A song by
John Vanderslice, San Francisco solo artist and former frontman of
MK Ultra. It was apparently the result of a challenge from the songwriter's brother, a
web designer, to write a song about a
pedophile addicted to Internet
porn. It was never supposed to be about Bill Gates at all, but Vanderslice went there, in a brilliant twist of victim's logic, transforming the song from the scary confession of a loser, to a foreboding threat from a madman.
Vanderslice has a history of pranksterism - his former band MK Ultra cooked up a story about a brilliant filmmaker who went into hiding, to promote their album Original Motion Picture Soundtrack. Having seen the promotional power of a good hoax, he and a friend cooked up a bogus legal threat letter from Microsoft concerning the song. Unsurprisingly, in this age of just-in-time journalism and sloppy fact-checking, one bogus press release spawned interview after interview, in which Vanderslice kept embellishing the story with details of mysterious web-server crashes and crank calls from the Redmond area code. Even after he gave straight-up denials to a press source or two, the credulous media folks kept lining up. It took a televised interview on ZDTV to finally break the thin film of plausible deniability around the story. There was never even a real Microsoft employee's name attached to the press release.
The song appears on Vanderslice's first solo album, Mass Suicide Occult Figurines, on the Barsuk label. The complete story of the hoax, as well as links to some of the original articles in which it was perpetrated, is available at http://www.johnvanderslice.com/html/press.html . The website also has an MP3 of the tune, which rocks in a nice, early-90s way.
Lyrics:
Teeny tiny little teens
Keep pouring out of my machine
I just typed a word
Just pressed return
Someone made this easy,
Made this inevitable...
So
For bringing me here
Bill Gates must die...
People stray, people stray,
People stray, people stray,
People stray, just don't say
I'll never make it back
Intact
Teeny tiny little teens
Keep pouring out of my machine
Backdoors, passwords galore,
Only the hackers, only the Feds know
Just how far out I've been...
So
For bringing me here
Bill Gates must die...
People stray, people stray (etc.)
So
For bringing me here
Bill Gates must die...
Must die... (repeat)
CST Approved. Lyrics are © John Vanderslice, reprinted here by his kind permission. He also added in his email that E2 looked pretty neat.