Pod People aspire to manicured destiny - soft, serene, controlled, filtering any information that does not impinge on their their pre-fab gestalt. Their retreat from reality is tempered with enough minor but manageable worries and decisions to negotiate boredom and furnish the mirage of individual mastery. These narcoleptics find sublimity in a jar of mayonnaise. As a consequence of the atrophy of the survival instinct, the Pod People can only breed monsters.
The disenfranchised offspring, along with an entire ageless class of human discards, know only that they are doomed. They are drawn to spikes and pentagrams, gasoline, guitars screaming like whips, MIDI-programmed Thanatos, with sufficient amplitude to occupy that hollow space where the consciousness once resided. These Dionysians obliterate themselves by removing filters, ultimately becoming insensate with sensation. This mode of behavior originates in the superstitious belief that transcendence is acquired in the precise ratio by which reason is destroyed.
G.G. Allin carves crude tattoos deep into his skin with a penknife. He bills himself as the "sickest, most decadent rocker of all time," a boast he intends to back up by committing suicide on stage (while taking-out a few of his fans for good measure), just as soon as he's let out of prison on the charge that he burned and sliced-up a groupie. Allin claims that his 18-month sentence reflects nothing more than the Pod People's distaste for his Dionysiac lifestyle, that the cut-up groupie "knew what she was getting into." In court, the groupie said, "Mr. Allin cut my skin in a manner very savage and rough. Cutting my breasts, he told me it was like painting a picture. I was completely resigned that my fate could well be death."
The primitive, gutteral yelpings of vicious, life-denying lyrics exist as a rhythm track for the impulsive theater that wells up from G.G.'s poisoned innards. G.G. shits on the stage, laps it up, spits it out on the crowd, hitting rock journalists in the face with a taste of their own medicine. G.G. masturbates onstage, taunting the girls in his audience to "come up and suck my cock." Tanked up on alcohol, G.G. uses the microphone as a weapon on his face, knocking out his front teeth. G.G. beats the shit out of a girl who has the temerity to stick her fingers up his ass.
G.G. Allin isn't as much a rock and roll act as a vaunted practitioner of the peculiarly American game of chicken. There is a poignancy in Allin's Romantic belief in the redemptive nature of the rock and roll dream, while so many others view it as a career, a way of buying into the Pod People fantasy.
"The stage is a battlefield," says G.G., "and even if I went across their line, I was still on my own turf. I'll just take off on the fucking audience. I'm not there to please the cocksuckers. I just don't give a shit. The audience is the enemy. The [sic] don't want to know, they just want to see." G.G. inflicts on his audience an awareness of the darkness they pretend to revere, even if it should kill them.
In jail, G.G. pours out a constant stream of poetry and prose poems, all of them sounding like murder notes scratched out by a English-as-a-Second-Language student with a case of rabies. It's the transmision of intensity rather than sense which counts. (See "Self Absorbed," reproduced here with all G.G.'s misspellings, neologisms, and puzzling grammatical constructions.)
Most stage acts attempt to inject a sensibility of aliveness to what is essentially planned-out well in advance. There is only a mimesis of unpredictability. G.G. attempts to make it new each time. His method: "I take in account my life and my mind spins, and the shit pretty much just comes out. It's not something I plan."
Of course, there are only so many ways a scum-rocker like G.G. Allin can top himself, and death is the natural apogee to his particular brand of confrontation. "I don't want to be just another junkie dying with a needle hanging from my arm. I want to feel the excitement of the bullet blowing my head off. I don't want to miss the thrill of it. Why not die and feel it? Feel the pain and the danger?"
In a postscript to a recent letter, G.G. writes, "I'm just awaiting a parole, my revenge, and a bloody highway. It won't be a pretty sight."
Adam Parfrey
As I walk the blood soiled path of my cosmopolitan existance, I abscond to the inner fractures of my internal, external, opened up and bleeding lacerations. Walking alone I conjoin my death and dangerous disire ablaze my ultimate consumation. I conducere the collision of life and suicide through confrontational dogmatic, rituals of my burning underflesh. We are all dogmeat on the bones of ashes. I am introverted first and utmost. I discard gregarious behavior. The one man bullet from within shoots out from the decending elevators of my ever expanding brain map. I shall procede to arbitrate the ways in which I shower the fragments of my corpse with lead further puking the phlem through conduit intestines on the rusted edge of an instant plunge. Deep digging, tearing to explore new openings of our interior depths of punctured skin spiders. Digress with me as I have become the trail of mutilation towards destruction and evil for all. Follow closely the depths of my empathy. We the arbitrary souls of our own temple need nobody. Our self structured minds will take course our passions to the battlefield of elasticated hands. Reaching out to suffocate the closing air passages of passers by.
GG Allin
1990 Prison
Return to The GG Allin SuperSite Media Guide