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Saturday, August 25, 2007

Genesis Gone Wild

Last night, I witnessed first hand the pandrogyny of Genesis P-Orridge with Psychic TV at The Independent here in San Francisco. Yes, the man has breasts now, in case you weren't paying attention, and likes to be called s/he, my favorite pronoun often used in place of the more formal 'one' when referring to hypothetical individuals.

Gen is working on his own hypothesis. Here's an excerpt from an interview at Perfect Sound Forever:

PSF: What do you think could be a positive evolutionary change for the human race?

Well, it depends how attached you are to the human body as a sacred thing. We think of the human body as not sacred. That's one of the great errors of the old religions, that the human body is the centre of everything. Our personal belief is that the evolution of the species is imminent in another sort of quantum leap and it will be where we finally let go of our romantic idea of the human body or of gender or the species being already perfect, and we use genetic engineering and cosmetic surgery and biological and cyber-organic attachments to completely redesign ourselves according to our wants and our needs and we become a species of infinite variety. So if you want to go into space, you use genes from polar bears to hibernate and maybe add extra arms and get rid of the legs because you're in a weightless environment. That's just an example. People have to let go of all their preconceptions of what we're meant to look like and how we're meant to function biologically and step into the actual future from our prehistoric state. We've let technology develop miraculously but we haven't bothered to change ourselves. If we change physically, then our way of perceiving things changes and we need to change the way we perceive everything. That's our dream, but for some people, it would be a nightmare. It's about whether people are sentimental about the human body or not. People are surprisingly resistant to change.

PSF: There's always resistance to change full stop, isn't there?

But I think with the human body even more so because of all these medieval religions that insist that the human is perfect, divine, a reflection of an angry god. I don't want to be a reflection of an angry god, quite frankly.

PSF: You've already embarked upon that path with pandrogyny and cosmetic surgery.

It's a matter of immersion in the idea to see how it might feel and where it might go and state quite clearly that we believe what we're saying and we're prepared to stand by it and submit to our proposals as far as we can. Wouldn't it be great if you could say, "I'd like to have scales or fur"? The environment is changing and we might need to be able to do that just to survive whatever happens to the weather or the ozone. I think we're going to have to really rethink ourselves and put ourselves not at the centre of life but just be one aspect of life.

PSF: I suppose the ultimate extreme of that would be that human consciousness would exist without a body.

Absolutely, well done! Of course, that would be the perfect final result.

PSF: Are you hoping to achieve that?

Oh god, yeah! We talk about that a lot. To leave the human body completely behind but maintain a sense of self, an individuated self, would be perfect.

My own theory, based on that interview, is that at 57, Genesis might be having some issues with mortality, just like any aging diva. Wouldn't perky breasts like these make any 57 year old feel young again? Man or woman? For his sake, I hope so. Seeing them live and in person took a few years off my own life, thank you very much. (Yes, he likes to show them off. Be thankful I didn't get my own photo.)

Forgive me for trivializing what's actually an interesting take on gender, identity, and the freedom of self-expression. Check out Breaking Sex!, written by Genesis and his wife, Lady Jaye. It's not exactly a linear thesis, so be patient. There's some good stuff in there. Here's an excerpt:

To throw off the shackles of experience of true sexual freedom and physical love, free love! End gender. Break sex.

Smash your closet relationships.
Your closest friendships.
Cut your SELF up, break every pattern of behaviour,
Every taboo, every inhibition…
To see who you really are?
To see who’s really there.
Free yourself from sex.
The more detached one is from a role, the easier it becomes to form.
IS IT YOU?

"So, Kirsten, shut the fuck up about Gen's man boobs, already, and tell us about the show," you say? Ok, fine, but I can't shut up about the whole body modification theme of the evening. There was a lot of footage of Gen's and Lady Jaye's plastic surgery experiments projected during the show. Apparently, they're trying to look identical, presumably to blur the lines between their genders and identities. Seems to me, he's getting a lot more work done than she is. Maybe he really just wants to be her. As far as we could tell, all she had to do was get a nose job.

Genesis is on the left side of that projection and Lady Jaye is on the right. The bass player in the center of the photograph is NOT Lady Jaye, by the way, although they look a bit alike in some of the footage. Lady Jaye was at the back of the stage somewhere presumably pushing sample buttons and controlling the reverb on Gen's voice - the reverb that made me deaf, as a matter of fact.

So, right, speaking of the music, how about that show, huh? In short, it rocked so much more than I expected it would. My friend Bill, long time Psychic TV fan and former Genesis devotee, had told me to expect a rock show. I was skeptical. Why? Well, Bill and I are quite different. Since the turn of the century, I've moved pretty far away from electronic, dance, industrial, and experimental music. I like to rock out. I have my reasons, which I won't go into now, but suffice it to say that when Bill says something's going to rock, it's generally derogatory. Based on this, I expected low energy, mid-tempo meanderings, the likes of which are found on Trip Reset, the last album I bought by Psychic TV back in 1996. To me, Trip Reset was trying to be a more traditional 'rock' album than I was used to from the band.

What I really hoped was that Bill was wrong. I secretly wanted to return to the early 90s and hear something completely out there - loopy, electronic, psychedelic, ambient...or noisy. Whatever. I was ready for it. You see, the last Psychic TV album I actually liked (fell madly in love with, frankly) was Cathedral Engine. (Sadly, this album appears to be unavailable right now.)

[I will not be distracted by this cover.]

Besides the fact that this album is, well, loopy, electronic, psychedelic, ambient, and occasionally noisy, I have a strong emotional connection to it. For me, the sounds and how I feel about the sounds are indistinguishable. I don't know how else to describe it. The chance that I could have had this kind of intense experience at a live Psychic TV show (without the aid of any exotic drugs) was pretty slim, so I was both hopeful and a little frightened (man boobs aside) of what I might encounter that night.

Thankfully, they took the safe route and decided to give us a good, old-fashioned rock show - a loopy, psychedelic, occasionally noisy, occasionally electronic, high energy rock show. As far as I can tell, they played mostly new material, a few old songs, including 'Suspicious', and a couple covers, including a cover of the Velvet Underground song 'Foggy Notion'. So there you have it: after all that, a two sentence review of the actual performance.

Oh, and because of the show, I think I might actually check out their latest recording: Hell Is Invisible...Heaven Is Here, but I'm skeptical. I suspect my renewed interest in Psychic TV will be brief.

Labels: music, San Francisco, sex