Assimilate by Reed S. Alexander;

Author:Reed, S. Alexander;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: A Critical History of Industrial Music
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 2013-03-01T16:00:00+00:00

Figure 12.1: The cover art of Skinny Puppy’s single “Dig It” is unambiguously gothic in multiple senses of the word. Drawing by Gustave Doré; design by Steven R. Gilmore.

Similarly, on the cover of Skinny Puppy’s 1986 single “Dig It,” the choice of an illustration from The Inferno (of a man ascending from an open tomb, drawn by the nineteenth-century romantic artist Gustav Doré) drives home this additional compatibility with the literary gothic.

5. Gothic Femmes

To bring this all back to Skinny Puppy’s disruption of industrial music’s male genderedness, the point here isn’t necessarily that abjection and gothicism translate positively into Canadian girls wanting to dance to “Assimilate” or tattoo the band’s logo on their shoulders. Instead, it’s that Skinny Puppy took a music that had been (ironically or otherwise) militaristic and impenetrable and recast it as permeable, ectoplasm-drenched, and borderless. Their music embodies non-rigidity, overflow, theatrical spectacularity, birth, and irrationality. It creates a metaphorical space that welcomes real, visceral bodies—not body armor.

Though it’s essentialistic and crass to declare these qualities intrinsically feminine, they nevertheless transgress the values of fitness, organization, cleanliness, and discipline that the overwhelmingly male industrial scene chose to privilege. As Rhys Fulber recalls, “The big thing about Skinny Puppy was that they had a huge female audience,” and a connection is evident when we consider that this coincided with the band’s unique invocation of the natal and linguistic abject, the monstrous, and the grotesque.20 Ogre’s good looks and Key’s history with Images in Vogue would likely have done little to attract women to industrial music and retain their attention if Skinny Puppy’s music itself hadn’t conjured and given voice to ways of being that extended beyond the genre’s agenda up to that point. Fulber says, “They certainly turned the scene into what it is now, by glamming it up a little bit, because it wasn’t like that before.”21 He highlights the lasting importance of Skinny Puppy’s gothic subversion of gender on account of the social, political, and ultimately musical possibilities that it made newly available.

Did Ogre and Key think of their music in these theoretical terms? Not likely, though they did read up on critical theory—laughing, Key says, “We had to find an intellectually stimulating way to say we like horror films.”22 The purpose of theoretical constructs like the gothic or the abject, though, is to give a generalized explanation that can be applied to actual events; they give us ways to understand what people do more than they tell us what those people think. This is useful because when makers and listeners viscerally latch onto a sound and want to be part of it, that subconscious negotiation is wrapped up in how the music resonates with their understanding of their social, intellectual, emotional, and sexual identity—sensibilities more deeply rooted than any premeditated creative strategy.

As a concluding illustration of the real gendered effects of Skinny Puppy’s gothicism, consider the case of Jolene Siana, a fan who documented her self-harm and teenage rebellion in confessional letters to Ogre, later published as Go Ask Ogre.

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