<p>Up until a month ago, I rarely thought about '90s club legends The KLF. This is because The KLF were never all that big in the States, and thus I only remember them for their biggest single here, “3:00 a.m. Eternal.” If I had been paying closer attention, I would have discovered that the group, led by musicians Jimmy Cauty and Bill Drummond, were singing “ancients of Mu Mu” in the chorus of that song, in reference to <a href="https://shimajournal.org/issues/v10n2/g.-Fitzgerald-Hayward-Shima-v10n2.pdf">a mythical, pre-Atlantis lost continent</a>. I also would have known that Drummond was a multi-hyphenate of the oddest sort: a musician/producer/promoter/performance artist/carpenter who, in tandem with Cauty, infamously took a million pounds sterling from their KLF earnings and deliberately <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=InZydV39hb8">lit it on fire</a>.</p>
<p>Now, the easiest explanation as to why these two men set a bagful of money on fire is that they were fucking insane. But if you’ve read author John Higgs’s incredible <a href="https://johnhiggs.com/books/the-klf/">history of The KLF</a>, as I just did, you might be more amenable to its founders’ runaway train of thought. After all, you don’t help stage a 12-hour production about the Illuminati, shepherd Echo & The Bunnymen into the British mainstream, become worldwide pop stars in your own right, and then delete your entire back catalog without <em>something</em>, possibly drug-aided, going on up there. Is it not worth following your muse, even if that muse might come off as superficially cuckoo-nanners? Is there not value in the act of creation, and of creative destruction? In fact, what if art is at its core an act of conjuring? Of <em>magic</em>? Also, why did Tammy Wynette decide to lay down a track for these two lunatics when they cold-called her? THAT, my friends, is (kinda) the subject of this week’s <em>Distraction</em>.</p>