It's Bad For Ya

George Carlin
Laugh.com Records
Released in 2008

Like a lot of celebrities these days, George Carlin is dead. In fact, he died at around this time last year, June 2008. Considering he survived a cocaine habit, alcoholism, two heart attacks, and seven decades on this planet, it's pretty remarkable he was still standing at the end---not only standing, but doing stand-up, and he was just as sharp as he had been in the past decades, if not sharper.

This album, recorded just a few months before his death at age 71, is perhaps one of his better albums recorded of his last few. The anger, the pure twisted "don't give a fuck" observations of the world come out like a rapier dipped in shit, ready to stab into the sacred cows of the word and give them sepsis.

Being aware of his mortality, he talks a lot about being old, spends a good deal of time talking about crossing out friends who are dead from his address book and not really giving a shit who he pisses off.

The usual targets are there, religion, government, general rules of society. If you're easily offended, especially about attacks on God, then you won't find this album funny in the slightest and may write an angry letter to---well, I don't know, Carlin is dead, so you can't write it to him, and even if he was alive it would probably just give him more of an excuse to attack religion on stage anyway.

I guess if there's one disappointment to this album is that the packaging is so sub-par. It really looks like the artwork and graphic design was put together in five minutes on someone's home computer. I guess that might be because this is one of the albums released on Carlin's own invested label, Laugh.com and they just didn't have enough money to pay someone to do this right. His previous release, Life is Worth Losing has some very nice, diginified picture an layout to it. This just looks kinda goofy.

Ah well, maybe they'll re-do the cover for some future release. There are enough bitter, angry people out there in the world who see a lot of the bullshit for what it is and for those people there will be some George Carlin to listen to.