as his ultimate comedic closer. With a career built upon hostility, angst, scathing social commentary, and above all, compassion, Hicks' abrupt departure virtually sealed his fate as a contemporary cultural enigma.

In the nine years since his passing, Bill Hicks has taken on neo-mythical status. Drawing plaudits from myriad pop culture icons, album dedications from the likes of Tool and Radiohead, and galvanizing the malevolence of cynics everywhere, his fame has soared exponentially. Unlike so many mediocre icons who find notoriety and mass-media acceptance in death, however, Bill Hicks was a man whose art transcended all time and spatial limits and thus established his legend long before his enormous heart stopped beating on February 26th, 1994.

Bill Hicks was Noam Chomsky, David Sedaris, Lenny Bruce, and Carlos Castaneda rolled into one. Where other comedians like the late great Sam Kinison identified and ridiculed the problems of modern life for the purpose of shock and laughter, Hicks abhorred the passivity of the populace to such lengths that his rants rang closer to a guerilla revolutionary than a talking head with a microphone.

No one has ever been more vocal about the evils of disposable pop culture. A society rendered mentally mute by the ills of marketing, advertising, and corporate dogma spelled the very death of this country and by extension, western civilization. Years before Chuck Palahnuik drafted a blueprint for eschewing convention by relinquishing all ties to commercialism in Fight Club, and thus making anti-commercialism more commercial, Hicks scripted a rousing fight song with the intent of impugning everything unholy and dangerous in the world of capitalism. Foremost on the list was the evil known as laziness. Not laziness in the casually procrastinating sense, but rather the much graver error of cultural indolence. Essentially, people who've grown weary of their power to discern submit to the demands of fictional authoritative figures (i.e. media) who dictate their tastes, interests, opinions, and beliefs.

What results from this "dumbing down" is a culture of people who have forgotten how to judge correctly. A group of people-- some of whom are reading this review-- that find themselves on the wet end of a degenerate culture. A culture erected from the cancerous mutation of hype machines, spin, and an elitist social sect designed to capitalize on the acquiescence of its members. These same idle sheep find themselves flocking to inferior merchandise simply to nestle snuggly within an arbitrary hipness quotient, and because of the concomitant satisfaction in rallying behind mediocre products with strong PR.

In collaboration with the Bill Hicks Estate, Ryko recently released two CDs worth of (mostly) previously unreleased material entitled Flying Saucer Tour, Vol. 1 and Love, Laughter and Truth. Recorded at a non-smoking venue June 20th, 1991 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, a city better suited for gun shows, tractor pulls, and Klan rallies than the musings of Hicks, Flying Saucer Tour, Vol. 1 gives us a keen view of Hicks at his most indecently acerbic. He starts off with one of his customary targets (non-smokers), informing the largely disinterested crowd that, despite their effort to remain healthy, smoke-free beings, their demise is as inevitable as his. The sheer frenzy of Hicks' nicotine addiction-- according to Hicks, "I go through two lighters a day"-- is matched only by his lust for disgusting the audience with references ranging from tracheotomies, premature birth, and lung cancer.

Within a mere ten minutes it's become painfully apparent that Hicks has completely alienated the incoherent Pittsburgh crowd. When the sound of low grumbling is the only response to a rant on the cyclically relevant tensions in Iraq, Hicks dubs the crowd the worst he's ever faced. After several more unsuccessful attempts to rouse interest, Hicks focuses his vitriol solely on the audience. With his frustration nearly at critical level, Hicks taunts the slack-jawed audience with a promise of "dick jokes" mere seconds before (repeatedly) pleading that a nuclear holocaust befalls the mostly yuppie crowd.

Although Hicks generally thrived on a perplexed audience, the uncanny bemusement of the Pittsburgh crowd on Saucer, Vol. 1 forced Hicks to cloak most of his societal observations in blatant shock. If there's one detriment to the disc, it's Hicks' tendency to push moral limits a bit too far for gasps and groans. For every schoolyard chord Hicks strikes, there's at least three absolute chasms of silent confusion, wherein the entirety of his commentary on the corruption of President Bush (the elder), the governmentally endorsed lies on narcotics, and the value of pornography in art is completely lost on the audience. Only when Hicks posits celebrities hawking commercial products on television as akin to fellating Satan's penis is there anything resembling a functional synapse present in the Pittsburgh comedy club.

By contrast, Love, Laughter and Truth functions as a sort of greatest hits package, compiling recordings made in Denver, San Ramon, San Francisco, and West Palm Beach from 1990 to 1993. Most fascinating about Love, Laughter and Truth is the evolutionary window it provides us on the career of Bill Hicks. We witness his development from the lounge lizard rube to the denunciatory comedic sage. When Hicks unleashes a rampage on the commodification of "drugs" in the form of subversive Public Service Announcements and beer commercials, he deftly blends the thermonuclear vocal explosion preferred by fellow Texan Sam Kinison with the kind of shadow government social paranoia familiar to fans of George Carlin. But while Kinison was content to rest on fireworks, and Carlin typically rants to draw blood, Hicks seized the role of sobering realist. When confronted by an audience more comfortable with schoolyard sex fare than education and self-awareness, Hicks assumes the voice of a member of his audience and recriminates, "Doesn't he know about our puritanical self-hatred of our own body and its desires? The only way we can find relief is through the medium of penis material."

George Carlin, and to some extent Dennis Miller, have built careers upon spewing facts and figures in the most abrasive manner possible. In fact, Carlin's famous bit on euphemistic language can be viewed as a crude blueprint to what would shortly become Hicks' legacy. Expressing disgust at how emotion has been squelched out of the English language in order to create a softer existence for mankind, Carlin astutely recognizes the inherent danger to masking and muddling meaning with lots of extraneous words, syllables, and hyphens. Real life Newspeak was always a major preoccupation of Hicks' as well. And although George Carlin was content to condemn the government and lukewarm civilization who'd allowed meaningless jargon to pervert the language, Bill Hicks always remained optimistic about the possibility, no matter how remote, that civilization might one day awake from its golden slumber.

We live in a time where the Orwellian lexicon is at its zenith. Between the low and steady buzz of "weapons of mass destruction," the thinly veiled liberty confiscation machine dubbed "The Department of Homeland Security," a feckless, oil-smeared "road map" to peace for people who've hated each other since time immemorial, and a feel-good fruit colored Terrorist Threat spectrum that has more in common with a bag of Skittles than a system of effective deterrence, it's quite simple to lose sight to distinguish what is real from what isn't.

I've often felt cheated that Hicks wasn't alive to witness September 11th, 2001 and the subsequent chain of events. Aside from the comedic field day he'd undoubtedly have with the American programs mentioned above, Hicks might have provided some of the most lucid and trenchant analysis of exactly what's happened in the past two years. Hicks' supreme gift was being blessed with a coping skill sorely lacking in most of us: the ability to instantiate what is real from what is illusory, what is valid from what is disposable.

At the crux of his work was the following question: does the plight Beyond Good and Consumerism imply foregoing personal happiness? If my years studying Hicks have been fruitful, the answer would be no. We can remain informed and aware in spite of marketing ploys and ambiguous language designed to lower standards and public awareness, delighted by the fact that we get the joke while others do not. As Hicks himself might have said, we're all capable of loving rather than fearing. Some of us require chemical assistance to attain higher consciousness, while others will find that enhanced state in something as basic as the companionship of another person. Whatever our means of mind expansion, we must never lose sight of the fact that life is nothing more than a brief detour to something better, something more fulfilling. Bill Hicks dedicated his life to showing us the funniest possible route.