Sonseed: I'm calling it as fake
Someone was posting on F13.net about the
hoho-so-funny Christian ska band Sonseed supposedly rediscovered by Dougsploitation.
I was suspicious. For one thing, they were surprisingly modern and astonishingly fresh for an early-eighties ska band wearing waistcoats and awful hair, especially in the nicely understated guitar solo. For another, there were a couple of cliched lines where the audience was supposed to laugh at the naive Christians: "Jesus touched me deep down inside". And anyone who, like me, has 25-year-old VHS tapes of music videos will look at the video quality after the first few seconds and want to know what climate-controlled vault that master-copy was stored in.
Other things. Look at
the logo for Sonseed that he links to on the dougsploitation site, and which was supposedly the one that they were putting on t-shirts between the late 70s and 1983, when they supposedly broke up. Despite the fact that this would undoubtedly have had to be scanned, zooming in gives some obvious compression artifacts, and absolutely perfect white away from the lettering.
The
supposed poster for the show struck me as a bit suspicious, too, after looking at the detailing around the top and bottom of the lettering compared to the rest of the poster, which had obvious off-vertical artifacts on it. The lettering, however, had absolutely [i]perfect[/i] horizontal lines, top and bottom. As in, every
single pixel was perfect on the horizontal plane of the log, top and bottom. No other image [i]with[/i] the lettering existed outside of the dougsploitation site. Looking around, I found
the picture which the wording had been added to. The white lettering against a white background also looked like nothing a professional designer would do, while the style was about seven or eight years out. Um, so he dug up the real name of a late eighties religious affairs program where the host is already dead. The host is seen, but muted while the sound begins
immediately after he supposedly introduces the band.
The program was a serious magazine discussion of religious affairs, which
in the last year that Sonseed supposedly existed (1983) booked "Mother Teresa, Bishop Tutu and His Holiness, the Dalai Lama". The idea that they were, on that day, running music (try and find any other references to them doing that) and booking a puppet-show called "Punch and Judaism" doesn't hang together.
The
only reference to Sonseed that I can find outside of the dougsploitation site and references to it and the youtube posting is
their album for sale at a vinyl site. When I found this, I was kinda surprised. It looked genuine. But the
last updated date on that page was, suspiciously, within a day of its discovery by none other than... the dougsploitation site:
http://dougsploitation.blogspot.com/2008/08/more-about-sonseed.html Depending on server timestamps it may even be the same day.
And so on. The lead singer, Sal Polichetti, appears right now linked with sonseed in
one link on the web, the dougsploitsation site (this will change as google updates links to it). Not unbelievable for someone in a televised, widely-touring band with an album release, but not hugely likely either (I'll spare you the detailed explanation, but I can tell you that even obscure UK Christian pop acts of the late 1960s get a few mentions, especially if they had albums, which are quite collectable in some cases).
I believe the stuff about "Sal Polichetti" being an actor. I suspect that sticking all that stuff in the interview (none of which relates to "Sonseed", including any references to him on the web) was our Doug being a bit pre-emptive.
I could go on and on, but I'll spare you. And it's Sunday evening. The keyboards player in that video isn't even
pretending to mime, let alone actually playing. She is actually playing a completely different chord sequence in the reverse of the direction she would actually play it. While she may have been intended to be miming, it would be unusual for an actual keyboards player to play a falling chord sequence when miming to a song she normally plays with a rising (I-IV-V) one. The notes are wrong, sure, but the basic
shape is wrong. too.
That said, it's nice work. The instruments are good (I'm not so sure about the drumkit, to be honest), the clothes pretty believable as long as you have the idea that these guys would have chosen to play ska but not to borrow
anything of the stylings of the scene.
So I'm pretty convinced that it's dougsploitation getting traffic through self-referential links. And it's working, too. With the internet, peoples' critical faculties are dulled, especially when they really
want to believe.
If you're interested, here is a
real ska song from that year. Pretty awesome it is, too.