Cargo Records

BLACK SHEEP + YOU GOTTA PROBLEM WITH ME

BLACK SHEEP is Julian Cope’s new album for 2008CE, and is a musical exploration of what it is to be an outsider in modern Western Culture.

Across 11 songs and one epic poem, Cope examines the idea of social outcasts and how they — through their sheer obstinacy and strength of personality — carve a path for themselves in the normal world, often changing societyís own concepts of normality in the process. On BLACK SHEEP, Cope attributes his personal descent into outsider-dom to his 9th birthday on which 116 children his own age died in the infamous Aberfan Disaster.

Julian Cope's first album on the Head Heritage label You Gotta Problem With Me (no question mark) is another protest album in the tradition of his previous releases Peggy Suicide, Jehovahkill, Autogeddon, Citizen Cain'd And Dark Orgasm. Unlike most records by Cope's head-in-the-sand punk rock contemporaries (almost all of whom he believes to be shirking their primary rock'n'roll responsibility as cultural mouthpieces), You Gotta Problem With Me deals primarily with such currently controversial, nay taboo issues, as religion (our own and other peoples'), and the West's latest wave of xenophobia and self-doubts brought on by a combination of the war in Iraq, the so-called 9/11 bombings and the EEC's latest huge wave of migrants from former Communist countries.