Diamanda Galas - You Must Be Certain Of The Devil (1988) (@256)

Today is the World AIDS Day. Awareness and preventive education is the best weapon against the further spreading of the disease. As for the treatment, while in the western world the medication has developed to offer sustainable living conditions to the victims, the third world and most notably Africa is deliberately kept away from the available elsewhere drugs. We read from Time: "The pharmaceutical firms see local manufacture and so-called parallel imports--where other countries buy the copycat generics instead of the brand name--as a threat they are battling to wipe out. They feel that they alone should not have to pick up the tab for Africa. They want to stanch drug pirates who might make worthless fakes or flood drugs onto the black market. And they fear that making AIDS therapies cheaper for Africans will prompt lucrative Western markets to demand lower prices as well."

This upload offers the third (and most 'accessible') part of Diamanda Galas' "Masque of the Red Death", a trilogy dedicated to the victims of the AIDS/HIV epidemic. We read from the back cover: "I dedicate this album to my brothers and sisters, Persons With Aids, who now live and die in fear". This album is a shocking evidence of an artist so intense, that someone has to be totally impassive not to feel at least uneasy when exposed to it.

Lyrics of "Let's Not Chat About Despair"
You who speak of crowd control, of karma, or the punishment of god
Let's not chat about despair.
Do you fear the cages they are building in
Kentucky, Tennessee and Texas
while they're giving ten to forty years to find a cure?
Let's not chat about despair.
Do you pray each evening out of horror or of fear to the savage God whose bloody hand commands you now to die alone?
Let's not chat about despair.
Do you taste the presence of the living death while the skeleton beneath your open window waits with arms outstretched?
Let's not chat about despair.
Do you spend each night in waiting for the devil's little angels' cries to burn you in your sleep?
Let's not chat about despair.
Do you wait for miracles in small hotels
with Seconal and Compazine
or for a ticket to the house of death in Amsterdam?
Let's not chat about despair.
Do you wait in prison for the dreadful day
the office of the butcher comes to carry you away?
Let's not chat about despair
Do you wait for saviors or the paradise to come in laundry rooms, in toilets, or in Cadillacs?
Let's not chat about despair.
Are you crucified beneath the life machines
with a shank inside your neck
and a head which blossoms like a basketball?
Let's not chat about despair.
Do you tremble at the timid steps
of crying, smiling faces who, in mourning,
now have come to pay their last respects?
Let's not chat about despair.
In Kentucky Harry buys a round of beer
to celebrate the death of Billy Smith, the queer,
whose mother still must hide her face in fear.
Let's not chat about despair.
You who mix the words of torture, suicide, and death with scotch and soda at the bar,
we're all real decent people, aren't we, but there's no time left for talk.
Let's not chat about despair.
PLEASE DON'T TALK AB0UT DESPAIR

album review link: here

download link: here (mirrorcreator) and here (rapidshare)