Happy Death-Day, Oderous Urungus!

No.254, aired March 26, 2014. GWAR special, with readings from the Book of Isaiah (KJV), Ezra Pound & Beowulf (trans. Michael Alexander).

David Brockie, AKA Oderous Urungus, exhiled member of the Scumdogs of the Universe & lead bellower for the band of murdurous aliens known as GWAR, died Sunday March 23rd at age 50 (in the case of the earthling Brockie) or 43-billion-something (in the case of Oderous Urungus). 

For the uninitiated, GWAR is a costumed, monstrous, satirical heavy-metal band known for their wild stage-shows at which effigies are murdered & blood & other fluids are routinely spilled into the audience. I previously blogged about two of my four GWAR concerts in Regina and Winnipeg
(scroll to 5th post down).

GWAR is not the work of a solo artist genius directing hierlings – it is a multi-media collaboration involving many musicians, artists, and constume and set designers, film-makers, stage-hands, and not to mention recording engineers & mixers & marketers & everyone else up the art-industry chain which is in turn fed by many other industries stretching back to the BIG BANG BOOM. However, when I, as writer with a taste for the EPIC, think about GWAR, which I often do, I am mostly thinking about the artistic vision present in the lyrics & vocals of Brockie in his Oderous personna. He is the only constant member through the band’s history, and for me, the contributor whose contribution is what most makes the band worth commenting on.

I said in the program that GWAR is dead – which may not be exactly true. I read in one of the online tributes that GWAR may go on in memory of Brockie – which is fine by me – but of course it will not be the same. Brockie gave the project its epic focus, its horrifying clarity. GWAR did not create “literary” metal, as did Iron Maiden & Rush, for example. No, GWAR is an epic original, with deep roots in Homer, Shakespeare, Dante, The Bible, and every other bloody book in the sad yet vibrant history of human literature. Although there are many subtle examples in GWAR lyrics that could demonstrate that Oderous is a well-read monster, what actually matters is that Brockie’s ability to plug into what is REAL in the secular & religious canons allows him to take great creative RISKS in art-life unthinkable to lesser bands, and to invoke a historical gravitas unavailable to other shock-rockers & glam-rockers.

One commentator quoted Brockie in the week of his passing answering a question on the meaning of life, saying that the meaning of life is death. Nothing uncanny or remarkable here, I’m afraid. Looking for Oderous Urungus talking about death is like looking for a needle in a needlestack. If he was not talking about death, then he was probably talking about birth or sex, and often all three. His lyrics are incessently material – base. When he talks about religion, it is bloody wooden crosses and lusting priests. When he talks about war, it is all about the soldier killing, raping & being killed. When he talks about philosophy – he doesn’t talk about philosophy – he talks about human life reduced to its true essence, which is the fragile, breathing, bleeding, dying body itself.

I have much more to say about GWAR – all in time – but for now I feel inclined to comment on a couple of the songs played in this episode, those that some folks may be inclined to call “offensive,” as it were.

In a pair of songs (2 of a trio from the America Must Be Destroyed album), GWAR looks at life from the perspective of a rock star. What is actually disturbing in this pair – Rock N Roll Never Felt So Good and The Road Behind – is the directness & honesty of their performance. Where Frank Zappa combines ernest (if slightly ridiculous) lyrics with a mocking delivery, Brockie delivers horrifying content with a songwriter’s sincerity – he means every word – and in doing so reveals a general condition of falseness in rock music.

If either song were removed from its GWAR context & played on radio (and they sound very much like they could be hit rock songs from the late 70s/early 80s) it might come off as humourless and homicidal, truly horrible. But in the GWAR context they are hilarious send-ups of the rock and roll industry.

Rock N Roll Never Felt So Good is a GWAR original, but it is a also obviously a KISS song, or at least as close as you can get without being KISS. On the album, it arrives in the wake of mostly thrash metal, with some lounge jazz & rock & other sounds mixed in. The sudden incursion of radio-friendly rock is jarring. In GWAR’s typically heavier songs, the mechanized violence of metal becomes comedic ritual mass-murder. In the case of KISS’s glam rock, the violence implied in the music becomes a single violent assault. Go ahead and read the lyrics if you’re curious. In the first posted version of this essay, I mistakenly implied thtat these are Brockie's lyrics - in fact, according to wikipedia, Michael Bishop (Beefcake the Mighty on bass & vocals) was the sole credited songwriter, and therefore the lyricist.

The brutal acts depicted perfectly suit their musical context. Anyone with ears can hear the disconnect between the lyrical content of typical rock songs (school-boy crushes, innocent good-times) and their musical context, not to mention the actual excesses of rock-stars lives. GWAR shows us what is lurking behind rock spectacle – the domination and brutality of modern industry. Note that the images, when combined, are nonsensical – the protagonist first notices his victim’s age and clothing, and later that she is quadraplegic, and even later that her limbs are made of wood. Actually, these images describe the state of the stadium rock audience – immobile and passive in their numbered seats. The debaucherous acts range from conventional – “I laid a line of coke on her tits” – to homoerotic – “I need the taste of dick on my lips” – to bizarre – “I fucked her asshole with a piece of frozen shit.” The last of these could be a description of what bands like KISS are selling their audiences – moments of life fixed into frozen form and sold as shitty, predicable product. What is important is that the violent lyrics are sung in a way that is convincing as a hit rock song – there is no dissociation between the words & music. To demonstrate the point, at the very end of the song Oderous assumes his announcer personna, and asks “how you feelin’ now, baby?”, then the band plays a short metal lick from their Hell-O album – so the song is clearly framed as a rock side-show. (Side note: one of the particularities of 1980s media censorship is that far more explicit content could appear graphically in music videos than could be sung in words on record or printed on a lyric sheet – think of Motley Crue’s bondage videos, which displayed far more of their lived experience than any of their lyrics).

The next song on the album, The Road Behind, continues the rock star theme in ballad form. Again, Oderous sounds frighteningly sincere & plausible. But instead of ridiculous rock-star sentiment, GWAR shows us a spoiled, drug-addicted monster. And again, the imagery works at different registers, from plausible – “signed a million-dollar contract / I puked on every page” – to exagerrated – “slaughtered half the crew cause they ate my deli tray” – to rockstar bullshit combined with GWAR fantasy -

Well there you have it baby
I'm just a sensitive guy
Y'know I snuffed a million planets
But I still find time to cry
 
- all sung with the same affected sincerity. GWAR's homicidal lyrics dramatize the distance between music industry stars and their audience, who are reduced to lifeless corpses in endless revenue chains. Some phrases, “homicidal rage,” “you were a road-kill baby” – could be used in everyday rockstar situations, but in this context the death metaphors are resurrected & made literal.

GWAR’s bloody corpus of recorded events is indeed an epic poem of our time, and it will require a writer’s lifetime to understand & articulate its import. Stay tuned.

Part 1

1. Happy Death-Day - GWAR
2. Naval Aviation In Art? – Frank Zappa
3. Time For Death - GWAR
4. From The Eastern Gate I: Ceremonial Music – Alexina Louie (comp.) / Erica Goodman (harp) -- Isaiah Ch.34
5. The Salaminizer - GWAR
6. From The Eastern Gate: Haiku I – Alexina Louie (comp.) / Erica Goodman (harp)
7. Ham On The Bone - GWAR
8. From The Eastern Gate II: On Permanence – Alexina Louie (comp.) / Erica Goodman (harp) -- Sestina: Alt Aforte - Ezra Pound
9. Rock ‘N’ Roll Never Felt So Good - GWAR
10. From The Eastern Gate: Haiku II – Alexina Louie (comp.) / Erica Goodman (harp)
11. The Road Behind - GWAR

Part 2

1. From The Eastern Gate III: Birds At The Mountain Temple – Alexina Louie (comp.) / Erica Goodman (harp) – Beowulf
2. You Can’t Kill Terror - GWAR
3. From The Eastern Gate: Haiku II – Alexina Louie (comp.) / Erica Goodman (harp)
4. Go To Hell - GWAR
5. From The Eastern Gate IV: The Mandarins – Alexina Louie (comp.) / Erica Goodman (harp)
6. Damnation Under God - GWAR
7. Song of Nymphs III: Ritual – Marjan Mozetich (comp.) / Erica Goodman (harp)
8. Sick of You - GWAR