Day 73: L. Ron Hubbard – Space Jazz
I am officially a fifth of the way through my year-long project, so I thought I’d do a little novelty album review today. These past few days (Slayer not included) I’ve had too much of the good stuff, and as I said in my 50 day recap post, I might start experimenting with peppering in some crap here and there just to keep things exciting. So today, I’m reviewing Space Jazz by L. Ron Hubbard.
I’m sure you all know which L. Ron I’m talking about, there aren’t really that many L. Ron’s kicking about. It is exactly who you think it is: the founder of the religious culorganisation, the Church of Scientology.
Album cover courtesy of Applause Records
This’ll be an interesting one. As stated in a prior post, I’m a casual enjoyer of jazz but I don’t know too much about it. I’m ready to be proved wrong, but let’s face it, science fiction writer Lafayette Ronald Hubbard probably isn’t the jazz virtuoso that he thinks he is, and a space-themed book soundtrack jazz album by a cult leadhead of a religious organisation probably won’t be the best thing I’ve ever heard. So we’re separating the wheat from the chaff here, we are testing my taste in jazz. The question is, can I tell jazz from j… well, you know. Another thing.
Space Jazz, an album whose full government name is Space Jazz: The soundtrack of the book Battlefield Earth, is based on one of Hubbard’s books. In the book, Johnny Goodboy Tyler lives in a rare human tribe on an earth that’s inhabited by aliens. A mine security guard of the Psychlos alien race kidnaps Goodboy, who learns all their weaknesses and recruits a bunch of Scottish people to help him take down the aliens. Or something like that, I didn’t read it.
I considered skimming through it but that bad boy is 1050 pages long. 1050 pages! Delusional, even for him. That’s not even worth looking at. 150? Sure, yeah, maybe if it’s free. Over 1000? Please. War and Peace ass length. Who has the time? I’ll just have to trust Mr L. Ron to have made Space Jazz good enough to work as a standalone album.
First of all, I thought this would be some sort of a chic sci-fi themed instrumental jazz record that builds on the atmosphere of the book. Reader, it’s not. It sure does not sound like any jazz that I’ve ever heard. It also has ample lyrics and space-themed narration. My hot take is that you can’t make an album to accompany a book and put in lyrics – that gets in the way of the reading! Silly L. Ron.
Musically, the only reference point I have is that it sort of sounds like the background music to a Mickey Mouse-themed PlayStation 2 game that I owned as a kid. It’s just weird and childlike, not in a fun way. In the first song, there’s no other lyrics than yelping various superhero names. They announce, “It’s Flash Gordon!”, yell “Yaaay, Flash Gordon! Yay!” Then they do the same with Superman. I’m assuming this is L. Ron’s way of subconsciously trying to make us associate Goodboy with actual superheroes, but yelling “Superman!” a few times unfortunately might not cut the mustard.
From there, it just sort of escalates. There are some songs with actual singing, some with growling, some with growl-yelp sequences on the beat. There’s one song with some sort of rhythmic barking/whinnying. My favourite lyrics are from the song presumably about miners, with the lyrics “Gotta get gold / To be free of poverty / Gotta get gold, gotta get gold or slavery”. At least that’s what it sounds like, I can’t find the lyrics online. Another song kind of sounds like anti-bank propaganda, which I’m assuming bodes well with his agenda of asking people to give their money to him and his church instead. It just sounds like an album that was made to accompany a video game that was made by a child as a joke.
My heart goes out to Scientologists. Imagine having to sit in some sort of an auditorium pretending that this is a musical masterpiece, knowing that if you’re not enthusiastic enough, they might send you to cult Gulag. But who knows, maybe they’re all so deep in the game that this actually sounds like an intergalactic version of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.
All killer, no filler, 10/10. Just kidding, it’s a 2/10. I hope at least one person heard this and thought “actually, you know what, maybe Scientology just isn’t for me.”