 | ||
 | ||
                       |
|
 |
|
The Abominable Mr. Zombie rises again
"A lot of the music these days is bent on reflecting reality, but I never thought that was the purpose it was supposed to serve," says Zombie, commenting on the depressing poor-me-life-sucks trend of angst-driven suicidal grunge now plaguing the airwaves. "Music is supposed to take you somewhere else, not keep throwing it back in your face. The only role music fulfills in society is entertainment. And if anyone wants to say that it's something else, they're full of shit. If it's not entertaining you, you're not going to listen to it. That's why Disneyland is still there." Non-minced words for all those ego messiahs and one or two Lilith fairies who disempower submissive audiences, pretending their songs are divine beacons for the lost when it's really just another gimmick. That's entertainment, ladies and gentlemen. Ch-ching. And Zombie's not kidding himself about the underpinnings of the industry. "It's a business," he says. "A lot of people naively want to get into it thinking it's some grand love of art. But as soon as you don't make them money, they don't want to know you exist. I always knew the reality of what it was, so I was never disgusted by it. This doesn't mean that within it you can't do great things. But you know, you can't run around like a damaged little sensitive artist either." For Zombie, business is about delivering fun to famished audiences, and business is good. With praise from forebears like Alice Cooper and under a continuous fusillade of parental curses, he's been stinging the youth with his techno-thrill bazaar of horror since the mid-'80s birth of White Zombie. Three platinum albums and five Grammy nominations later, today he's giving all-new meaning to the word twisted, entrenching himself yet deeper in the fast food underbelly of America's darker persona. "It wasn't really intentional," says Zombie, who was raised in the high camp '70s with G.I. Joe, snorkel coats, Vincent Price, and the KISS Army. "Growing up and being surrounded by that stuff, I feel like I'm just a product of that world. Watching TV, going to the drive-in, reading comic books. It was that complete, 100-percent American pop-culture upbringing." From the Clockwork Orange flashback single "Never Gonna Stop," to the Ozzy Osbourne collaboration on "Iron Head," Zombie's November release, Sinister Urge, is an urban industrial dance mix for the living dead. A culmination of those '70s influences translated into a modern street tongue. For instance the song "Bring Her Down (to crippletown)" recorded live with a 30-piece orchestra in this James Bond-meets-Cheap Trick concoction of garage brilliance. "I wanted to find a way to create the sound records used to have when everything was big and live and real," says Zombie, "before you could cheat everything with computers. That's what all the records I loved as a kid sounded like. The [symphony] thought it was funny. It's really not the type of thing they ever do." Then again, Zombie never does the same thing twice. Like some postmodern Virgil, by constantly challenging himself and experimenting, he manages to elude category, staying a step ahead of the crowd as shock rock's more mature, more intelligent bastard child. From designing his own T-shirts and concert posters, to stage pyrotechnics and directing his own music videos, creative control is important to Zombie, who keeps his elbows steeped in every aspect of his productions. The music and the art are an integral part of the experience, an interactive multimedia journey of Zombie's own creation, like cutting waves on a surfboard through the American psyche. "For me, everything ties together into one giant thing," he explains. "They say that you can tell when someone really cares about what he's doing. Some of them are so incredibly prepackaged. You know, with Britney Spears or whoever. In interviews, they look like deer caught in the headlights, because they have no idea how their lives are run. It's hilarious. They don't even know why they're wearing the clothes they're wearing. 'My stylist picked it out for me,' ya know. It's bizarre." With more than 20 music video direction credits under his belt, Zombie was also responsible for sketching the hallucination sequence in the animated film Beavis and Butthead Do America, where Beavis eats peyote and ends up in hell, which turns out to be Las Vegas. Besides the music, art, and stage shows, film has always been Zombie's other passion, stemming back to his 1970s childhood, when exploitation trash films reigned the drive-ins. Seeing his talent in music video production, in April 2000, Universal Studios gave Zombie the opportunity to write and direct his first major motion picture, House of 1000 Corpses, first slated for release in early 2001. "Without being specific," he says, "What I tried to achieve was making a very gritty, sleazy, '70s-style horror movie. You know, Last House on the Left, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Hills Have Eyes, from that time period of sleazy horror." After the screening, the film was quickly dropped by Universal as an "über-celebration of depravity" for its "visceral tone and intensity." Universal later signed over control to Zombie, and the film is currently in negotiations with a different distributor. "They don't want to put it out," says Zombie, "because it got an NC-17 rating and Universal doesn't release NC-17 movies. Right now it's at the MPAA. We're going back and forth trying to get an R-rating on it. You know, trying to motivate lawyers to generate papers is like watching grass grow. Everyone's like, 'When's it coming out?' But it's completely out of my hands; lawyers don't get paid by moving fast. I'm pushing as hard as I can to get it out by Halloween." As a recently released action figure, Zombie is living proof that we are slowly becoming the media we absorb. Or as he puts it, "There's almost no distinction between it anymore. Everything is so over-saturated, just complete overkill, you don't escape it." The rules are not only changing, but they're effective, and Zombie fans thoroughly understand them. Only the brave will survive this neurotic roller coaster of modern insanity, and the choices are becoming very clear. You can either learn the chaotic rhythms and hit the dance floor with gyrating hips, or shrivel up like a wimp, babble about how good it used to be and feel guilty like the rest of the victims. Respond: letters@boulderweekly.com
|
A smarter, younger world full of hunger and desperation continues to evolve from the spoils of previous generations. It has its own language, its own heroes. It holds the deed to its own destiny, and it ain't waiting around for nobody. The young people get it, and the older generations complain about how screwed up the young people are. About how we don't have squat today. But it's a lie. We are in full control. We run the show, and someday we'll be deciding the fate of your Social Security pensions, so you better be nice to us. Where does Rob Zombie fit into all of this? He's one of the engineers on this train, and you better be nice to him, too, or he might poison your confused children.
