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you just can’t believe everything you see and hear, now can you ?

Announcer:    (Electric Pop Bass riff intro:) Good Evening, ladies and gentlemen.  Welcome to Radio Station EXP.  Tonight, we are featuring an interview with a very peculiar looking gentleman who goes by the name of Mr. Paul Corusoe, on the dodgy subject of are there or are there not flying saucers or . . . ahem, UFO’s.  Please Mr. Corusoe, please could you give your regarded opinion on this nonsense about spaceships and even space people.

Mr. Corusoe: Thank you.  As you all know, you just can’t believe everything you see and hear, can you.  Now, if you will excuse me, I must be on my way.

      Announcer:    (A wall of other-worldly electric guitar feedback chording.) Bu . . . but, but . . . glub . . . I, I, don’t believe it.

      Mr. Corusoe: Pffffttt!! . . . Pop!! . . . Bang!! . . . Etc!!!?

“EXP” (Hendrix, 1967)

as performed by The Jimi Hendrix Experience on Axis: Bold as Love

[INSERT, Pizza Hut logo, Apple’s iBook, Whammo’s Frisbee, Weber Grill]

I’m trying to meditate on the ubiquity of this round yon saucer shape demonstrated again and again in the Blinderman/Conger UFO Show, in most UFO sighting testimony, in nearly every single Hollywood saucer depiction, in the Pizza Hut logo, the shape of Apple’s iBook, the Weber Grill, and let’s not forget the preeminent Hippie toy— the Frisbee.  In a moment I will suggest some implications that spring from the position “we are not alone.”  Jimi’s Corusoe—whose name is meant to conjure Defoe’s White European invader Robinson Crusoe (who was shattered when he discovered he was not alone), conqueror of the Black-skinned island resident Friday, thereby confusing the resident/alien equation—responds to the dismissive and condescending voice of British authority (Mitch Mitchell) by reminding the LP’s faux radio audience and Jimi’s own listeners to question official versions of reality.  Jimi’s alter-ego, Paul Corusoe, stands in here as a surrogate for all earthlings who, for whatever reasons, believe in extra-terrestrial visitation, and who, like all writers and artists and film makers and pop songsmiths, present a version to their audience of this miraculous visitation: what the beings and their mode of transport look and sound like, what they do with and to us once they arrive, and why they are here.  And like the defamiliarization of Swift’s Hounynymic Horses and Orwell’s Farm Animals, Jimi’s alien’s perspective is all about right here on Earth, today—a formalist veil for self-critique.  Jimi’s alien visitor’s “Greetings Earthlings” says: “I just want to talk to you. I won’t do you no harm.” “I hear you got your people livin’ in cages tall and cold.”  “I have been here before, etc.”  When one race “discovers” another, along with colonialization, comes miscegenation.

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