33 1/3 Author Q&A: A closer look at Ministry’s A Land of Rape and Honey

Welcome to our latest author Q&A, where we chat to the writers behind new and upcoming 33 1/3 books! From interesting stories that didn’t make the final cut to recommended alt albums for your playlist, Jason Pettigrew gives us a closer look at his new book on Ministry’s The Land of Rape and Honey.

It’s the story of what happens when two completely uncompromising men are given free reign (and a seemingly endless studio budget) to confidently follow their muse—and their respective ids—to carve their name into the veneer of rock history.

I discovered this record upon its release in 1988 and have never let up on my fascination with it.

I think it’s the cocktail of machine beats, noise, ugliness and foreboding that made it loom like a mile-high obelisk over various contemporary music genres considered “extreme.” The luxury of hindsight has revealed how many artists across multiple genres have (un)knowingly used Ministry’s sonic blueprints for their respective visions, from metalheads to the clown car that is EDM.

The first self-titled album by Killing Joke, Half-Machine Lip Moves by Chrome, Cabaret Voltaire’s Mix Up and The Land Of Rape And Honey.

Listeners may then take that knowledge and see where it fits in their current milieu of alternative entertainment. It’s been so long that a lot of what Jourgensen and Barker did nearly four decades ago is now considered standard operating procedure—or horrifically smoothed out for the sake of (puke) “accessibility.”

Ministry—fortified by the managerial gumption of Al’s then-wife Patty—conducted business in a way that was just as fierce as the music they were making. They traversed record-label and touring conventions at practically every turn, shutting up both their critics and the old-school guard in various ancillary businesses. Ministry was rigid in their aesthetics and personal philosophies on how to do business. Nobody could ever call them “pliable.”

There could’ve been a whole chapter dedicated to how Ministry approached the creation of their videos from that era. They worked closely with Ben Stokes, the co-founder of the video production company H-GUN Labs, who was an early adopter of MacIntosh computer technology, a curator of stunning “found footage,” and a purveyor of early technology (let’s use the term “steampunk”) from primitive cameras to archaic arc lighting.

Stokes famously used Super 8 film cameras attached to weather balloons long before the invention of drones. His best story was when he was making a video for Nine Inch Nails, one of his cameras got caught up in powerful winds and he lost track of it. The Chicago office of the FBI retrieved it and considered it a snuff film, thus requiring Trent Reznor having to prove he was still alive to the bureau.

I am similarly fascinated by Brian Eno’s debut solo album, Here Come The Warm Jets. But Eno is completely uninterested and unwilling to discuss the minutiae of his past and some of the parties involved are no longer with us. So I would go with Nine Inch Nails’ The Downward Spiral because like Ministry, there is a similar psychic trajectory (big business wants maverick artist to deliver “product” and not “art”) and the stuff coming out of Reznor’s speakers was positively maverick compared to the uninspired opportunist bandwagon that began rolling at the time in the wake of his early successes. Besides, you have to love a guy who had a hit single with an f-bomb in the chorus…