Ministry: Ballad Of A Broken System
When the world starts buckling under the weight of its own gluttony, there’s a few things you can expect. They’ll be an overload of misinformation, panic buying, and scaremongering. They’ll be headless chickens clucking the head of the world. They’ll be calls to arms and desperate cries for help. And most importantly, they’ll be art reflecting reality. So it’s no surprise that as climate change shifts gears, the political climate swaps parties in America, and a certain global pandemic continues to cause problems worldwide that MINISTRY frontman Al Jourgensen has something to say on new album Moral Hygiene.
“I think the pandemic is a really positive wake-up call that something like a MINISTRY album can’t muster up because we don’t have a global following like the pandemic has – they’re number one on the charts” chuckles Al down the phone from his home in California. “We both pose the same questions, like this might be a reboot for society to realise what’s important and what’s needed in this society to go forward as a human species on this planet, or whether we’re eradicated and extinct like every other thing that’s gone before.”
MINISTRY have never been a band to shy away from saying it how it is. Al Jourgensen pulls no punches when wading into political and societal waters, and the pandemic has provided a platform for him to explore our place in the universe’s grand scheme of things. It’s the basis for the many microscopic moments Moral Hygiene inspects.
“I found it almost refreshing, and obviously I don’t find 650,000 tests here and however many worldwide refreshing, but it does give pause to ‘are we doing things right?’” He ponders, questioning his own thoughts at every junction. “I don’t have the answers but I want people to be talking about it and discuss it in an intelligent and thorough way, and I try to incorporate all of that into art, because art imitates life as life imitates art.”
The intersection between art imitating life and life imitating art is closer to home than you might expect for a MINISTRY album. Whilst many of its songs are written like wake-up calls, the first song written for the record, Alert Level, was more personal. “Before we started working on the album, it was just a one-off, and the reason it was so important is because it’s intrinsically about climate change” Al admits. So far, so good, right? “We weren’t planning on even doing it as a single but the wildfires in California had come within a mile of my house and if that isn’t a wake-up call when it’s midday and the sky is orange and grey and you can’t breathe and you’re getting half hour alerts whilst recording saying you may have to evacuate – like yeah, that’s the biggest wake up call you can have and that set the tone for the record.”
And let it be written, Moral Hygiene is by no means easy listening. It’s eye-opening and it’s uncomfortable. It empowers you to dig a little deeper into everything you’re fed and encourages you to burst your own bubble and embrace the world as a global citizen. It’s something civil rights activist John Lewis sparked in Al’s heart, and inspired much of the album’s direction.
“He was prescient even on his deathbed, and everything he said in his final editorial, we’re in the middle of it now. I’m not into those fables 600 years earlier predicting the rise of Hitler, but I am interested in people that are prescient with what is going on six months to a year from now. What he said in his final editorial was a real wake up call to me as far as societal concerns.”
For an artist so intrinsically connected to political protests in his music, Moral Hygiene sees Al and MINISTRY move into even more personal concerns. “We need to get past this tribalism of skin colours, and any difference of opinions, or labels to do with this camp or that camp, because look man, we’re all fucking earthlings” he states seriously. “It all ties into the fact that the Earth is dying, and so if we don’t combine to be Earthlings as opposed to individual tribes warring at all times, we will perish.”
Moral Hygiene is like a dot-to-dot of modern life. It’s an album that explores all of our macro problems on micro levels and vice versa. It’s an album that talks about one thing by highlighting another. And most importantly, it’s an album asking for one thing, and one thing only: to unite.
“A song like Good Trouble goes a lot deeper than just voting rights and the minutiae of it. We’re earthlings and we need to protect this planet, and we can do it if we band together and this album explores that. It stems from Alert Level which is about the planet falling apart, and so Good Trouble is not just about race relations, it’s about combining as a species on Earth towards getting that done, and that’ll never get done unless we all come together, so I hate to sound all fucking hippie, but it’s the truth.”
Telling the truth is something Al has never shied away from under MINISTRY. It’s something he’s had his fair share of criticism for, having been accused of “only making good music when republicans are in office, and failing at it when it’s a democrat,” yet something he wouldn’t change. Because deep down he can’t. “I’ve been fortunate or unfortunate in some people’s minds to not have any other skills in life, so this what I do, and some people like it, some people don’t, but it’s all I know how to do. I’m a town crier with musical skills” he laughs, before admitting, “MINISTRY is not some kind of hidden agenda, MINISTRY is me so therefore these are things that concern me. I don’t know how to do anything else, if I didn’t do music, my skills would lead me to be a dishwasher in a restaurant or one of those persons in hardware stores that puts shopping carts away!”
Whether you agree with his resume of skills or not, Al Jourgensen has made a career out of being a global town crier. As MINISTRY enters its 40th year as a musical entity, it’s astonishing to see it standing the test of time when so many other bands have come and gone during the last four decades. Of course, it’s not something Al ever thought possible.
“Come on, is this a joke?” he retorts, adding “I wasn’t expecting to survive my thirties, let alone my forties. Was I envisioning MINISTRY to be anything? No, not at all. In the early days, MINISTRY was just a way to get a pay-check and buy fucking heroin and there’s not much future in that.”
For a former drug addict who was happy just “waking up without the help of CPR,” Al Jourgensen has achieved a lot across the four decades that’s seen him reach his 62nd year on this planet. Often hailed as a pioneer of industrial metal, it’s something that Al is keen to address as he hopes to reach people with Moral Hygiene.
“Every person has a different path and mine took me to hell and back before I reached a point where I’m just comfortable in my own skin, and I get a lot of people running with the baton and becoming successful with it, and I think it’s wonderful, but I can’t take credit for it” he admits. “All MINISTRY is, is collage rock – I get put in industrial rock and I don’t see any of that, I just look at images being flashed towards me throughout my life and I make a painting on that and release that as music, it’s just my interpretation of them and then other people interpret my interpretation and eventually they put their own stamp on it.”
“Some people say ‘oh, they stole that from MINISTRY.’ No, they didn’t – they didn’t steal it from me, they stole it from the world, they were just finally bale to process it into their own art and I think that’s wonderful.”
You might look at MINISTRY throughout the years and interpret their legacy in your own way. It’s clear that there’s two sides to every story, and it’s no different here. Al is at once as jovial as he is serious, switching between the two like Clark Kent and Superman. He can’t exist without either side of his personality, and the world’s reliance on seriousness is what drives Moral Hygeine.
“One of the things about MINISTRY that sets us apart from other bands is that we’re actually making fun of everything, but people don’t get that. Irony is a lost art, especially today in the age of social media and reality television, and to read between the lines and have a good chuckle is a dying art” he admits, adding “I think it’s one of the reasons society is crumbling as fast as it is, we need to have irony and sarcasm back in our life without everything being taken 100% face value,” he explains. “Yes, we are fraught, but we still need to laugh about it. We can’t take everything to the point of being a fanatic, you need to have your own brain, you need to have your own moral compass and you need to practice your own moral hygiene – how’s that for wrapping the whole thing in a fucking bow?”
There you have it folks – MINISTRY might not always be the flavour of the month, but Al Jourgensen and his band of merrymen are exactly what we need in the moments we need it most.
Moral Hygiene is out now via Nuclear Blast Records.
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