Sloppy Scales Previews ‘This Machine Mocks Fascists’ with “I Shagged a MAGA”

Legendary rodeo clown turned musical satirist Sloppy Scales’ debut album This Machine Mocks Fascists: The Sloppy Scales Songbook (out Dec. 20) is a hilarious Latin countrypolitan blues-rock bulldogging of the United States’ far-right politics. It’s refreshingly incendiary in its raw condemnation of injustice. It’s modern sad-clown music. It mirrors the humanist perspective of Woody Guthrie while charting Sloppy Scales’ whimsically tragic biographical odyssey to this collection of songs.

And, in equal parts, it’s a scathing and inflammatory takedown of radically conservative, bigoted and ultra-nationalist politics. He takes particular aim at Donald J. Trump, the MAGA movement, the overturning of Roe vs. Wade, and, in his opinion, the racist, xenophobic and fear-mongering elements that have become the norm in modern politics.

The album kicks off with the dreamy folk debut single “I Shagged a MAGA,” with its landscape of lap steel, cello, light drums and Alison Krauss-esque vocals by Skye Doughty. It’s a comedic Americana tale of a drunken one-night-stand with a border guard MAGA member in Texas, a state with oppressively restrictive reproductive rights laws. The song ends as our protagonist-turned-medical tourist heads off to Canada, where women’s bodily integrity is protected. Its ridiculously over-the-top description of the tryst is entangled with the humorously oddball juxtaposition of confronting the real-life horror that is the aftermath of the Dobbs decision by the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn Roe vs. Wade. “But the Supreme Court / Will not support / The greater good or Planned Parenthood / My right to choose has been refused,” Doughty sings.

Tour Dates:

Nov. 5 – Atlanta @ Buteco 7:00pm election night show: Sloppy Scales performs This Machine Mocks Fascists: The Sloppy Scales Songbook live.

This Machine Mocks Fascists: The Sloppy Scales Songbook Track Listing:

1. I Shagged a MAGA
2. When I Was 13
3. Sweet Baby Jesus
4. That’s My Ex-Wife’s New Sex Life
5. Republicans
6. Brown Clowns Need Not Apply
7. Cantinflas
8. Trump
9. I Shagged a MAGA (reprise)

Sloppy Scales ‘This Machine Mocks Fascists: The Sloppy Scales Songbook’ cover by Beaumont Howard