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A review by julcoh
KLF: Chaos Magic Music Money by John Higgs, J.M.R. Higgs
5.0
I came to this book after hearing Higgs on the Ezra Klein podcast, and his opening comment to Higgs is much more understandable now: “just who the hell do you think you are?”
This book is absolutely fascinating... and I’m having difficulty describing why and how. I could tell you about the contents of the book— the KLF (a band I’d never heard of that topped the charts in the 90s), their antics and eventual burning of a million Pounds, weaving in the psychedelic concepts of Robert Anton Wilson’s self-referential reality tunnels and Alan Moore’s Ideaspace, Discordianism and Operation Mindfuck and the novels Illuminatus!, material rationalism and inflationary economic systems, and the creation of our 21st century.
But that would only be a model of the book, and models, “after all, are significantly less detailed than what they represent. Reality is ablaze with infinite connections: every particle in the cosmos affects every other particle. It’s Too Much, it really is, and seeing reality in all its innate finery would be so overpowering that you’d be in no state to nip down to the shops when you need a pint of milk.”
This book is absolutely fascinating... and I’m having difficulty describing why and how. I could tell you about the contents of the book— the KLF (a band I’d never heard of that topped the charts in the 90s), their antics and eventual burning of a million Pounds, weaving in the psychedelic concepts of Robert Anton Wilson’s self-referential reality tunnels and Alan Moore’s Ideaspace, Discordianism and Operation Mindfuck and the novels Illuminatus!, material rationalism and inflationary economic systems, and the creation of our 21st century.
But that would only be a model of the book, and models, “after all, are significantly less detailed than what they represent. Reality is ablaze with infinite connections: every particle in the cosmos affects every other particle. It’s Too Much, it really is, and seeing reality in all its innate finery would be so overpowering that you’d be in no state to nip down to the shops when you need a pint of milk.”