How a Los Angeles riot fired up a classic Ministry video and captured political breakdown
As the world burned around them, Ministry’s industrial juggernaut reached the biggest commercial peak they’d ever achieved.
Momentum was behind them to anyone paying attention. Having shaken off their synthpop chart pleasers in favour of a harder, punk-serrated electronic attack across the 1980s, the reputation forged amid Chicago’s Wax Trax! underground fast-tracked Ministry to one of the leading forces of the Lollapalooza generation, 1992’s Psalm 69: The Way to Succeed and the Way to Suck Eggs, enjoying a US Top 40 and suddenly lampooned on Beavis and Butt-Head.
A seismic asset to Ministry’s explosion was Psalm 69’s second single. Dropped in July along with the album, ‘NWO’ bottles an end-times fervour amid its mechanised metal barrage, fronted by Al Jourgensen’s corroded vocal seethe and saturated with the band’s penchant for warped media samples, pilfering some Apocalypse Now and President George HW Bush’s chilling NeoCon visions for a potently eschatological summoning of doom. It was in the air. The Cold War had ended and brought an uncertain unipolar world, Operation Desert Storm’s Middle Eastern dust hadn’t long settled, and US hegemony was spreading its tentacles around the globe.
Such febrility seemed to play out domestically, too. Three months before ‘NWO’ entered the charts, six days of riots tore through Los Angeles across late April and early May, the metropolitan area in flames as 63 people lay dead, thousands were injured, and property damage to the tune of over $1 billion. The chaos grew so great that both the California National Guard and even the US Army were called in for backup.
A simmering tension had been brewing across the working-class Black communities toward the LAPD before the riots’ final ignition. On March 3rd, 1991, African-American Rodney King was apprehended after a high-speed chase through the San Fernando Valley, receiving a taser and savage baton beating under the pretence that he was resisting arrest and suspected to be under the effects of PCP. Unbeknownst to the cops, all was caught by bystander George Holliday’s camcorder, evidencing otherwise.
Not since Watergate had a country’s moral conscience been so rocked, turmoil on the streets and anxieties surrounding the breakdown of old political orders, kicking into touch the supposed ‘end of history’ triumphed by liberal democracy.
Chaos is channelled from the era’s social upheaval and slathered all over ‘NWO’s frame, presenting a burning urban landscape of police brutality, gunfights, and a gyrating caricature of Bush dancing to his Congressional joint session “new world order” speech. Directed by Throbbing Gristle’s Peter Christopherson, Ministry’s signature number told the real story of the US’s cultural decay.
For further acidic satire, Christopherson orchestrates a sequence of a lady dressed as the Statue of Liberty being hauled out of a car and beaten by police, all caught on a faux-amateur camcorder. Such an image was raw in the LA memory; the officers involved in King’s abuse were only acquitted by the state three months earlier, which lit the city’s tinder box.
Viewing today, ‘NWO’ feels less like a mere promo doing the MTV rounds and more a document of when the US rot first set in, anticipating its internal collapsing to such devastating effect over 30 years later.
