Surgical Meth Machine

Meu problema com Al Jourgersen – já q ele parece ñ tê-lo consigo próprio – é o tanto de projeto q ele inventa e descarta. Tudo bem q a criatividade (ainda) ñ paga imposto, e o sujeito manja de tecnologia suficiente pra fazer o q dá na telha. Mesmo q seja voltar o Ministry recém-terminado, sei lá pq incoerência.

Grande contradição: ñ consegue acabar com a banda-mor, mas tb ñ dá sequência aos projetos “foda-se”.

Trechos pinçados de entrevista no Allmusic com o cara, sobre novo projeto pela Nuclear Blast, Surgical Meth Machine. Q tem um som q poderia ser Revolting Cocks (“I’m Invisible”), outro (“Tragic Alert”) q poderia ser Ministry. Pelo q vi/ouvi.

Link pra ler tudo: http://www.allmusic.com/blog/post/al-jourgensen

E os assuntos são: 1) gênese do novo projeto; 2) ele mesmo versus um personagem de si mesmo; 3) redes sociais e as xaropices delas decorrentes. Seguem:

AllMusic: Surgical Meth Machine sounds like it was probably a lot of fun to make. How important is the fun aspect to you at this point in your career?

Al Jourgensen: It’s the most important thing. The whole premise of this album and this band and everything about it started with some ideas towards the end of recording the basic tracks of From Beer to Eternity, the last Ministry record. Me and the late, great Mike Scaccia, my little brother, my best friend, who died right after finishing the basic tracks, it was me, him and my engineer, Sammy [D’Ambruoso] in the studio. When I record a record, I just bulk-record a lot of ideas, I get a lot of ideas down on tape, and at the end of the day we check out what we’ve got, and the ones that wound up on From Beer to Eternity seemed to go with each other, so we kept those, but we had all these other really fast, brutal ideas that didn’t seem to fit on that album, but we kept them for a later date.

Then Mikey died, and so what we did was after we got done finishing From Beer to Eternity, I had to mix it after he died, and then we had all these ideas on the shelf that me and Sammy went back and recorded, things that were in that spirit, just balls to the wall, fast as shit stuff. We were having a lot of fun doing it, we wanted to do it in the spirit of Mikey. In the middle of that record I wound up moving from Texas to California, and when we moved to California, within a couple of weeks I went out and got my medical marijuana card, and so you can pretty much see the album completely change as soon as I got my weed card out here. It turned from a really fast, brutal assault into, “Whoa, the sky is so beautiful today.”

(…)

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZZ1OQp7gMQ[/youtube]

AllMusic: How much of the record is you playing a character versus being yourself?

Jourgensen: It’s 100 percent me, because the character would be me, too, it’s just something I write into a character voice, but it’s also Sammy’s take on that, he does a lot of vocals on this record, a lot of the rants and raves, like on “Rich People Problems” and “Tragic Alert,” those rants aren’t samples, that’s Sammy, and some of the character voices are mine, but I’ve been doing that for years all throughout Ministry and RevCo, we have a lot of character voices. It hits the point home without having to go and borrow someone’s sample, but it’s of the same mental makeup, we’d just rather do it ourselves.

(…)

AllMusic: “I’m Sensitive” is probably the first time I’ve heard the term “unfriended” used in a song.

Jourgensen: I just watched my 30-year-old daughter, who’s grown up on this shit, it’s such a part of her day to day life, and I’ve met her friends, and it’s such a part of their life, and it’s so not a part of my life, I’m so out of the loop on this shit. It just amazes me, they sit there and fret over their likes, it would be like me actually reading reviews I get or reading the interviews I just gave, I don’t do that shit. I’ll do it because I have to, I understand my promosexual duties as a member of the artistic community, you have to self-promote, but it’s not something I pore over and critique the critique, if you will. It’s mind-boggling to me, it’s just not in my DNA. I found it funny, counting how many likes you have, “My likes went down this week!” “Yeah, so what, you’re probably doing something right.”

(…)

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljgs9Bbe_wU[/youtube]

AllMusic: On “Unlistenable” you name-check a bunch of bands and then dismiss them in a tongue-and-cheek way. Are you ready for people to misunderstand that song as you actually calling them out?

Jourgensen: The response I’ve gotten to that, just with friends going, “Do you really want to do that? You’re going to piss some bands off.” I’m like, “That’s not the point, I even slag Ministry off on that.” The point is that, once again, social media, with all these people under the cloak of anonymity, that creates braveness, and surliness and belligerence, because they don’t have to answer for it. When you ask about anything, “What do you think about Ministry?” “Ahh, they suck! Fuck Ministry, fuck Iron Maiden, fuck Megadeth, fuck Lamb of God!” It’s all these little kids in their mom’s basement suddenly becoming music critics, and that’s what it’s about.

It reminds me of in 1988 when we released Land of Rape and Honey, that song starts out with sieg heils, and it’s a complete anti-Nazi song, yet for that tour, we had nothing but fucking Nazi skinheads up front seig hieling me and getting pissed when I wouldn’t do it back and called them a bunch of cunts. Sometimes you have to do that, it’s called parody. In the immortal words of Robert Plant, “Does anybody remember laughter?” “Unlistenable” is a piss-take, it’s a parody, it’s irony, it’s sarcasm, it’s not to be taken like, “Oh, Ministry and Lamb of God are at war!” Fuck that.