I have a terrible confession to make. I was an enemy combatant in the War on Terror.
Between the years 2002 and 2007, wearing a mask and under false names, my co-conspirators and I directly attacked the President of the United States and Australia’s Prime Minister. We chopped them into pieces. Mashed them up. And shat them out. All to a sick beat.
The evidence is overwhelming. And it’s about time all 47 terrorfying minutes of it saw the light of day.
It’s a film. It’s a band. It’s a video concept album about a war against a concept.
It’s New Horizons In Violence.
As satire, it’s about two decades out of date. But as history, I stand behind it as a pretty engaging artifact. Part guerilla documentary, part propagandist anti-war advocacy, part crass entitled tantrum, but mostly a warped techno-pop-prog-rock political musical. Recommended for people who have a strong enough stomach for that kind of thing.
With unjustifiable war raging in the Middle East and a pathologically lying idiot on the verge of being re-elected as the American President, it feels somewhat timely to finally tell the full story of N.H.I.V.
Disaster on the Horizon
In the immediate aftermath of the horrifying terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, it was clear that the USA was going to not just respond, but respond disproportionately. They were going to war, that much was sure, but while their initial response was an invasion of Afghanistan, President George Dubya Bush declared that the War was actually against Terror.
A war against an abstract noun – indeed a human emotion – never seemed like it was going to end well. Basically, the Bush Administration were proposing to flex their military muscle against whomever they liked. They had their eye on Iraq. And in Australia, Prime Minister John Dubya Howard was ready to follow suit, in lockstep, along with introducing new anti-terror laws that overreached in all kinds of liberty-infringing ways.
The unique combination of Bush’s idiocy, and the American and Australian governments’ reckless disregard for diplomacy, due process and the truth infuriated me and my former Plastic Spacemen bandmate Brett “Brëss” Harrington so much that we decided to found a musical project that took this War Of Terror apart. The crackdown on liberties and rights, the corrupt profiteering militarisation, the sales pitch for a pre-emptive war on Iraq justified by an endlessly repeated lie about Weapons of Mass Destruction which never existed. For which credible evidence never existed.
So N.H.I.V. was born. We had already been doing the occasional jam, with me on synths and Brëss on that delicious 10-stringed prog rock instrument, the Chapman Stick, and programming his drum machine, the trusty Dr Rhythm. We started to write some satirical songs, with the occasional sample which we pulled from the nightly news or docos. But I was never really sure of how the vocals should work. We tried effects without much effect. The things that seemed to work best were a bit ranty, in hindsight probably inspired by Ron Hitler-Barassi.
“The World’s Worst Leaders”
The project really crystallised when we discovered two key clips of Dubya as he was increasingly beating the drum for war against Iraq. One was a theme he continually returned to: the idea of not allowing “the world’s worst leaders” to have “the world’s worst weapons”, which was rich hypocrisy coming from this illiterate dodgily-elected nincompoop with enough artillery to destroy the planet several dozen times over.
The other was some candid footage from a doco of Bush on a private jet (maybe his maiden flight on Air Force One?) stumbling around with a giant black sleepmask over his eyes, blathering, “I can’t see because I can’t hear – I mean I can’t hear because I can’t see”. Out of the mouths of man-babes…
Best of all, these two illuminating quotes had the rhythm of great hooks. We jammed up some stick and keyboard parts that fitted snugly. And so The World’s Worst Leaders was born, and we raced to get the song online in February 2003, just before the March deadline for UN Inspectors to turn up some evidence for these non-existent WMDs – or else their lack of evidence would be considered damning evidence. No doubt we were thinking that only if people understood what a warmongering idiot Bush was, we might stop the war. (It was a more naïve time.)
We sent burnt CD-Rs of the track to Melbourne community radio stations, where it got a small amount of airplay, and the video followed just after we had failed to stop the world’s biggest military superpower from making this catastrophic mistake.
We had decided to take on pseudonyms and personas both for creative reasons and to distance our true life, legally prosecutable selves from the content. Brëss came up with the ingenious name Saddama bin Laden, as an embodiment of the Coalition of the Willing’s desperate attempts to link Saddam Hussein with Al Qaeda. I became the baser and aptly less insightful joke: George Dubya Pussy. Bad taste was a key part of the brand, and over time we did lean into the brand idea. As much as the site you’re reading right now, N.H.I.V. were a Media Empire, in direct competition with War Of Terror cheerleader Rupert Murder. We were breaching copyrights with impunity, but that was the whole idea. It was for the greater good.
The song and video were available for download on our website (which is still alive!) – remembering that this was before there was any such thing as YouTube, social media or streaming. The video came in two sizes, a 180×144 one at 15fps, or the “hi-fi” version, full frame rate at a massive 360×288 – a whole 12 MB (.wmv) or 17 MB (.mov) – for the serious fan with some time on their hands.
Hitting the streets
We continued to toil away. Dubya and the news cycle continued to provide ample material. In May, a mission was allegedly accomplished, Baghdad was seized, and Saddam was in hiding.
But by the Aussie spring, it was clear that something was horribly wrong with the idea of Operation Shock and Awe. The invasion had left a leadership vacuum that brought terrorism TO Iraq. War Of Terror, indeed.
The World’s Worst Leaders clip was now being downloaded about 1000 times a week. With our usual good taste, we chose September 11 as the day to launch the The World’s Worst Leaders EP, which also included a few other tracks and a remix by that extraordinary pioneer of mashup documentaries, Buttress O’Kneel.
For good measure, Saddama and George hit the Melbourne streets, to deliver the CD to radio stations and media outlets personally. A memorable day. Going into the Herald Sun offices in those costumes felt like walking into the mouths of the enemy. Of course we weren’t going to be whisked off to Guantanamo Bay, but then again that was the temper of the time.
In the end, the only issue we encountered with our costumes was in the Melbourne Uni Union Building, the very place we had spent our formative years being dickheads. Trying to gift a copy to the Rowdon White Library’s extraordinary audio collection (after so many hours over so many years spent in the Rowdon’s listening room expanding our musical tastes), we were confronted by a building security guard. He demanded we remove our masks. I mean, fair enough. Just surprising that that was the only place where it happened.
A costly triumph
Overnight, or at least over the next few nights, N.H.I.V. “went viral”1.
A couple of days after launching the CD I had to flee the country – to a relaxing holiday in Fiji. (Another good thing about costumes and pseudonyms being not having to check my coloniser privilege.) I checked my email at the resort’s business centre a few days later (yes, seems bizarre to Present Me too), and was horrified to find an email from my web host, saying that my monthly plan had been exceeded, and I was being charged over $500 extra.
It seems The World’s Worst Leaders video had been linked on a couple of prominent political blogs. Some people took it as a commentary on where the Iraq war was currently at, rather than understanding that it didn’t take a crystal ball to imagine an endgame of Bush chasing Hussein through a devasatated landscape, long before a single bomb was dropped.
The upshot was somewhere around 50,000 people had downloaded the Hi-Res version in a few days, something my hosting plan had no room for. It was a hit! Shit!
It doesn’t exactly sound Earth-shattering today, but it was probably the biggest audience I’d had for anything to that point. The link was being emailed around, and it was still spreading. I didn’t want to shut down the link entirely, but I made a quick holiday switcheroo so that the Hi-Res link pointed to a copy of the tiny version, cutting the traffic sizes by a factor of around 20. I then threw myself on my web host’s mercy, who graciously gave me a 50% discount, as the download numbers moved into six figures.
Breaching the borders of taste
We were encouraged, and devoted more time to the project, as much as our real lives would allow. Following up The World’s Worst Leaders wasn’t easy; relevant samples usually didn’t have such a good groove, plus we’d used up a lot of the best Bushisms.
So we taped (on good old VHS cassettes) multiple news bulletins every night along with any docos that felt like they might be relevant, and digitised any grab or shot that felt like it may possibly be useful for some future song, or even link. Soon we were stockpiling DVDs of footage by the spindle.
As we were writing new songs, our accumulating video archive was threatening to overwhelm us. No wonder we leaned to songs based on a single interview, like War President. In February 2004, Bush gifted us the fodder for our second single, a lengthy interview with Tim Russert in which he both uttered the inanity “I’m a War President, with war on my mind”, and looked as awkward and lost for words as a world leader can.
Sometimes you did need to provide a little extra context, such as in the song we pulled from a John Pilger doco, US Under-Secretary Of Defence For Policy Douglas Feith Refuses To Answer Questions About Civilian Deaths, November 2003 in E Flat.
(Warning: this one contains a very confronting final image of a man holding a child who’s been horrifically injured in a bombing, treated glibly, which I somewhat regret but also kind of feel is N.H.I.V. at its most impactful.)
I Need War! added three tracks to the previous EP, I guess making it an EEP. Seems appropriate.
With the Abu Ghraib torture scandal in the news, the idea for the artwork seemed obvious – paste Bush, Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld and Howard’s heads over those of the gleeful US soldiers posing with their degraded prisoners. It was a subtle piece of symbolism. Oh the humanity hilarity.
But having decided to outsource the duplication and printing this time, we came up against an obstacle. The CD pressing plant that we sent our job to refused to print the artwork, apparently an edict from the top. Metal band dismemberments were no problem, but world leaders’ heads superimposed on these images went too far. We found another, more expensive plant that would print it, but given that we were always trying to keep up with the news, it was a delay we could ill-afford.
Destruction and death – live!
In late 2004, both Bush and Howard faced re-election, and we were determined to get a release out there, and even do some live gigs.
We managed to secure a few gigs at small venues. The setlist tied footage to our Dr Rhythm and sample backing track, and we threaded it together into a loose narrative through the half hour set, played off DVD through my long-suffering cathode ray “terror-vision”.
When something did go wrong, there was no stopping down, we had to make do as best we could. The relentless Dr Rhythm wasn’t letting up. The gigs were not well-attended, but the audiences that were there responded pretty much as we hoped, thrown from belly laughs to squirming in horror without a moment to catch their breath. Saddama was a virtuoso on the Stick. It was Shock and Awe.
Finding Osama
Unfortunately, once again we completely failed at our political aims, and Bush and Howard were both re-elected by the end of the year. We discussed whether to give up or go on.
The scales were tipped towards continuing when we were approached by ace guitarist Warren “Woz” O’neill, asking to join. Naturally, he took the nom de plume Osama van Halen.
For the next three years the three of us hunkered in our bunker, trying to keep the quality of the songs and production up while staying topical yet somewhat timeless. The war was in the quagmire phase and for a while N.H.I.V. were in a similar state.
This Is Hollywood was one track birthed in the duo era that took a lot of work to get right. In the end, it was all worth it to see Osama not just play a guitar solo on a clifftop, but then drop his guitar down the cliff.
We were stretching how we assembled our samples. We came across an extraordinary resource of George Dubya Bush samples, cut up word by word, so you could make him say virtually anything. Swearing, for instance. From that arose our theme song, N.H.I.V. Are Evil.
But we were also keen to shift our focus to local politics, with John Howard up for another election in 2007. And so we did two Howard-centred tracks, another cut-up called Who Do You Trust? and an unusually straightforward pop song which Saddama brought in. It felt like the public had turned on Howard, but there was the fear that time after time, he’d managed to find a way to win elections. If he won this one, then surely we were staring down the barrel of an eternal Prime Minister: The Preserved Head of John Howard. It was super-silly, especially with the little animations, and remains in my opinion the funniest N.H.I.V. song.
We released the album N.H.I.V. Are Evil in October 2007. This time around the artwork was subdued enough that we didn’t have to find a second pressing plant.
Mission Accomplished
Meanwhile we were pushing against the clock to put the finishing touches to the New Horizons In Violence movie.
Getting our hands on an Osama mask created one lengthy unplanned bottleneck, leaving us scrambling to get footage of ourselves to drop in to multiple clips. Our attempt to use a blue wall in my house as a blue screen was far from studio perfect. The result is suitably punk, I guess. And in keeping with the fuzz of the terrible SBS signal that you can see in many of the clips.
The film was finally premiered at Melbourne’s Loop Bar on November 20, 2007, just four days before the Australian election when Howard was tossed out, losing not just government but his own seat in the process. It’s hard to say, but the release of the N.H.I.V. film may have been the deciding factor. At least the 20 or so people at the premiere seemed to think it was the bomb.
The N.H.I.V. film was the ultimate expression of our raging against the machine, but unfortunately, as soon as it was finished, it was rendered irrelevant. We had achieved our political goals at last, but with Howard gone and Bush a lame duck, the raison d’être of N.H.I.V. also went. We had our YouTube channel, our MySpace page, our website, our mailing list, but we had no reason to exist or engage.
We couldn’t upload a 47 minute film to YouTube in those days, and when we attempted to upload the remaining tracks, we found our showstopping ballad The Silence of the Senators (with haunting vocals from the longest serving Senator in U.S. history, Senator Robert Byrd) was blocked for copyright infringement. At which point the whole exercise seemed a bit futile.
Five years of work, screened just the once. We burnt ourselves a DVD and shut up shop.
Preserving Old Horizons
So I’m pleased to have discovered this week that the Tube is now allowing me to upload the complete movie. Only 17 years too late. The Horizons are no longer so New, they’re more like Quaint Horizons In Violence, but if you want to understand how we got to a place where spouting unmitigated bullshit is now the standard technique for right wingers to fight elections, you could do worse than a look back at these Weapons of Mass Distraction.
Which brings me to the climax of the film, maybe my favourite piece of N.H.I.V. Weapons of Mass Hysteria was one of the first pieces we wrote and recorded, based around a creepy Dr. Rhythm bell pattern, and utilising elements from the Australian government’s “Be alert but not alarmed” anti-terrorism campaign. We revisited the track in the trio years, making an “06 mix” that brought it up to date and made it extra-creepy. For the clip, the masks came off, as we recreated N.H.I.V. hard at work mashing media in our underground lair and saw what might happen next in a world of unchecked surveillance and detention.
Be alarmed.
- 2003 version of viral may not match modern day expectations. ↩︎
