Album review: Charles Manson’s One Mind (free download) [I Heart Music]

Incarcerated killer and walking synonym for crazy Charles Manson recently released a full folk album, distributed for free under the Creative Commons license, meaning that it can be freely distributed for non-commercial use.  Some have said this is an FU to the RIAA, but more likely it’s simply because Manson can’t profit from any works while he’s in prison and since he’s probably never going to get out of prison, he really doesn’t have much a choice.

You can download Manson’s new album, One Mind here via Limewire among other places.

Much like Manson himself, One Mind is unkempt, folksy, uneven, at times incoherent and a little crazy.  It’s a combination of Manson’s own folk songs and poetry and has moments of clarity, some which can be seen as brief glimpses of genius followed immediately by moments of lunacy.  One Mind won’t be winning any Grammys any time soon, but it never stops being fascinating as the portrait of a mad mind gone even more mad with age and solitude.

Listening to the album in a stretch, it’s hard to tell where one song starts and another ends since the whole album was recorded in one long jam session.  Sixteen tracks of Manson musing on the society that put him behind bars, politics, love, prison shrinks and the meaning of life among other things.

Despite his dreams of becoming a world-famous folk singer when he was a young man, Manson isn’t a top-notch musician, though he’s not that bad either.  The one thing that can be said for One Mind is that I wish there were more albums like this– more albums that were as raw and real and this.  More albums that are not all fluff and production tricks and manicured, lacquered and sugar-coated until all life is drained from them.  The last major album recorded in this free jam session style that I can recall is Ol’ Dirty Bastard’s Brooklyn Zoo.

Of course, Manson doesn’t have anything to lose and therefore can afford to do an album exactly his way, the way so many musicians would love to and maybe record companies should let them.  Most albums these days aren’t produced to be heard as a whole album but rather a couple of catchy singles that then hopefully sell an album.  Problem is, people just download and share the good tracks and say “fuck the rest”.  Decades ago, an album was a whole experience but not much anymore.  In addition to having historical value, One Mind is a bit of a time capsule.  Minus some of the dated lyrics, its style sounds like it could be straight out of the late 60s when the folk explosion hit and brought with it the likes of Bob Dylan and the Mommas and the Papas.

It’s part Dylan, part Wesley Willis, part ODB, part Henry Rollins, part Sex Pistols, part Johnny Cash, part CCR, part Jim Morrison, all pure batshit crazy Manson.

One Mind is real music and it’s real prison.  He rants, he whistles between tracks when he’s thinking of what to do next.  You can hear him light up a cigarette before a rant on society, you can hear the prison PA system behind tracks and the echo of empty walls. Some other prisoner interrupts his jam session to ask for a cigarette.  At one point, you can clearly hear him taking a piss while he’s delivering a spoken-word rant.  Really, when was the last time you heard someone taking a piss while they were recording an album?  To me, this is one of the best albums of the year.  Screw Britney Spears, screw New Kids on the Block’s reunion and Paris Hilton.  This is music.  It’s crazy and ugly and unhinged and daring.  It’s just too bad that it’s America’s resident boogeyman that has to do it.