Internet Freakshow

Godspeed You! Black Emperor

Internet Freakshow - Godspeed You! Black Emperor

In various episodes here, I’ve talked about how people use the internet to create new mysteries. But sometimes, the internet solves the mystery rather than creates it, and this is one of those times.

Before we get into how the internet was used to solve a musical mystery, I need to give you some background into the band, Godspeed You! Black Emperor. If you’re someone who, like me, isn’t big into the music scene you may not have heard of them. Godspeed You! Black Emperor is a band originally formed in Canada in 1994. They’re an experimental rock group who has had quite a bit of success. Their most popular song is called East Hastings, and it was featured in the 2002 film, “28 Days Later”. Anyone who has seen the movie likely remembers that haunting song as the film’s protagonist wanders around a deserted city.

That’s not the only success the band has had though. Throughout the years, and despite the various drama that bands have with members leaving and hiatuses to pursue other projects, they’ve collected quite a cult following and they still produce music today. So while you may not have heard of this band, all you need to know for the purposes of this podcast are that the band is popular in many circles with rabid fans dying to hear their music.

In 1994 shortly after forming the band, they assembled at a small studio in New Brunswick to record an album. This album had a very small run. Just 33 copies of this cassette tape were created in total, and over the years all cassettes vanished. Despite the best efforts by the fans to track down the missing album, they were unsuccessful. The album was destined to be lost forever. Even the band didn’t have a copy.

Even to this day, this album is not included in their official discography. Most places list 1997’s “F sharp, A sharp, infinity” as their first album, ignoring the lost 1994 album, “All Lights Fucked on the Hairy Amp Drooling”. The album became like an urban legend, with some doubting the album ever even existed in the first place.

The mystery was laid to rest in 2013 though. A user on reddit had found this missing cassette.

His basic story is that he used to travel around to various studios and collect demo tapes from them. Sometime between 1994 and 1995, he stopped by the studio where this album was recorded and picked up the demo tape. It sat in a cardboard box for nearly 20 years, when in 2013, he found the album while cleaning out a closet.

Like me, he had not heard of Godspeed You! Black Emperor, so he googled them and found the same information presented before. Realizing he may be sitting on an album that is much sought after, he looked to the internet for advice. The user, casketjacket, posted on the music subreddit looking for advice on how to handle the tape.

The subreddit was skeptical of course. On the internet, everything is a lie until proven otherwise. To prove he was in possession of the cassette, he posted photos. The photos definitely looked legit. The front of the tape was black with white handwritten text and a grayscale illustration. On the inside were a similar scratchy style of illustrations like hearts and stars with the number ‘3’ inside.

The subreddit exploded with feedback about this discovery. The user with the tape said he had no way to record a cassette tape into the computer for easy sharing, but he’d be working on a solution in the coming days.

And sure enough, casketjacket delivered again. He ripped 2 songs from the tape, “Random Lovely Monctun Blues” and “Dadmomdaddy”, and he uploaded them to a random and obscure filesharing site. Fans of Godspeed You! Black Emperor trudged their way through slow download speeds and timeouts but eventually did recover those tracks. And all vouched for the legitimacy of the tracks. These were the real deal. The first peak at their favorite band’s first recording which had been lost for decades. You can imagine the intense and passionate interest in these songs from the fans.

Unfortunately, casketjacket didn’t share their enthusiasm. In fact he seemed annoyed by the interest, leaving the conversation for hours or days at a time with excuses like attending a birthday party for his son, or even just that he needed to sleep.

At one point, he wonders about the legal ramifications of sharing these songs. If the band or studio or anyone didn’t want these songs to see the light of day, how would they react to someone on the internet sharing the music?

I’m going to defend this outlook a little bit. Obviously internet piracy is a thing, and it’s a thing that can get you big fines or even booted from your internet provider. People are rightfully timid to share movies, TV shows, and music online, and casketjacket was obviously quite worried about this. He claimed that his wife was encouraging him to just sell off the cassette and let someone else deal with the headaches of sharing it and the potential legal ramifications.

Fans replied with interviews from the band themselves, wishing the tape to be released. But this did not persuade casketjacket. Users wanting to hear the rest of the tape kept pressing and hoping to change his mind, but their conversation kept getting more heated and eventually resulted in another user calling casketjacket a “god tier troll or the biggest asshole [they] had ever interacted with”. Casketjacket replied to this saying his mind was now made up, and he would not be sharing the tape.

Later, he came back for one final post, apologizing for the chaos he’d caused among the fans and trying, one last time, to do right by the fans, the band, and the label. He promised that he’d reached out to the band’s label and asked for permission to share or sell the tape. He also shared his plan to auction the tape off on ebay once he realized it was safe to do so. It restored a little hope and faith for the fans who still desperately wanted to hear the tape.

Unfortunately, none of that would ever come to be. Casketjacket deleted his reddit account without posting another comment about the tape. It never showed up on ebay.

So what happened to the tape? Only casketjacket knows for sure. Throughout his postings about the tape, he alluded to selling it, wondering how much it was worth, and maybe using the proceeds of a sale to take his kids on vacation.

So was all this money motivated? It’s relatively easy to consider some possibilities. If his posting this was ultimately money-motivated, maybe a user sent him a private message and made him an offer for the tape.

Or maybe this wasn’t motivated purely by money. Maybe casketjacket’s concerns about piracy were legitimate, and he got spooked by all the attention and gave up on the effort to share the tape. While it is possible that casketjacket is the “god tier troll” that he was accused of being, that actually seems like the least likely possibility here. This is certainly a troll that got people very upset, but that seems accidental. And why would he go through all the trouble of designing a cassette and finding a band or recording music that sounded like it may be from this band, just for trolling? I believe the tape is legitimate, and one of very few that still exist. After all, cassettes are an outdated technology. I’m sure many have been thrown away, or simply listened to enough that the tapes themselves fall apart. Those of us old enough to remember cassettes remember they’re prone to getting the tapes stuck in devices. Sometimes just exposure to heat or cold can ruin them.

For their part, even Godspeed You! Black Emperor has disowned the tape, instead claiming their 1997 album to be their first legitimate work.

While this little story doesn’t have the best resolution in the world, there’s hope for a happy ending in the future. There’s no reason to believe the cassette is gone or ruined. Maybe it is in a happier place, with a new owner just biding his time until he can safely release it to the world.

These days, of course, the internet has changed the music scene. Cassettes and even CDs are no longer things that people purchase and keep on the shelf or in their car. Albums are streamed online almost exclusively now, through services like Spotify. I’m sure there’s hundreds or even thousands of stories out there similar to this one, in times of physical media when that media can be lost or destroyed. What separates this story from those others is the continued success of Godspeed You! Black Emperor and the rabid fanbase they still have. It’s the only reason this story matters at all. Casketjacket, the reddit poster who went around collecting demo tapes for several years, probably just has a lot of albums made by guys who never made another album, and went on to have normal and boring lives that no one cares about.

Stories of lost media like this are becoming more rare as the internet ensures media can live basically forever. These days, the closest thing we’ll get are bands doing experimental art like the Wu Tang Clan, who created an album with only 1 copy, selling it to the highest bidder to ensure the buyer controlled the release of it. That happened in 2014, with the album “Once Upon a Time in Shaolin”. In this case though, the album wasn’t an amateurly produced cassette tape. It was gifted in a hand-carved box with a leather-bound collection of lyrics and other details. This album was purchased for $2M by the “pharma bro” Martin Shkreli. And if you think he must be Wu Tang’s biggest fan, you’d be wrong. He’d been quoted as not even listening to the album, but bought it as leverage to hang out with celebrities who may want to listen to it. So I guess casketjacket isn’t the only one keeping an album all to himself, away from the loyal fans who would actually enjoy it. In Shkreli’s case, he ended up going to prison for things totally unrelated to the Wu Tang album of course, but it shows the types of personalities who like to keep everything to themselves, and share nothing.