Ask the Box

01 jul 06

"What's the meaning of Skinny Puppy's 'Assimilate'?"

i have quite a few (sixteen) skinny puppy tracks that i ripped to mp3 from a "puppy" (not sure if this is a cool shorthand) compliation album i bought called "brap: back and forth, series 3 & 4". "back and forth series 2" was an expansion of their very first, self-published album, called (surprise) "back and forth," released in 1983, when i was 9 years old and into "van halen". the album i have is a 2-disc collection of old, new and live material. a nice intro to skinny puppy, i think. i have no idea why it's called "brap."

skinny puppy lyrics read like free-verse poetry penned by some weepy goth teen. however, lyrics websites tend to lump the words together into lines that should probably be split up. i'll try to re-arrange the line breaks of these lyrics to make them more readable. i'll even add some punctuation, and break it up into stanzas for you.

here are the lyrics to "assimilate", by skinny puppy:

oil remove
shred and tear
radiation vapor
it's the fear
so unclear

man in motion, going nowhere
in our homes
stuck in the face
spread the word to the populace
yellow journal, yellow journal
set the pace
feel the rage

manifestations of a sort, so insidious
off the point
simple solution; never confusion
sport a gun
kill a cop
crazy world of weary thought
so, receive me
had enough
lock me up, lock me up
rot and assimilate
so hot
to annihilate

deviation
tonic mess
prolonged existence
innocence is: "he who speaks" (isn't weak)
"wheelchair virtue", so to speak
bubonic plague, the truth of AIDS
immunity, avoid, decay

in the trench of pestilence
the bible screams "announce your faith!"
mutterings of death to bring
suffocate a newborn thing
degradation of an age
venereal

it's all sensation
protect, design the moral plan
infallible as propaganda
completely black, with no steps back
hot to assimilate
we'll rot or annihilate

agony profusely stains the inner thinking of the brain
accusations
clanking chains
experiments with the groans of pain

all prefer
no-one blames the terror in an animal's screams
in cages, our future
the answers, insane

this guy just goes on and on, doesn't he? interesting, for the most part, but he cheeses out a bit on that last line with "the answers, insane". i mean...come on -- can't you tell us a little bit more about the answers? why rely on "insane," which is not only undescriptive, but unequivically a cop-out and a cliche? geez.

without looking it up, i'm pretty sure that skinny puppy consists of two guys named kevin, one of whom spells his name backwards (nivek). this is a good idea, when there are two guys named kevin in one band; they definitely thought things through ("hey, kevin!" "what?" "dammit, not you!").

"assimilate" is about the futility of human existence, knowledge, and communication, and how any effort to give them purpose and effect will only cause pain as it leads to inevitable failure, while we suffer through our last-ditch attempts to seek out meaning with violence and by surrendering to bestial, destructive instincts. throw in a tad of antivivisectionism and environmental doomsaying, and you got yourself a skinny puppy song!

"assimilate" is essentially a celebration of nihilism: the failure of man to establish a purpose of or meaning to his universe, and how this failure manifests in violence, technological dependence, environmental disaster, and medical experimentation.

good stuff. the problem is, this is pretty much what every skinny puppy song is about. but you can't really understand the kevins anyway, so it doesn't annoy as much as or as soon as it would otherwise. i can take skinny puppy in moderation -- i think it would do something to my brain if i listened to nothing else (i'd become a scowling goth teen, and maybe start spelling my name backwards).

the lyrics to all skinny puppy songs consist of stream-of-consciousness imagery about the general decay of civilization and humanity in a wash of filth, disease, technology and horror. there are also frequent references to animal experimentation, which "skinny puppy" doesn't like (i think the group's name has something to with this). one song uses a great sound-sample from the dark, underrated, largely unknown to uncool people (you) animated movie about laboratory animals titled "the plague dogs":

"I hope you make sure we're properly dead before you start, old Rip-Beak!" -- talking dog

"old rip-beak" is a vulture who is going to (hopefully) eat the plague dogs after they die. i think. i haven't seen it yet, actually -- it's on my netflix queue. "the plague dogs" appears similar to "watership down", and "the rats of NIMH"; there's apparently a whole sub-genre of macabre animated films about talking animals being tortured and killed.

skinny puppy generally likes to sample dark and evil things, like dialogue from the 1973 horror movie titled "hellhouse":

Ann Barrett: What did he do to make this house so evil, Mr. Fischer?
Benjamin Franklin Fischer: Drug addiction, alcoholism, sadism, beastiality, mutilation, murder, vampirism, necrophilia, cannibalism, not to mention a gamut of sexual goodies. Shall I go on?
Ann Barrett: How did it end?
Benjamin Franklin Fischer: If it had ended, we wouldn't be here.

actually, puppy just does the "drug addiction, alcoholism, sadism, beastiality, mutilation, murder, vampirism, necrophilia, cannibalism, not to mention a gamut of sexual goodies" bit. the effect of the listed items, spoken in queue over top of some gravely synthesizer sounds, is humorous.

suffice to say, skinny puppy likes to present as dark and evil -- it's their raison d'être. in spite of this affectation (or maybe they have a sense of humor about it), i'm sure they're pretty serious about their synth-goth-electro-industrial musical mêlée. i think skinny puppy might, along with bands like "throbbing gristle", be considered "proto-industrial". but, i'm not here to talk about musical categories; down that path only pain will you find.