Home Read Steve Schmolaris’s Album Review: Father Mao | I Blame You

Steve Schmolaris’s Album Review: Father Mao | I Blame You

Each song on this LP shifts rapidly through different styles, collages and tempos.

The Great Leap Forward was Chairman Mao Zedong’s collectivist attempt at rapid industrialization, which lasted until 1961. Millions died. And artists and intellectuals – right-wing criminals, in Mao’s eyes – were sentenced to re-education camps. It is this time period that Father Mao examines with his hyper-industrial album, I Blame You.

The album is much more than its seven songs, as each one shifts rapidly through different styles and collages and tempos. This constant flux mimics the constant change of quotas that each re-education compound was required to meet. And the album ends with the view through ’62, a retrospective of the three years of The Great Leap Forward (1958 to 1961), that looks to the future (1962 onward), and what may be coming next. In doing so, Father Mao is presaging China’s Cultural Revolution, which saw political purges and protests and students violently turning on their teachers, torturing them, humiliating them, murdering them; in other words, blaming them.

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To read the rest of this review — and more by Steve Schmolaris — visit his website Bad Gardening Advice.

 

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Steve Schmolaris is the founder of the Schmolaris Prize, “the most prestigious prize in all of Manitoba,” which he first awarded in 1977. Each year, he awards the prize to the best album of the year. He does not have a profession but, having come from money (his father, “the Millionaire of East Schmelkirk,” left him his fortune when he died in 1977), Steve is a patron of the arts. Inspired by the exquisite detail of a holotype, the collective intelligence of slime mold, the natural world and the suffering inherent within it — and also music (fuck, he loves music!) — Steve has long been writing reviews of Winnipeg artists’ songs and albums at his website Bad Gardening Advice, leading to the publication of a book of the same name.