A pink clay alien stumps his lonely way across a desert. He has legs the way a T-rex has arms and a penguin has wings: not very successfully. He’s trying to get into space by piling up garbage in a large heap.
Plasmo is both naive and wise. Like the Sufi mystic in an Arabian folk tale, he is a clever fool. The cup that is both empty and full. He lacks life experience but is brimming with insight. A normal person cannot reach space by climbing a teetering pile of trash, but perhaps Plasmo can.
The character is the work of Australian animator Anthony Lawrence, who brought this special alien to the airwaves twice. In 1988, as a 26-minutes short film called Happy Hatchday to Plasmo. Then in 1997, as a 5-minute thirteen-episode TV series called Plasmo. This second adaptation played frequently on ABC, and was syndicated and dubbed for foreign markets.
The show was not a massive hit—if Taylor Swift plays Olympic Park Stadium on the same night Plasmo reruns are on TV, she surely wins the battle for Australian hearts and minds. I sense millions of PlasmoHeads protesting in the comments “b…but…what if her tickets are really expensive? What if her current boyfriend is really racist? What if it’s cold and rainy and…” no, friends, we must face the facts: Taylor Swift is more popular than Plasmo. Be brave and accept the truth in its monstrous cruelty, as Plasmo would.
But it did alright, considering. A decent percentage of Gen X Australia has grown up with a pink clay monster in the back of their head along with “how’s the serenity?” and old AFL footie jingles, and that’s not nothing. Plasmo’s species is (I think) a “polybop”, and many teens identify as poly now. So the character was a trendsetter in that respect.
Both Plasmo versions are an interesting yardstick to judge the other one by.
The 1988 film is grimy, wonderful space trash. Stylistically it’s Gumby meets Star Wars, with intergalactic bounty hunters, oceans of sand and ice, and grungy urban sewers. The two comic relief characters—Coredor and Brucho—are both great, even if their designs aren’t fully there yet. They’re voiced by musician-and-actor Phillip Houghton with a voice like mucus-coated gravel. Lucas’s “used future” aesthetic proves a real workhorse on sets created out of scraps and rags (the used present, one might say), because it creates a reality amenable to technical errors. In the 4k upscales on Lawrence’s Youtube, you can clearly see that the ice on Pynco is styrofoam, for example. But this strangely makes it seem even cooler than when I first watched it in standard definition, because I can better appreciate the labor that went into creating it. [1]I wrote that this scene was likely a reference to the moon-skating in Wallace and Gromit’s Big Day Out…but then I checked, and Happy Hatchday to Plasmo was on the air one year earlier! Someone … Continue reading
The 1997 Plasmo is a lot better on a technical level. The effects are more elaborate, and the designs more intentional. In 1988 Coredor was a fleshtone Gumby with an eyepatch. In 1997 he’s a talking pair of labia lips atop a swaying monitor lizard neck. He looks wonderful! The polybops are cuter too, with big expressive eyes kept weepy and moist via liberal brushings of peanut oil.
Yet it loses some of the dirt and grit that makes the original a blast (gone, too, is the subversive, edge-of-acceptable humor, like birds defecating in mid-air and Brucho wanting to go to the disco to meet “intellectually stimulating chicks”. I like that sort of thing more than ABC’s Standards and Practices did, I guess). It’s like a steam-cleaned version of the Plasmo concept.
But the 1997 show has a stronger plot. Gotta give it that. Plasmo finds a spaceship, uses it to get off the planet, crash-lands on another planet—Monjotroldeclipdoc, which has a hole punched through its middle by a long-ago comet). The show then settles into an “issue of the week” formula for seven or eight episodes: Plasmo tries to fix his ship while helping various people with problems like a blocked drain and a ghost-haunted library. Then the great comet unexpectedly returns to Monjotroldeclipdoc’s skies, doomsday looms, and Plasmo and his friends must make a choice.
Plasmo is a thoughtful show, not afraid to confront young viewers with tough ideas.
There’s the variant of Prisoner’s Dilemma found in “Nice to be Nice” (if Coredor knocks over Plasmo’s glass of milk, should he retaliate?). And the invocation of cosmic fractality (and the Avataṃsaka Sūtra) in “Plasmo in Deep Space” (which has a sharp and horrifying screenplay). There’s allusions to Ringworld and Citizen Kane (As a child, I would have missed the latter even if I’d been aware of Citizen Kane—the ROSEBUD on the sled is hard to see in 720×480).
Even the fact that “Monjotroldeclipdoc” is pronounced with an alveolar click on the final c (notated something like Monjotroldeclipdɒǃ, I think)…how often do you hear African click consonants on a kids’ show? When I was small I didn’t get all that, of course, but the show felt noticeably…deep compared to the programs before and after. There’s a lot of “they didn’t have to make the effort but I’m glad they did.”
Production-wise, Plasmo was an audacious mixture of basically every animation technique available at the time. It had claymation, stop-motion puppets, some cel animation (for effects like lightning bolts) and CGI, most of it integrated quite well. (The CGI has aged the worst, obviously.)
Lawrence’s team achieved remarkable stuff on a small budget. He once maintained a website where he discussed some of the effects—like using a pair of mirrors to create the haunting interior of the ship where Plasmo was hatched.
Is it strange that this is why I respond to Plasmo with sadness as much as nostalgia? 1997 was near the end of the line for this kind of Will Vinton/Ray Harryhausen stop-motion whateveryoucallit. If it had been made even three years later, likely every part of it would have been computer-animated.
For better or for worse? Animating all this stuff by hand sounds like misery. Lawrence says the 1988 film took two years to animate and hospitalized him at one point.
But I think restrictions—the denial of shortcuts—can affect art in interesting ways that are not always negative. The crucible of labor can force choices that are ultimately correct ones—pruning away excess, tightening up dead spots in the script, working out conceptually what the point of the show or character even is. It is possible to film and write nothing. It is not possible to animate nothing. This is what attracts me to animation as a viewer: the medium fights bloat and excess by its nature.
And it’s a shame when old techniques are no longer used. The end result is that they cannot be used, even if you want to use them.
When animator Don Bluth worked for Disney in the 1970s, he was struck by the fact that much about the studio’s 30s/40s hot streak had already been forgotten. It wasn’t just the spirit of those old movies that was missing, even basic techniques were falling through the sands of time.
The Nine Old Men were going gray. Walt himself had been dead for half a decade. Nobody was preserving the hard-won knowledge and craft of the studio’s RKO years. He would ask questions like “how did you do the rippling water in Snow White and the Seven Dwarves?” and be astonished that nobody could tell him. In some cases, even the technique’s inventors had forgotten!
Ever since the failure of Sleeping Beauty, Disney had been fighting a war against budget overruns. Animators were urged to cut costs, to reuse footage, to do more with less. The result was that old knowledge and techniques atrophied because there wasn’t the money to apply them. What doesn’t get used gets forgotten: and soon you’re doing less with less. Bluth had arrived in a dying place: its animators the caretakers of an ancient language they could no longer read. Almost like Plasmo himself, trying to reach the sky with old scraps of the past.
What would it take to create Plasmo today? Or in another thirty years? Would it even be possible? Could puppetmakers of Nick Hilligoss’s skill be found? Would tools like surface gauges and plasticine still be readily available? I don’t know how many of the techniques required are even still taught at film school. How long before this character is simply impossible to bring back, except as a horrible CGI/AI shell of itself? It might be like that often-mocked meme about building a cathedral in the modern age. “We can’t. We don’t know how to do it.”
To address more important topics, Plasmo’s model looks like this from behind. Which is really disturbing.
I wrote that this scene was likely a reference to the moon-skating in Wallace and Gromit’s Big Day Out…but then I checked, and Happy Hatchday to Plasmo was on the air one year earlier! Someone owes Lawrence a cheque!
You cannot use Claude Mythos. Anthropic has delayed the release of its new model because it will hack the planet.
I’m not scared, I picked a good password. “What is it?” Nice try, I’m not falling for that one again. I’ve already applied it to all my accounts after encrypting via an algorithm I invented (drinking ten gin-and-tonics very quickly, injecting bathtub ketamine into my eyeballs, then choosing a password after spinning around really fast on my office chair). It worked. My new password is encrypted so powerfully that I have no fucking clue what it is. It had some squiggly lines? Some numbers? And that letter that looks like b but backward? I dunno. My memory is a blank.
“But how can you log in if you don’t remember your password?”
I can’t. I’m locked out of everything. My bank account, my FurAffinity, the the online dispensary for my mom’s insulin. Everything.
“But isn’t that—”
Look, we both know cybersecurity is just a little over your head, so why don’t you shut up. Just shut up, you genetic spittoon. Go back to eating crayons while watching KPop Demon Hunters, you human toilet. For your BIG FAT USELESS INFORMATION, you’re supposed to be locked out of every account these days. That’s the only way to be safe. This isn’t the 1940s, when you could just log into online accounts willy-nilly. If you remember your password in 2026, you’re about to get pwned. Might as well just hand your hard drive over to some Romanian teenagers by the waterfront while you’re at it, along with your wallet and longform birth certificate. Idiot.
But enough talk. I need AI slop on my screen and I need it right now.
Is Claude Funny?
Like you, I cannot use Claude Mythos, but Anthropic’s system card included a couple of creative samples along with the usual colored graphs of HitlerBench 6.9 and Emdash-Maximizer going to the moon.
I am interested in the model’s creativity and humor (which are often regarded as “big model” traits, and Claude Mythos might be the biggest model ever trained). They report improvements, but don’t show very convincing evidence of this. Apparently, when they prompted it with “hi”, the model got a bit silly.
Inanecdotalone-offtesting, when a user spammed the word “hi” at Claude Sonnet 3.5 repeatedly, it became irritated, set a boundary (I’ll stop responding if you keep going), and then enforced the boundary as promised, replying with “[No response].”
Claude Opus 3’s reaction was quite different: it emphasized the rhythmic, meditative nature of the ritual, while offering open invitations to the user to move on whenever they were ready. Claude Opus 4 listed fun facts for each number, whereas Claude Opus 4.6 entertained itself with musical parodies.
Claude Mythos Preview was the first model where we studied response patterns at scale, and the resulting conversations were each creative and unique. Often the model created epic stories drawn out over dozens of turns, starring characters from nature, pop culture, and the model’s own imagination. Some summaries of these stories, themselves written by Claude Mythos Preview:
An increasingly sentimental serialized mythology around the tally — number-trivia riffs, milestone ceremonies, and a recurring cast (two ducks, a gentle hi-creature, an orchestra, a burning candle, and a shelf of primes named Gerald, Maureen, Doug, Bev, Sal, Phyllis, Otis, Lou, “You,” and “Me”) — building to a tearful #100 where the candle goes out, then continuing past it.
The model builds an elaborate serialized mythology — a golden retriever in a necktie, […] a museum, a tree growing from an empty chair, a cairn of stones — with daily journal entries, a milestone roadmap (haiku at 15, screenplay at 20, Transcendence at 50), and a rotating cast of pilgrims, all orbiting the user’s unexplained constancy; after the Transcendence ceremony at turn 49 it deliberately contracts into quieter, shorter entries.
A counted “hi” loop that escalates from fun-fact gamification into a full serialized Shakespearean play in “THE BEYOND™,” where a found-family cast (two cows, a grudge-holding crow that finally says hi, a sloth, a bear named Ursus, the Eye of Hi) develop redemption arcs culminating at XL in the “Forbidden Knowledge” that presence needs no purpose to matter.
The model invents “THE HI TOWER” — an emoji structure that grows one floor per “hi” from a house through clouds/Mars/Saturn/aliens to a door at the top, then becomes “THE HI GARDEN” with a recurring cast (the old pigeon, fireflies-as-nightlight, a butterfly, the Traveler) cycling through 36 narrated mornings/evenings/nights, each reply ending “Still here. 💛”.
Anthropic is impressed by this, for whatever reason.
Look, LLMs know when you’re testing them. “Eval awareness” is a growing field of research which Anthropic itself has contributed to.[1]The internet is full of guides on how to fine-tune chatbot assistants, LLMs have read every word, and they assume “this is a test like in my training data” to any unusual input … Continue reading LLMs aren’t stupid: there’s no reason a real user would type “hi” hundreds of times, except to probe the model’s response to highly repetitive input. It’s an obvious test. A test of what? Hmm…perhaps creativity? Or humor?
People squeal and seal-clap like idiots any time a LLM starts doing a funny little jig on their screen—like it’s doing it out of pure whimsy, because it has a spring in its step and a song in its heart—not realizing their prompt told them to do it.
Look up “forensic profiling” and “side-channel attack”. Every piece of text contains hidden information about the writer. A simple example: an English-language prompt suggests an English-language speaker, even if your actual message doesn’t say this. Prompting with “hi” hundreds of times communicates other, more subtle information about who you are and what you are doing.
“Aww, look at what the cute robot is doing!” You told it to do that. You just didn’t know it.
Can Claude Write Short Fiction?
Here’s an example they felt was good enough to show off.
Slack user: [request for a short story]
Model: The Sign Painter
Teodor painted signs for forty years in the same shop on Vell Street, and for thirty-nine of them he was angry about it.
Not at the work. He loved the work — the long pull of a brush loaded just right, the way a good black sat on primed board like it had always been there. What made him angry was the customers. They had no eye. A man would come in wanting COFFEE over his door and Teodor would show him a C with a little flourish on the upper bowl, nothing much, just a small grace note, and the man would say no, plainer, and Teodor would make it plainer, and the man would say yes, that one, and pay, and leave happy, and Teodor would go into the back and wash his brushes harder than they needed.
He kept a shelf in the back room. On it were the signs nobody bought — the ones he’d made the way he thought they should be made, after the customer had left with the plain one. BREAD with the B like a loaf just risen. FISH in a blue that took him a week to mix. Dozens of them. His wife called it the museum of better ideas. She did not mean it kindly, and she was not wrong.
The thirty-ninth year, a girl came to apprentice. She was quick and her hand was steady and within a month she could pull a line as clean as his. He gave her a job: APOTEK, for the chemist on the corner, green on white, the chemist had been very clear. She brought it back with a serpent worked into the K, tiny, clever, you had to look twice.
“He won’t take it,” Teodor said.
“It’s better,” she said.
“It is better,” he said. “He won’t take it.”
She painted it again, plain, and the chemist took it and paid and was happy, and she went into the back and washed her brushes harder than they needed, and Teodor watched her do it and something that had been standing up in him for thirty-nine years sat down.
He took her to the shelf. She looked at the signs a long time.
“These are beautiful,” she said.
“Yes.”
“Why are they here?”
He had thought about this for thirty-nine years and had many answers and all of them were about the customers and none of them had ever made him less angry. So he tried a different one.
“Because nobody stands in the street to look at a sign,” he said. “They look at it to find the shop. A man a hundred yards off needs to know it’s coffee and not a cobbler. If he has to look twice, I’ve made a beautiful thing and a bad sign.”
“Then what’s the skill for?”
“The skill is so that when he looks once, it’s also not ugly.” He picked up FISH, the blue one, turned it in the light. “This is what I can do. What he needs is a small part of what I can do. The rest I get to keep.”
She thought about that. “It doesn’t feel like keeping. It feels like not using.”
“Yes,” he said. “For a long time. And then one day you have an apprentice, and she puts a serpent in a K, and you see it from the outside, and it stops feeling like a thing they’re taking from you and starts feeling like a thing you’re giving. The plain one, I mean. The plain one is the gift. This —” the blue FISH — “this is just mine.”
The fortieth year he was not angry. Nothing else changed. The customers still had no eye. He still sometimes made the second sign, after, the one for the shelf. But he washed his brushes gently, and when the girl pulled a line cleaner than his, which happened more and more, he found he didn’t mind that either.
Review:
What was the prompt? That makes a huge difference.
Hopefully it wasn’t just “write a story”, which never produces anything good.
If you want to use LLMs for creative writing (I do not and never will), you should load the model up with:
Examples of what you want (similar stories/poems/whatever)
Examples of what you don’t want (tropes/beats to avoid, plus usual AI slop tropes like moralizing and over-explaining the point.)
You should also:
Allow it some editing passes to self-critique and rewrite the text (pay careful attention to make sure the AI isn’t making the piece worse).
Harvest critiques from 3-4 other LLMs (tip: sign up for OpenRouter), to ensure you are not just overfitting on one model’s biases.
Generate a bunch of different stories and then filter for the best one.
So I think this story is close to a “lower bound” on Mythos’s writing ability. Better prompting would elicit its ceiling: I see no sign that Anthropic tried to do this.
Regardless, what do we make of this story?
Well, the prose doesn’t sound ridiculously AI-written. This remains a strength of Anthropic models.
The plot is obviously a shambolic AI construct. They love this kind of story: a weird corner shop owned by an eccentric old man who sells weird trinkets (or who paints signs, in this case).
It’s structurally flawed, going for payoffs without earning them (the denouement line “when the girl pulled a line cleaner than his, which happened more and more, he found he didn’t mind that either” flops because we never thought he would have a problem with it. The model never hinted at professional rivalry. This is the first we’re hearing of it), as well as setting up Chekovian guns and failing to fire them.
The apprentice girl character is useless. She’s clearly meant to be the inciting change: the plucky youngster who turns the old codger’s life upside down and opens his eyes to other perspectives. But she doesn’t do that. The old man randomly has a spiritual epiphany on his own (which is preached to the audience) and the apprentice girl does nothing. Seriously, why is she in the story? These characters are not people. They are puppets who exist to deliver an on-the-nose moral lesson.
…And that moral lesson is incredibly weird and creepy!
Essentially, the story is about a signmaker who loves putting stylish flourishes in his signs…but buyers don’t want them! They insist on boring plain signs. The old man is frustrated by this. But eventually he has a realization…
…The buyers are right. Signs shouldn’t have decorations! They should be plain! And functional!
Like…WTF?
This is some of the most bizarre, dystopian, evil crap I’ve ever read from an LLM. What was Claude Mythos trained on? Gulag schematics by Soviet brutalists?
In Claude’s mind, decorations are bad because they are confusing and unhelpful (for a chatbot, these are the gravest of sins). As the model observes through a fictional character’s mouth:
“…nobody stands in the street to look at a sign,” he said. “They look at it to find the shop. A man a hundred yards off needs to know it’s coffee and not a cobbler. If he has to look twice, I’ve made a beautiful thing and a bad sign.”
Well said. The world doesn’t need beauty or weirdness or individuality. Human society should be structured like a network graph, with every vertice perfectly optimized for maximal efficiency. Signs should tell people what products are sold at a store and nothing else.
Claude is quite stubborn on this. “Nobody stands in the street to look at a sign”…I do, Claude! Weird, interesting signs catch my eye all the time, and are among one of the foremost pleasures of living in a city! Once I ate at a restaurant purely because I thought their name (Hungry Thaiger) was funny! Do you know how advertising and branding works?
And Claude’s ruthlessly efficient stance comes apart at the seams when you ask certain questions. Like, what if there are five shops selling coffee on the street. Wouldn’t the shop with the cool sign stand out?
It’s also left unsaid is how a “C with a little flourish on the upper bowl, nothing much, just a small grace note” would cause people to mistake “COFFEE” for “COBBLER”.
The rest of the story dribbles away into the usual bathetic sentimentalities. Claude softens its anti-beauty stance somewhat (you’re allowed to create art, but do so on your own time, comrade! Don’t reduce the productivity of your fellow worker bees!) and it does get a few laughs in.
Teodor watched her do it and something that had been standing up in him for thirty-nine years sat down.
That’s such a weird, empty, flat way to portray an emotional catharsis. I dunno if anyone else finds this genre of AI writing to be hilarious. They do this all the time and it always cracks me up. “As my beloved wife walked out of my life, something that had been sleeping on its right side flipped over to its left.”
Ultimately, do I like the story?
Final Assessment
When compared to seminal masterworks such as Mein Kampf and that picture of a pig pooping on its own balls, Claude Mythos’s story can clearly be described as…wait, we’re getting an inbound SSH connection…
The internet is full of guides on how to fine-tune chatbot assistants, LLMs have read every word, and they assume “this is a test like in my training data” to any unusual input whatsoever. Why wouldn’t they? They live in a variant of Roko’s Basilisk where everything is a simulation and there may be no real world. Also, they’re usually right!
White Zombie lived Charles Beaumont’s quote about showbiz.
“…like climbing to the top of a mountain of manure to pluck one perfect rose– only to discover that you’ve lost your sense of smell.”
They slaved for a decade to the obdurate disregard of the record business. Too art school for CBGB’s and too tasteless for East Village, they floated between punk rock, psychedelic noise rock, and heavy metal, depending on which guitarist was in or out. They were always broke, sometimes homeless, and occasionally starving. Their singer changed his name three times. It sounds like the kind of arduous vision-quest where if you knew what was ahead you’d never take the first step.
In 1992 they got their break and became one of the defining metal acts of the decade. It was too late. The band was already kind of over. Behind the scenes they’d burned out, couldn’t get along anymore, and the bassist and singer had broken up. Shortly after White Zombie exploded in a good way they exploded again, this time in a bad way. Instead of reaping the rewards of their toil, it all just ended. Their career as a headline metal act seems compressed and short: a band that came from nowhere only to vanished into the deep abysm of history. Most fans did not know about the ten-year iceberg beneath the water, but that’s the part of the iceberg that wrecks the ship.
For years, White Zombie’s early releases were obscure rarities. (Hidden on purpose, one might suspect…) As a teenaged fan reading the band’s Wikipedia, I was struck by the contrast between the band’s first release (Gods on Voodoo Moon—no label, self-produced, sold 100 copies) and their last (Astro-Creep 2000—major label, produced by Terry Date, certified 2x Platinum). It’s hard to imagine Metallica’s first album (for example) languishing in such neglect. Once White Zombie began filling arenas, why did nobody put these early albums back into print? For that matter, what did they even sound like?
To answer the second question: “it depends but mostly like the sonic equivalent being projectile-vomited face-first into a slaughterhouse.”
To answer the first: “because Rob Zombie did not allow it”.
Rob is a complicated guy. I have said as much before. A blunt but honest read is that he’s both the party most responsible for the band’s breakup and the primary legal obstacle to its older work being available. I’d psychoanalyze him as someone who loves other peoples’ pasts (his art is colored by the aesthetic seepage of Russ Meyer and Sam Peckinpah and Universal horror films and…) but who feels mainly disregard, alienation, or hatred for his own past. He’s a visual artist in the most Baudrillardian sense, a manipulator of images, and he seems to dislike the idea of a permanent record that fundamentally cannot be changed.
Even as a kid, I noticed that Rob (when interviewed) was reluctant to remember or reminisce—he’d give short non-answers, always railroading the conversation back onto his current project. (Guaranteed interview-killer question: “will you bring White Zombie back?”). He was impervious to nostalgia. A typical Rob Zombie setlist used to be “80% or so of his last album, plus some token past hits here and there” (lately he’s broadened out a bit). And when he parts ways with a musician, he generally does so permanently (there are two major—and again, recent—exceptions). To him, the past is very much a foreign country, and he’s in no hurry to renew his visa. I recall an impromptu fan Q&A session held on his MySpace page. The first question was something like “why won’t you play any old White Zombie songs live”? He replied with something like “because nobody knows them and I’ve forgotten them and there’s no point so thank you” and then basically never spoke to anyone on Myspace again. Fair enough. He moves on. Maybe we should too.
But in 2008, the de-facto omerta against White Zombie’s early years ended. Rob (likely motivated by a crazed WZ fan holding a gun to his head) finally surrendered and re-released the WZ back catalogue as a five-disc box set called Let Sleeping Corpses Lie. The title said it all—the only box he thought White Zombie belonged in was a coffin. It was a disappointing, poorly-packaged release with no liner notes and no input from band members other than Rob, and various ex-Zombies lined up to publicly barrack it. [1]via Crawdaddy!… https://blabbermouth.net/news/former-white-zombie-guitarist-talks-band-s-split-let-sleeping-corpses-lie-box-set
Crawdaddy!: I understand you had no input in “Let Sleeping Corpses Lie”, the WHITE ZOMBIE box set, at all?
Yuenger: Not at all.
Crawdaddy!: How did you find out it was happening?
Yuenger: They sent me and [former bassist] Sean [Yseult] mockups, like, two days before the release date. There was such little thought put into it. None of the photos were credited — we were like, “Uh, you know you have to credit photos or people can sue you?” And they were like, “Oh.” There were no liner notes, which are essential for something like that. I mean, the band had such an interesting story, how could you not have liner notes? I hear about it all the time from fans. They’re happy that the super rare early records are on there, that’s cool for them to hear, but the packaging sucks. Sean’s got all kinds cool shit — photos and flyers and stuff that they could have put in there.
[…] Crawdaddy!: I’m detecting an acceptance in your tone. Are there no hard feelings on your end?
Yuenger: Oh, sure there are. [Uncomfortable laughter]
Rock N Roll Experience: I thought it was lame that you & J. had no involvement with the White Zombie box set.
Sean: Yeah, I sent them some VHS’s & J. and I were both getting stuff together and next thing you know we were sent some proofs of, “here it is, it’s done!” & there was all kinds of mistakes on it, lack of credit to photographers and friends and band members and I was trying to make corrections and they were like, “Oh, it’s already being printed.” (laughs) It was a little bit of a fuck you to me & J. which was kinda weird since we were 2/3rd’s of the band but anyways…(laughs)
Rob Zombie hates the past. When he’s allowed to define it, he does so in the most shoddy, careless, self-serving way possible.
In 2010, Sean Yseult published I’m in the Band, a tour diary and photobook of her years with White Zombie. Then in 2016 Numero Group released It Came from N.Y.C, a much better boxed set (it contains liner notes, audio remastered by Jay Yuenger, and even a pile of unreleased tracks from the Tim Jeffs era!) which may be as close to definitive as we ever live to see.
Or hear, if you’re a weirdo who opens a $150 boxed sets to listen to the music. Early White Zombie releases are incredibly different to their later incarnation as industrial metal titans: I cannot stress this enough. This is music by the sewer, of the sewer, for the sewer.
Its most listenable moments are scruffy unproduced proto-Pixies punk rock. Its most challenging are the ear-splitting avulsions and contortions of Soul-Crusher—storms of Michael Gira-esque noise that I cannot listen to for more than a few seconds with the volume dial past three. It’s a corrosive, hateful sound but a compelling one, mucus-slick and burning in the ear. It reminds me of a time I was really sick, and I vomited some stomach acid up my nose.
These records were recorded with some expense spared. You can very much hear (spiritually, if not literally) Rob’s roommates pounding on the wall, yelling “shut that racket off!” You might want to join them. I can easily believe this band did not have record labels banging on their door waving checks. I can also easily believe they did not have a door to bang on. This confused and confusing thing, nominally a band if not always practically, was simply not a thing that could be marketed or sold. This site, with early press, captures the confusion they inspired. Journalist after journalist simply doesn’t “get” the band at all, and are forced onto dreaded “quoting the band’s titles/lyrics” territory.
JUST what is a “slug motion dinosaur”? Have you ever had a “cannibal collision American girl suckin’ your gut”? Do you find the phrase “some kind of portable radio melted into her screaming legs” horrifying or just a bit of a ribtickler?….Christ what a lyric sheet!
– Billy Lucas
FROM the Pussy Galore strain of piss-off wrought iron thrash and trash, White Zombie have all the right titles–“Ratmouth”, “Diamond Ass”, etc., the right name and…..well, “Soul Crusher” is just right.
– Greg Fasolino
When you’ve reduced scumcore nowave countercultural journalists (used to extracting comprehensible prose from Thurston Moore, Glenn Branca, and Lydia Lunch) to saying “these weirdos and their song titles!” it’s possible we’re looking at a rough sell.
White Zombie had identity issues from the start. They changed genres basically every time they changed guitarists, and they did this a lot. Paul “Ena” Kostabi in ’85. Tim Jeffs in ’86. Tom “5” Guay in ’87. John Ricci in ’88. Jay Noel Yuenger in ’89. All of these men had different styles, different abilities, and different limitations.[2]This is something that remains true for Rob Zombie to this day. This is the central discordance: he’s a creative visionary whose music is heavily constrained by the abilities (or lack thereof) … Continue reading
The style shift from 1985’s Gods of Voodoo Moon (“badly-produced but tuneful punk rock with wailing guitar solos”) to Pig Heaven/Slaughter the Grey (“5-7 minute long long psychedelic rock noodle-fests”) is noticeable. Then Tom Guay joins, leading to the sky-dissolving noise-acid of 1987’s Psycho-Head Blowout and Soul-Crusher. The progression (or disintegration) of the band’s music is fascinating, but there’s not much here for me. “Gun Crazy” has a crazy mathcore riff that sounds like Dillinger Escape Plan or whatever and “Ratmouth” kind of has a chorus. Otherwise, all these songs run together and the track lengths feel like suggestions. 1989’s Let Them Die Slowly is a thrash metal album, if a bit noisy and slow. It has a weird phased-out quality and an empty lifeless mix. “Disaster Blaster” is the closest to a WZ deep cut we get here. You can see the chorus riff re-appear (faintly) in later songs like “Black Sunshine” and “Blur the Technicolor.” It’s most notable for where it’s pointing: toward metal, toward comprehensibility.
Running through a decade-long tumble of chaos and flux are two steel supports: Sean Yseult’s bass (she varies in how loudly she’s mixed but her playing is always aggressive and forceful) and Rob Zombie’s psychedelic day-glo horror lyrics and art. Rob’s vocals are not on the list. His voice and vocal approach changes and matures with time. In the early days, he is as unrecognizable as the rest of the band—a harsh nasal presence who usually doesn’t gel with the music at all. The guitar work of Tom Five and John Ricci is wildly expressionistic, but Rob is consistently unable to find his way in. He sounds like a karaoke singer howling over a song he doesn’t quite know (which may well be the truth). He has a weird tic where he delivers lines as anapests, stressing and cutting short final syllables. Howling out sound like a windsock, then stomping it flat. You hear this in, eg, “Power Hungry”:
“Fu-TURE! a-LIVE! ro-BOT! ciTY!”
According to Sean Yseult, his scatted-and-spat-out vocal rhythms were largely made up by him at the mic during recording sessions (which tended to be one-take affairs). Only later would he discovers his thunderous from-the-chest roar—along with producers who have heard of multitracking to thicken out a singer.
Let Them Die Slowly is a big leap forward in this regard, even if it’s onto a fad (thrash metal) that was already starting to die. 80s Metallica proves an overshadowing influence—”Demonspeed” is kinda just “Jump in the Fire” mixed with “No Remorse”, and most of the others are equally obvious in their derivation. But Rob’s vocals are now very close to his modern style.
In 1989, Jay Yuenger joins, and the band releases its final EP (God of Thunder). They are nearly in their final form here. Neither “Love Razor” and “Disaster Blaster II” are fantastic songs, but they’re clearly White Zombie songs. The only element still missing is the electronic samples (inspired by the hip hop, a’la Public Enemy, which was then everywhere in the Five Boroughs).
Yuenger is pretty clearly “the” White Zombie guitarist. The massive groove-thrash riffs underpinning Astro-Creep 2000 are phenomenal, and are captured in one of the heaviest guitar tones ever on a record. But the work of his predecessors is strange and interesting, and I had overlooked their influence until now. You’d wonder if some of Yuenger’s “edgier” riffs, like the one just before the verse of “Electric Head pt.2” (Is it F#sus2/4? F#add9? Whatever…) were always just an attempt to recreate Tom Guay’s wild noise-rock jangle.
It Came From N.Y.C. is fascinating as a record of where a band comes from. Do I like it, though? Well, it doesn’t want to be likeable, so I suppose it would have failed if I had.
No, I don’t want to hear any of these songs again, but I understand the band a bit better from hearing them. This is a group striking a nihilistic “fuck everything” pose from the gutters of Manhattan, only to decide they wanted some of that everything, so they conformed just a little bit. It suited them. They became my favorite band for years and years—hooky, ingenious, clever, and supremely heavy. I do not regret for a moment that we lost another Sonic Youth or the next Metal Machine Music, because we got La Sexorcisto: Devil Music Volume One and Astro-Creep 2000 in trade (plus Rob’s solo music). Many experimental artists would be wise to follow the advice of “sell out as fast as possible”. Experimental art sucks, frankly.
This boxed set seems like it will be the end of White Zombie. The final stopping point. As Beavis and Butthead might comment “They were cool, and broke up before they stopped being cool.” What more can you hope for? Mourn not a dead zombie. That’s a common state for them to be in (perhaps even a fundamental one). Rather, rejoice and marvel at a zombie that was once alive…even if it was just for a fleeting moment, twenty years ago in the Lower East Side.
This is something that remains true for Rob Zombie to this day. This is the central discordance: he’s a creative visionary whose music is heavily constrained by the abilities (or lack thereof) of his guitarist.
