Updated 1 year ago
If you ever were curious about Jeffrey Dahmer and Skinny Puppy,
I did some digging and here is what I found
First, a palate cleanser.
Ready? Let’s begin.
Chapter One
Now is the only thing that is real.
1980s: Houston, Texas
In the 1980s there was an urban legend floating around Houston, Texas (where industrial music is very popular for some reason, the seminal club Numbers is still going strong after 40 years).
The legend went like this: a group of club kids, in an ominous foreshadowing of New York club kid murderer Michael Alig, or, for that matter, the Seattle rave afterparty shooting, kidnapped a street youth and kept him in a closet and gave him acid and played Worlock by Skinny Puppy (above) repeatedly for days. The child was eventually murdered. I can’t find anything in the press about it, but it was so long ago, finding it would be a needle in a haystack.
This would not be the last time the music of Skinny Puppy was related to murders.
“Tin Omen” (Tianamen, get it?) was another popular song from that era.
Chapter 2:
Just the Dying
1989: New York City “Maybe hate is what we need if we want to get ‘something’ done”
In a strange coincidence that only an acid-addled mind would notice in retrospect, in 1989, one year before Jeffrey Dahmer went to the “Central Park” club in Milwaukee and met a victim, Donald Trump was spouting venomous lies about the Central Park 5.
On both occasions, Black men were the victims.
Chapter 3:
A Whole Planet Full of Torture, Madness, Death
1990: Milwaukee
Challenge accepted. I found the ONLY event it could have been with 100% certainty: Halloween night, Wednesday, October 31, 1990, at the Central Park club in Milwaukee.
Bear with me for a second:
By orders of magnitude, our brains are the most complex structures in the known universe. They contain one hundred billion nerve cells (neurons). Each neuron makes links with ten thousand other neurons to form an incredible three-dimensional grid. This grid therefore contains a thousand trillion connections – that’s 1,000,000,000,000,000 (a quadrillion). It’s hard to imagine this, so let’s visualize each connection as a disc that’s 1mm thick. Stack up the quadrillion discs on top of each other and they will reach the sun (which is ninety-three million miles from the earth) and back, three times over.
And imagination is the ghost in the machine. Imagination is a powerful thing. It creates images and situations far more frightening than any digital celluloid can produce. The book is always better than the movie.
Suspension of disbelief is a very expensive and precarious ideal to strive for. It’s frankly out of my wheelhouse right now. So rather than trying to take Dahmer footage from the Netflix series and using After Effects to place him in a Skinny Puppy concert in some simulacrum that would hope to be believable, I’m going to just supply you with all the assets so you can assemble them in your imagination, and fall into the music, and picture Dahmer slowly walking through the crowd like a cheetah stalking a herd of gazelles, finding a suitably tasty victim, to crunching metallic industrial beats by an ogre on stage covered in blood.
Ticket and Flyers
Setlist: Choralone, VX Gas Attack, Tin Omen, God’s Gift (Maggot), Convulsion, Testure, Worlock, Harsh Stone White, Rash Reflection, Dogshit, Shore Lined Poison, Nature’s Revenge, Spasmolytic, Reclamation, Morpheus Laughing.
Actual audio from that night
The Youtube that had it was blocked sometime early 2023. I’ll keep this here as a placeholder in case it is located again.
Concert videos from around that time
Dahmer was arrested July 22, 1991.
The End.
No easy resolution, no profound insight into the madness of killing and eating people.
Kind of anticlimactic, isn’t it?
Well, at least you’re alive to feel that way.
Happy Halloween!
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