GG Allin & The Scumfucs
Doctrine of Mayhem

THE REVIEW

In nineteen ninety, GG Allin preached his Gospel, the synthesis of his "Doctrine of Chaos", "Doctrine of Mayhem", through a compilation of emblematic tracks—a slew of masterpieces in the best-of devastation, selected from what was then ten years of repertoire. Almost every song was performed in a different period, in a different musical style, from sleaze/glam metal, to proto-punk, to No Wave ("Torture You"), all the way to pure hardcore, by the same band—the Scumfucs.

A shamanic wealth of experience, of uncontrollable Dionysian scraps, of heretical art, immorality, the performative destructiveness of a mystic of evil; among the great poets of punk rock with Luca Abort, Richard Hell, Satan Panonski, Lydia Lunch, Nick Blinko, Derby Crash...

"Sluts in the City" is the suburban reinvention of the New York Dolls. Pouting rock 'n' roll but with black skinny jeans, stained with moods, found in a garbage bin instead of the green and pink leggings of Greenwich Village; dark circles, trauma from contact, and heroin marks as eyeliner and makeup.
Dressed up like a street walker but with a machine gun in hand, not on 53rd but in a Texas suburb. With the female second voice (Holly Would from the Cedar Street Sluts) echoing, it’s laugh-out-loud, madness rules in this tableau of shameful mockery. "We’re the sluts, and we hate everyone".

Jesus Christ Allin, also known as GG, a comic yet authentic reinterpretation of Jesus Christ as in "Violence and the Sacred" by René Girard, sacrifices himself for the sublimation of the condemnation of the human form, transcending individual limits in the ancestral rite of expiation through pain.
In "Abuse Me (I Want To Die)", one of the ten most important punk songs of all time, the sentient lamb is on the altar of an evil that has been overcome, desired, craved, challenged, in that hail of invocations to the listener/spectator ("abuse me, kick me, cut me, stab me, axe me, knife me, fork me, fuck me, suck me, beat me, fuck me, blow me, eat me, stab me, abuse my body") so irreversible and decisive that it becomes a liberation. The challenge was never so intrinsically a threat: "destroy me, i wanna destroy you". Choose, one of us will have to die—symbolically...sure, but not necessarily. Will you make sure I’m the dead one?
The act of aggression, whether perpetrated or suffered, as a means to connect with humanity, having lost any other way to recognize it.

For GG, communicating with people was important.

"Look me in the eyes and what do you see?"

The stentorian proclamation of the new coming of Jesus Christ—his namesake from the past, perhaps the real one after the myth—takes form in "Blood For You", in both acoustic and electric versions; almost a liturgical recitative, one of the other masterpieces.

"I'm life, I'm death, I'm the blood for you."

When the orgy ends (and it’s never fun), you return to a room, somewhere; just a room, and the body inside it is always elsewhere, in the darkness, floating in chemical alterations, even in the injured bones and torn limbs.
Reactive in stasis as in "Darkness & a Bottle Hold", catatonic and catacomb-like as in "Sitting in this Room" (terrifying). Country-folk songs, in which the rural legacy of Johnny Cash emerges, though stripped of any melodicism or imagery. Acoustic guitar-voice ballads, written by someone blind and deaf, dying alone, not listening to his own notes, looking out the window and not seeing.

"Death is in this room and you know death is often these days on my mind."

There’s still time for another masterpiece, GG’s anthem, with the most beautiful intro riff ever composed by his nefarious companion Al Meadow.
The battle mule that will play forever, until death (nineteen ninety-three), ever raspier, with a voice increasingly cavernous, enraged, inhuman: "Bite You Scum".
A suffocating carousel of archetypal hardcore punk, with which GG usually opened his shows after getting naked and greased up for the performance.
Simply "bite"—nothing more, nothing less.

Not all the tracks are affronts or calvaries; there are also just songs that sing of his idea of physical love, his relationships with others, simple everyday things, in a generic but pleasant, carefree punk rock, always marked by a lofty madness and a variety of accessory musical influences, like "Ass Fuckin' Butt Sucking", "I Wanna Piss on You" (the eighties Ramones of "Animal Boy"), "Needle Up My Cock" (Stooges-style garage rock, with the clear ghost of Iggy peeking through GG’s mouth), "I Wanna Fuck Myself", "Fuck the Dead" (a para-Sabbathian hard rock ode that turns into a thrash metal standard), and "You’ll Never Tame Me".

His singing was not just made of anguish, madness, and self-annihilation, but also of small truces, of the everyday, of ordinary moments.