Rocked By Rape (7", Eerie Materials)
Rocked By Rape was released as a 7" single on Eerie Materials, the San Francisco label which also put out ECC's earlier Whipped Cream Mixes 7" single. It was intended as something of a follow-up to the success of Whipped Cream, and was also The ECC's first major piece using digital audio editing. Rocked By Rape took the original mash-up formula laid out with the Whipped Cream Mixes (Vocal Track A + Instrumental Track B) but expanded it drastically, sampling violent words and phrases spoken newscaster Dan Rather and then making 350 edits to put the words in place. Once synced to the instrumental track of cut-up AC/DC riffs, the track emerged as one of The ECC's crowning achievements.
It also emerged as lawsuit bait, garnering a cease & desist order from lawyers for CBS (Dan Rather's network). Unable to spend the tens of thousands of dollars required for a legal defense, The ECC waged a war in the press. Wired News printed a great article on all of this, and ECC did interviews with Punk Planet and Bizarre Magazine as well. In the interviews and on the web site we asked that people write or call CBS to express their dissatisfaction with what they were doing. After receiving rounds of bad publicity and complaints from the public, CBS did not follow through with their threat of suit. Because of the bad publicity? Maybe, maybe not. Either way, the matter isn't really resolved -- we're basically in a legal limbo, no suit filed against us, yet not in the clear either.
The song "Rocked By Rape" later appeared on the Plagiarhythm Nation v2.0 album.
Here's what the single sounded like before Eerie Materials deleted it from their catalog to avoid a suit:
