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This 40 minute debut CD from Victrola & the Duhst Bunnies features 10 hilarious songs and comes with it's own disclaimer: WARNING: The songs on “Duhmocracy” may make the heads of the blissfully unaware and the willfully ignorant, explode. Everyone else will laugh hysterically! Just when you think you know Victoria Parks as a songwriter, her label Wild Mane Music releases something completely different. With Duhmocracy, Parks uses comedy with an extremely serious subject—the survival of our democracy. "As our democracy rots from the top down and from the inside out, our once proud republic devolves into Duhmocracy. As a songwriter I felt Duhmocracy was the only way to respond to everything that is happening to us as Americans. The times demand this of me as a songwriter, artist, activist and news junkie. I connect the dots giving voice to the confused and those shell-shocked into silence." Parks' history as a democracy activist has clearly shaped her writing on Duhmocracy. Ask Parks what went on in Ohio's '04 election and she will go on for hours on "the twenty-six ways to Sunday" how the election was stolen citing numerous details. "I think as media consumers we are over-informed, force-fed voluminous compost, while being grossly uninformed on the stuff that is taking us down the collective sewer of failed empire. Conspiracies can be proven and already have been but the stories get sucked into spin or completely ignored. I am just being the media. My typical fan is well informed. Folks just need a 'Victrola' to boil down real information into a simple song they can sing along with. The CD is not all political of, course. There are songs here that are just plain off-the-wall silly. There's plenty here for all tastes." Debuting as Victrola and the Duhst Bunnies, Parks attempts to break our shellshocked silence with paroxysms of laughter. Her last CD, Wild English Rose ©2003 was her critically acclaimed, artistically accomplished, and historically compelling collection of traditionally influenced folk music. "With Duhmocracy, I take an unexpected light-hearted turn into the war zone of our polarized nation. I go where my fans of the traditionally influenced writing would not expect me to go. So to be fair I put all the funny songs on the same CD. Duhmocracy has been a long time in coming. I just never had a place for my satire until now." Parks' long time fans appreciate the body of her work regardless of genre. With Duhmocracy, Parks demonstrates her ability to draw on humor in multiple genres crossing from country, into jazz and then blues. The entire CD also takes on the distinct qualities of musical theatre. Parks' vocals are big and the well-produced arrangements dramatic. The 40-minute CD takes on corrupt politicians, religious hypocrisy, ex-husbands and cultural myth. Some lyrics evoke laughter with Parks' unique brand of off-the-wall humor written from a female perspective, as the fractured fairy tale of her ill-fated frog prince in "Love Croaks." "This song placed in the 15th annual Mid-Atlantic Song Contest and finally has a home on Duhmocracy."
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