Caws Radio

Street Gangs and Exorcisms.

Recently I decided it was time to get to the bottom of an age-old mystery, a question that has daunted man for years: who the hell is on the cover of the ARE Weapons album?

For those of you who aren't in the know, ARE Weapons is a psuedo-art band who make electro-punk songs about New York sleaze and street gangs. I joke that I am the only one who bought their album; while all those pretentious Pitchfork and NME reviewers didn't get the joke or the funk, I really dug these guys for being both campy and rad at the same time.

But since buying the CD my brother and I have been preplexed by the cover image of a scary/badass face, simply because we kept seeing it pop up in other places - such as that game Manhunt and a preview for that new Exorcist movie. I finally decided to do some detective work with my friend The Internet.

There are no sites that reveal the origin of the super badass cover image, so I thought I would follow the lead of the Exorcist preview. Now, I have never even seen the damn movie, but I remember when it was re-released in theaters and everyone was talking about the hidden subliminal demon faces. It turns out that the faces (not Rod Stewart) were not new to the re-released version, but existed in the original 1973 release. They were simply made more clear for the new version. But none of that is relevant; what matters was that I needed to see these faces.

Stangely enough, for causing such a big hubbub, these subliminal faces are virtually nowhere to be seen on the web. So after a lot of review-reading and image searches, and many combinations of words like "exorcist" and "demon" and "hidden face" and "the goddam hidden demon face in the exorcist," I at last came across two screen shots.

The cover...
...and The Exorcist demons.

So there you have it. Of course, this leads to the question of 'what the hell does demonic posession have to do with songs about street gangs and the Bad News Bears?' But at least now if anyone else is searching the web for the answer to the badass face mystery, they can just come to the Flying Wheel. New York Muscle.
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