Let's get it on with the second half of two consecutive posts tributing two absolute non-givers of fucks.
Today we have another avatar's avatar, and another person who made the music of our world bend to their will like a psychic bends a spoon.
Not just music, either. A holistic, complete and unapologetic assault on culture and its backwards, primitive norms at all levels and across all previously-extant boundaries.
They started in earnest in the first half of the 1970s, and by the middle of that decade, our honoree was already beginning to shift the sands of everything.
The band they formed as a vehicle for their cultural assault was named after the Throbbing Gristle of an erect penis, with an original logo that illustrated same.
Fast forward after six years of laying down the template of what came to be termed Industrial Music, when our birthday person started a whole new adventure, with a whole new band and a whole new approach.
This group had moderate hits! And as the 1980s progressed, they helped pioneer the Acid House movement by pretending they were part of a whole slew of UK Techno bands. When all those albums were just them!
We're talking about 45 years at not just the cutting or the bleeding edges, but the ones that carve new territory from old norms like hot knives through butter.
And this says nothing of the gender fluidity and the body modifications and the pioneering Pandrogyny.
If what you're after is sheer, in-your-face challenge to the bloodless, dehumanized cultural shitscape around you, then you've already known who Genesis Breyer P-Orridge -- born this day in 1950 -- is for a long time.
Word on the street is that GBP is ill and in decline from a leukemia diagnosis a ways back, and that they may not have much longer.
This is one person whom I'm not gonna wait for them to die before I write down what they mean to me.
Genesis likes to issue everything they've done, so archival stuff is sometimes confusing and hard to come by. But to celebrate, I've got two things: one of Throbbing Gristle, and one of Psychic TV, the equally-as-unequaled band they formed in 1981. The latter was taped on GBP's 36th birthday.
Genesis Breyer P-Orridge
1975/1986
i.
Throbbing Gristle
The First Annual Report of Throbbing Gristle
1975
01 Very Friendly
02 Dead Bait
03 10 Pence
04 Whorle of Sound
05 Final Muzak
06 Scars of E
Total time: 43:14
Genesis P-Orridge - vocals, guitar, violin & bass
Cosey Fanni Tutti - guitars, cornet, tapes
Peter Christopherson - tapes, loops, found sounds, electronics
Chris Carter - tapes, synthesizers and electronics & programming
still-unreleased debut album, sourced from the 2001 boot CD on the Yeaah! label
190 MB FLAC here
ii.
Psychic TV
ZAKK
Düsseldorf, Germany
2.22.1986
01 intro
02 She Touched Me
03 I Like You
04 Seduce Me
05 Just Like Arcadia
06 Riot In the Eye of Sky
07 Godstar
08 I Heard It Through the Grapevine
09 Roman P.
10 Soul Eater
11 Sorry
Total time: 1:01:27
Genesis P-Orridge - vocals & percussion
Paula P-Orridge - drums, tapes and loops
Alex Fergusson - guitars, vocals
Monte Cazezza - guitars
Mouse - bass
Philipp Erb - synthesizer & keyboards
Matt Best - drums
sounds like -- and spectral analysis confirms -- a master off-air FM capture of unknown origin
401 MB FLAC here
I will return once more at least before month's end with another blast of Black History Month, count on that.
Today, however, is the day to reveal Genesis -- 69 today -- and to say Thank You for all these decades of Art and Life completely stripped of even the barest notion of compromise. If there were even a few brave souls like them today, we might not be staring down the abyss of total annihilation at the hands of the denuded, already-dead-just-awaiting-burial Normals, who are truly starting to smell like the walking corpses they are by now.--J.
