Magic Jewball

I had my own mini-Digg effect this week when Brooklyn Vegan linked to my post about the Air show. By 11am I had as many visitors as I usually have in a whole day. Rockin’! We’ll see if any of them come back. In any case, I wanted to show my thanks to the BV site by telling my own vegan story which ties in with the iPod Song of the Week.

When I was a youngster at my first music industry job I had the thrill of eating lunch with members of a band I had idolized in my youth*, Killing Joke. We had a meal catered and brought up to the conference room and I sat with my salad or vegetarian dish or whatever and the guys from KJ also ate from a limited selection as they were vegan. One of them asked me if I was as well. No, I explained, I’m Kosher. Pardon? Well, I eat meat but it has to be killed in a Kosher way which means the animal feels no pain. They looked at me as if I had three heads. One of them laughed derisively at me. I was crushed.

But you know, I still love their music, despite the fact that my childhood idols snortled at my “kill ‘em but do it painlessly” way of operating. This song was my absolute favorite, and the streaming link is the 12″ version that I bought at my local record shop as a kid (B+B Music, they would just see me come in and start jacking up the price of their Depeche Mode imports). It’s typical Killing Joke, dark, ominous, gothic, and heavy yet danceable. When I was bored in class I used to transcribe the words to this song in my notebook. (”Red tears are shed on gray,” come on, the meaning is obvious!) That was before they laughed at me, naturally.

*Youth, get it? Ahahahahaha. Right.

Killing Joke - Love Like Blood