1987 (What the Fuck Is Going On?)

1987 (What the Fuck Is Going On?) is the debut studio album by British electronic band the Justified Ancients of Mu Mu (the JAMs), later known as the KLF. 1987 was produced using extensive unauthorised samples that plagiarised a wide range of musical works, continuing a theme begun in the JAMs' debut single, "All You Need Is Love". These samples provided a deliberately provocative backdrop for beatbox rhythms and cryptic, political raps.

Shortly after independent release in June 1987, the JAMs were ordered by the Mechanical-Copyright Protection Society to destroy all unsold copies of the album, following a complaint from ABBA. In response, the JAMs disposed of many copies of 1987 in unorthodox, publicised ways. They also released a version of the album titled 1987 (The JAMs 45 Edits), stripped of all unauthorised samples to leave periods of protracted silence and so little audible content that it was formally classed as a 12-inch single.

Background and recording On New Year's Day 1987, Bill Drummond decided to make a hip hop record under the pseudonym "the Justified Ancients of Mu Mu". First broadcast in 1994, per Knowing little about modern music technology, he invited Jimmy Cauty, a former member of the band Brilliant, to join him. Cauty agreed, and the JAMs' debut single, "All You Need Is Love", was independently released on 9 March 1987 as a limited-edition one-sided white label 12-inch. Cauty became "Rockman Rock", and Drummond used the nickname "King Boy Hard" (Later "King Boy D").

The reaction to "All You Need Is Love" was positive; the British music newspaper Sounds listed it as the single of the week, and lauded the JAMs as "the hottest, most exhilarating band this year". The song's reliance on uncleared, often illegal samples made commercial release impossible. In response, the JAMs re-edited the single, removing or doctoring the most antagonistic samples, and re-released it as "All You Need Is Love (106 bpm)" in May 1987. According to Drummond, profits from this re-release funded the recording of their first album. This was the first of many "Information Sheet"s that KLF Communications would send out to fans and the press. The JAMs had completed and pressed copies of the album by early May 1987, but did not have a distributor.News item, Sounds, 9 May 1987

Like "All You Need Is Love", the album was made using an Apple II computer, a Greengate DS3 digital sampler peripheral card, and a Roland TR-808 drum machine. Being a guide to recreating the record at home, this communique from the JAMs provided detailed information about the construction of the album and the samples used. Several songs were liberally plagiarised, using portions from existing works and pasting them into new contexts, with the duo stealing "everything" and "taking... plagiarism to its absurd conclusion". This mashup of samples was underpinned by rudimentary beatbox rhythms and overlaid with Drummond's raps of social commentary, esoteric metaphors, and mockery. Drummond later said that:

Composition

1987 is built around samples of other artists' work, "to the point where the presence of original material becomes questionable". The album is raw and unpolished, the sound contrasting sharply with the meticulous production and tight house rhythms of the duo's later work as the KLF. The beatbox rhythms are basic (described as "weedy" by Q magazine), samples often cut abruptly, and distinctive plagiarised melodies are often played with a high-pitched rasping accompaniment. The plagiarised works are arranged so as to juxtapose with each other as a backdrop for the JAMs' rebellious messages and social comments. The lyrics include self-referential statements of the JAMs' agenda, imbued with their fictional backstory adopted from The Illuminatus! Trilogy.

Side one The album's opening song, "Hey Hey We Are Not The Monkees", begins with simulated human sexual intercourse noises (which Drummond later referred to as "sampled breathing stuff") arranged as a rhythm. The album's first sample is "Here we come..." from the Monkees' theme. It progresses into a cryptic and bleak spoken verse from Drummond: "Here we come, crawling out of the mud, from chaos primeval to the burned out sun, dragging our bad selves from one end of time, with nothing to declare but some half-written rhymes". A cacophone of further samples from The Monkees' theme and Drummond's voice follow – "We're not The Monkees, I don't even like The Monkees!" – before it gets interrupted by an original a cappella vocal line that later became The KLF's "Justified and Ancient" – "We're justified/And we're ancient. We don't want to upset the apple cart/And we don't wanna cause any harm".

The track is followed by a long sample of a London Underground train arriving at and leaving a tube station, with its recorded warning to passengers, "Mind the gap...". "Don't Take Five (Take What You Want)" follows, featuring the JAMs' associates Chike (rapper) and DJ Cesare (scratches). Built around The Dave Brubeck Quartet's "Take Five" and Fred Wesley's "Same Beat", the lyrics are mostly unconventional, with the majority of the song containing references to food: "I was pushing my trolley from detergent to cheese when I first saw the man with antler ears. I tried to ignore but his gaze held my eyes when he told me the truth about the basket of lies". Sounds considered the message of the song (if any) to be a modern version of Robin Hood: "This is piracy in action, with the venerable music industry figure, King Boy D, setting himself up as the Robin Hood of rap as he steals from the rich vaults of recording history".

The first side of the LP closes with "Rockman Rock (Parts 2 and 3)", a homage to Jimmy Cauty that plagiarises from an array of sources, including the "Bo Diddley Beat" and "Sunrise Sunset" from the Fiddler on the Roof soundtrack. Led Zeppelin's "Whole Lotta Love" (interspersed with Jimi Hendrix's "All Along the Watchtower"), "Since I've Been Loving You" and "Houses of the Holy" can be also heard in this track. Side one would not close until "Why Did You Throw Away Your Giro?", a track consisting of a question in reference to a line from "Rockman Rock" from a female adult jokingly answered by a male person, ended in 20 seconds.

Side two The second side begins with "Me Ru Con", a traditional Vietnamese song performed a cappella by the JAMs' friend Duy Khiem. According to Drummond, it was a spontaneous recital by Khiem, who was in the studio contributing clarinet and tenor sax to the album. Khiem's vocal performance was later sampled by The KLF on the ambient house soundtrack to their movie, The Rites of Mu.

"The Queen and I" features extensive samples from ABBA's "Dancing Queen", often overlain with a rasping detuned accompaniment. These lead into Drummond's satirical and discontent rapping, a fictional account of his march into the British House of Commons and Buckingham Palace to demand answers. The song also protests the involvement of cigarette companies in sport ("When cancer is the killer/John Player run the league") and lambasts the "tabloid mentality" ("They all keep talking about Princess Di's dress"). The Sex Pistols' "God Save the Queen" is briefly sampled. After nearly three minutes of samples from the television show Top of the Pops, as well as sound clips from programmes and advertisements on other TV channels, Drummond cries "Fuck that, let's have The JAMs!". The acerbic "All You Need Is Love (106 bpm)" follows. A "stunning audio collage" featuring an AIDS public information film, a rerecording of glamour model Samantha Fox's "Touch Me (I Want Your Body)", and the nursery rhyme "Ring a Ring o' Roses", "All You Need Is Love" comments on sex and the British media's reaction to the AIDS crisis.

The final track on the album is "Next", which Drummond describes as "the only angst-er on the album", with "imagery of war and sordid sex". The track samples Stevie Wonder's "Superstition", Scott Walker's "Next" from Scott 2, the Fall's "Totally Wired," and Julie Andrews' "The Lonely Goatherd" from The Sound of Music, alongside Khiem's original melancholy clarinet and tenor saxophone contributions ("a saxophone of stupefying tediosity", according to Danny Kelly [Album review of 1987 (What the Fuck Is Going On?)]).

Bill Drummond summed up the JAMs' approach to composition in the first "KLF Information Sheet", sent out in October 1987: "We made [the album] not giving a shit for soul boy snob values or any other values, we just went in and made the noise we wanted to hear and the stuff that came out of our mouths.... Not a pleasant sound but it's the noise we had. We pressed it up and stuck it out. A celebration of sorts." Jimmy Cauty defended sampling as an artistic practice: "It's not as if we're taking anything away, just borrowing and making things bigger. If you're creative you aren't going to stop working just because there is a law against what you are doing."

In 1991, Drummond admitted: "We didn't listen to 1987 What The Fuck's Going On for a long time, and when we did we were embarrassed by it because it was so badly recorded. But I still felt we were able to get a lot out of ourselves through it."

Release and controversy 1987 (What the Fuck Is Going On?) was released in June 1987 on the JAMs' own record label, "The Sound of Mu(sic)".

1987 was met with mixed reviews in most of the major British music publications, including Melody Maker, NME, Sounds, and Q, and the album came to the attention of the management of Swedish pop group ABBA: The JAMs had sampled large portions of the ABBA single "Dancing Queen" on the track "The Queen And I". A legal showdown with ABBA and the Mechanical-Copyright Protection Society (MCPS) followed, 1987 was forcibly withdrawn from sale, and the JAMs were ordered to "deliver up the master tape, mothers, stampers and any other parts commensurate with manufacture of the record".News item, Sounds, 12 September 1987.Davage, I., letter from the MCPS to The JAMs, reproduced in "The KLF 1987 Completeist List" [sic], an insert to Who Killed The JAMs?, KLF Communications JAMS LP2, 1988.

King Boy D and Rockman Rock travelled to ABBA's home country of Sweden, in the hope of meeting with ABBA personally, taking an NME journalist and photographer with them, along with most of the remaining copies of the LP and a gold disc of the album. Failing to find ABBA in residence at Polar Studios in Stockholm, they instead presented the gold disc to a blonde prostitute they pretended was Agnetha Fältskog "fallen on hard times". Of the original LP's stock, some copies were disposed overboard on the North Sea ferry trip across, and the remainder were burned in a field in Gothenburg before dawn (as shown on the cover of their next album, Who Killed The JAMs?, and detailed in that album's single "Burn the Bastards"). The JAMs also played a recording of "The Queen and I" loudly outside the offices of ABBA's record label, Polar Music. The trip was unexpectedly eventful, the JAMs accidentally hitting and killing a moose, and later being shot at by a farmer, a bullet cracking the engine of their Ford Galaxie police car. They were, by their own account, towed back to England by the AA.