Machines of Loving Grace - Gilt (Revisited)

I feel bent like a reed in the wind, so we're revisiting Machines of Loving Grace. I want to unpack Gilt in as much stultifying pedantry as possible, you know like i do with everything all the time. We got a poem and the title and the artwork and the lyrics which include "supply and demand" and everyone's favorite Jim Jones quote in a song called Serpico, and even though the allmusic review implies it's just the same song over and over, it's a damned good song with a lot of great heavy guitars and some bleep bloops. What a jerk, there's tons of variety. 

I of course like all types of music, but Industrial Rock is like the core of my being. Supposedly their first two albums are much more synth heavy. I don't know, like i said, this album is a committed piece of art not a random throwaway stab at fame or selling bottles of colored sand or moving your cult to an epithetic socialist commune in South America. It's like ogres and onions, you know? Layers. 

Gilt means covered in a thin veneer of gold. Looks all pretty on the surface, cheap junk underneath. 

The photo is a recreation of the 1947 Robert Wiles photograph of Evelyn McHale 4 minutes after she jumped from the 86th floor of the Empire State Building. She did not survive that particular suicide, and the note in her purse was surprisingly terse and matter-of-fact. 

The album predates the movie Suicide Kings by several years so i can't really justify a Christopher Walken impression. Maybe they are referencing Charlemagne, but i think it's probably a more simple metaphor of drug addiction, since the other character repeatedly referenced is "the richest junkie still alive." 

Slaughterhouse five is definitely a reference to the Vonnegut novel, but how that reference actually works in the song is a bit lost on me. 

The "discipline of flowers" is probably not Ikebana. 

Isadora Duncan was a pretty famous dancer strangled to death when her enourmous scarf got tangled around the hubcap of the car she was driving. 

Those are some of the highlights, but Serpico is the real masterpiece. Frank Serpico was a NYC detective famous for whislteblowing NYPD corruption in the 60s/70s. Add to that the sentiments of "sick of it all" and "something has gone wrong" from an old man whose "insides spilled out" and the narrator concluding "he'd been dying or dead for years and this was just his way of saying let them hear it in the night" the way Jim Jones said "let them hear it in the night" in his tyrade about the assasinations of MLK and JFK and how hatred of the US government way his primary motivation to amass weapons and fight like Mao told him to do. So suicide is the ultimate stance against the corruption of power? It loses something in translation to Bottle-speak, i think. You can't do it justice by summarizing, you just have to hold the whole thing in your head as the culmination of the process of just completely and belligerently destroying yourself. 

So, is the band's identity sarcastic? Does GREGORY like turtles? The thing about that Richard Brautigan poem is that it exists inside the very peculiar socio-political environment of taking the technological nightmare that was the Cold War and reclaiming it in the Ken Kesey/Merry Pranksters/Acid Test Hippy/Stewart Brand context of using technology to let us return to nature as the mammals we really are, those machines of loving grace preserving the earth for us rather than helping us annihilate it. That idea got Florida-ed up real good all over Al Gore's internet, didn't it? 

The real heart of the album, though, is that unidentifiable moment where we switch from naive casual users to full on rotting-corpse junkies. Why can't we recognize the moment we go too far before it happens? That's obviously a rhetorical stupid question, but we can't remember from the remembering side either, so it's all fun and games until it isn't fun and games anymore but hell if we know where the dividing line is. One moment we're people doing things, the next we're dead and by definition not doing them anymore. Some of us, come hell or high water.... 

Do we need to understand the album as directly growing out of writing Golgotha Tenement Blues for The Crow? I suppose it gives some additional context for the religious metaphors at play (hello, Jesus and Mary Magdalene), but sinners and saints and the religious component of 12-step programs and power dynamics are already at play here. 

What i'm trying to say is there's a lot going on on this album that you aren't going to get on a casual listen or two. Every song is a research project or dissertation in its own right, and that's what makes it one of the best albums of not just the 90s, but all time. It's like its own little hyper-real post-modern apocalypse in a jewell case. Plus, i love Industrial Rock anyway, Sylvia Massey made it sound amazing, and those riffs are so freakin' good.