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94.
American Porn.
(Rotterdam): Sea Urchin Editions, 2014. LP record + CD (no label number).
Limited edition of 100 copies (not stated).
Cover photograph of Heathcote Williams by Jan Herman, who recorded the author at his home in Oxford in September 2013. Herman also provides the sleeve notes in which he quotes Harold Pinter on Williams: “All his work is deeply political. I think it’s informed not only by violent contempt for the way people are manipulated, for the status quo, the complacency of the status quo, but also - certainly more and more evident in his later work - by compassion for the weak.”
The LP contains three tracks: “Mr. President” (4’30), “The United States of Porn” (17’15), and “Forbidden Fruit, or The Cybernetic Apple Core” (20’37), and the accompanying CD includes these three tracks together with two more: “Snuff Films at the White House” (4’06) and “I Will Not Pay Taxes Until” (4’45). In his liner notes, Herman describes the author’s poetry as being “as radical in its polemics as Shelley’s, whose visionary anarchism he considers indispensable.”
The album’s title was used again for Williams’s last published work, a critique of the American political establishment and the election of President Donald Trump, and its publication date was the day of Trump’s inauguration in January 2017, six months before Williams died.
As new (still sealed in plastic sleeve).
