Needless to say, that’s the famous Gibby Haynes providing the vocals on Ministry’s Jesus Built My Hotrod. Gibby recorded the vocals while he was in Chicago, doing the first Lollapooloza tour. Ministry’s Al Jourgensen told Songfacts, “Gibby came down completely drunk off his ass. He couldn’t even sit on a stool, let alone sing. I mean, he was wasted. He fell off the stool about 10 times during the recording of that vocal. He made no sense and it was just gibberish. So I spent two weeks editing tape of what he did, thinking it still was better than what I was thinking of doing with the song.”
Fortunately, Gibby’s vocals saved both the song and probably the future of the band. Ministry had already been given an advance of $750,000 to make an album. According to Jourgensen, the band spent all the money on drugs and ended up with only this song to show for all of their efforts. In an attempt to at least get some of their money back, Warner Bros. released the song as a single and it quickly shot up the charts. For a while, at least, it was Warner Bros’s top selling-single of all time. As a result, Ministry got another advance of $750,000 and this time, they actually used the money to make an album.
As for the video, it’s all about car culture. Paul Elledge also directed two videos for Anthrax.
I’ll be back tomorrow. In the meantime, enjoy Every Day Is Halloween by Ministry. Mvdbase says there was an official music video for it, but I can’t find it. If I ever do, then I’ll do a post on it. There are plenty of unofficial ones, though. I’ve included a couple of them below.
Now we have reached Ministry’s industrial metal years. This is probably my favorite Ministry songs of the ones I have heard. It’s also both better in music video form, and worse at the same time. It’s worse for a minor reason. The video has him say “Jesus was the devil.” That’s not what he says in the song. In the song it’s “Jerry Lee Lewis was the devil. Jesus was an architect, previous to his career as a prophet.” The one on the song is much better. However, the video does add something I absolutely love. At about three minutes and twenty seconds we get a guy who looks like the man with the horned-rimmed glasses saying “drag racing” several times in a row. This music video seems to throw every repetitious thing they can into the pot to create this hard rocking industrial metal song. This included dialog and imagery. The imagery being something they couldn’t do in a purely audio form.
This time Alain Jourgensen seems happy. In fact, I’d say it’s almost like he’s floating on a cloud as he seemed to be doing literally in the music video for Over The Shoulder. The music video also has that tying in of everything to the theme of the song visually thing going on. This is one of those songs that I would suggest watching in music video form, and not just off of the album.
I don’t really have anything else to say about the video or the song except that I think it’s one of the best music videos I have watched for this ongoing series of posts.
Director Paul Elledge would direct a couple more music videos, but that’s all. He did an excellent job here.
I have tried to stay away from repeating the same artist before I even reach 50 of these posts, but I can’t. I did Rio by Duran Duran and People Are People by Depeche Mode, so it only feels right to not only do Ministry here, but to follow it up with one of their industrial metal songs tomorrow.
I don’t know if I would call this just dark synthpop, or whether I would go ahead and call it industrial rock. It’s not industrial metal. We’ll see that tomorrow, clear as day. It certainly sounds like something Nine Inch Nails would have done though. You can hear how they have expanded the ingredients thrown into the musical pot in order to start to create this new flavor of music that is still based heavily on repetitious sounds. Just like Depeche Mode’s People Are People, it uses mechanical sounds, but here it’s done to a greater degree. Almost in an orchestral way. I know it sounds weird, but I certainly think of The Perfect Drug by Nine Inch Nails to be less of a rock song, and more of a composition a la classical music.
You can tell that Alain Jourgensen was still not happy yet. I say that because he is still faking a British accent like he did on the band’s previous album. I’m guessing that the record company or other pressures on him said, “If you are going to do this style of music, then you must sound British like Simon Le Bon or Dave Gahan!” For the record, Alain Jourgensen was born in Cuba, and grew up in Chicago. Eddie Vedder is also from Illinois, but we all thought he was from Seattle when I was a kid.
Anyways, this video isn’t that much different from the one for Revenge, which was off of their previous album called With Sympathy. Over The Shoulder was off of their next album called Twitch. It too has a dark look about it. Two of the biggest differences to me are that it looks grimy rather than stagey, and it is comprised of the kind of imagery you would expect from industrial rock/metal. In fact, it ties all of its’ imagery together with the song while actually becoming part of the song the same way that we’ll see tomorrow. They are all disposable things.
I love how the ending of this video has Jourgensen twisting around mostly naked the way Marilyn Manson and Trent Reznor famously would later on. I also love how it seems that if Jourgensen floated around that grocery store any longer, then he probably would have bumped into Thom Yorke in Radiohead’s music video for Fake Plastic Trees.
Director Peter Christopherson would go on to direct a lot music videos, which included ones by Nine Inch Nails.
I must admit I don’t know a whole lot about Ministry other than a few things I have read about them and their music. I first found them the way most people probably did. That being through songs like Jesus Built My Hotrod and Just One Fix. These are industrial rock/metal songs although I have heard them referred to more like hardcore punk. You could argue that if you want. I think less Dead Kennedys, and more if Depeche Mode didn’t sing Just Can’t Get Enough and instead played their style of music with more politics in a metal fashion the way Ministry has done for the majority of their career.
I remember some MTV/VH1 thing bringing up that Ministry actually started as a Snythpop band. I remember them playing this up like it was some sort of magical metamorphosis the group had gone through. I remember at the time eating that up. Not anymore. I don’t care what the situation was with lead singer Alain Jourgensen at the time, the reason for the ultimately minor change that only looks huge, and stupid comments on their videos saying:
“Hopefully those synth pop loving post punk wannabes have been flushed out with this ministry, dragged on the street under cars and murdered with hate crimes.”
I didn’t make that up. That’s an actual comment left on one of their videos.
I listen to this, then The Land of Rape and Honey and hear the same kind of song. Synthpop and Industrial Rock/Metal are related genres. The fact that he chose to go with something more hardcore didn’t fundamentally change their sound like a metamorphosis would suggest. I like their Synthpop sound too before they expanded on it and made it harder. I welcome an edgier Depeche Mode. Just like I welcome them saying that’s not for them and evolving their sound. It’s just ridiculous when you hear talk about this like it’s a metamorphosis. If Neil Sedaka decided to start playing heavy metal, then sure, but not this. This is the creation/mass discovery of a new style of music built on previous ones. Ministry just happened to not just be at the forefront, but actually started on the edges of the main original genre and tweaked it till they found their true voice.
As for the music video itself, it makes me think of the shot on video Japanese 80s horror film Death Powder (1986).
Death Powder (1986, dir. Shigeru Izumiya)
I haven’t even watched that movie either other than to get a screenshot earlier this year, and it is still the first thing that comes to mind when I look at this video.
I mentioned before how related the two styles are to each other, but you can really tell when you watch the video. It’s like you can literally see something such as Jesus Built My Hotrod lying just under every surface in the video ready to burst out. Especially burst right out Jourgensen’s face and body.
I like connections, so it made sense to use this as the first Ministry music video to feature.
Through the Shattered Lens 