Book Review

Rating: (5 out of 5)
Paperback: 312 pages
Publisher: Soft Skull Press (November 2004)
ISBN-10: 1932360654
ISBN-13: 978-1932360653

Bill Hicks died 26 February 1994. It’s a long time ago. Forget about it…

Hear me out. This isn’t a book ABOUT Bill Hicks, this book IS Bill Hicks. A historical record of one man’s output, on stage and in private memoir. It’s a real and complex account of a career that started in Hicks’ teens and ended when he was only thirty two years old. But he’d done just enough. His joke-blowing message made it through the banality of corporate white-noise like a perfect C held for over a decade by a tenacious choirboy.

Book cover of "Love the People" by Bill Hicks. And photo of the author © respective owner.

And you wanna know the frightening thing? It’s a message that’s still relevant today, in the year 2009. You might even think most of his humour would have dated really badly and while this can be said of some of it, his President Bush Iraq War material has been effortlessly adopted by his son, W. Job done. Cut ‘n’ pasted.

His legendary censored (read completely removed from the aired show) twelfth appearance on the David Letterman Show is less about hot points” as related to a “perceived NBC audience” but “hot points”’ as related to ‘the corporations who are feeding NBC the colourless bile and garbage of their rancid 24/7 TV schedule’. Think you can say abortion jokes on television sponsored by Pro Life corporations? Maybe Bill thought his boyish faux naivete pouting and deer-in-the-headlights ambivalence would exempt him from the cull

Wrong.

That’s what’s coming for all of us who Think and Love and Dream in the corporate future, Total Creative Annihilation.

Before we’re all torn from our families as Undesirables and carted off to our new homes plugged into the National Grid like ever-degrading bio fuel cells, let me reiterate, Bill Hicks warned you this would happen and you didn’t listen.

Of greater interest to fans of his stage act are the letters, one of which ‘On the Fall of Communism’ prophecies a world in search of an enemy. It mentions False Flag Terrorism and you, the people, who all governments are really at war with.

And these supposed “twelve industrial capitalist scum-fucks,” as Hicks calls the global ruling banker elite who run this planet like they’re playing RISK over brandy and cigars, you think President-elect Barrack Obama hasn’t been taken into a smoky room and shown the Kennedy assassination from an angle that on-one’s seen before? You think he hasn’t been given his corporate agenda?

If there were any justice in this world, Bill Hicks would be our first New World Order global president. You know, just Max Headroom the dead joke-blower into global office while no-one is watching. But there is no such concept as justice on this planet. Only the entrenched (and inhumane).