RIP Webby

We got you in this fuckin’ movie, to exterminate all the lunatics, all at once. We’re the filtering system of God; we’re the psychosemantic police -- you can’t even see us! How in the fuck can you do anything about it? We’re pure intelligence; you’re not. You’re a biological product of the cosmoLOGICal universe; you’re molecular matter. I constructed you, FUCK you. I made you up, you didn’t make me up; you got it backwards. You know who you are? You’re a fuckin’ semantic blockage. That’s what made you up.

Semantic Blockage is the title of the full length recordings of Raleigh Theodore Sakers from which were sampled the “Raleigh Soliloquies” featured on Sublime’s Robbin' The Hood and Unwritten Law’s Elva. On the one hand, it is an incoherent half-hour rant; on the other hand, it is a logological manifesto, riddled with subtle linguistic nuance.

Scraps of humor are scattered throughout the monologue. If you’re obsessed with both blowjobs and the English language (and who isn’t?) then you’re in luck because Raleigh returns to those two topics again and again as he covers a range of other material, including but not limited to who he is (God, usually) and why (because he says so). All while continually tearing down the identities of a multitude of imagined listeners he inexplicably hates. Alternately enraged and euphoric, he swears almost constantly (e.g. saying “fuck” 176 times) and engages in more than one type of ‘-ism.’

Very little is known about Sakers. He was born in 1926; in 1994, the original recording was made at a California halfway house where a former Sublime drummer’s brother worked and Sakers was staying. Sakers died in 2000 at the age of 74.