THIN BOY FAT Enter The Hot Dream (Original Mix) (Ozit/Morpheus)
THIN BOY FAT Enter The Hot Dream (Ozit/Morpheus)
So, once upon a time Fatboy Slim released a single called "Sunset (Bird Of Prey)", which sampled a section of Jim Morrison's "An American Prayer" album in which the counterculture laureate burst into song for a couple of phrases. And here we have a Morrison-sampling single and album by the mysterious Thin Boy Fat (and yes, the logo is a pretty accurate facsimile of Mr Cook's), both encased in a sleeve with a picture of a sunset on it (just like the "Sunset"-containing Fatboy Slim album "Halfway Between The Gutter And The Stars" had a picture of a sunset on it).
Specifics are hard to come by - no press release arrived with these discs - so I can't tell who Thin Boy Fat is or are, or determine whether he/she/they were responsible for the entirety of the "Enter The Hot Dream" album or if the perpetrators are those named alongside each track, the most famous of whom is probably Mark Pistel of Meat Beat Manifesto (although I only know this because it helpfully says 'of Meat Beat Manifesto' next to his name!). The Thin Boy Fat moniker often appears with the word Fog bracketed next to it - I can't tell you if this Fog is the Fog signed to Ninja Tune, but my suspicions tend towards the negative.
Displacing documentation of the music in the booklet of the album is a thorough inventory of other Morrison-based wares available from Ozit/Morpheus. These include "Electric Proclamations Of The Wild Child", 'another album of superb Jim Morrison remixes', "Stoned But Articulate" (ha!), 'previously undiscovered pronouncements of Jim Morrison recorded in person, Europe 1968', "The Ultimate Collected Spoken Words 1967-1970", also available as an "Anniversary Limited Edition", the cover of which reads 'On December 8th 1988 Jim Morrison would have been 55 years of age' (no, really, it does!), "Dionysus", 'A collection of words spoken by Jim Morrison' (beyond parody, yes?) and most tenuous of all, "Freshly Dug", 'an album of poetry and keyboards featuring Ray Manzarek' but no Jim Morrison at all. There's also a book, "Jim Morrison And The Doors Eloquent Basilisk".
It would appear that Ozit/Morpheus have cornered the market in Jim Morrison's verbal, as opposed to musical, outpourings. So what better to do with them than to lash them to a series of electro-jazz rock-dance-muzak backing tracks so soulless they might have been squeezed out of a toothpaste tube? If this were lift music you'd get out and walk. At no point does the album answer, or even pose, the question of why Mr Morrison's stoned ramblings are so ideally suited to this kind of lame techno desecration, although the whole tenor of the album and its packaging suggests the overriding impulse behind this shameless, opportunistic release. The snippets chosen don't exactly reveal much of their subject either, apart from the odd recitation of lyrics from "Hello I Love You", "L.A. Woman" and "The Wasp (Texas Radio And The Big Beat)", or Jim's confession "I don't listen to music that much. I'm not what you'd call a music buff", which at least offers some security that, wherever he's at now, he won't be stumbling into this exploitative tat any time soon. And I wonder what the legalese cover statement "License requirements where appropriate in pursuance/negotiation with the necessary parties/Morrison Estate" actually translates as in English. But it doesn't and shouldn't matter: these discs simply have no merit or redeeming features of any kind. Don't buy them.