Monday, February 27, 2012

It's Time to Turn Off Psychic TV: Part 3!

Hey look it's Genesis P. Orridge of Psychic TV with a birthday cake! Boy, Genesis sure looks great these days… Two of the more successful blogs I've done on here were the obituary I wrote for Mike Kelley when he committed suicide a few weeks ago, and a blog where I suggested that Psychic TV should stop making music. The blog on Psychic TV really seemed to resonate with people. It might be thought that this was an at least partially successful attempt to pick up the old audience for the "transgressive" conceptual art audience that used to surround people like Genesis P. Orridge or the old "abject" conceptual art audience that surrounded people like Mike Kelley. Yes and no. Here is a piece of absolutely useless but sort of surreal trivia- when I was an intern at the art magazine TRANS>arts.cultures.media I had to edit a lengthy interview with Mike Kelley and Tony Ousler in which they discussed the influence Genesis P. Orridge had on them as art students. Throbbing Gristle may have been doing something new and shocking when Mike Kelly and Tony Ousler were art students in the 70's. The whole Genesis P. Orridge thing really has not aged well. I'm not just talking about the fact that Orridge has become a fat old man with breasts and metal teeth. In high school and college I found this whole trip interesting, not now. Orridge always was an incoherent acid burn out, I just lacked the insight when I was younger to acknowledge it. Now Orridge is an aging, incoherent acid burn out with fake breasts. I am fully aware that I write on here about how much I like Cleopatra Records, and I'm aware that Psychic TV were signed to Cleopatra Records in the 90's. I've recently flipped opinions about Cleopatra Records- I used to say "All the compilations they made when I was in high school were great, I can't stand what they put out now". Now that I have Spotify I think it's the other way around. I think the better compilations that Cleopatra have put out are the ones they've put in recent years where they've reached beyond gothic music into all kinds of other weird music from the 80's like hair metal and bands like Berlin. The other thing is the more recent Cleopatra Records compilations don't have Psychic TV on them. That's a relief because I don't feel like having to skip over Psychic TV while I'm lifting weights.

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