Wednesday, July 07, 2004

Work For Love

You know that wanky British goth dance number "Everyday Is Halloween?" Hey, I loved it; still do sometimes. And you remember how the band that sang it, Ministry, later had a massive hit called "Jesus Built My Hotrod" that was all noisy industrial styled NIN stuff? I love that that happened. Al Jorgensen, leader of Ministry, cracks me up.

The way the legend goes, Al started a band and decided to do poppy goth numbers, while singing with a fake British accent, in the early 80's because he just wanted to get signed. It totally worked. The heavily eyelined, black haired (dyed, of course) kids of the era still swoon fondly to tracks like "Work For Love" and "Effigy" and "I Wanted to Tell Her" and all those fun (yet dark... brrrr...) tunes from With Sympathy.

Then a couple years later, Al came roaring out of the gates with The Land of Rape and Honey and tore out the eardrums, with an industrial screech, of all those kids (who were now getting pierced while listening to Skinny Puppy anyway)and they really appreciated it. And he kept going that route, and everyone kept buying it. No one seemed to mind that the British accent was gone.

Anyway, Al just put out a new record, and while doing his obligatory promotional push for Houses of the Mole, he's also jumping on the political platform and encouraging everyone to vote the Evil Idiot W outta office. He's a part of Punkvoter.com, and will be heading off on tour this fall. The only reason I'm telling you this is because he's offering free oral sex, kinda: "Our goal is to register 100,000 kids on the tour," says Jourgensen. "I'll do anything to entice them: sign autographs, give blowjobs, whatever."

The rest is up to you.