Jimi Hendrix used a guitar, Bill Hicks used jokes
Very interesting analogy. Hendrix played over three-chord vamps with recycled Albert King licks and was revered as a genius. Hicks did smutty jokes about the government and big, bad corporations and was hailed a genius. While both were good at what they did, neither was by any stretch a genius.
It's ironic that the same forces of compliant image-based reverence apply as much to Hicks' persona as to some of his targets.
As for his "message", I've often times asked people what precisely it was. It's never been very well elucidated to me.
There was very little need for "balls the size of watermelons", if you ask me, in doing a stand-up routine. Honestly, why do so many people think he was 'brave' in this wise? Obnoxious is perhaps the more fitting adjective.
As for the 'good sense of humanity', I defintely disagree...however not as much as I disagree with you about him having the brain the size of a meteor. He actually seemed to evince a fairly mediocre intellect from the material I've seen him in. He tended to contradict (albeit tacitly) most everything he said. It was gimmick-minded material for a gimmick-minded audience.
Anyway, I'm glad you like it. Horses for courses, as they say.
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mekootje
16 years ago
What the message was very much differed from show to show, so it's pretty hard to give a clear definition of what Bill was trying to say on the whole. He very much wavered between hope for humanity (the ending speech of One Night Stand) and hopelessness (basically the entire Rant in E-Minor album) and wanted to express those feelings based on how he felt at that time of his life.
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16 years ago
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SALTER-pt
16 years ago
SALTER, if you watched Revelations and disliked it, then you are narrow-minded and have a dull sense of humour
Is that so? Ironically enough, that statement smacks of complete narrow-mindedness.
There's no humanly possible way to watch that performance and not enjoy it unless you have something shoved up your ass that makes you a stiff prick
Do you know what ipse dixit means?
He was a genius because he talked about things that most adults try to be oblivious to
Even if true, that wouldn't make him a genius. An iconoclast maybe, but not a genius. Look up the word when you look up "ipse dixit".
The problems in the government, the fact that the "drugs are bad" message in the media is just garbage because the people giving that message have never experienced drugs
Uh, no. The drugs-are-bad message is formulated through simple observation. I work in court. You're welcome to head down to your local court and see the damage that drugs (illicit and non-illicit) cause to people, their families and society. The fact that certain people have a good time on drugs has to be weighed against the cost of those who fall (easily) into dependency.
the problems with new music
What? I could point out "problems" with Hicks's taste in music, as it's entirely subjective.
As for his message, in case you missed it, "Life is just a ride."
Wow. Deep. Didn't Ronan Keating have the exact same message in one of his songs? I might have to reconsider him as a genius.
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