The Cover Uncovered: Ministry’s dark rebuttal of fascism with ‘The Land of…’
In 2016, the Canadian town of Tisdale in the country’s western Saskatchewan province voted to change its official motto after 60 years to “Opportunity grows here”. Owing to its prominent local economy driven by rapeseed and honey, Tisdale’s welcoming slogan that greeted passersby and visitors for decades was the unintentionally disquieting “The land of rape and honey”. With parlance shifting to ‘canola oil’ of late, fierce debate among the town council over the tagline’s accidental offence finally prevailed over the residents’ protective defence of Tisdale’s agricultural tradition.
Some say it was either spotted on a souvenir mug or printed on an advertisement, but either way, the moment Ministry’s Al Jourgensen had come across Tisdale’s motto, he knew he had his album title. Released in 1988 via Sire Records, The Land of Rape and Honey marked another giant step forward in the world of industrial electronic attack. Having smothered his With Sympathy debut the moment it had been dropped—Ministry’s big-label compromised synthpop hatchet finally buried on The Squirrely Years Revisited doover—a break in London working with post-punk dub producer Adrian Sherwood instilled a tougher punch of EBM muscle for Ministry’s sophomore Twitch in 1985.
Recruiting The Blackouts’ Paul Barker as a core member amid an ever-rotating cycle of collaborators and Wax Trax! Records labelmates, Ministry, finally began cracking their pioneering cyber-ravaged sound. Warped audio samples from horror movies and the bleak news cycle, corrosive guitar scrape, and mechanised drum machines all programmed and edited together in Jourgensen and Barker’s acidic Boschian collage. Led by the album’s sole single, ‘Stigmata’, Ministry’s third LP would serve as the key foundational record for the industrial wave about to explode into the 1990s.
While ‘Stigmata’ offers the most direct metal attack, The Land of Rape and Honey‘s title track is the album’s centrepiece cut. A chilling blast of martial percussion, razor synths, and ominously looping “seig heil” shrapnel all erode Ministry’s torn-up sonic and thematic landscape, lyrically pilfering Tisdale’s infamous motto and melded with The Old Testament’s biblical grace of plentiful hinterland, Jourgensen and Barker subvert every political leader’s promise of utopia into a nightmarish purgatory of ugly supremacy and spiritual dead ends: “Fist to fist / Eye to eye / The rulers of the wasteland / And in the land of rape and honey / You pray”.
Political ideologies that tell one cohort of society they’re innately better than the other and deserving of rule and state favour lead to very dark roads. Starkly illustrating fascism’s eternal threat, Jourgensen took a slapdash still from a Second World War documentary of a burned corpse in the Leipzig-Thekla division of Buchenwald concentration camp. With unnerving happenstance, the Polaroid snap yielded a bruised and discoloured purple tint across the image, giving the accidental effect of degraded digital molest. Presenting Nazi horror behind an obscured film of tech thrusts The Third Reich’s painful warning into a disquieting contemporary slowly unlearning its dark lessons.
Live performances of ‘The Land of Rape and Honey’ would convey Ministry’s fierce contempt for the political Right with greater resolve. Dead Kennedys’ Jello Biafra would routinely regale a satirical speech lampooning the United States pledge of allegiance like a phoney legislative avatar of American failure. Jourgensen then would hobble on stage with simian-like posture and a Totenkopf emblazoned helmet, sieg heiling in front of filmed projections of Adolf Hitler and marching SS while Biafra sucks his thumb like an infant. It’s a disorienting churn of absurdist punk theatre tearing apart blind patriotism and nationalist uniformity.
“All we’re ever saying is ‘think for yourself, question authority’, Jourgensen made clear to Rolling Stone in 1991. “It’s very, very simple. Everyone wants things precut, homogenised, spoon-fed, and I won’t give it to them. ‘The Land of Rape and Honey’ is a completely anti-fascist song. That’s what we’re fighting against”. Some didn’t get the memo. When Neo-Nazis who’d caught wind of the album’s cover eagerly attended Ministry’s shows and earnestly brandished fascist salutes, Jourgensen was known for leaping into the crowd and smacking a bottle of Bushmills whiskey around their skinheads.
The Land of Rape and Honey‘s arresting and haunting cover would act as a benchmark for Ministry for the remainder of their nearly 45-year existence, a stark and vicious excoriation of fascism and liberal democracies’ complacency in challenging the Right’s pernicious allure. Having since scored politically charged cuts from ‘NWO’, the 2000s’ ‘Bush Trilogy‘, and AmeriKKKant‘s riposte to President Donald Trump’s end-times corporatism, Jourgensen looks back at his seminal 1988 LP with pride and trepidation. “As much as I like this record, it’s kind of a shame that some of the same topics I was railing about then are still pertinent now,” Jourgensen confessed in 2013’s Ministry: The Lost Gospels According to Al Jourgensen. “Time flies, but nothing changes”.
