1970
CAMBODIA * WINSTON BLAKE * HARRY J 6619 * UK
Cambodia, a country in Southeast Asia, formerly known as Kampuchea, had once been the powerful Hindu and Buddhist Khmer Empire, which ruled most of the Indochinese Peninsula between the eleventh and fourteenth centuries. Many changes occurred in Cambodia during the decade between the release of Winston Blake's Cambodia in 1970 and The Dead Kennedy's Holiday In Cambodia in 1980, mostly due to the proxy wars fought by American imperialist forces and Chinese imperial forces in neighboring Viet Nam. On Cambodia Winston Blake mentions America and war - in April 1970 President Nixon announced on television that America was invading Cambodia - yet he frames this passing mention to the hostilities in the country with a peace and love song; very much the musical message of the day. By the time the Dead Kennedys recorded their song with its ironic title (irony was very much the order of the day) the communist backed Khmer Rouge had been in power for five years and had slaughtered just under a third of its population - carried out pretty much in the same fashion as the Communists had done in China under Mao, and in Russia under Stalin; the history hasn't been written of North Korea and Kim Jong Il yet . . . and talking of great 'socialist' leaders our new one is off to a lying, err, flying start.
HOLIDAY IN CAMBODIA * DEAD KENNEDYS * CHERRY RED 13 * UK
