Bwa-haha! Yes! Yes! I know it was all I needed, I know that all it would take to lift me out of my stupor was a visit from my old friend, the big man downstairs, lord fire and brimstone, Georgia’s best fiddler (in every sense! Bwa-haha!), The Big D with the Big D, the Antipope, Red (Dante’s version), I Love Lucifer, Orbital’s 1996 number 3 hit, Mr Rin Tin Sin, The Devil himself!
Or herself. I’d like to think we’ve reached a stage now where we#re comfortable with the devil being a woman. If you met my ex-wife, you definitely agree.
(My ex-wife was a tenured professor at Cornell in both Gender Studies and also Religious Iconography in Postwar Visual Arts. She once wrote a fascinating paper called ‘Get Alongside Me, Satan: What the History of Depictions of The Devil Tells Us About Changing Gender Norms in Western Society’, and she would absolutely be the best person to talk to about it)
One year ago now, in those heady times of December 2021 – when we were too busy talking about Addison Rae’s first movie and whether or not people were ‘cheugy‘ – the pact that Anna von Hausswolf had made first came to light. She had scheduled a concert on the 9th at the Notre-Dame de Bon-Port in France, before having to cancel because (wait until you hear this) local Catholic groups protested the venue because her music was ‘Satanic’!!
First of all, nice try, Anna, trying to sneak your SATANIC music into such a holy place! But don’t you know that you can’t reason with militant Catholics! Like, you’re heard of Catholicism, right? You know how fucking bonkers that is, yeah? You know that it’s essentially a money laundering scheme to finance an international child sex ring? Yeah? We all accept that? Well imagine the single minded lunacy to glance upon all that, and decide to become a militant defender of it?? Like, we all know how dumb and silly Paw Patrol is, and how it’s mainly just copaganda aimed at indoctrinating the very young into subservience, but imagine if an actual adult loved Paw Patrol so much they were prepared to die for it! That’s your general militant Catholic. That’s who you’re dealing with here. See, lesser people can be won over by liberal virtue signalling like ‘facts’ and ‘logic’ – But the Roman Catholic Diocese gave me the go ahead! It’s actually a wholly instrumental gig so I won’t actually say anything or sing any lyrics! – Pah! Who do you think you’re talking to?? Your precious Jon Stewart?? Take this liberal propaganda with you as you are condemned straight to hell!!
Yeah, fair fucks to the Catholics. They’ve been world number one at losing their absolute fucking shit over fucking nothing since around the time of the Spanish Inquisition, What’s more so, since the Spanish Inquisition started in around 1478, Catholics haven’t learned a single more thing about how the world works, which only makes them more dangerous! I mean, the first dinosaur wasn’t discovered until 1677, and the concept wasn’t even solidified until 1841, so just imagine the angry little hamsters running around in a Catholic’s brain when they sit down to watch Jurassic Park. Plus, if they’re watching the newer Chris Pine ones there’ll be extra angry. Because the movies are shit. The movie that Catholics like the most? ‘Stuart Little 2’. Unfortunately, I’ve not studied the scriptures enough to tell you why. But I do know it has to be ‘Stuart Little 2’, not the original ‘Stuart Little’, the third Vatican Council was very clear about that.
I will speak up a little in Hausswolff’s defense though. The Cath-Bros held up some of her older lyrics as proof of her general Sataness (which I’m not denying), including the closing coda to 2009’s Pills, which goes… a little something… like… this…
I’m on the floor constantly, intensivley,
Making love.
I made love
I made love
With the devil
With the devil.
Oh I, I made love with the devil
With the devil.
Oh I, I made love with the devil
With the devil.
Oh I, I made love with the devil
With the devil.
Oh I, I made love with the devil
With the devil.
Devil
With the devil.
Devil.
With the devil.
Devil.
With the devil.
Firstly, you might be reading between the lines a bit too much there. Secondly, this isn’t a value judgment. Would you rather say that she hated having sex with the Devil? Like, Antichrist? More like Anticlimax, ammi right girls? If the devil’s crap in bed, then why are we all so scared of him? Shouldn’t his power and Big Sin Energy be so tempting that denying it is some sort of achievement? Otherwise, what are you all so proud of? You’d want Anna to come away from the encounter saying “Tell you what, he lives up to the legend. These brimstones are gonna be on fire all week, let me tell you”, surely? No, let me guess, your preferred method is abstinence! Listen, get it through all of your brain broken skulls that people are going to want to fuck the Devil. We all have these feelings sometimes, and exploring our sexuality with the Devil is an important part of growing up. The best thing to do isn’t to make Satan bonking this great taboo, but to have it out in the open. Talk to your children about bouncing on Beelzebub’s inferno, maybe actually be honest about your first time getting the horn from the dude with the horns. Yes, your kids naturally despise you right now, but this might bring you together.
Oh, and one last thing: you guys just made the devil up. I don’t mean ‘lol, the bible is fanfic’ – we all know it was handwritten by Jesus himself – I mean that there is no devil in the bible. There’s a bunch of retcomming, sure, but all the classic devil ‘tropes’ (fallen angel, lives in hell, Big Sin Energy) were 90% culled from Dante’s ‘Inferno‘ (not a scientific text), and 10% other stuff you people have thrown in over the years. You people are like if Jim Davis created Garfield, then got really angry about people making ‘blasphemous’ Garfield porn. Lemme tell you, Jim Davis is a busy man, he does not have time to look at all the Garfield porn on the internet.
Yeah, so anyway, this album is incredible. I think it’s always seemed difficult to capture Hausswolff’s extraordnary and unique talents on record before, but this album – recorded a night she was opening for Nick Cave in 2018 – is the closest effort yet at capturing her magic. An ideal introduction to an amazing artist.
You could say that this record is… devilish!
I mean, you could say that, you can say whatever you want. Apart from “I railed the Devil”. People get upset, unfortunately.
I just want to say: I may have haphazardly used ‘Catholic’ and ‘militant Catholic’ synonymously throughout this article. I just want to make it clear: all Catholics are thick as pigshit
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