The User's Guide to Skinny Puppy, Part III - Music

One day when I was in high school I was listening to Rabies by Skinny Puppy on a cassette tape in my bedroom while I was studying for a history exam. "Rivers" had just finished up and "Choralone" was starting. Time to stop the tape and either unwind or flip it over, you know how it is.

No, you don't. We all don't. Now we just hit buttons and songs come instantly to you, popping up out of some infinite electric void. We just conjure music now, and it's a realm of science fiction for people like me who remember that when you wanted to listen to that favorite record wherever you went, you played it loud, left a tape recorder on and left the room. An hour or so later and you had a tape of whatever you wanted. Now we have cd burners, computers and iPods. The music is ours, to command at will. A golden age.

In fact, tapes were weird because every cassette tape would eventually die on you. The tape would snap or flip over, sometimes while you were listening to it, and suddenly it would sound like you were listening to space aliens. Gotta love analog.

"Choralone" is a really weird song. Don't get me wrong, "Rivers" is it's own particular flavor of weird, but "Choralone" is bizarre.

The song sounds like a hymn to Anton LeVay, homeboy. I mean, it's like a hellish, soulless dirge or a grand, malefic chant to some eon-etched chthonic deity. I don't even know what the hell the song is saying. From what I remember, the first lyric is, "UNFURNISHED," whatever the fuck that means.

Seriously, the voice is this deep, dark, almost devilish rumble, like it's coming from a vampire that's buried in the soil three feet to your left. What is this song even fucking about?

I don't know, because I usually skip over it. Like all of us, we have favorite bands and songs we hate, no matter who made them. For instance, I hate the song "Jangling Jack" by Nick Cave. It's just a dumb song that not only does nothing for me, but it's actually a negative integer that subtracts from my happiness, just like "Choralone."

So I'm in high school listening to this tape and my mother barges in and says, "What are you listening to?" I respond, "Skinny Puppy, it's an industrial band." For those of you who don't remember, growing up with your parents is a lot like growing up in jail, and your mom and dad are wardens, guards, and parole board officers. Any infraction could land you in solitary.

Mom freaks out and takes the cassette tape. The song was just too much like Satan, so she swiped it.

"Can you tell me how to get?

How to get to...

SESAME STREET!!!"

I tried to tell mom I never really liked that song, and that to be honest I was still more of a Ministry man, but the problem is my room couldn't take a thorough inspection by The Man. One, I was hiding like two boxes of condoms in my underwear drawer (it was somehow poetic to store them there) and two, I still had my copy of Too Dark Park. If I couldn't explain my way out of Rabies, I certainly couldn't talk my way out of that album.

Before I go discussing TDP, my point is that some moms think everything is Satan when you are in high school and that some Skinny Puppy songs are inaccessible.

By inaccessible I mean that sometimes, the art is just, well, not going to do it for you. That is different than a song just not being your thing. For example, some people just don't care for Roy Orbison, because they just don't care for classic American rock and roll, and because they have no soul and probably devour the flesh of babies and live near dumpsters. What I mean is, if you don't like Roy Orbison please leave my blog and never  visit this hyperlink again.

An inaccessible song or artist or album is just something that is so totally out there, or maybe even chaotic, or even a little too minimalist like "MONOCHROME" by Kodo. Too Dark Park is crazy, it's almost too much Skinny Puppy for neonates to handle, but you can enjoy it. Metal Machine Music by Lou Reed is just plain fucking inaccessible. 

Friends don't let friends listen to this album. It's kind of like

listening to really loud radio frequencies having an orgy.

Like I talked about in my last post, it's fun to be into music that's weird. The problem is, "Choralone" has that deep, chanting voice that just makes me feel weird listening to it. I kind of have to pay attention, but then the lyrics are very weird so it's pointless to figure them out.

The lyrics of Skinny Puppy add to the intense defamiliarization a normal person might feel when confronted by cutting edge industrial music. It's got a weird bet, I guess I could dance to it, but what is he saying? When you think about your favorite songs, it's kind of a prerequisite that you sort of kind of have to know what the fuck the message is before you go chanting the song as if it's a mantra to joy.

Remission, the album I spoke of earlier, has a lot of cool songs like "Far Too Frail," which certainly sounds like Satanic disco, but it also has songs that are nearly as bizarre as "Choralone," like "Film."

Do you know what's going on in this song? You do? Can you tell me? Because I certainly don't know, and this is one of my favorite songs from my favorite album by my favorite band. Go figure. Maybe that's what happens...you listen to a band for so long that every song they have on that one favorite album they made is perfect, and if people don't like it they just aren't hip.

By the way, just so I can wrap up that whole story about my mother, what finally happened was my father got home, explained to mom that whatever modern industrial music had to offer had nothing on The Rolling Stones, especially "Sympathy for the Devil," my mother's favorite song, so maybe she should lay off my record collection. Fathers can be very cool like that.

The lyrics of Skinny Puppy basically seem to be stream-of-consciousness, although I certainly don't believe the consciousness that is streaming is anything remotely sane. Poetry is somewhat like that. If you read a poem and know what it means, you usually either have college degree in a relevant subject or the poetry is awful.

Since you already heard "Assimilate," I'm sure you quickly realized it was a song about man's decay and descent into some sort of cybernetic, dystopic, hellish future. "Oil remove shred tear radiation everywhere it's the fear so unclear man in motion going nowhere..." ok, we get it, stop driving your car all the time, plant a tree and just recycle, I get it, you don't have to scream it.

Ladies and gentlemen, here it is, Cleanse, Fold and Manipulate.

Up in Canada there are actually Caucasians

who are so white they end up looking

light blue.  

The next time you have a Halloween Party just turn the lights down and turn this up. The atmosphere will spook in no time. That's not to say it's the kind of album that's just too weird, but rather that, this album is just more ambient than industrial. It's a whole lot of beats, samples and sound effects. You just can't dance to this.

There are good songs, but for the most part this is a big collection of some pretty dense, experimental stuff. If you enjoy algebra, this is calculus. If you like Moby Dick, this is Billy Budd. 

Industrial does that, sometimes. A band just comes out with an album, and it's just the soundtrack to a horror flick, and not something you play as the sun is coming up and the road trip has just begun. I mean, songs like "Fly By Night" by Chilliwack or "Freebird" by Lynyrd Skynyrd is fun, sun and good times. Driving just a little too fast on the freeway while blasting something with guitar solos is an American tradition. 

Yeah, baby, program the cruise control and crank this up...

MCA and the Beastie Boys - Commentary

The mighty Adam Yauch has passed away, or as I prefer to think of it, he's fighting evil in another dimension. This depresses me in ways that cannot be written about, blogged out or even effectively communicated in any way, shape or form. The sadness I feel transcends normal human comprehension. It is a dearth that has it's own dimension, zip code, website (www.horriblydepressing.com) and phone number. You could navigate the Earth by it.

The fact that Adam Yauch will no longer tour with the Beastie Boys and compose music is terrible, terrible, terrible. String theory theorizes that there are 11-12 dimensions that make up what we call reality. I theorize that one of those dimensions is the mass depression that exists because Adam Yauch is gone.

Totally fucking awesome.

When I found out about Adam Yauch I was on www.rollingstone.com and there it was. WTF? I didn't even know he had cancer. If he had been in his 80's, old and falling apart, sure, you'd hear that he'd passed away and feel bad, but when someone dies young and great, it just feels very, very unfair.

Saying the Beastie Boys are great and that their music is legendary and that they are all very talented musicians is a waste of fucking time. Writing about how the Beastie Boys are awesome is like writing about how the sun is bright, hot, and important to life on Earth.

So liking the Beastie Boys is easy. They are quality. They kick it next to Jimi Hendrix, The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, whoever. In fact, from what I heard Obama has just declared it a national week of mourning, and if anyone says anything bad about the Beastie Boys you can punch the really hard in the mouth until a police officer shows up to arrest them for not having any taste at all for good music.

I found out that Adam Yauch died and eventually called my best friend for no damn reason. I had seen him just a few days ago, but just like me, he grew up Beastie, so I knew he was in the same dimension of sadness the whole world is, even little children who never heard of the Beastie Boys. There was a death in the family, so that's what you do, you call up your friends and mourn.

No, seriously, right now little kids living in the Amazon Jungle who don't even know what a compact disk is are scrawling rap lyrics in the mud with a stick, maybe even trying to beatbox, and they are crying because the Beastie Boys are gone.

I have to admit that I had not bought a Beastie Boys album for some time. I had grown up on the Beastie Boys. Starting with License to Ill, and then was astounded by Paul's Boutique, and then just couldn't believe how Check Your Head changed music, changed everything...maybe I'm crazy, but every rap album after Check Your Head sounded better, as if the industry knew that the Beastie Boys had once again wrecked the bell curve for everyone in music.

Growing up punk in Southern California back in the 90's was basically an invitation to get your ass kicked on a daily basis. Having a shaved head, a leather jacket, military green Dickies work pants and Doc Martin's (with black or black-and-white checkered laces, never red or white) with an Exploited t-shirt was an open invitation to get your ass beat by everyone in Ass Kicking City.

I got harassed by cops and the school administration because I had a copy of Living in Darkness by Agent Orange. I got beat up by the captain of the school's football team (he was a junior, I was a sophomore, so as you could imagine I lost that fight awesomely) for wearing a Dead Kennedy's t-shirt. Apparently, he didn't care for the Give Me Convenience or Give Me Death album as much as I did.

I knew one kid who got beat up for having a mohawk, which started a brawl involving everyone who listened to punk rock and heavy metal against all of the kids who were into football at my high school. So my point is, at that time punk rock wasn't just music, it was a culture, a counterculture, and it was dangerous to publicly admit to listening to it.

To us the Beastie Boys were punk rock, too. At any party where the radio was on it was perfectly legitimate to replace a cassette tape blaring The Adicts or the Red Hot Chili Peppers with License to Ill. Yes, it was rap, but no, it was cool, they were punk. Turn it up.

I've always believed that this was the reason that Adam Yauch, aka MCA and everyone else in the Beastie Boys were always fucking cool. Their music was always very, very relevant. They were also extremely prolific, which is why I hadn't purchased an album from them in a while. Ever since Ill Communication they had kept composing album after album that I just couldn't keep up.

The reason was, if you listen to Paul's Boutique, it is an extremely complex, compellingly deep album. It weaves disco, iconic Old West cowboy imagery, growing up in New York City and rebellious rap. Don't forget, rap was just catching on at the time. American and the rest of the industry didn't really respect fucking awesome badasses like LL Cool J, N.W.A., Public Enemy, Run DMC and a lot of other bands were doing at the time.

Just as the Beastie Boys reshaped not only music, but the awareness of what music was to the general public at the time, they also reshaped what was expected of a great rap album to people who liked rap. I write about hip-hop a lot because hip-hop artists are basically poets, philosophers and logicians. They really belong to the same groups of people that told rhyming stories about the deeds of gods and men long ago in ancient Greece. Rap is an art form because of this, which is why when you think about it, artists like Tupac Shakur or Bone Thugs-N-Harmony are no different than Plato or Shakespeare. Poetry, logic, myth and a beat. That's all you need to have a good time, B.C. or A.D.

The reason I suddenly rocketed into this wild ass-tangent about high school, punk rock, the hip-hop and ancient Greece is because with the Beastie Boys, purchasing one of their albums was always a solid choice. If you had a road trip to go on, a party to go to or people to entertain, the Beastie Boys was the perfect choice and Paul's Boutique was perfect for any mood.

In the copy I have the text for all the lyrics run on after another, in lower case across the paper, and it tells a story of a person who is an American outlaw of sorts, stealing cars, shooting other criminals, hooking up with girls at parties, smoking and drinking across the U.S. frontier.

With this album Adam Yauch and the rest of the gunslingers were saying, "Wait a second, we were just kidding, but fuck that, we're good at this..." When you go on YouTube and watch the music videos for "No Sleep 'Til Brooklyn" or any of their old videos, there's something very ironic in their manner and appearance.

The video for "Hey Ladies" does it all. They make fun of disco, they make fun of themselves, they mock being cool and concepts of machismo...I mean, fuck it, it ain't comedy unless a body is lying on the floor, and with the Beastie Boys, no matter how big they ever got, or how talented they became, or how rich they got, it never seemed like it got to their heads.

That's why their music stayed relevant, all the way from the 1980's to the 2010's. The Beastie Boys never sold out. With the death of Adam Yauch (meanwhile, in another dimension, Satan and his devils are losing whole fleets of demonic starships to this awesome new commander fighting alongside the forces of good known as "MCA") artists across the industry, from LL Cool J to Perry Farrel are talking openly about how the Beastie Boys forever shaped their perceptions, their music, and their perceptions about music.

"Looking Down The Barrel of a Gun" was always the perfect song to play when you were mad at the world. It was a powerful song, an angry song, and MCA always had the powerful voice, the angry voice. He had this throaty rasp to his lyrics, as opposed to the rest of the boys, who could sometimes come across as a little goofy, so you knew when MCA talked bout shooting you he probably meant it.

Album after album they kept making these classics, and I knew that when I bought one you could just hear it, you had to listen to it. You had to feel that music. Just like Edgar Allen Poe or Chekhov or any great work of art, to truly appreciate the Beastie Boys you had to memorize their lyrics, and believe me, my friends and I all tried. More than one person at a bar in L.A. has the lyrics to "Brass Monkey" ready to go, perfectly memorized, with a crystal clear precision.

That's why I feel so bad that Adam Yauch is no longer with us, even though he is now commanding whole legions of angels that are currently obliterating five (count 'em) of Satan's death stars at the same time. Not only is Adam Yauch that awesome of a military commander as he currently fights evil in another dimension on behalf of the forces of light, it's also because he was an awesome musician, and with the Beastie Boys he created music so powerful, so intelligent, so driven by a real personality who was down for the music and the fans, not the industry, that to this day buying three of their albums, no matter which one, will always be a solid purchase no matter who you are.

I remember at one point a friend of mine said, "Hey, check this out," and popped in a cassette tape that was a single of "Shadrach." I listened to it and couldn't believe what I was hearing. Was this just rap? There had to be another term. Why wasn't this on MTV all the time?

But they got on MTV and David Letterman and played all over the world. The Beastie Boys did it, whatever you had to do to be a legendary hip-hop band, and it's so painful I can't see them all play live anymore. What's wrong with the world?

I still remember how all of my friends and I felt right before Check Your Head came out. The air had been electric with anticipation. For a young man listening to music and watching MTV back then, it was an uncertain time. The Poison and Phil Collins and hair metal music videos had been replaced by Nirvana, Alice in Chains and Jane's Addiction. The culture of music had shifted. The punk, goth, industrial and alternative music people had just about taken over.

But MTV had rap videos, and by the time Check Your Head was on it's way, there was a lot of hip-hop to check out. You could hear so much more diversity with rap coming out of the tape players of your friends or bumping off the airwaves, so the pole was very high for the Beastie Boys to jump. It suddenly scared the hell out of all of us that our favorite band had gone into the studio, but now they were going to have to face a whole new world of music. Did they still have the magic?

Between using fuzz distortion that emulated the spirit of industrial that seemed to pervade all music at one point in the early 90's, playing their own instruments and delivering tracks that alternated between dub, punk and rap, Check Your Head was a fucking party in heaven. I remember that for one summer, the Beastie Boys were all my friends and I could listen to, aside from The Chronic and the original Cypress Hill album. We'd rap along with the lyrics, even watching their music videos and imitating the jumps, leaps and gestures the trio made for the "So Wat'cha Want" video. They were back, and of course they dominated.

What I always admired about them as musicians is how every album felt like they really did give a damn. We've all seen those fucking VH1 specials where a band puts out two good albums, crashes to the ground, delivers a third, and then fades into an embarrassing vapor, aside from the inevitable Greatest Hits album.

The Beastie Boys never, ever, ever did that. You could stand by the group, as a fan. They were the football team that never fumbled, broke up or lost. They were the racing horse at the track that was always the sure bet. With just about every other band out there, ever now, there's always a feeling of it being some sort of gamble when you buy their latest LP without checking it out on the internet. Not so with the Beastie Boys. You could always leave the music store with a handful of their CD's knowing you had a fistful of platinum.

I'm going to miss them, and now I feel that, as a fan, I took them for granted.They were like the Grey Goose or hip-hop. Always awesome. Every one of their albums was as cunning, as original and as timely as License to Ill, Paul's Boutique, or Check Your Head. The much-anticipated Hot Sauce Committee Part Two is going to really hurt to purchase. I grew up with friends who where very devout fans of the Beastie Boys, and just like MCA, I really wish they were here, now.

Just the same, it's ok. We'll always be able to listen to the music Adam Yauch and the rest of the Beastie Boys made on the car ride to where we need to go, for the rest of our lives. No matter who you are or where you are going, busting out "So What'cha Want" on your car stereo as loud as you can will not only drive away the blues, it will always be so powerful that it makes your whole world shake, rattle and roll forever.

The User's Guide to Skinny Puppy, Part II - Music

We all get a visceral thrill of mentioning a band to another music enthusiast that is so damn cool the other person has never heard of them before. Back in the day when I truly believe that how cool you were was determined by your LP collection, if someone told me they liked the Dead Kennedy's, Depeche Mode and The Cure, I'd hit 'em right back with how much I was into Black Market Baby, Television and Pigface. 

Such are the singular battles that comprise that time in our young teens and twenties known as, "The Cool Wars," where we just absolutely need to be more hip than the other person. 

Or maybe you have no idea what I'm talking about, but I'm sure we can also both relate to how cool it feels to get a person into a really badass band. If someone is into Ice Cube, but they've never heard of Westside Connection, well now it's absolutely time to bring that homeboy up to speed on life.

When I was growing up one of my best friends got me into Skinny Puppy by giving me a copy of Remission. I mean, he gave me a cassette tape. This was a million years ago, before CD's got popular, so I am old skool industrial.

At the time I was pretty much into punk, ska, and whatever rap sounded the most violent, starting with Easy E and certainly not ending with N.W.A. and Cypress Hill. It's a freakin' miracle I even sat down to listen to something that was as purely industrial as this album.

We just started playing around with Rabies, and I don't want to move on just yet, but "Smothered Hope" is the first song on the LP, and every time I listen to it, I remember the first time I listened to one of my favorite bands.

This was back when there wasn't much beyond gothic, industrial and early electronica (I'm talking about groups like The Pet Shop Boys) so listening to something I guess I could describe as primitive darkwave was dark and evil fun. 

Late at night, near 2:30 am, when the party was winding down, everyone was passed out and it was just a bunch of guys and girls with spikey hair and leather jackets crashing by a stereo, I'd slap in Remission and check for the reactions of the crowd. I have to admit, to them it probably sounded like satanic disco.

The lead singer of Skinny Puppy, Nivek Ogre, puts his vocals on just about every track, and in concert he really does look like he's very disturbed as he lays down the lyrics. I heard a guy interviewing Nivek Ogre on the radio once that it sounded like Ogre's vocals are put through a "satanizer" during recordings, and you have to agree. Twisted, distorted vocals gives the music the final scary element their music benefits from.

That's not to say Ogre's vocals are always synthesized for terror. On "Candle," the third song from The Process, he sings without electronics twisting the sound to an acoustic guitar. Even for Skinny Puppy that was kind of odd.

Before I go describing the more obscure albums that Skinny Puppy has made, particularly Remission, Too Dark Park and Cleanse, Fold and Manipulate, I want to show you another song you might like. While "Rodent" was kind of a slow burn kind of song, this one is the type of track that populates a dance floor.

The first version is cool, but the remix that can be found on Skinny Puppy's Bites and Remission album (a two-in-one combo featuring a few extra remixes, and certainly worth owning a hundred times over if you like industrial) and it everything you want industrial music to be. It's also the kind of song you play for people you like to get them into a band you appreciate, so here it is.