Church Of Subgenius

Aquired through the mail art network back in the 80's this tape is a sampler of what to expect if you join the Church Of Subgenius - a kind of spoof of cults and pseudo religious groups and right wing propaganda which teeters on the edge of self parody.

Wikipedia says -

"The Church of the SubGenius claims to have been founded in the 1950s by the "world's greatest salesman" J. R. "Bob" Dobbs. "Bob" Dobbs is depicted as a cartoon of a Ward Cleaver-like man smoking a pipe, an image originally seen in one of the many "can you draw this" ads commonly found in the back of comic books in the 1950s and 60s.[citation needed] The church really started with the publication of SubGenius Pamphlet #1 in 1979. It found acceptance in underground pop-culture circles and has been embraced on college campuses, in the underground music scene, and on the Internet.

Because of its similarities to the tenets of Discordianism, The Church of the SubGenius is often described as a syncretic offshoot of that belief. However, its members state that the organization developed on its own with the publication of SubGenius Pamphlet #1[citation needed] (also known as The World Ends Tomorrow And You May Die!) by Reverend Ivan Stang and Dr. Philo Drummond. A group that formed after Stang and Drummond began mailing their first pamphlet to publishers, using such pseudonyms as "Puzzling Evidence", "Dr. Howl", "Susie the Floozie", "Palmer Vreedeez", and "Pope Sternodox", helped forward the literature to a number of underground pop-culture figures such as R. Crumb, Paul Mavrides, Harry S. Robins, the New Wave rock group Devo, and Erik Lindgren (producer and president of indie label Arf! Arf! Records in Boston), who embraced it and incorporated it into their work. Crumb's promotion of the Church through his comic book series Weirdo brought many new members into the fold, including artists, musicians, and writers. Their efforts resulted in the publication of the Book of the SubGenius in 1983, followed by Three-Fisted Tales of "Bob" in 1990, Revelation X: The "Bob" Apocryphon in 1994 and The SubGenius Psychlopaedia of Slack: The Bobliographon in 2006. In the late 1980s, the video ARISE! was produced by Cordt Holland and Ivan Stang, and narrated by "Dr. Hal" (Harry S. Robins), then distributed by Polygram.

The popularization of the Internet in the mid-1990s brought a new surge of interest in the Church, resulting in dozens of home-made, elaborately decorated web sites and two Usenet newsgroups, alt.slack and alt.binaries.slack. A third newsgroup, alt.binaries.multimedia.slack, was created later, in 2005. Ivan Stang currently maintains the official SubGenius home page. The Church's weekly radio program, the Hour of Slack, is a staple of many college radio stations. It draws from live broadcasts by Stang, his wife Princess Wei R. Doe and voice comic "Lonesome Cowboy Dave" (comedian/musician Dave DeLuca), as well as from other SubGenius radio shows."

To learn more visit the Subgenius official website HERE.



Church Of Subgenius - Side One