Does anyone know the meaning of the K.L.F. song "Justified Ancients of Mu Mu"?

Answer 1

G'day Diesel219,

The KLF was originally known as the Justified Ancients of Mu Mu in 1997. In 1988, they had a UK number 1 hit as the Timelords with Doctorin the Tardis.

As The KLF, Drummond and Cauty pioneered the genres "stadium house" (rave music with a pop-rock production and sampled crowd noise) and "ambient house". The KLF released a series of international top-ten hits on their own KLF Communications record label, and became the highest internationally selling UK band of 1991. The duo also published a book, The Manual, and worked on a road movie called The White Room.

From the outset, they adopted the philosophy espoused by esoteric novels The Illuminatus! Trilogy, gaining notoriety for various anarchic situationist manifestations, including the defacement of billboard adverts, the posting of prominent cryptic advertisements in NME magazine and the mainstream press, and highly distinctive and unusual performances on Top of the Pops. Their most notorious performance was at the February 1992 Brit Awards, where they fired machine gun blanks into the audience and dumped a dead sheep at the aftershow party. This performance announced The KLF's departure from the music business, and in May 1992 the duo deleted their entire back catalogue.

With The KLF's profits, Drummond and Cauty established the K Foundation and sought to subvert the art world, staging an alternative art award for the worst artist of the year and burning a million pounds sterling. Although Drummond and Cauty remained true to their word of May 1992—the KLF Communications catalogue remains deleted—they have released a small number of new tracks since then, as the K Foundation, The One World Orchestra and most recently, in 1997, as 2K.

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 the group of Discordians they've allowed to infiltrate them (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. 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.

The JAMs' debut 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, receiving positive reviews and being made "single of the week" in Sounds. The JAMs re-edited and re-released the single, removing or doctoring the most antagonistic samples; lyrics from the song appeared as promotional graffiti, defacing selected billboards. The re-release rewarded The JAMs not just with further praise (including NME´s "single of the week",) but also with the funds necessary to record their debut album.

The album, 1987 (What the **** Is Going On?), was released in June 1987. Included was a song called "The Queen and I" (sample (help·info)), which sampled large portions of the ABBA single "Dancing Queen".The recording came to the attention of ABBA's management and, after a legal showdown with ABBA and the Mechanical-Copyright Protection Society, the 1987 album was forcibly withdrawn from sale. Drummond and Cauty travelled to Sweden in hope of meeting ABBA and coming to some agreement, taking an NME journalist and photographer with them, along with most of the remaining copies of the LP. They failed to meet ABBA, so disposed of the copies by burning most of them in a field and throwing the rest overboard on the North Sea ferry trip home. In a December 1987 interview, Cauty maintained that they "felt that what [they]'d done was artistically justified."

Two new singles followed 1987, on The JAMs' "KLF Communications" independent record label. Both reflected a shift towards house rhythms. According to NME, The JAMs' choice of samples for the first of these, "Whitney Joins The JAMs" saw them leaving behind their strategy of "collision course" to "move straight onto the art of super selective theft". The song uses samples of the Mission: Impossible theme alongside Whitney Houston's "I Wanna Dance With Somebody". Ironically, Drummond has claimed that The KLF were later offered the job of producing or remixing a new Whitney Houston album as an inducement from her record label boss (Clive Davis of Arista Records) to sign with them. Drummond turned the job down but nonetheless The KLF signed with Arista as their American distributors. The second single in this sequence—Drummond and Cauty's third and final single of 1987—was "Down Town", a rather more conventional dance record built around "Downtown" by 1960s star Petula Clark. These early works were later collected on the compilation album Shag Times.

A second album, Who Killed The JAMs? was released in early 1988. Who Killed The JAMs? was a rather less haphazard affair than 1987 and earned The JAMs at least one five-star review (from Sounds Magazine, who called it "a masterpiece of pathos"

I have attached sources for your reference.

Regards

Answer 2

From Wikipedia:

"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 the group of Discordians they've allowed to infiltrate them (in order to feed them false information)."

Answer 3

Justified Theme Song Lyrics

Answer 4

This Site Might Help You.

RE:
Does anyone know the meaning of the K.L.F. song "Justified Ancients of Mu Mu"?

Answer 5

Justified And Ancient

Answer 6

I don't think they even know, ask Dolly Parton, she might!