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Al Jourgensen, front-man of Ministry and the brains behind an additional fifteen gazillion side projects, is surprisingly easy to talk to. That is, up to a point. He speaks with the straightforward frankness of anyone’s tough-ass friend with a penchant for whiskey who hangs out at the bar. But just like that one booze soaked buddy, he’s given to moments of abruptness that make you think “maybe I shouldn’t piss this guy off, because he very well might strangle me.” Shocking, isn’t it? With Ministry’s record catalog spanning every conceivable form of outrage and aggression, gift-wrapped in ear-shattering metallic onslaughts with a bright, sparkly bow of Mr. Jourgensen’s throat-shredded, sickeningly warped vocals decorating the package, you’d expect him to be the type of guy who’d invite you over to dinner, ask how your grandparents are doing, and maybe give you a backrub if you’re feeling tense. Or not. Ministry’s most well-known work, from The Land of Rape and Honey and Psalm 69, falls firmly into the category of music that you’d like to be listening to while caving someone’s skull in with a brick, and so it goes that the force behind it all might come off as a little pissed. But the gruff, tersely spoken icon has been focusing the lion’s share of his legendary ire towards the political sphere as of late, as nothing short of an obstreperous opponent of the Bush Administration. Current political realities, in fact, have the gravel-voiced Jourgensen creating what he claims is some of his best work. If you’re not too familiar with Ministry’s musical legacy, suffice to say that they lead the burgeoning Wax Trax! pack of bands with an ultra-aggressive metal-meets-electronic assault, and they did so long before the mid-‘90s industrial boom. Before Nine Inch Nails hit it big and went from being a damned excellent and subversive act to kicking off a barrage of lame trends, Ministry was making teeth rattle. If you’ve lost track of them since those long gone days before trenchcoats denoted a penchant for roleplaying and became perpetually accompanied by ratty moustaches, the industrio-metal pioneers have continued to churn out abrasive records with characteristically punny titles every few years, most recently 2003’s Animositisomina, which aired perhaps a bit too on the metal side of things for anyone’s comfort, and the brand new Houses of the Molé (yes, like the sauce), a disc touted as a return to Ministry’s most virulent and notorious days. Reviving Revolting Cocks after quite a few years of inactivity to record a new album and open for Ministry on the latest tour makes for a solid couple hours of inhuman growling every night, so it’s no surprise that Jourgensen greets me with a raspy introduction, “Dude, I can barely speak, obviously my throat is fucked.” The story that Jourgensen got his voice “that way” on the records by drinking a fifth of whiskey and smoking a carton of cigarettes a day doesn’t sound too far off. But no more than a few hours later Al is ready to roll. The beginning, with the much-discussed album With Sympathy, an early Ministry release that sounded more like New Order than Front 242, seems like the best place to start. With Sympathy was, after all, a pretty decent album by all accounts and an incredible mindfuck for those of us who, steeped in Ministry’s crippling roar, heard it a decade after the fact. Getting the “final word” on it is just as uncomfortable as I thought it’d be. Al isn’t hesitant to talk about With Sympathy, though not particularly crazy about discussing it either. “Well, we were doing the industrial stuff before [the deal with] Arista, but basically what I did was I sold out before I started,” he says. “You know how most artists go for 20 years and bang their head against the wall doing cool shit, and then sell out? I got my sell-out period over right away.” But could there be any more to it than that? Jourgensen starts to heat up as I try to push farther into any interest he may have had in dance music prior to going all “aggro.” His response is decidedly more “aggro” than it is “dancy,” giving perhaps some insight into exactly how candid he’s being. “Look dude, everyone knows about that album,” he says. “I can’t believe I’m still talking about it 20 years later. It was written by producers, it was forced out by the record company, I might as well have been fucking Milli Vanilli. But you know, time moves on.” One can’t help but react with, well, sympathy for the man for always having to hear about the topic, and so I learn an important lesson – don’t ask Al Jourgensen about that album, and I’d consider anyone out there wise to do the same now that you have the final word on it. My lofty ambition of discussing the relationship between punk rock and dance music must be saved for another day, another band, probably a British one. But as time moves on, so do interviews, regardless of who Jourgensen might as well have been fucking.\ Turning the conversation to post-election related fare finds Al surprisingly hopeful given his activist political commitments, and he answers questions like, “Are we fucked?” and “Does the Bush administration pose significant threats to independent art?” with a definitiveness that lacks a single iota of defeatism. “The one saving grace is that these people are so greedy and corrupt that I totally and honestly believe someone will be impeached,” he says. “Hopefully Bush and Cheney.” Even as most of us tremble at the thought of a new age of PMRC-style censorship and right-wing fundamentalist rhetoric further permeating the political landscape, Al is confident: “They’ve had their heyday and their time is over. Sure they’re gonna try, but I just don’t see it happening. They’ve gone as far as they can go. When the full corruption of this administration gets exposed, they’re fucked.” Listening to such strong political sentiments, one can’t help but wonder what Jourgensen has to say to all the meatheads that no doubt flock to see Ministry in the interest of tearing shit up in a way that has very little to do with scholarly discourse. Al is certainly no stranger to the notion that there’s probably a decent amount of folks more interested in bringing the ruckus than bringing about widespread social change checking out Ministry. “Well,
you know, somebody’s gotta reach the meatheads,” he
says. “They may be smashing each other over the head with
a pipe in the mosh pit, but maybe later that night they’ll
go home and think about some of the shit, or maybe read the lyric
page or something, so you never know who you’re reaching,
man. I don’t just want to preach to the converted.”
“I have absolutely no interest in an industrial scene,”
he says. “I don’t even know what that is. Everyone puts
the industrial moniker on us, but you know, it’s so funny.
ZZ Top uses sequencers, are they industrial too? Ministry just does
what we do. We mind our own business, we’re not part of a
scene, we just hopefully write challenging and educating music.” This, oddly enough, isn’t the last mention of ZZ Top that Al has to offer. He’s of course been known to work with all sorts of left field musical icons that stray far from the beaten path of industrial, or whatever you call it, music – from Minor Threat and Fugazi’s Ian McKaye in Pailhead to the Dead Kennedys’ Jello Biafra in the infamous LARD. His musical interests are expansive. Jourgensen likes “just good music, whether it’s country or jazz, rock, blues” and has “more interests than just making a bunch of pipe noises and machine gun beats,” an interesting sentiment from a man known primarily for his pipe noises and machine gun beats. But even his well-documented eclectic musical tastes didn’t quite prepare me for where he had his sights set as far as potential future collaborations, that being a desire to work with Tom Waits and ZZ Top’s own Billy Gibbons, two artists he identifies as idols. Perhaps it’s not so far off, as he’s often discussed his long in-the-works “Old School Country” project, Buck Satan and the 666 Shooters, but I mean, Billy Gibbons? That’d be a hell of an interesting merging of worlds. So with a new Revolting Cocks disc being finished up right after Christmas, and the promise of a new LARD album in the near future (Al says Jello Biafra has about six tracks completed tracks to put vocals on at the moment), Ministry’s Al Jourgensen is still a man with a whole hell of a lot to do. If all the new material is indeed a sign that a new Jourgensenian renaissance is upon us, there’s no doubt it’ll be as surprising as it is angry, and even in light of recent revivals in synth-pop chic, will not sound anything like the With Sympathy album. A2P Ministry plays the State Theater in Detroit on December 10. |
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