Ministry The lost gospels according to Al Jourgensen by Al Jourgensen
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

"That's the weird thing about Al. He has done enough drugs to kill a horse. Every day he wakes in the morning he defies science. But somehow, to this very day, in the end no matter what condition he's in, he comes up with amazing stuff."
(Jello Biafra, Dead Kennedys and Lard frontman, talking about Al Jourgensen)

It may seem strange that having been born in the pre-historic times I may be interested in industrial metal music. Indeed, I am a classical music fan (for example, see my review of The Beethoven Quartet Companion), I am into 1960s jazz (for instance, see John Coltrane: His Life and Music ), and I also listen to the so-called "alternative rock" of the 1980s and 1990s (for instance, see the review of Never Enough: The Story of the Cure ). Yet I also like some music even "farther out there" from classical than rock: I still frequently listen to Ministry, an industrial metal band - commonly considered outrageous - whose career spans the years from 1981 till, basically, the present.

I love their live album In Case You Didn't Feel Like Showing Up and their most celebrated work Psalm 69. This is a kind of music that has convinced my family, my friends, and my grown-up students that I am insane. This is the music that merges "sharp, choppy thrash riff with the sounds of a whirring dentist drill, scraping metal, and screamed distorted punk vocals." My favorite piece is So What, a "sadistic number with a rattling beat, a droning bass line, and samples about murder, backed by wheezing laughter and interjected with blowtorch guitar bursts."

The above descriptions of music by Ministry come from Ministry. The Lost Gospels According to Al Jourgensen (2013) co-written by Mr. Jourgensen, the frontman, guitarist, and multi-instrumentalist of the band, and John Wiederhorn, a renowned rock journalist.

I am writing more about Ministry's music than about the book because I do not like the biography at all. While I admire Mr. Jourgensen's frankness about his extreme, massive, just plain gargantuan drug use - "I would shoot heroin, drink whiskey, smoke crack, do LSD, and then methadone would just keep me from getting sick if I couldn't find my heroin dealer" - I do not approve of the authors' (plural used on purpose) fascination with so many revolting things Mr. Jourgensen has done while not sober like, say, eating his bandmate's still warm vomit. Of course, he has the right to do whatever he pleases as long as it does not hurt anyone, but why do we, the readers, have to know about it? Also, I question the purpose of enumerating all drugs Mr. Jourgensen used while making each of the seventeen albums.

I put the blame on Mr. Wiederhorn for the book sounding like an attempt to gross the reader out or impress them with the depth and breadth of the musicians' chemical dependency. Mr. Jourgensen has miraculously survived and is apparently clean and sober now and praise to him for that. There is not much to praise the biography for. But I still love Ministry's music and am in awe of Mr. Jourgensen's art.

One and a half stars.



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