Genesis P’Orridge: Improvising with Evolution Part 2 of the interview I did in 2005 with "trickster" artist/musician and evolutionary agent Genesis P’Orridge of Throbbing Gristle Fame

"I love the human species and I despair of its stupidity and cruelty."

JK: How much of the band’s performance last night was improvised, instrumentally speaking?

GP-O: The last time we played together was in Paris, the last week of September. We haven’t rehearsed or played together since then, except that Lady Jaye and Morrison Edly and I played in Psychic TV for three months. Friday (the night before the gig) Edley set up a couple of loops (triggered on his drum pads) and asked me if I could work with them. I listened to each one for no more than thirty seconds and picked three and said I could definitely do something with those. I wrote the set list ten minutes before we went on. “New York Stories” began as a poem that I made up on the spot in Paris, in September and evolved into a full song during the tour with Psychic TV. The last section in which I sang “I was small, I was tall” was a new loop. I hadn’t even heard it before. So I’d say basically ninety five percent of the show was improvised.

JK: It’s a great mix of song structure and improvisation. The music is very fresh. You can tell its being created at the moment you’re hearing it. Most bands that play songs, although they can generate great energy, you basically know what’s gonna happen even before they walk out on stage. Three to five minutes of verse/chorus/solo/ verse/chorus… followed by another song with the same structure. It’s all so predictable. The bottom line that you have to ask yourself, as Steve Lacy used to say is: “Is this stuff alive or is it dead?”

GP-O: (Laughs)

JK: But improvisation had a big part in the beauty that you guys created last night. Did your initial awareness of improvisation come from listening to jazz?

GP-O: I grew up listening to jazz as a kid. I used to really like Art Tatum and listened to a lot of Gene Krupa and Buddy Rich. My father was a drummer in a dance band before the war, so I grew up drumming along with him to that music and went to see people like Duke Ellington and Count Basie. I mainly listened to jazz until ’63 when the Stones came along. Then it was the Stones and the Velvet Underground. I also collected records by John Cage and Berio and all kinds of early amazing electronic music. Stockhausen was a big influence on me. In fact the original approach to Throbbing Gristle was to combine the Stockhausen with the Velvet Underground, to liberate the verse/chorus/verse/chorus rigidity. But I still listened to jazz for years and years, day in and day out - to Coltrane, Albert Ayler and Charlie Mingus. I always listened from the perspective of the drummer. Then at school I joined the choir and used to sing plain chants and medieval music. I used to sing Descante and was interested in more unusual harmonies. So that combined with listening to how jazz melodies are improvised and extended was a big influence. Most people never ask me about it, no more than six people in the last thirty-odd years have asked if I ever had musical training. They just assumed I haven’t, but in fact I am a trained drummer. I also play the piano. To me it’s very obvious that I have a clear grasp of phrasing and tonality.

JK: I’m not at all surprised that you sang in choir. At times I hear elements of modal, choral-like singing your performance. You’re phrasing is really succinct and strong. You never lose it even while all the sounds and textures are melding into one another and rhythms are bumping and colliding. What holds it all together is not just you as a performer, visually, but your delivery as a singer as well.

GP-O: I used to listen to a lot of Billie Holiday and Frank Sinatra. When he was young and had a really pure voice, he was fantastic! Because I was a drummer I have a very good sense of rhythm and can always find my way back, no matter how far I seem to have slid away.

JK: Well, you had that one piece with the drum track and you were trying to tell the sound man to turn it up in the monitors and everyone thought you were doing some cute little disco routine, waving your finger in the air. Some of the people in the crowd even started to do it as well, but you were actually trying to signal the sound guy.

GP-O: I’m glad you got that!

JK: It was hilarious. They thought you were boogying. So did the sound man ‘cause he never figured it out.

GP-O: (Laughs)

JK: What was great about it was how you set up this vamp like you were about to do a rap and then you just walked away from it. Instead of letting the beat dominate and define the delivery of the lyrics, it was just there, co-existing with everything else that you and the band did.

GP-O: I think people are ready to be surprised. Novelty is very under-rated!

JK: Perhaps at this point we should talk about your physical appearance.

GP-O: You mean this? (S/he points to his/her breast.)

JK: Well, I’m old fashioned, Gen. Let’s start with your teeth.

GP-O: It’s funny, sometimes I’ll be in a bank or a shop, paying for something. I’ll smile and say thank you and people will give me a slightly taken-aback look. And I’ll leave scratching my head, wondering what’s wrong with them? What did they look at me like that for? By then I’ll be halfway down the block and realize they were surprised by the gold teeth. I’m so used to it that I completely forget. Every once in a while I catch a glimpse of them and realize they’re pretty striking.

JK: Yeah, pretty striking! My mother would call you “ a piece of work.”

GP-O: Actually, I’m a piece of work in progress! In 1995 my left arm got smashed in a fire in LA. (S/he holds up both arms together for me to observe and compare.)

JK: Wow! I can really see the difference! I first met you in 1996 with Bachir Attar and was amazed at the scars on your arm. (Not only is her/his arm terribly scarred, it is a bit twisted and misshapen as well.)

GP-O: Oh, it was just out of the cast then. I’m really lucky it works. The wrist was broken. Eventually I won a court case and got the insurance to pay up for the hospital bills plus the pain and suffering. I always, always wanted to have metal teeth ever since I saw the movie Belle D’jour. Pierre Talente (check spelling of name) plays a gangster with this nice long leather coat and metal teeth. I saw it when I was on acid and was thoroughly besotted with the idea of those metal teeth. I told myself that one day, if I had any extra money I’m going to get metal teeth. By then I already had four gold teeth. I was working on it bit by bit. It was play money, really. Something I never expected to get so I treated myself to something completely frivolous. Lady Jaye found this dentist who would do it, because he had to destroy completely healthy teeth, which most dentists thought was sacrilege. He (the dentist) also made jewelry as a hobby, so each tooth was a replica of the one that was destroyed. They were drilled into a pointy stubs and the nerves were taken out. It took about eighteen months in all. There were times when it got really painful. One day it took six hours and they had to push all the skin away from the tooth and shove this…

JK: Uh… that’s maybe too much information for me. I’ve kind of got a weak stomach. Were you awake for all of this?

GP-O: Yeah, they gave me a local anesthetic and I was in agony. It was just one long delirious memory of pain and dental smells. I just stuck it out and I wound up with my gold teeth. It was kind of self-indulgent and decadent I s’pose… It turns out that Lady Jaye’s favorite movie was Belle D’Jour as well!

JK: There’s a lot of layers to what you do Genesis. There’s plenty of sensuality to your performance. Your sexual expression seems to be equally as important as your art and the music that you and the band create. Could you talk about the concept of “life as art?”

GP-O: When I used to read about the beatniks it seemed that their lives were just as important or equal to the art they produced. The same was true in dada or surrealism. The lives of 20^th century artists, no matter what their medium, was an essential aspect or ingredient of what made their work effective. I grew up in a very informed, modern generation, in the sixties. I took it more or less as a given that life and art, if they weren’t, should be inseparable. In old, early cultures art was a devotional expression and integrated with the cycles of life. Somewhere along the line it all became decorative in the service of the bureaucratic church. And then it became decorative in the service of the rich and powerful.

JK: And then it became a commodity, produced and sold by record companies.

GP-O: Yes… But there’s always been this very, very deep conviction in me that the emotional nature of people that I work with and their vision of life is what I’m interested in, even before I learn what their musical or artistic skills are. I met Bryin Dall, of all places in the post office on East 14^th Street, waiting for a parcel at the window. He said, “Genesis?” I’ve trained myself to not react because more often then not I’ll be involved in a pleasant but dreary conversation and I’ll have to pay attention to some guy I’ve never met before. That day I just wanted to be asleep on my feet and ignore everyone. But he was quite insistent, “Genesis… Genesis…” I looked around and in fact two people were saying my name!

JK: Well, you’re hardly incognito! You’re a far cry from Burroughs’ El Hombre Invisible!

GP-O: No, I’m not very good at that. In fact I once talked about that with William. But that’s another story. Anyway, one of those two people was Bryin Dall. He said, “I really love your music and I want you to know that it’s largely because of you that I became a musician. I was basically the first person who had given him permission to make music even though he didn’t have the traditional skills and qualifications. He was very nice and said, “I have a small recording studio and I’d like to offer you some free time as a way of thanking you.” I said, “Thank you,” took his card and as the universe would have it someone asked me to do some spoken-word poetry. That was a collaboration with Merzbow, (check spelling) the Japanese noise band that we did in ‘97. So I ended up recording various poems and spending time with Bryin in his studio. It worked very well. I was invited to do a poetry reading and invited Bryin along with his guitar and that’s how Thee Majesty began.

JK: Some of my favorite music has been created through what you might call “inspired amateurism.” Both Brian Jones and the Incredible String Band used to pick up whatever instrument around and just give it a whirl, to see how it fit into the mix. Sometimes the effect could be amazing. That approach really opened the door for me as a multi-instrumentalist.

GP-O: Lady Jaye had been caught up in a culture that said, “No, you can’t be a guitarist. You don’t have all the appropriate qualifications to be a musician.” And it was through her that I met Mo Edley. So with hindsight you can see this symmetry that makes everything balanced. But if you freeze the picture and analyze it with society’s logic, with consensus reality logic, it’s chaos and shouldn’t work. It should be a non-functioning combination. And yet as you and I know that’s the thing that some people call magick. There’s something else that happens when you assemble things in unexpected ways. Miracles occur. Things that you’d never find out if you always followed logic. I put together four people and have implicit faith in their integrity and honesty as people and the thing that makes it all work, between the band and the audience is a particular form of love that only creativity can release.

JK: Genesis you push a lot of people’s buttons. Some people think you’re a weird and scary guy or girl and yet here you go talking about love! There’s a remarkable amount of gentleness to what you do. A lot of people get turned off to things they think they won’t understand without even giving them a chance. In order for someone to fully experience what you have to offer they’ve got to suspend their ideas of music, sexuality, poetry, whatever… and let your performance wash over them like a waterfall. I think that’s what you’re after in your own gentle way, getting people to suspend their concept of reality and let you show them something new and different. Your performance seems more like an offering than bludgeoning people with your music and attitudes and philosophy. You’re offering a different vision, new and different sounds. Your physical presence alone gets people to re-think their very identity as a man or woman or something in between. That is, if they’re willing to go there.

GP-O: That’s really a beautiful way to explain it.

JK: You don’t purposefully make people feel bad or uncomfortable about who they are or who they think they should be. You just offer it and no matter how dark or scary or weird the imagery or the music gets, it’s offered with love and gentleness.

GP-O: Well, thank you. I don’t want to deliberately upset people because I want them to listen and consider what I’m saying. If I alienate them then they won’t listen.

JK: I find your physical, sexual expression to be totemic. With all your tattoos and different talismans you’re like a living, breathing collage.

GP-O: Oh definitely! It’s funny but one thread that really helps people to get what we’re doing with this pandrogyny as we call it, we always wind up going back to William Burroughs and Brion Gysin…

JK: Who both physically looked very straight.

GP-O: Way back in 1971 I had a long conversation with Burroughs about this. His strategy was to wear suits and be invisible and blend in. He did that so that he was able to go to the CIA offices, which he did once and give a talk on (his theory of) Control and language etc. He could go to a variety of functions and not put people off straight away. It allowed him the opportunity to say the ideas that he wanted without people being distracted by the way he looked, or him being dismissed by the way he looked. With his ideas it would have been too easy for people to write him off, if he was a weird guy with long hair. And that’s a strategy.

JK: Completely the opposite of Allen (Ginsberg)!

GP-O: Yes! And they disagreed about it too! I committed myself to more of the Ginsberg approach. But if you come off very visual in your presentation, you almost become transparent. You can become like a cartoon.

JK: Maybe a mirage but you were far from transparent last night. No one could take their eyes off you.

GP-O: And yet I was as dressed-down as I’ve been in years. That was Lady Jaye’s idea. We want people to take what we have to say seriously. She said just for a change dress black, somber, simple so they’ll hear what you say without discounting it because of how you look. And she was right! We’ll never know what would have happened if I wore a bright pink outfit! Ultimately I want to create a safe zone where I can have a dialog with people about ideas. Of course you have to realize it’s a voyage of discovery for us too. There are certain things you don’t know that’s going to happen that you just go with.

JK: The band has a real ensemble. You’re all creating in the moment and then it seems as if everyone splits off and goes into their own space, ignores each other for a while and then the band collects again and continues.

GP-O: There’s a tiny lag where one part of my consciousness is the observer and I’m able to enjoy what’s happening with the audience and am just as surprised by it. It’s very much an out-of-body experience. There’s a part of Gen that’s just watching and listening and thinking wow those are nice words and I love the way they played those chords. I think the audience instinctively feels that we are journeying with them and that we are not privy or have super power over anybody.

JK: A lot of rock singers, we won’t mention any names, work from their ego and it’s so tiresome. They perform at you. They have it and they’ll put it out there at you for the price of a ticket.

GP-O: Rock bands often come on stage and believe the situation as it is traditionally presented, which is that they are special and the audience is there to give energy to them in adoration and in money and that the band deserves it. We always go on, whether in PTV3 (the latest incarnation of Psychic TV ) or Thee Majesty to give as much of our energy to the audience as we can! And we do feel privileged, blessed and lucky that people are willing to give us some of their time and money to be with us and that shouldn’t be taken lightly. So I have a responsibility to respect they’re there. They could be somewhere else! Just because you’re on stage doesn’t mean you’re important or intelligent.

JK: Is that a cheap shot at the president? What is the difference between Psychic TV and Thee Majesty? Both bands have Morrison Edley and Lady Jaye in them…

GP-O: PTV3 is to rock music what Thee Majesty is to improvised music. I never thought I’d hear myself say it but PTV3 is how I always wanted Psychic TV to sound. It’s just really, really good mantra psychedelic garage music with a modern twist. We’ll be recording a new album with this line-up. (Including Alice Jenese on bass, Marcus Fabulous Perrson on keyboards and David Max on lead guitar.)

JK: Good. The world could use more modern psychedelic garage mantras these days.

GP-O: With TG (Throbbing Gristle) I agonized a long time about what to call it and finally decided on “Industrial Music” and probably nobody who’s reading Signal To Noise remembers that once upon a time there was no genre called “Industrial Music.” Now there’s a world-wide industry! But actually I sat down and strategized and designed it as a concept. That’s why I call myself a cultural engineer and not an artist.

JK: Do you see your life separate from the discipline of “cultural engineering?” Or is it completely intertwined?

GP-O: I grew up believing that art and life were very much the same thing. And although it might’ve become a cliché, there are not that many examples of people that I know of, artists or whatever that have taken it as seriously as I have. I truly have committed my life and art to being absolutely inseparable. And that includes my physical body too. I’ve always said I would never wear anything on stage that I wouldn’t wear to go shopping. Which is to say it shouldn’t be artificial or a “safe” character that I’m playing. Whatever I am on stage is me representing what I believe in and what I think people should be able to be like. That’s how I challenge myself.

JK: At what point did you become aware of Brion Gysin’s cut-ups and what effect did they ultimately have on you?

GP-O: Through Williams’ Dead Fingers Talk. Several of his books were published in England as cheap paperbacks because they were seen as pornography because they had sex bits in them. My father, bless him, used to pick up anything by Burroughs or Kerouac when he was travelling. He got me Naked Lunch, Dead Fingers Talk, On the Road. He didn’t read them thank goodness and had no idea how much they were corrupting my world view, or reinforcing it I should say. The cut-ups, for all you people who read Signal To Noise but don’t know, William and Brion did a book together called The Third Mind. The basic theory is when two artists collaborate, - they would both write stuff, chop it up and then re-assemble it, the re-assembled piece of work was no longer by William Burroughs or Brion Gysin. Nor is it really by them as it includes the process of random chance. So they would assign the being which created that work, they would call it the Third Mind - the mind created by the other two collaborators. Lady Jaye and I have been collaborating too. As you can see when we got married we switched roles, and began playing with expectations and identity. (Genesis hands me a photograph of their wedding. Lady Jaye is dressed macho in black leather while P-orridge is all in white wearing a wedding gown.) All through my life, from the sixties until now I have been investigating identity and the unfolding of DNA as a program and different ways to confound it. One question I asked William Burroughs… I would go visit him and treat him like the oracle… “What is the purpose of creativity?” And he said, “The only real purpose of creativity is to short-circuit Control.” I said, “Well how do you short circuit Control?” And he said, “You have to cut it up!” Then the linearity is gone and with linearity comes the for-seeable. DNA is the ultimate program. As Brion used to say in a pre-recorded universe who made the first recording? You can argue very convincingly that the planet earth is a recording device. How do we know about history? Because traces of it are recorded in fossils and so on. Nearly every age of human beings that have lived so far are still happening simultaneously. Some are still living in the middle ages. You have men in the Sahara still living in a prehistoric mode and then there are people in present day Tokyo. So Lady Jaye and I have taken what is the next inevitable step, which is to include the human body. For the first time in history, that we know of, we have the ability to cut up, rewind, collage, assemble and disassemble DNA, which is the ultimate recording of the species. That recording was once helpful for human beings to survive. It was good for human beings to be aggressive, to maintain and possess territory and breed and replicate by the strongest having the right to make babies. All of that was a series of prehistoric imperatives that are in our DNA, our genetic code, which are the reasons that as a species we have survived and flourished through ice ages and everything. However the environment has now changed. But we still have the same genetic code and the same imperatives which are to occupy other people’s territories, to use violence and brutality to control replication of children with abortion and so on… All these things that were once survival codes are now destructive codes. It seems that the most critical purpose for thinkers in our time is to find ways to short circuit DNA codes. We now have genetic engineering, cosmetic surgery and computers - all this amazing technology which we could apply to make the species evolve so that it was actually modern. At the moment we have a prehistoric species in a technological environment and we’re behaving with pre-historical imperatives that are not only irrelevant, but actually negative and destructive. So we feel that we want to use our bodies, because we use our bodies as our art, and our lives to at least represent and suggest a new alternative way of evolving because we believe it is actually a matter of survival as a species. We can either continue to pretend that something will miraculously change our innate behavior and save us all at the very last minute or we can finally take responsibility for own evolution. And that’s exactly what we’re representing with pandrogeny. The two different lineage of human species - male and female, for lack of better terms, were fine when we just needed to replicate and build up the population. But now its time to create a third being just as William and Brion created the Third Mind. I am limited by the biology that I’ve been given…

JK: But you’re working on it!

GP-O: Yes, but I have committed my body and mind and my life, as well as my life experience to this issue that needs to be addressed. It may seem extreme. I don’t think it really is, but in fact the job of the artist is to present extreme ideas in order to drag the rest of society kicking and screaming towards something that might enhance and improve the quality of life and the experience of being alive! Ultimately Lady Jaye and I are halves of something new that can be created by our species. We’re improvising with evolution!

JK: Burroughs identified it as “Control.” Gysin said it’s a pre-recorded world, which ties into the Muslim concept of pre-ordained fate – “It is written.” So what is running the whole show?

GP-O: It’s often forgotten in the blur of daily life that each person is a narrative, a story. But more often than not, we’re not the authors of the narrative. It happens before birth if you think about it. You’re conceived often by parents, if it’s deliberate anyway, who have, at the moment you’re conceived, expectations of what they want you to be like. They start to write them out before you show up. They choose a name for you that was either the name of a grandparent or a pop star. But with that name they pick they impose a narrative, their idea of what your identity should be before you even appear. Even when you’re in the womb you can hear people talking - is it a boy or girl? What will they be when they grow up? Where will they go to school? All this is being discussed and imprinted as you’re appearing into this material world. As a child, your family and people in the immediate social group continue to interfere with and control your narrative. The first thing I did to liberate myself from other people being the author of my narrative was to claim back authorship of my own story and that was to change my name, legally to Genesis P-orridge in 1970. At that point I declared I’m going to do everything I can to reclaim every aspect possible of my story. Wipe it clean and decide who and what I want to be. In a way, the rest of my life and art has been the documentation of that struggle to become truly the author of my own story and become the being that I wish to be. I kept some aspects that I inherited, behavior or philosophy, but I want everything that I am to be by choice, not unconsciously imposed. Once you can see everything that you are as malleable and changeable its inevitable that the body would become another question. Did I want to be this shape? Did I want to be male or female or don’t I want to be either? (Genesis said with a big gold tooth smile.) It’s not about gender. It’s about identity and narrative.

JK: As a “port of entry,” to use Burroughs’ term, most people would connect your sexual expression and identity with the scene surrounding Andy Warhol in the sixties. By the early seventies, kids started wearing mascara and blurring the distinction between male and female in their dress, following the fashion from pop stars like T. Rex, David Bowie and Lou Reed. There was a playfulness to it that was incredibly liberating. But with you it goes much further. What do you consider yourself? She? He? Or transgender?

GP-O: (Laughs sinisterly) Some people will tell you they’re a man trapped in a woman’s body. Some will tell you they are a woman trapped in a man’s body. Lady Jaye and I will tell you that we just feel trapped in a body. Having said that, in terms of twenty four hour a day, day to day living, it’s easier for me to be perceived by the outside world as female because that’s what most people assume I am. If biological males think you’re a female and find you attractive and you’re not a biological female they can become incredibly aggressive. There are dozens and dozens of transgender people murdered every year because some guy was afraid of himself. So while there’s lots of fun and games involved in what Lady Jaye and I do, it’s very dangerous. When I go out I have to make a choice. Do I use the men’s toilet and risk being beaten up and thrown out or do I use the women’s toilet where no one bothers me and I’m accepted.

JK: And it’s cleaner too!

GP-O: But it’s illegal. It’s still illegal in most places in the United States for a trans-gender person to use the bathroom of the sex that they appear to be. And then what do you do when you go shopping for clothes? Which dressing room do you use? There’s a lot of difficult daily situations which occur. While its already a big commitment and can be painful from surgeries and so on, it’s also psychologically very demanding. It’s not something we decided to do lightly. I’m not planning on having my penis removed because I’m not trying to be female. I’m trying to be everything!

JK: I admire your commitment Gen, rigorous and demanding as it is. But though you say you’re not out to deliberately offend people you can’t say that your incantation-like song “Mary Never Wanted Jesus” doesn’t somehow mess with their belief systems.

GP-O: It just popped into my head as a whole ‘nother way of looking at the entire scenario. What if she really didn’t want the baby? It’s my job as an artist to explore and present what people are faced with. If I think of an idea, if it’s good, relevant or important, then it’s my responsibility to inject it into the bloodstream of culture.

JK: You’re a true patriot of the species!

GP-O: I love the human species and I despair of its stupidity and cruelty. But not enough people are willing to speak up about how disillusioned they are about those who control culture. I just want to say I couldn’t do it without Lady Jaye, she identifies all the really deep themes and points out the obvious to me all the time.

JK: Any last parting words of wisdom that you’d like to add?

GP-O: Yes… In a time of darkness like this, that we’re now facing, pleasure is a weapon. Joy and communing with other people is radical. It’s no surprise that the powers that be are trying to suppress pleasure they understand its subversive role.