Evidence has recently emerged that the CIA built a secret stockpile of Lounge Jazz and Funky Beats which may have been active well into the 1980s. Documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act suggest that the agency maintained an active arsenal of over 5000 12″ records and a large number of fashionably dressed DJs aged in their mid to late thirties. The DJs were sent to Johnston Atoll in 1989 to be decommissioned and buried in concrete, but the government has not revealed what became of the records themselves.
Lounge Jazz was originally developed by DARPA during the early 1960s, they had become interested in the potential of Ska and Two Step as tactical battlefield weapons but considered them too unpredictable for use in the highly populated areas of Austria and West Germany. Work began on a new kind of weapon that would be able to halt a Soviet armoured advance with minimal collateral damage. Repetitive funky bass-lines and saxophone samples and inane filtered vocals were identified as being particularly effective against mid-income single men whilst only producing slight irritation in the rest of the population. It was decided that these predictable funky grooves could be used to specifically target and disable Russian platoon officers.
Military commentators and conspiracy theorists had long speculated that such weapons existed, but this is the first official confirmation.
Uncomfortably for the government, these revelations come amid speculation that Lounge Jazz and a more recent derivatives, Progressive Funky House and Elevator Music, may have been deployed against Iraqi civilians during the battle of Fallujah with devastating effects.
Professor Litmus J. Flowchart of Harvard University commented that he regarded any modern use of these weapons as very ill advised. “The original tests did suggest that civilian casualties would be relatively low, but they were fundamentally flawed. They were conducted during the height of the Disco scene, so that any volunteers would likely have had a pre-existing tolerance to funky grooves; and compared with cities in the US, Fallujah had little established club culture, and particularly no trendy vodka bars, so the military basically had no idea what effect the weapons were going to have.”
The Pentagon refused to comment on the issue.
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