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Well, for some time there in the course of the tumultuous Sixties, it did appear attainable to wield music as an instrument of protest and revolt able to enacting actual social change.
Songs like Pete Seeger’s “We Shall Overcome” and Jefferson Airplane’s “Volunteers” grew to become rallying cries for the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War actions, nudging these budding flower kids we now name Boomers to take motion and struggle for social justice within the streets.
With the advantage of hindsight, nonetheless, historians have traced the demise of Sixties counterculture idealism to the Manson Family murders of 1969 and the Kent State shootings of 1970. These grim landmarks are referenced in Rabies, the best-selling 1989 album by Canadian electro-industrial pioneers Skinny Puppy.
“Worlock,” one of many band’s most influential singles, amply samples Charles Manson singing “Helter Skelter,” the Beatles music that Manson delusionally claimed had prophesied an apocalyptic race conflict and prompted his Hollywood homicide spree.
The Manson case gave America a stunning and ugly glimpse into the darkish facet of the Sixties counterculture. Manson’s nefarious manipulation of his followers — utilizing thoughts management and violence to additional his twisted, acid-fascist ideology — stood in stark distinction to the hippie beliefs of peace and love. It would additionally feed Skinny Puppy’s enduring fascination with the darkish psychology of energy, corruption, and social management.
In preserving with that morbid Sixties cult theme, the title of Skinny Puppy’s 1996 album The Process is a nod to the Process Church of the Final Judgment. Founded in 1966 as a Satanist spinoff of Scientology, the Process Church could be investigated by Los Angeles prosecutors for suspected hyperlinks to the Manson Family murders.
Of course, Skinny Puppy frontman Nivek Ogre was first launched to the Process Church story by Genesis P-Orridge of Throbbing Gristle and Industrial Records, the seminal British group and label that gave industrial music its title.
As an offshoot of COUM Transmissions, a transgressive artwork efficiency collective based in 1969, Throbbing Gristle and the commercial style have been successfully a musical outgrowth of the Sixties counterculture, albeit a disillusioned and enraged one. After all, the trauma of violent state-sponsored repression at Kent State and the poisonous Kool-Aid hangover of false prophets like Charles Manson referred to as for radical new ways to free folks’s minds and struggle the powers that be.
“We must seek for strategies to interrupt the preconceptions, modes of unthinking acceptance and expectations that make us, inside our constructed conduct patterns, so weak to manage,” wrote P-Orridge. Skinny Puppy would vigorously heed this name to motion in the course of the band’s four-decade marketing campaign to deprogram concertgoers by stunning and disturbing them out of their desensitized complacency with the established order.
Like the counterculture earlier than them, Skinny Puppy has lengthy rallied in opposition to the dehumanizing results of warfare, authorities surveillance, expertise, and environmental degradation underneath late-stage capitalism. Of course, theirs is a far cry from the peace indicators and daisy chains at Woodstock, manifesting as an alternative as brutal, oft-controversial stay performances that mix efficiency artwork with music and blur the road between what’s actual and what is not. The band’s bloodcurdling onstage theatrics run the gamut, from feigned self-mutilation to mock executions by hanging and decapitation.
Is all this blood and gore gratuitous? Well, not if you happen to ask Nivek Ogre. “It appears to me that that is the one option to make folks take into consideration issues,” he informed the Fort Lauderdale News in a 1987 interview.
What is gratuitous is the cosmic irony of the U.S. navy allegedly utilizing Skinny Puppy’s music to psychologically torture inmates at Guantanamo Bay. Released in 2013, Weapon, the band’s twelfth and ultimate album, was impressed by this unsettling incidence, and the band claims to have filed an bill for musical companies with the Department of Defense to the satanic tune of $666,000.
So, does music genuinely have the ability to stay it to the person?
Well, Monday, April 10, can be your final probability to see Skinny Puppy give it a shot when the band’s farewell tour brings them to Revolution Live. The timing could not be higher as a result of there is not any hiding from the brutish realities of this foul 12 months of Our Lord, 2023. The Doomsday Clock now stands at 90 seconds to midnight — the closest to international disaster it is ever been — because of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, looming nuclear escalation, the local weather disaster, and a breakdown of worldwide norms and establishments wanted to mitigate the dangers of advancing applied sciences and organic threats just like the COVID-19 pandemic.
Skinny Puppy could be saying farewell to the followers, however greater than ever, the world wants these iconic subversives.
Skinny Puppy. 7 p.m. Monday, April 10, at Revolution Live, 100 SW Third Ave., Fort Lauderdale; 954-449-1025; jointherevolution.web. Tickets price $26 through ticketmaster.com.