A Farewell to Skinny Puppy as the World Teeters on the Brink

Update 4/10/23: Revolution Live announced today, April 10, that tonight's Skinny Puppy concert has been canceled. The reason given was due to the weather causing technical issues. Refunds will be made available at the point of purchase.

Does music genuinely have the power to stick it to the man?

Well, for a while there during the tumultuous 1960s, it did seem possible to wield music as an instrument of protest and revolt capable of enacting real social change.

Songs like Pete Seeger's "We Shall Overcome" and Jefferson Airplane's "Volunteers" became rallying cries for the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements, nudging those budding flower children we now call Boomers to take action and fight for social justice in the streets.

With the benefit of hindsight, however, historians have traced the death of 1960s counterculture idealism to the Manson Family murders of 1969 and the Kent State shootings of 1970. These grim landmarks are referenced in Rabies, the best-selling 1989 album by Canadian electro-industrial pioneers Skinny Puppy.

"Worlock," one of the band's most influential singles, amply samples Charles Manson singing "Helter Skelter," the Beatles song that Manson delusionally claimed had prophesied an apocalyptic race war and prompted his Hollywood murder spree.

The Manson case gave America a shocking and gruesome glimpse into the dark side of the 1960s counterculture. Manson's nefarious manipulation of his followers — using mind control and violence to further his twisted, acid-fascist ideology — stood in stark contrast to the hippie ideals of peace and love. It would also feed Skinny Puppy's enduring fascination with the dark psychology of power, corruption, and social control.

In keeping with that morbid 1960s cult theme, the title of Skinny Puppy's 1996 album The Process is a nod to the Process Church of the Final Judgment. Founded in 1966 as a Satanist spinoff of Scientology, the Process Church would be investigated by Los Angeles prosecutors for suspected links to the Manson Family murders.

Of course, Skinny Puppy frontman Nivek Ogre was first introduced to the Process Church story by Genesis P-Orridge of Throbbing Gristle and Industrial Records, the seminal British group and label that gave industrial music its name.

As an offshoot of COUM Transmissions, a transgressive art performance collective founded in 1969, Throbbing Gristle and the industrial genre were effectively a musical outgrowth of the 1960s counterculture, albeit a disillusioned and enraged one. After all, the trauma of violent state-sponsored repression at Kent State and the toxic Kool-Aid hangover of false prophets like Charles Manson called for radical new tactics to free people's minds and fight the powers that be.

"We need to search for methods to break the preconceptions, modes of unthinking acceptance and expectations that make us, within our constructed behavior patterns, so vulnerable to control," wrote P-Orridge. Skinny Puppy would vigorously heed this call to action during the band's four-decade campaign to deprogram concertgoers by shocking and disturbing them out of their desensitized complacency with the status quo.

Like the counterculture before them, Skinny Puppy has long rallied against the dehumanizing effects of warfare, government surveillance, technology, and environmental degradation under late-stage capitalism. Of course, theirs is a far cry from the peace signs and daisy chains at Woodstock, manifesting instead as brutal, oft-controversial live performances that blend performance art with music and blur the line between what's real and what isn't. The band's bloodcurdling onstage theatrics run the gamut, from feigned self-mutilation to mock executions by hanging and decapitation.

Is all this blood and gore gratuitous? Well, not if you ask Nivek Ogre. "It seems to me that this is the only way to make people think about things," he told the Fort Lauderdale News in a 1987 interview.

What is gratuitous is the cosmic irony of the U.S. military allegedly using Skinny Puppy's music to psychologically torture inmates at Guantanamo Bay. Released in 2013, Weapon, the band's twelfth and final album, was inspired by this unsettling occurrence, and the band claims to have filed an invoice for musical services with the Department of Defense to the satanic tune of $666,000.

So, does music genuinely have the power to stick it to the man?

Well, Monday, April 10, will be your last chance to see Skinny Puppy give it a shot when the band's farewell tour brings them to Revolution Live. The timing couldn't be better because there's no hiding from the brutish realities of this foul year of Our Lord, 2023. The Doomsday Clock now stands at 90 seconds to midnight — the closest to global catastrophe it's ever been — thanks to Russia's invasion of Ukraine, looming nuclear escalation, the climate crisis, and a breakdown of global norms and institutions needed to mitigate the risks of advancing technologies and biological threats like the COVID-19 pandemic.

Skinny Puppy might be saying farewell to the fans, but more than ever, the world needs these iconic subversives.

Skinny Puppy. 7 p.m. Monday, April 10, at Revolution Live, 100 SW Third Ave., Fort Lauderdale; 954-449-1025; jointherevolution.net. Tickets cost $26 via ticketmaster.com.