Making the Myth with Ogre

Having had an immense impact on the formation of early industrial music since its formation in 1982, Skinny Puppy has long been considered goth-metal royalty, despite meager commercial success. They brought together distortion, samples, tape-splicing and drum machines long before Trent Reznor started wearing fishnets and Hot Topic was the point of musical discovery for fat girls with daddy issues and way too much eyeliner.

With explosive live shows that shocked and often offended, Skinny Puppy always strove to disarm, pushing limits and urging people to question their own beliefs with jarring imagery and confrontational soundscapes. They always went beyond pushing the envelope; in fact, they tore it to pieces. At a recent show, the band reenacted a Taliban-video-style beheading onstage – fake blood and all. This, as well as their outspoken disdain for President George W. Bush drew boycott threats from several Christian conservative groups, much to the delight of the band.

A nightmarish downward spiral took hold in the early nineties as inner turmoil grew. Vocalist Nivek Orgre (aka Kevin Ogilvie, vocals) plunged deeper into his death-defying love affair with heroin, and pressure mounted from the record company to create more commercially viable music in the vein of Nine Inch Nails. The band’s initial demise took place in 1995 when member and keyboardist Dwayne Goettel was found dead of a heroin overdose.

After a maniacally well-received reunion show in 2000, founding members Ogre and cEvin Key (instruments and effects) reconvened as Skinny Puppy to create 2003’s The Greater Wrong of the Right, with help from the likes of Tool’s Danny Carey. It was a warmly welcomed return for the cult heroes, finding new relevance in a world much different than the one that spawned the band a quarter-century ago. They also found a new fluidity and maturity in the process of creation, a fresh change from the violently difficult births of the previous records.

Inspired by the enthusiastic reception of their audience after so many years, Skinny Puppy returned to the studio with a renewed motivation. They found new ease in the process of writing and recording their 13th album, Mythmaker (release date of January 30th on Synthetic Symphony), and will embark on an extensive world tour beginning in March.

We called up Ogre to discuss the creation of Mythmaker, the bastardization of commercial music and why Skinny Puppy would fail if they were a new band today.


You’ve got a big year shaping up for Mythmaker in 2007. Are you happy with the finished product?

Yeah, it’s looking that way. I mean, the album turned out really well. It’s probably one of the most difficult records I’ve ever made. For the amount of time it took us to record, the issues involved and things like that, when we sat down and listened to it…. I’m happy. It’s got a good feel to it.

What made the process difficult?

One of the first songs that Mark and I presented was “UgLi” and there was some resistance to using the line “Jesus wants to be ugly.” No one really understood where I was going with it. At that time, this was almost a year ago, there wasn’t this shakeup in the religious right where they’re even questioning their satanic union with the people in control, and their own morality by doing that, which is now happening. And that was the very basis of what I was trying to convey in that song, but not in a way that was really explaining it. I wanted a lot of things that would be on the record to be things that touched on people’s nerves on all aspects of life. And that was met with a bit of a push and pull, where the album started taking a different turn.

What kind of difference?
 
Instead of what we would’ve done in the past, where we’d really be getting into perhaps overly destructive states of being, this time we’d just go on with the process. And I think now we’ve found a working situation and it’s actually an easier process. How it ended up was a bit difficult because we all had different ideas of what the album was going to be, what we should do with it. I could certainly pursue the ideas of irreverence within the ohGr project and for myself. So it just became something that, at the end, it was a matter of acceptance within certain issues of control, which ended up being the greater theme on the whole. It’s about acceptance; letting go of certain things and just letting the process take hold. I think the process now is in place after this record and the last, where I think whatever we do next will come a lot easier to us.

Lyrically, there seem to be more universal themes in the new songs, but there’s also a more personally direct element than ever before. Was that a conscious decision?

I think when I was younger, there were a lot of four-syllables and more poetry… stuff that maybe didn’t flow melodically, and that’s part of what gave it its charm. But that’s also what maybe a lot of people look at and question. The bassline to "Warlock" is an example of that to me to this day. I was just blown away by that bassline. I‘ve gotten to a point where I get the idea of taking something from the internalized and stepping it up to the interpersonal, and then taking it to the external world and trying to have something that is simple and yet has meaning within all three of those realms. It’s sometimes the most difficult thing to do in writing. That was kind of where I was trying to go with the lyrics on this disc. So I think that however much I tried not to involve my personal life, it’s all there in one layer. It just kind of all meets in certain places in a lot of the songs, definitely.

For me writing is a process of discovery, but a lot of it is stream of consciousness. After multiple listens I start to really hear the different layers of meaning. And I fully embrace that, because it’s always been that way. It was a lot more acute in the past, and now it’s a bit more esoteric. Even though the delivery and the working is a lot simpler now.

How do you approach deciding what tools to use in the construction of the music, specifically the vocals?

As far as the vocal affectation, everything’s more or less recorded dry and affected later. I think there’s certain things that need to be there to retain our sound so it still has some elements that nostalgically will appeal to those people that want to hear a certain voice. There were a few songs where I sat down and as far as the wording goes and was like "okay this is what it needs to say" but a lot of the songs on the record, to be honest with you, it was a lot of stream of consciousness stuff at first. Then I looked at it and started piecing it together afterwards.

Any favorite tracks on the record?

 “HaZe” is something I’m really struck with. I really like “UgLi”… I like a lot of the stuff. It’s so varied for me, which is a special thing on this record and people will either embrace it or they’ll be like "Why is there so much vocoder on the record? Why are the vocals so out front? Where’s the screaming maniac?" And you know, I like “Magnifishit” a lot for its irreverence.

What’s the meaning behind the title of the album?

I’ve always wanted to do something that was a sarcastic, “Oh what a wonderful world this is,” the idea of making these big statements and then just going like "Oh yeah, bullshit." That’s kind of the idea of the mythmaker and all of these mythical applications, whether it be in the context of how people view histories of things in order to somehow create a much bigger mythic archetype, or how we deal with history in the sense of the current situation in the world. How we represent ourselves, be it on MySpace or things like that, I find kind of fascinating. This idea of hyperbolized hyper-reality, hyper-realized people. To me, when you meet somebody, you’re not really meeting them, you’re meeting who they really want to be. But now it’s like you’re watching people actually construct these things and continue to update them in a virtual world, and then reading them over and over again and actually believing all of these things about themselves. It’s kind of interesting to me. And I’ve seen a lot of people who I just know are not like that but are presenting themselves in such this hyper-realized way that’s both a tragedy and a comedy.

 Using a biased narrative to tell your own story, taking little self-glorifying liberties and then wearing that costume as if it’s who you really are. Make your own superhero.

Exactly.The thing with kids today is that they’re under a lot of pressure. They need some sort of escape. They have so much more to deal with now than I did when I was younger, in the sense that they have cell-phone bills, they’re buying an iPod, buying designer clothes, which we never really had. We’d sort of piece things together from thrift stores even when we were in our twenties, doing this whole dress-up thing to a certain degree. It's all about total access to everything now. With the internet, the sky’s the limit on what they can do, which can be a curse as well as a blessing.

They have access to a much wider selection of music as well, and they have the gear that allows them to get it for free.

I think that the biggest thing I’d like to instill in those younger people is that they have to realize, a lot of upcoming music and music that they like, that’s not just something that they should feel entitled to because they bought the hardware to support it.

Well, it’s marketed as disposable, so it’s devalued to them.

Yeah! There’s this huge marketing campaign right now having music on phones and having it so available and so throw-away that people aren’t even really listening to the music anymore. They’re just like T-Mobile commercial with these guys talking about “Rock the Casbah,” and they’re totally getting the lyrics all wrong. They’re almost marketing it as, "Alright, this is really shitty quality music that you won’t be able to understand but it’s cool." And I think that the thing that I’d like to get across, which is idealistic, but if you don’t support the music that you like at an early level, that music will eventually disappear. Either that, or bands and young people will make desperate decisions about their music to be successful that probably won’t follow their hearts. And then as a result, that music will again change drastically. Then you’ll be caught in this world where music is being kind of formed for you through a lot of things that people have to do in order to survive in this business.

How do you think Skinny Puppy would do starting out now?

I honestly think that if Skinny Puppy started at this point in time, we probably wouldn’t exist for very long. That’s the one thing, just realize, you have all these toys, but the things you love you should support. We’re lucky; we have a brand. We have something that’s survived, and we have kind of a multi-generational thing that we’re really both proud of and wary of. At times I see it as a curse, but I wouldn’t change it for the world. We’re so lucky to have gotten here, and if we look back on the fact that we were on Capitol Records at a certain point, being distributed and making these albums under budget… there was one year when we were the only band on the label to profit, when MC Hammer lost a shitload of money. I can still appreciate how odd it was that we had the chance to do that because it doesn’t really happen in a lot of cases. And kids should realize that now, for a lot of bands, even though there‘s MySpace and all these things, there’s such a glut of it that it’s hard for a lot of people to make it, to get themselves heard and continue on with their own heartfelt desire to make music. There’s just not that artist development going on where people can take chances anymore, and that’s sometimes where the real gems in music come from.