As my somewhat warm Pabst and I sit down to begin a review of this re-release of GG and Antiseen’s Murder Junkies CD (originally available, I believe, on the immortal Baloney Shrapnel label), TV sets across America are buzzing with masturbatory coverage of the fresh death of the celebrity train wreck known as Anna Nicole Smith. A fitting background, I suppose, to ruminate about one of the most garish train wrecks of the modern era; scumfuc sex symbol, Mr. GG “Jesus” Allin. It may well be true to say that the only thing that we, as a narcissistic, reality-TV-addicted society, are more fascinated with than our own selves, is celebrity train wrecks. GG’s Q-Score, of course, never got close to that of Anna Nicole, because, for one thing, we seem to prefer our train wrecks, like our rebels, to look like movie stars. Whether you’re crashing and burning or raging against the system, you’d better damn well look good doing it. If not, the sleepy gaze of the ovine populace will wander elsewhere. And let’s be honest: it didn’t help GG’s Q-Score to have a pink Mike-N-Ike between his legs. Can you imagine what a folk hero he’d be if he’d been proudly brandishing a giant trouser pike like that of adored metal dunce, Tommy Lee? I’ll even go so far as to say that Tommy Lee is a celebrity now because of his abundant schwanz. He’s literally riding the coattails of his own penis. Yes, he’s a decent, if unimaginative, heavy metal drummer in a popular ‘80s hair metal band, and he’s an apparently sweet, dumb guy—when he’s not practicing rock star-style domestic abuse. But would he really have ascended to the heights of fame that he has if he hadn’t done so by scaling his own dick ladder? I doubt it. He’d be just another also-ran, half-baked celebrity, starring on B-celebrity reality TV shows like his compadre Vince Neal. No big whoop. And then that begs the question: if GG didn’t have his famously toddler-sized dink, would he have had the seething rage and all-encompassing loathing that inspired him to make a name for himself by spazzing out naked in public and re-eating the digested dinner he had the night before? And that makes me wonder what would GG have been like if he were around now to take advantage of all the wonderful penis enlargement technologies that I keep hearing about through constant and daily email ad campaigns. I’m sure GG was much more complex than a mere penis envy case and I don’t doubt that, for whatever reasons, he felt real pain in his short, tattered life. But as it is with all celebrity train wrecks, be it Anna Nicole or GG Allin, it’s hard not to wonder what inspired them to do what they did while they were alive. And it’s especially difficult to try to unknot the truths and the lies of their lives from one another. That’s because the truth of their perceived fakeness or genuineness probably lies most closely to the realm of paradox; the Twilight Zone-ish area where the lines we’ve all drawn between our either-or’s disappear like Britney Spears underpants. As a matter of fact, it is out of a healthy respect for the gooey reality of paradox in our everyday lives that I try to make a point of drinking my beer out of a Klein bottle (a sort of Mobius Strip version of a bottle that has no actual inside or outside) just to remind myself how our rational mind forever falls short of explaining away the weird, weird universe in which we live. But I seem to have wandered far afield here, as I so oftentimes do. On with the review: This re-release captures the euphonious sounds of GG Allin teamed up with the Boys from Brutalsville and if you’ve ever heard GG or Antiseen before, you know just what to expect. Glowering scum dirges of hate with guitars that sound like lawnmowers running in a tin shed. This CD also includes a few tracks of GG’s tender “unplugged” side, crooning “I wanna fuck the shit out of you” in his best David Allan Coe impersonation. The thing about GG, though, was that he always sang—or hollered—like he had a couple shoehorns lodged in his mouth. But maybe that’s a good thing, because no one wants a self-proclaimed “outlaw scumfuc” to have the clean virginal pipes of someone like Josh Groban. Sounding like you might be sucking on some turdballs the way other people suck on hard candies can only lend to your verisimilitude when you’re someone in GG’s line of business. The only problem with having a mouthful of dung Mentos is that sometimes GG’s “sinister” lyrics lose some of their scariness to the mush-mouth syndrome. For example, on “I Hate People” it sounds like he might actually be singing “I hate cream corn”—which would be a funny thing for GG Allin to be singing, considering that the foul glop that used to drop from his backside babyfood dispenser looked a lot like cream corn much of the time. And no one in their right mind would ever slather their bloodied, naked body with something they hate, right? That just wouldn’t make sense. But maybe this has less to do with GG and more to do with the wax build up in my ears. Then again, it never really was about the lyrics. GG was a lot of things, but he was no poet. He wasn’t even all that original. Some of his most infamous trademark moves had already been done by others: most notably, Sid, Iggy, and Stiv. Each of those gentlemen had experimented with onstage scarification rituals before GG did. Even his never-made-good threat to kill himself onstage wasn’t all that original; Nazi Dog, of Canada’s Viletones, had made similar threats years before the gimmick even flickered in GG’s dented head. And as far as jerking his pud and shitting himself in public goes, Diogenes the Cynic secured that act as his “intellectual property” way back in ancient Greece, several hundred years before the birth of that other famous “Jesus.” But GG was certainly an original synthesis of all those people and all their various vile acts. And he took that whole burning shit heap of reckless endangerment and rage and he pushed it further and more demonically than anyone has, before or since. And in some weird way, in doing so, he provided us a vital service much like Diogenes did way back when. That’s something that I don’t think can be said of a train wreck like Anna Nicole. “All retch and no vomit” is a tag you can never pin on GG Allin.
–aphid (TKO)