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Truth & Paranoia At The Church Of Jello
By Gil Kaufman
Music News of the World
Former Dead Kennedy's singer Jello Biafra is the righteous punk equivalent of a Yahoo! search engine of political ideology. Give him a topic and he'll find an opinion in his adenoidal-voiced database to read you the riot act about. The evils of Ronald Reagan? Try 1986's Bedtime for Democracy. Evils of war? Try "Holiday in Cambodia." Jello's thoughts on censorship and his 1986 trial for distribution of harmful matter to minors? Try 1989's High Priest of Harmful Matter -- Tales from the Trial. You get the point.
If opinions are like assholes (i.e., everybody's got one), Biafra's multitude of the former are akin to an anatomically-correct painting by his favorite artist, H.R. Giger, whose Alien-themed works are just crawling with 'em (one of which is the genesis of his 1986 obscenity trial). And it's just those legions of assholes Biafra and his comrades in Ministry, known jointly as Lard, rail against on the latest testimonial from their collective conscience, Pure Chewing Satisfaction.
While the first full-length effort from Lard, 1990's The Last Temptation of Reid was generally regarded as a good idea hampered by poor execution, this time the Biafra/Ministry mind-meld begins to get the political/industrial mix closer to the edit. Voiced by Biafra with production by Al Jourgensen, Paul Barker and Bill Reiflin of Ministry, and a few posthumous drum licks from the late Jeff Ward, Pure Chewing Satisfaction is a 37-minute caustic policy paper set to the kind of mind-numbing jackhammer beat Ministry hasn't been able to summon since 1992's Psalm 69.
The album-opening "War Pimp Renaissance" sets the frantic pace with a endlessly-repeated heavy metal drum and guitar lock groove over which Biafra warbles his post-Cold War victory song/warning "Evil Commie empire's gone... now we're the only one/ Let there be peace on earth/ what ever gave you that idea/ Economy depends on guns/ We'll have an arms race with ourselves."
Lard brings with it a lot of baggage on both parts of the equation, but mostly it opens the door for Ministry and Biafra Inc. to flex a part of their personalities that their rigid, media-defined personalities don't often allow. For Biafra, it's a chance to put his rants and acid-tongue lashings to harder, more snarling music than in the majority of his post-Dead Kennedys work. Although the social messages of the DK's still, for the most part, ring true in the post-Reagan era, their then-vicious music seems a bit thinner and worse for the wear in the post-industrial age.
For Ministry, long associated with depravity of every kind and a public glee in wallowing in druggy excess and unhealthy living, Lard offers an opportunity to do work that in some ways benefits mankind. With Biafra's political spin-doctoring laid over their pummeling beats, they present Ministry-with-a-conscience, destruction with an agenda.
The hilarious "I Wanna Be a Drug-Sniffing Dog," with a jackhammer beat that recalls the dirty sex drive of Ministry's "Jesus Built My Hotrod," finds Biafra fast-forward daydreaming about being a cop dog ("I wanna be a drug-sniffing dog/ So I can snort coke all day long"), a member of the religious Right ("I wanna join the Christian Coalition/ So I can molest my children"), the San Francisco cops and a customs agent, all bent on abuse of their respective powers in the most violent and repulsive fashion they can reasonably get away with.
The booklet to the album is almost as sensory overload as the menacing, gothic guitars and assault rifle drums in "Moths," or the faux-fascist mind-wash chant of "Faith, Hope and Treachery" in the song of the same name. Filthy with the kind of misinformation that Biafra has spent a lifetime railing against, the booklet presents images such as that of a soldier carting away a blindfolded Nicaraguan villager with the phony headline "Grateful Nicaraguan Village Renames Itself Ronald Reagan." The message that emerges being "don't trust anything you see or hear, especially since the shadowy THEY might be behind it." Hell, don't even trust Jello, because, like it says next to a series of multiple Saturday Night Fever-era John Travoltas, "Who can you trust... when anyone can be cloned?"
To the accompaniment of grinding drills and robot drums on "Peeling Back the Foreskin of Liberty," Biafra drops his quavering vocal style for a few minutes to assume a more menacingly indignant grunt. An apocalyptic rendering of a heavy-metal-child-molesting-Black-Helicopter-fearing-you-can't-take-my-guns-from-me-remember-Waco world on the edge, it's the most effective and scariest indictment of our constantly-surveiled modern existence on the entire set, not to mention the clamorous musical high point of the album.
There was a time when Lard would be labeled a "vanity project," indicted for its hollow attempt to fuse together two unrelated artists purely for the satisfaction of their overblown egos. All of which (and more) is true about Pure Chewing Satisfaction. Because it's precisely the clash of these two 100-ton ego trains that results in the momentary dropping of the veil of bullshit and easy lies fed to us every day, just long enough to reveal a batch of ugly truths few people have the nerve to commit to plastic.
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