Bill Hicks - Rant In E-Minor (1997)

ARTIST`````Bill Hicks

ALBUM`````Rant In E-Minor

GENRE`````Stand-up comedy, Genius, Character assassination

YEAR````````1997

Why?

Recently I watched American: The Bill Hicks Story documentary (very bleak & shitty fan-made effort if you ask me) and later discovered that I missed the best and rather famous Bill Hicks material ever recorded - Rant In E-Minor. Some bits from this album are just stunning pieces of character assassinations. It doesn't matter if you heard this before - hear it again and again because recordings like these remind us that it is healthy to occasionally express our anger in the most direct way possible.

Review from allmusic

Rant in E-Minor is the comedy equivalent of an Ingmar Bergman film. This posthumously released CD is so brutal, bitter, pessimistic, and honest that it is a very difficult task indeed to listen to it. Recorded most likely while he was going through chemotherapy for pancreatic cancer in 1993, Bill Hicks must have sensed the end was near for him. Like John Coltrane's wailing saxophone on "Interstellar Space," Rant in E-Minor seems to exorcise the burden of life from Hicks' body, while simultaneously reaching a level of passionate intensity rarely matched.

Read the whole review here

Review by NICK TAVARES

The images are as graphic as any nightly newscast. Pro-life warriors murdering doctors. Cops storming trailer parks. Jesse Helms and Jay Leno killing themselves. Ronald Reagan, George Bush and Dan Quayle urinating into Rush Limbaugh’s mouth. Federal officers blowing fire into a Waco compound. It’s likely more explicit than any NC-17 movie released in the past decade. But at no time is it obscene. Sure, it’s not appetizing, but it’s funny as anything,and it’s all geared towards proving his ultimate point: that we are all one and we have to live with each other.

Read the whole review here

Review by ALAN RANTA

Till that point, I thought Denis Leary's No Cure For Cancer was hilarious. Then I found out Leary lifted many of the ideas for his breakout CD from the material Bill had been developing since the early eighties for this album, watered them down, of course, to cater to the beer swilling, soap opera and wrestling watching pop fans Hicks stood against. Bill didn't really hate the people too lazy or ignorant to understand. His ultimate message, revealed to those who could see past his foul language and unapologetic delivery, was one of love, compassion, and understanding.

Read the whole review here

DOWNLOAD