Red/Blue/Green "Transcending Stupidity"



Religion is to Music as...

A) MOOism is to Negativland
B) Catholicism is to J.S. Bach
C) Discordianism is to John Cage
D) The Church of the SubGenius is to GWAR
E) All of the above

My answer? E.
MOO/Negativland: They take peices of other people's music, CB radio samples, TV, and anything else they can get their hands on, and juxtapose it. They have some serious things to say, but they also try to make it entertaining. We take peices of other religions, political ideals, Pop Culture, and whatnot, and do pretty much the same thing.
Catholicism/J.S. Bach: Both are wonderfully intricate, full of subtleties that the average outside observer would never notice. Both are classic sources. Both are hopelessly out of date by modern standards but among the greatest products of their own time.
Discordianism/Cage: Conceptual art. Nuff said.
SubGenius/GWAR: Both are great fun, in an annoying kind of way. Both LIVE to shock Normals, and precious little else. Both have a subtle sense of humour that's almost, but not quite, totally masked by the sheer blunt crudity of their jokes.
tHIS is just my way of defending MOOism against claims that it's just another SubGenius ripoff. Which, granted, it used to be. We invented MOO before we'd ever heard of them, as an experiment to see if a weird religion were possible. Then we discovered that they did it first, and did it weirder.
Since we can't compete with the SubGenius in the weirdness game, we got into a slightly different game, which is more conceptual, more balanced. (At least I did, and I'm editing this book.)
The new game came about because people kept telling me: "You fuckin' MOOists. Jeez, you people are annoying." This reminded me of how the Church of SubGenius made me feel. They're funny, but annoying. They put a high value on being weird, and then are just as dogmatic as any other religion. I didn't like that.
Besides, I'm not weird enough to compete with Ivan Stang and J.R. "BoB" Dobbs. I'd consider myself a SubGenius (though they might not), but I prefer to think of MOOism as a Discordian cabal than a SubGenius ripoff.
And that's all I have to say about that.