The electro-visual aspects of performance - wires, microphones and speakers - gear the human body into the energy circuitry as much as an astronaut becomes the cyborg of his capsule. One performer has developed a plasticized silver space-suit into whose front pouch he inserts his guitar, which is then immediately connected to concealed circuits, the result being no wires or visible generation. But in the hands of a major musician the use of electronics can be genuinely
creative.

 The only thing we have to do with art is that it's the last three letters in FART.

 Dim lights cradled by cigarette smoke. Busboys swiping beer bottles and plastic cocktail glasses from the floor Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart beam from overhead - cosmic signals from behind the mirror ball and the video screen. Suddenly the crash of darkness and the multiple flashes of a strobe light. Like plumes from the exploding space shuttle, fog pours from a staging area. Like a space shuttle explosion, people shuffle in expectation of a spectacle.

Two monsters emerge from the fog: one green, one red, both are naked, adorned with teddy bear heads. They hammer their painted bodies to the throbbing beat of multi-armed drummers. Shiva splits in two, kicks off the corpse of the percussionists' bodies and takes over. Through the haze, the flashing strobe disassembles projected images of car accident victims. A bullhorn wails absurd poetry; a guitar gouges out icy licks that melt into a wall of distortion.

We are at the End of Reason. The spectacle slips out of an abyss and slaps us like the crazy woman in the Minnesota shopping mall who massacres a bunch of kids with an M-16. Or the Vietnam Vet with the bumper sticker that reads "I'm not deaf, I'm just ignoring you" who enters McDonalds with an Uzi, shouting "I'll take you to 'Nam" while emptying clips of Israeli ammunition into Big Mac consumers. Or the guy in Philly who captured prostitutes and fed them dog food while he buried them in shit. Consensus reality cracked.

All information should be considered false until proven true.

From driver's ed. Car accident film clips to a scene of a penis being severed by a doctor's knife to Death Race 2000, the spectator at a live Butthole Surfers show should feel assaulted. But the crowd has already been whipped into a hedonistic frenzy of tribal and sexual dance. Slam dancing introduced mild violence into this 90's-style Jitterbug, but it's mere roughhousing. The real violence is in the culture that spawned it.

The Buttholes employ humor and irony to demystify power and deal with horror (and I'll assume that most MONDO readers agree that consensus reality represents a kind of horror.) Cultural icons from Charlie's Angels to the generic rockstar are dis-and-reassembled. Their album titles are dada poetry (Locust Abortion Technician, Rembrandt Pussy Horse, and Hairway to Steven) while lyrics to songs like "Booze, Tobacco, Dope, Pussy, Cars" dissect and reflect American culture. Underlying this "cultural critique" —and I don't believe it's a fully conscious critique, the band members are merely following their aesthetic intuition—is pure tribal rock 'n' roll energy. After all, people don't go to live concerts to philosophize. They want to have fun. Which is what makes the whole thing so subversive. In being consumed by the tribal energies, the spectator ceases to be a passive observer and becomes an active participant in a ritualistic setting. The hammering of distorted guitar, psychotic vocals, and pulsating drum creates a group trance that disrupts the spectator-consumer mass media trance for a moment (two hours of geological time). The result? A
primitive bonding.

Anomalies are outlaws that escape the jails of consensus reality.

A Butthole Surfers show should be seen in the larger context. The increasing intensity of amplified music has roughly paralleled the expansion of atomic energy and the arms race. The defection from mainstream society into the folds of the counter-cultures ebbs and flows, but with each new cycle the music gets louder and taster. And at its core, rock music has been a refuge for tribalistic and spiritual fulfillment for alienates in the West.

Immediately post-WWII, vou had the likes of John Lee Hooker - radically distorted guitar work for its time. Then, into Eisenhower's calm, post-war consumer Eden, a rowdy erotic noise called rock 'n roll - a louder, faster version of the blues - exploded straight into the heart of teenage America. But alas, through payola and corporate influence, the Pat Boone's took over and bland consumer capitalism won the day.

Then the children of the 50's became the radicals of the 60's. The music got louder, the drugs got stronger, the alienation of white kid? from "the system" got deeper and a counterculture grew. Bands like the Grateful Dead built huge followings based on an alternative lifestyle of drugs (altered states) and nomadism: a new tribalism, a I surrogate religion.

On to the latter 70's, where punk and new wave appeared superficially to be a rejection of "Aquarian" age values. Punk mutated rock into a visually and aurally violent assault on Anglo Saxon society, thus serving as a mirror of historical violence. No longer could young people be expected to accept the status quo politely Themes like "No Future" reflected the negationist sensibilities of modem youth, stretching rock into a still louder and J faster frontier and serving to countervail the near-pervasive right ' wing conservatism.

The disenchantment with the 60's was easy enough to grasp. Look at what we got: Ronald Reagan, yuppies, urban sprawl and ecological apocalypse. Where was the revolution? To the casual observer on the punk scene, rock music symbolized the failures of mentors. Punk, in this sense, had the political trappings of the 60's but rejected the tribalistic elements of 60's rock music. Its very premise was (and is) that punk is not rock, it's "fuck you" music ar:

God is dead anyway, right? It was like waking up with a bad add hangover from a decade that - as far as they knew - never really happened. They were just born then... that's all.

But in the final analysis, punk was rock in a functionalist sense. fulfilled the need of a generation in the same way that the blues served the blacks, or the various mutations of rock had served other generations. Punk was merely the blues for faster, more fragmented times. So now we've come full circle, and I think the phenomenon the Butthole Surfers attests to this. The Buttheads came out of the closet, shedding some of the "political correctness" of punk, to embrace the unconscious of pop culture and - while they're at it—reshuffle the whole reality deck and redeal.

So the Butthole Surfers should be seen as a reflection of the mood underlying the spectacle reality of the 90's. As it is with all generations, some kind of cultural shamanism is needed to fuse the primitive urges of people to dance with the cosmos, celebrate the chaos of apocalypse and make love with the spirit of the Earth. All this while dissecting whatever consensus reality had been manufactured by the dream factory (Hollywood) and the reality workers of the media. Whether it's the Theater of the Absurd, Dada, Be Bop and Beat poetry, psychedelia, be-ins, rap, punk or the Butthole Surfers, industrialized tribes who are keyed into the mysterious way of the universe will be driven to create their own rituals and their own means to find a parking space in the garage of absurdity.