As the story repeated in Skinny Puppy interviews goes, cEvin Key (born Kevin Crompton) and Nivek Ogre (born Kevin Ogilvie) met at a party in Vancouver in late 1982, went and recorded the song “K-9” on a lark, and saw the next day that in their drunken session they’d written the name “Skinny Puppy” on the tape. It’s not exactly true, though; Key had thought up the band name a least a year beforehand, and he’d already composed many of Skinny Puppy’s earliest tracks on his synthesizers at home before he asked Ogre to sing, moan, and cackle over them. Ogre, a Calgary native, was nineteen or twenty when Key first heard him growl along to the jukebox at a diner, and his manic dourness—somehow both gregarious and cagey—seemed a good match for the demos Key had been cooking up.
Key himself was foremost a drummer and had played in some trash rock bands in the mid-1970s—Bastille and Illegal Youth. He was now busy with Images in Vogue, a primped new wave act that was starting to attract some serious popular attention in Canada. The band’s roots reach back to the surprisingly fertile Vancouver punk scene of the late 1970s, but instead of relentless live playing, Images in Vogue spent most of their energy programming synthesizers and tweaking demo recordings in the isolation of a warehouse on the south shore of Vancouver Harbour.
Early on, the group exhibited some experimental leanings, but by 1983 Key was already wary of the upbeat pop concessions they were starting to make in their music. Though he would stick with Images in Vogue through August 1985, touring with the likes of Bryan Adams and Duran Duran, Key’s heart and creative energy belonged chiefly to the Skinny Puppy project once it launched in earnest during the summer of 1983. Ogre remembers, “He was looking for something to break out of [Images in Vogue], and maybe I was it.”1 It was then that Key and Ogre (who was rooming with Images in Vogue member Gary Blair Smith) composed most of the songs for their debut tape Back and Forth.
Back and Forth finds its clearest musical precedents in the dublike delay effects of Cabaret Voltaire; in the hollow, mean, analogue synth and drum machine grooves of Portion Control and Nocturnal Emissions; and in the roomy sadness of Chris & Cosey’s not-quite-pop. But Ogre’s voice is consistently treated with digital echo, tweaked so that instead of a tasteful one-beat repetition effect, it spawns choirs instantaneously—a short delay time with a low decay rate high in the mix, in techspeak. As Key recalls, the Lexicon PCM41 (borrowed from Images in Vogue keyboardist Joe Vizvary) was central to Skinny Puppy’s sound: “Everything we made was run through it. I had no idea what it was actually doing at first, other than what I heard, so I felt like it was the perfect machine.”2
Although this kind of processing to some degree mechanizes Ogre’s voice, it also gives the impression that every lyric careens in an imagined space and through the gaps between the sounds of Key’s Roland TR-808 drum machine, itself run through a Korg SDD-1000 delay. There are other elements at play in the sound too: Key would tape background noise and ambience from movies—sometimes minutes at a time—and simply play them in the mix as a thickening layer. On “Intro (live in Winnipeg),” the opening track of 1992’s “Series Two” rerelease of Back and Forth, you can hear Key’s primitive method of cueing these ambiences: the sounds of his pressing Stop/Eject and switching out a tape on a cassette player are unmistakable. Similarly, the long, legato synth tones that cascade over songs like “Sleeping Beast” show that even though Skinny Puppy was making beat-driven dance music, they weren’t quite marching in sync with EBM’s rule of tightly contained, pulsing rigidity.
Key and Ogre dubbed just thirty-five copies of Back and Forth, sending many of them to the addresses they’d seen printed in The Elephant Table, which was one of the most popular compilations to come out of the tape trading scene. This helped them connect with musicians like the Legendary Pink Dots, Nocturnal Emissions, Die Form, P16.D4., and Bourbonese Qualk. They made a quick splash in this network (Dave Henderson reviewed Back and Forth in his “Wild Planet” column in Sounds), and the group was sufficiently encouraged to go to Vancouver’s famous Mushroom Studios in 1984 and cut the Remission EP.
Ric Arboit, sometime mixing engineer for Images in Vogue, worked at Mushroom, and he and his buddy Terry McBride footed the recording bill and signed Skinny Puppy as the second act on their indie label Nettwerk Records—an imprint born from McBride’s experience with his failed label Noetix. Nettwerk’s first signee had been Moev, whose earlier debut single was Noetix’s sole release. Moev was a chronically underappreciated dark synthpop act whose bombastic initial recordings smacked of Siouxsie and the Banshees and Depeche Mode—hovering around the edges of industrial music but never really taking part in it. Skinny Puppy, though, fully embraced and embodied industrial’s snarling aggression. “We were interested in the Throbbing Gristle scene, but they hadn’t made enough rhythm,” Key says.3 Like a lot of second-wave industrialists, Skinny Puppy’s attraction to rhythm wasn’t consciously political, but based in the pleasure of making and moving to a beat; Key was, after all, a drummer.
The band’s first show was in February 1984 at a perpetually empty art gallery called Unovis. Key remembers, “Our friend who had the key to the place went away that day, so we broke in and set up … at three a.m. we played to about 300 people, including [the UK Batcave band] Alien Sex Fiend,” who was in town on tour.4 The band took the makeshift stage just as they were peaking on MDA, a hallucinogenic amphetamine. The publicity for the show was all word of mouth, quite a bit like Test Dept.’s early unauthorized performances.
Less than a year later, Skinny Puppy had picked up a third member—Vancouver über-scenester Bill Leeb (then known as Wilhelm Schroeder)—and recorded “Smothered Hope,” Remission’s lead track and as close to an industrial hit as any North American act had scored by then. A lot of the support for Images in Vogue, Skinny Puppy, and Vancouver’s underground music in general came from the University of British Columbia’s student radio station CiTR and from late-night clubs (mostly unlicensed) such as Mr. Toast and Club Soda. The most popular and influential venue of Vancouver’s underground was the Luv-a-Fair, a former gay club that turned into a punk hangout in 1980. DJs such as Steven Gilmore were dedicated to bringing cutting-edge oddities and soon-to-be classics to the little city. “The first time you ever heard, say, ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ by Joy Division was there,” Key recalls; “[Y]ou heard it at this club because some DJ went all the way to Seattle and picked it up. And so it was like, ‘Oh, my god!’ You’d run to the DJ booth so many times it was tiring.”5
If some of the names in the Vancouver scene sound familiar, there’s a reason. The city’s crop of musicians and engineers would become major players both within and beyond the industrial community in the years that followed: in addition to Leeb (who would found Front Line Assembly), Key, Arboit, and McBride, Dave “Rave” Ogilvie (no relation to Ogre) was a soundman for Images in Vogue and went on to produce Skinny Puppy’s first seven studio albums, later recording Marilyn Manson and Killing Joke; Steven Gilmore would go beyond DJing and become Nettwerk’s in-house graphic artist, helping to shape industrial music’s look; Greg Reely, another engineer for Images in Vogue, continues to work with Front Line Assembly and has production and mixing credits for Coldplay and Sarah McLachlan (who, before she was mother of the Lilith Fair, was immersed in Canadian ethereal and goth music); Images in Vogue guitarist Don Gordon later launched the gritty industrial band Numb; Al Nelson was road crew for Images in Vogue (and younger brother of keyboardist Glen) and recorded a few albums with Skinny Puppy’s members under the collective name Hilt; Anthony Valcic was briefly in the band Moev and later engineered records by Front Line Assembly, Manufacture, and Download. Others such as youngster Rhys Fulber (of Front Line Assembly, Conjure One, and later the producer of Fear Factory), Chris Peterson (of Will, Decree, and later Front Line Assembly), Michael Balch (of Front Line Assembly and Ministry), and Carylann Loeppky (graphic designer and former wife of Leeb) were also lurking in the Vancouver scene in the mid-1980s as DJs, club kids, and clerks at record stores such as Cinematica.
Skinny Puppy’s quick rise in 1984 and especially 1985 (when they toured more widely and released their first proper album, Bites) didn’t just serve to place Vancouver on the map of industrial history, and it wasn’t simply the inevitable product of an uncommonly talented musical community. Rather, Skinny Puppy’s recordings, performance, personality, and fan base together helped to open up industrial music to female audiences—and by extension female musicians. It’s hard to overstate the importance of this.
Certainly there were some women in industrial music before Skinny Puppy, but generally as makers, they played an ultraconfrontational role that took their power from the fear they inspired in male audiences with their sexual assertiveness. To participate in early industrial music, women were expected to be formidable and ultimately inaccessible. This was the case with Cosey Fanni Tutti’s dabbling in porn or with Diana Rogerson and Jill Westwood’s London-based act Fistfuck, whose live shows featured “a female dominatrix ritually humiliating men, pissing on them and tying them to chairs, all to a soundtrack of extreme noise and sound collage,” according to author David Keenan.6 Industrial music’s phallocentrism almost seems a tactic of sexual intimidation, given the names of its champions Throbbing Gristle, Meatwhistle, SPK’s incarnation as Surgical Penis Klinik, and later acts such as Revolting Cocks. Perhaps not surprisingly, then, female audience members in the early 1980s (rare as they were) more often listened to industrial music casually as merely one of many post-punk genres popular in the underground. SPK’s Graeme Revell admits, “I was always concerned that there was something kind of macho and therefore pathetic, about what we were doing because we couldn’t quite access it to females.”7 Desire and fulfillment are effectively invisible in early industrial; in the words of Throbbing Gristle, even if the music occasionally trails “hot on the heels of love,” it never obtains it.
Key supposes that “the female followers—I think they came maybe because in Canada, we were seen as a followup to Images in Vogue.” But this is at odds with the fanaticism that so many young women—previously locked out of industrial music’s cult—felt specifically toward Skinny Puppy.8 Beyond devoted fans’ deep emotional engagement (more on this later), Ogre’s appeal was sexually tinged: Michael Balch recalls that when Bill Leeb (Skinny Puppy’s keyboardist at the time) worked at a punk clothing store called Black Market, “Little goth girls would come in and stare at him and ask him about Ogre.”9 Owing in part to the simple demographics of the subculture, Skinny Puppy, by merely reaching out to goth fans, fostered an audience that, despite remaining mostly male, was far more gender-inclusive than any previous industrial fan base.
A self-professed fan of the iconically goth English band Bauhaus (who, incidentally, titled a song “Antonin Artaud”), Ogre took a cue from that budding scene and steered the makeup and teased hair look that Key had picked up in Images in Vogue toward a gaunt androgyny that occupied a fluid, pansexual arena of expressive desire that scholars such as Paul Hodkinson and Carol Siegel describe as central to goth culture.10* As Key recalls, “We kind of also attracted the people from the gay community, who were very sexless by that point. We were kind of all androgynous.”11
Beyond the band’s image, though, there’s an argument to be made that Skinny Puppy’s music itself takes on aesthetics and forms that resonate with more inclusive ideas about gender and identity than did other industrial music of the era.
Skinny Puppy’s appeal has a lot to do with the band’s invoking of what some scholars call the feminine gothic, with gothic here referring not to modern goth subculture per se, but to an older set of artistic themes and practices. The gothic in art is most often identified with certain eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature, but it applies here as well.
(As suggested by Balch’s story, it might also be said that Skinny Puppy’s popularity among female fans has to do with Ogre’s good looks and charisma; but even so, this charisma is tied in with his self-presentation through lyrics, voice, and image, which is filtered through this lens of the gothic. Indeed, Ogre wasn’t the first good-looking industrial frontman, but given that the Los Angeles Times has called him “the first industrial rock star,” it’s worth asking what Skinny Puppy did differently from other bands.13 It’s likely that most of the band’s directly acknowledged influence has to do with their sound, their lyrics, and their visual presentation, but again, these facets embody and demonstrate a treatment of gender and politics different from other industrial music of the day. Being thus set apart from European EBM or noise, Skinny Puppy was both popular and enduringly influential in ways that are difficult to divorce from their gothicism.)
Now, the gothic, as literary scholar Kelly Hurley explains, is fundamentally concerned with the body—specifically its ruination. Rather than glorify the ordered body of fascism and EBM, the gothic “offers the spectacle of a body metamorphic and undifferentiated … continually in danger of becoming not-itself, becoming other.”14
Hurley explains that the gothic as a practice speculates about questions of what it means to be human, and so it makes sense that Skinny Puppy highlights this with dehumanizing vocal processing effects and a political invective that prioritizes animal life above human life. In their undulating, voice-deforming, endlessly echoing dance music, Skinny Puppy raise these questions by wallowing in the danger of becoming other—Ogre’s image is of a thing drenched in blood, his voice is bestial, and his lyrical subject matter is a mix of confession and alienating rants about the world through the eyes of animal test subjects. Even Key has felt revulsion and surprise at his bandmate: “I was shocked the first few shows—they were heavy duty. He was doing a lot of simulated effects of cutting. Heavy, scary shit: razor blades, broken glass, heavy blood.”15
Ogre’s visual performances, his lyrics, and his vocal delivery perform abjection, a depraved self-purging—physical or otherwise—that Chris Bohn (writing as Biba Kopf) claims industrial music dedicatedly enacts and understands.16 According to literary theorist Julia Kristeva in her important book The Powers of Horror, abjection is a response to the realization that a peaceful and primordial kind of meaning—one of a unified, fully knowable world-womb—is necessarily unrecoverable, severed at birth as a precondition of being.17 Remember industrial music’s modernist recognition that we’re born into a hierarchical network of control systems from which it’s our impossible duty to escape? Well, abjection strives for an Artaudian rebirth into a new flesh uninterrupted by the real world and untouched by that most fundamental logic, the subject-object division. Abjection is a gross attempt to counteract the inescapability of the control machines. It rages against the irreconcilability of the exterior with the interior. And because abjection seeks to erase the borders between the inside and outside of bodies and objects, it shows up in human art and action as willful bleeding, vomit, and excretion. By refusing bodily order and behavioral rationality, abjection is a model for rejecting the fact that any experience of worldly meaning begins with an act of differentiating.
Skinny Puppy’s 1986 song “God’s Gift (Maggot),” is a good musical metaphor for bodily indifferentiation. The drums don’t rely on a four-on-the-floor kick but are instead syncopated, and a shaker (instead of a hi-hat) keeps time, its sonic attack more of a fade-in than a hit—the swirling noise of an eggshell’s contents. Behind them is a bongo drum loop that more closely resembles a porn soundtrack than a drum corps. The synth bass uses a low frequency oscillator that makes it sound like a worm being squished underfoot, not a plucked string. Film and choral samples are pitch-shifted down, taking on a direly evil and linguistically incomprehensible quality. Ogre, mutated as always with distortion and reverb, swaps between a nasal-voiced declaration and a gagging whisper; recorded in alternating takes, these two misshapen voices collide and overlap. Lyrically, he takes on the misapprehension of all meaning by interlacing references to Plato’s allegory of the cave, but he keeps coming back to the permeability of the body: “Knives in the eyes, maggots fill the brain.”
A song like “God’s Gift (Maggot)” can be usefully understood as an abreaction (to borrow a term from psychology), which means the reenactment of trauma in order to purge its effects. Within this theoretical framework, the original trauma of losing one’s harmonious unity to the harshness of the external world is recast musically as the grotesque blending of inside and outside, back and forth, in order to reclaim some kind of symbolic integration.
From a gender-informed perspective, there’s an easy connection to be made here to the physical experience and grossness of birth, and indeed Kristeva writes a fair amount about that. She specifically aligns abjection with the female body, and similarly, the gothic is often understood as representing a threat to patriarchal ideas of control that rely on the absoluteness and differentiation of identities—hence the term feminine gothic.* Similarly, the liberating female potential to disrupt male-enforced order is a hallmark of the previous centuries’ literature that informs what we mean by “gothic.”
Equally relevant to Skinny Puppy is that Kristeva also sees abjection’s attempts to reclaim undifferentiated wholeness as connected to the control system of language. One way that we can think about Skinny Puppy is to view them as constantly reenacting the trauma of coming to be. The near incomprehensibility of Ogre’s voice (as routed through the Lexicon PCM41) and the antisyntactical weirdness of his stream-of-consciousness lyrics perform a therapeutic function: an abreaction in attempt to reclaim preverbal harmony. Ogre’s textual and vocal affectations are strategies that he partially developed in his theater and mask-making training with artist Myra Davies and playwright-director Morris Panych, and in that verbal reenactment of a formational violence and meaninglessness he attempts to find a space for peace and understanding. In this way, abreaction serves as another explanation of the reversal tactic that so much industrial music applies to control systems (indeed, Burroughs’s famous assertion that language is a virus serves to conflate it with the genre’s other targets of critique). And the idea that the breakdown of language is connected to the grotesque is a basic tenet of the gothic: as literary scholar Anne Williams explains, “A ‘definition’ of ‘Gothic’ thus outlines a large, irregularly shaped figure, an irregularity that implies the limitations of language—appropriate for the category containing the unspeakable ‘other.’”18
Tying this together, when Kelly Hurley says that gothic strategies “function maximally to enact the defamiliarization and violent reconstitution of the human subject,” it’s easy to see how abjection as an act can play an explosive, transformative role in this.19 Significantly, how Skinny Puppy acts out abjection is theatrical—video of a 1986 hometown performance shows Ogre wielding a television set, attempting to eat a hamburger and vomiting (recall their animal rights advocacy); later, he holds aloft a severed head by its hair and serenades it in front of a backdrop video of a burning car, Hamlet by way of J. G. Ballard. In this theatricality, Skinny Puppy offers not merely a spectacle of heavy critique, but an overt, sexualized delight. There is, of course, a perverse thrill in finding the animal within; as Ogre hisses, “She’s a sleeping beast.”
Most ideas of the gothic, especially older literary and architectural ones, focus less on a preoccupation with the body and more on the invoking of the hidden, the dark, the ghostly. Though these aspects are less directly relevant to the argument here, it’s worth acknowledging that Skinny Puppy also engages with these topics, sometimes in ways that other industrial acts hadn’t previously done. For example, whereas early industrial music took interest in the occult as a study of mass control, a chastisement of Christianity, or an earnest attempt at magic, Skinny Puppy’s treatment of the haunted more closely resembles the ghost story as a convention: the undead are as good at mood setting as they are at critical commentary. Characteristically Ogre names as a favorite author Comte de Lautréamont, arguably the most macabre and abjectly gothic writer of the nineteenth century.*
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.
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. She writes to him:
I wanted to be raised differently. I wanted to have a father and sisters and brothers. I didn’t want to be teased in elementary school. I wanted to be special. I wanted to cry less. I wanted to be disciplined. I wanted to be safe. I look in the mirror. I know myself. I don’t like myself and I know you can’t like myself. I don’t want to die. I don’t want you to dislike me. I don’t know you well, but you matter. Kristy tried to tell me that I write to you because she says you’re good-looking. That’s so shallow and untrue. I’d write to you even if you looked like David Lee Roth but still had your thoughts. I like all nice people. I have no right to say anything to you. I have no right to care. I don’t know myself and I’m sorry about everything. Really I am.23
Stepping beyond the sort of sexual teenybopper appeal that Images in Vogue fostered, Siana proclaims a gendered but nonsexual yearning that situates Ogre’s “thoughts”—his lyrics and self-presentation via the band—as solace for her inability to understand herself. She’s able to use Ogre and Skinny Puppy’s music here as a stand-in for some missing piece of her own identity: “This may sound strange, but the only means of me getting my feelings out is on paper to you,” she wrote in 1987.24 Not only is this an act of personal relation (imagined or real) across genders, but given her own private abjection—her book’s subtitle is Letters of a Deathrock Cutter—it’s also a case of her using the band’s theatrical bodily ruination as a way to abreact her own.
In the mid-1980s, industrial music for the first time opened up to a level of emotional engagement that recognized its community’s personhood as well as its politics.* In live performance and on record, Skinny Puppy’s music introduced an aesthetic approach that both in theory and in practice proved crucial in this change, and by extension they helped ensure the social viability and longevity of the genre.
Also, it’s good for dancing.
ICONIC:
Diamanda Galàs – “Wild Women With Steak Knives” (1982)
Moev – “Cracked Mirror” (1981)
Skinny Puppy – “Assimilate” (1985)
Skinny Puppy – “First Aid” (1987)
Skinny Puppy – “Worlock” (1989)
ARCANE:
Bauhaus – “Antonin Artaud” (1983)
Doubting Thomas – “Blowfish” (1989)
Front Line Assembly – “A Decade” (1986)
Images in Vogue – “S&M” (1982)
The Tear Garden – “You and Me and Rainbows (parts 1–6)” (1987)