The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu[edit]
Early in 1987, Drummond and Cauty's collaborations began. They assumed alter egos—King Boy D and Rockman Rock respectively—and they adopted the name The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu (The JAMs), after the fictional conspiratorial group "The Justified Ancients of Mummu" from
The Illuminatus! Trilogy. In those novels, the JAMs are what the
Illuminati (a political organisation which seeks to impose order and control upon society) call a group of Discordians who have infiltrated the Illuminati in order to feed them false information. As The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu, Drummond and Cauty chose to interpret the principles of the fictional JAMs in the context of music production in the corporate music world.[
citation needed] Shrouded in the mystique provided by their disguised identities and the cultish
Illuminatus!, they mirrored the Discordians' gleeful political tactics of causing chaos and confusion by bringing a direct, humorous but nevertheless revolutionary approach to making records, often attracting attention in unconventional ways. The JAMs' primary instrument was the
digital sampler with which they would
plagiarise the history of popular music, cutting chunks from existing works and pasting them into new contexts, underpinned by rudimentary
beatbox rhythms and overlayed with Drummond's
raps, of social commentary, esoteric metaphors and mockery. (This technique is rather similar to that used by
The Residents on their album
Meet the Residents).
The JAMs' debut studio single "
All You Need Is Love" dealt with the media coverage given to
AIDS, sampling heavily from
The Beatles' "
All You Need Is Love" and
Samantha Fox's "
Touch Me (I Want Your Body)". Although it was declined by distributors fearful of prosecution, and threatened with lawsuits, copies of the one-sided
white label 12" were sent to the
music press; it received positive reviews and was made "single of the week" in
Sounds.
[17] A later piece in the same magazine called The JAMs "the hottest, most exhilarating band this year.... It's hard to understand what it feels like to come across something you believe to be totally new; I have never been so wholeheartedly convinced that a band are so good and exciting."
[18]
