My Life With My Life And The Thrill Kill Kult

It was Manafort Monday and the day before Halloween. What better band to spend it with than My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult? 

All day, I had been going around humming a little tune, checking twitter occasionally to see if anyone else was being indicted, thinking lovely thoughts about come uppances and revenge and retribution, just the kind of stuff that industrial electro-pop grindcore audifies.* In the shops, people were dressed up a little bit, as zombies and ghouls and as real people with blood on their faces, it was like being on the set for a video for a song by the Cramps. Later, as I got ready to go out in my thigh high boots (JUST KIDDING!) I played a bit of “Sex on Wheelz” as a warmup and my daughter poked her head in my room.

“Are you playing video games?”

Me: “???”

Her: “This sounds exactly like the music they play in Borderlands when a villain pops up. “

Borderlands, it seems, is a video game which purports to take place in another universe where everyone lives on a planet run by crime lords (known as bosses), and every boss has it’s own theme music, much like how baseball players get to choose a song to play while they’re walking up to the batters box. The bosses pop up now and again, anticipated by cuts from bands very much influenced by TTKK. In fact, video games in general seem to have been influenced by this band: in 1998, there was even one called Thrill Kill that didn’t get released because it was so violent. This struck me as an especially perfect metaphor on Manafort Monday, since in a way he’s like a real life crime lord (though as a matter of fact probably the music that plays when he walks in the room is by Frank Sinatra…or that perp-y opening theme from “Dragnet.” So if you think about it in the right light, who DOESN’T want to see TTKK on the night before Halloween?  

Sadly, the literal answer to that rhetorical question is: everyone in the Silicon Valley. It wasn’t TTKKs fault, really: it was sort of the fault of San Jose. That place has been a bad location for live music for years and years, and I should know, as I was the second string rock critic for the San Jose paper the Mercury News for a while. Mostly I covered shed shows at nearby Shoreline or arena shows, although I do recall a few weird outlying events like seeing  Ted Nugent  at the Civic Center (where my brother, eyeing a guy who was dressed only in a leopard print loin cloth and those Thor sandals that lace up around your calves,  made one of the all-time funniest remarks of my working life when he asked wonderingly, “but where does he keep his car keys?” or the Screaming Trees at some short-lived club or other right near here where a guy called me and Isabelle “embarrassing women” to our faces, because one of us had said something indicating we knew the name of the label, the bass player, and  opening act, and had possibly even heard of Black Sabbath.

In short, there is just something very un-rock ‘n’ roll about San Jose, and this had never been truer than on last Monday night. As I drove through the deserted streets – and I DO mean deserted -- I noticed a bunch of people in turquoise Sharks jerseys walking away from the SAP Center. They were not walking towards the Ritz, to top off their festivities with a little anti-religious/pro-satanic, psychedelic electro punk, that’s for sure. After about the third couple walked by dressed identically, it occurred to me that an ice hockey jersey, though exceedingly unflattering to almost everyone, would be good Halloween costume, and how odd it was that none of these people were intending it thusly.

What makes a town a good rock town, anyway? My brother, who writes a whole blog on this topic, says it has to do with cheap real estate, but if that were the case, the San Jose would be far, far more of a hot spot. It’s really very strange, there is a university just a few blocks away from downtown, lots of good restaurants and bars, all kinds of things you’d want in a city…but from a music perspective, the place just perennially languishes, and this was a case in point: poor MTWTTKK were playing to a half full house – and ‘half’ is probably throwing roses at it. It wasn’t quite a bad enough house to make me say they were playing only to me; there was a hefty cheer after every song from “I See Good Spirits and I See Bad Spirits” and “Confessions of a Knife,” but there was a giant gaping empty space on the floor that could not have looked good from the stage, and the band itself looked kind of shock-faced; like it was very professionally going through the motions. It made me feel bad for them, and I hate feeling bad for bands.  

I mean, you know the scene in “The Crow” where Brandon Lee gets all badass during a Thrill Kill Kult performance in a warehouse, and people are all throwing themselves off the stage and stuff? This show wasn’t at all like that. Also, the show only cost $13 to get in – one dollar less than it cost to see “Blade Runner 2049” at the-good-cineplex-with-the-seats-you-lie-down-in – but that also made me sad. I used to have a moderate liking for this kind of industrial-disco-grindcore: seeing Ministry charm an Akron audience into quite literally destroying the arena during a driving rainstorm is one of the signature rock critic moments of my life, as was, in a slightly different way, the time Al Jourgensen shook a devil-horned fist at me when I accidentally cut him off on an on-ramp to MOPAC in Austin. TTKK’s shtick, with its anti-religious costumes and sex stuff, is way more campy than that, but they too were groundbreaking in their way, and I like that song “Rivers of Blood, Years of Darkness,” (although “do as you’re told with the weapons of the world” has a more ominous sound to it than it did when I first heard it.)

As the ‘Ks’ indicate, My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult aren’t as hardcore as Ministry: their iconography is much more rooted in that latex-and-lace 70s L.A. aesthetic, with a soupcon of horror film/serial killer chic laid on for good measure; their  music is essentially a loud fast drone or chant overlaid with sampled snippets of b-movies over a very industrial-strength rhythm. It's really a studio concoction, which is why its live act changes each tour: in this incarnation, besides its two eternal main men (“Groovie Mann” and “Buzz McCoy”) and a young drummer, there were two women with identical Bettie Page haircuts, one a cool-as-hell bassist, Mimi Star, and the other ("Bomb Gang Girl") who stood stock still and did a zombie- robot dance the entire time. Later, someone asked me if the show made my ears bleed, and the answer was, no – and that’s actually problematic, because this kind of stuff doesn’t sound good unless it really makes your bones shake. Plus, a band without a guitarist, while an admirable idea, means that the key never changes, and monotony ensues. However grindy and electric the machines and the keyboards get, you end up thinking, ‘this would be a lot more tolerable to a person on speed.’ And there’s just no way that anyone is going to be on speed on a Monday night in San Jose, although to their eternal credit, there were two ladies clad in semi-obscene Marie Antoinette wear.

But it’s hard to be alone in spirit like that, and they didn’t quite overcome my ennui with the whole thing. Indeed, I left feeling disgusted that I had even gone  out; wishing instead that I had stayed home to finish Laurent Binet’s book “The 7th Function ofLanguage,” which has one very interesting gloss on Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of ‘desiring production,’ that is, the idea that desire is itself a productive, if mechanistic, force, that drives people (all us ‘desiring machines’) to do things in our social world that fall within the economy of desire; things like going to nightclubs on Mondays to see loud bands who sing songs about fucking and murder.

One interpretation of this idea – supported by recent sex scandals about all those men whose names I don’t want to mention herein -- is that our society’s use of desire is sort of evil, like factories are evil. Sex isn’t just on wheels in D & G, it IS a wheel, or rather an engine, with pistons beating down on life  relentlessly and unemotionally in the most heartless way possible. This is kind of a depressing and unromantic way to look at what is, after all, a life force. But another way forward, when listening to the Thrill Kill Kult, is that the band takes the idea of desire as mechanistic and plays with it. By turning it into an enjoyable audible proposition, they reinsert the pleasure in it – and also remove the fear and dread. You know, like Halloween does. That’s why I feel sad that TTKK didn’t have a good night; I hope that the next night show in SF went a lot better for them.

*(I just made that word up, it’s the audible version of personifies.)