Joe Scarborough Releases 'I Don't Want to Go Home for Christmas' EP

The Independent Counsel of Funk, the project spearheaded by Joe Scarborough of the critically acclaimed hit MSNBC Morning Joe show, today releases a new holiday-themed EP I Don't Want to Go Home for Christmas via Sony's RED MUSIC. CLICK HERE to listen to the band's latest collection of original songs that Scarborough wrote, arranged, and produced. With additional production by Mikhail Pivovarov and Nicholas Wells, the four-song EP mixes a dash of political satire with holiday-styled tunes and is available now on all digital streaming platforms worldwide. This project marks Scarborough's fourth EP to date, following his latest politically charged one in 2017, Freaks Love Freaks, which led Rolling Stone to say, "Scarborough's sound is personal and poppy, edging between Seventies power-pop and '00's indie rock."

On his new EP, Scarborough says, "It's not exactly traditional Christmas fare and the lyrics do turn dark at times. I mean, the line 'Oh God, it smells like Christmastime' wasn't exactly pulled from a Bing Crosby holiday special. But the EP might reflect how a lot of people feel about Christmas during these tense times. Yep, it's been a lousy year, but this is when we look past our differences and try to be decent to each other and even allow ourselves to have some fun."

Scarborough's larger than life production on the songs make his prolific pace even more impressive, as he plans to consistently release more original music over the next several years as part of a deal with Sony's RED MUSIC, all while hosting one of the most important political shows on American television and writing a widely-read column for the Washington Post.

The Independent Counsel of Funk will be joining Scarborough, whose band has played regular electrifying shows in standing-room only club settings in Scarborough's Upper Westside neighborhood, as well as NYC's The Cutting Room, as he continues a decades-long musical journey that started with him writing songs when he was 10. After listening to Scarborough's first three EPs, and with the new EP I Don't Want to Go Home for Christmas, you will find yourself agreeing with Billboard that Scarborough does, indeed, have chops. And, if you catch Scarborough live, you may understand why he could prove to be this season's most surprising debut artist.

I Don't Want to Go Home for Christmas EP Tracklist

1. I Don't Want to Go Home for Christmas
2. Christmastime
3. The Drumpf
4. This Christmas It's You & Me

The Independent Counsel of Funk was a revolutionary underground movement birthed during the violent days of the 1968 Paris Uprisings. The brainchild of then-prime minister George Pompidou, the Counsel was spawned within the shadows of the Sorbonne, the bastard child of the Direction Centrale des Renseignements Generaux and J. Edgar Hoover's lawless FBI.

Their plan? To weaponize four radical spies by launching a deviant and debauched underground band so offensive to middle class values that the toxic combination of their shocking musical sensibilities on stage and their licentious behavior off would redirect the Marxist rage then exploding across Paris and rechannel it instead deep below the Left Bank's smoking streets. Beneath those burning boulevards revolutionaries suddenly roiled in a subterranean soirée even more scandalous than revolution, while being offered a steady stream of depraved indignities.

Within weeks of de Gaulle fleeing Paris and the Independent Counsel of Funk first plugging in their battered amps, the toppling of France's Fifth Republic suddenly seemed passé and as gauche as choosing to browse through your uncle's Pat Boone collection while Western Civilization burned.

The band's multitudinous crimes against humanity were so scandalous during those 18 minute sets that exploded before horrified would-be revolutionaries that no audience member dared mention the band's name even once safely above ground. It was deep within those darkened and dank hollows hidden below Paris's glittering lights that a code was forged that remained unbroken even with the passing of the most indiscreet of generations:

"The First Rule of the Independent Counsel of Funk is that you do not talk about the Independent Counsel of Funk".

So successful was the Counsel's promoting of bourgeoisie values that the band spent the next decade fomenting revolution behind the Iron Curtain. Those history-bending romps were funded in large part by the Trilateral Commission, the Bilderberg Group and an uneasy alliance of Central American beet farming cooperatives.

As a pre-punk 4-piece ensemble, the band's sound was supersonic. As a disrupting force against Marxist and neo-Nazi regimes, the ICF acted more as sledgehammer than gentle persuader. By 1978, the band members had grown bored of the punk revolt it had invented in underground clubs on both sides of the English Channel. The Counsel turned its focus instead to creating a new disrupting musical genre that critics would years later describe as "Rap". The Counsel's most tumultuous Eastern European tour ended on September 10, 1980 inside a rusting Gda?sk shipyard. One week later, Solidarity was born.

Within a decade the Soviet Union would collapse and with its demise, the Independent Counsel of Funk would break up-a victim of its own remarkable success.

The bandmates scattered across Europe and America, taking on assumed names and ultimately becoming responsible for an astounding 237 Number One hits and more gold records than the Beatles, Elvis Presley and CW McCall combined. But the ICF's remarkable extended run ended abruptly in 2015 when the Bilderberg Group, in a disastrously ill-fated decision, voted to move the band's current catalog into the hands of a bland cable news host.

Within months, democratic norms were being shattered from Warsaw to Washington. Then last year, in a shocking first-of-its-kind joint communique between the Trilateral Commission, the Bilderbergs and the United Beet Farmers Federation of Central America (UBFFCA), it was announced that the Independent Counsel of Funk would reveal its existence to an unsuspecting world in an urgent effort to stem the spread of anti-democratic regimes (while artificially propping up depressed beet prices on commodity exchanges worldwide.)

The resulting madness of this shocking move will be the exposing of a band that has silently changed world history while repeatedly wiping clean the slate of popular music.

They are your idols. They are everything you once wanted to be. They are the embodiment of every band your parents' feared, and would fear once again were they not playing shuffleboard in a Boca retirement community.

They are Revolutionaries.

They are Freaks.

They are the Independent Counsel of Funk.

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