Drugs Are Nice

Lisa Crystal Carver Drugs Are Nice (2005)
I was dimly aware of the existence of something called Suckdog back when it was a thing, but couldn't tell if it was a person, a band, or what, and never investigated further because it sounded like it inhabited approximately the same territory as Costes and GG Allin.

For the sake of qualification, GG Allin was a rock dude who famously incorporated actual human poo into his stage act; and I'd once had a letter from Jean Louis Costes - because my mailing address had been in some fanzine or other - specifically a letter written on the back of a photocopy of a photograph of himself in the nip sporting a massive erection - which was at least thematically consistent with the tone of his correspondence. It was funny rather than annoying, but I didn't get the impression we'd have a lot to say to one another should I take him up on his offer, whatever it was.

At some point in the nineties I learn that Lisa Suckdog is actually a person and that she lives with Boyd Rice, which I hear because the band I'm in use the same distribution company. I'm not quite sure what to make of Boyd Rice - which is probably the whole point of Boyd Rice, it could be argued. His records are massively entertaining but something doesn't sit right - even given the possibility of stances adopted mainly for the sake of pissing off liberals. Gibby of World Serpent - this being the aforementioned distribution company - informs me that Boyd is now a father, but the kid has some sort of congenital birth defect. It's all very sad, although I can't help wondering how this squares with all the social Darwinian bollocks our man has taken to spouting, because the potential for contradiction seems unfortunately enormous, not to mention tragic.

So, given that Lisa Carver was romantically involved with both Jean Louis Costes and Boyd Rice, and given her occupation of cultural territory with which I'm roughly familiar, the autobiographical Drugs Are Nice seemed like it might be worth a look. Also, everyone seemed to think it was amazing.

For once, everyone turned out to be right.

I've got to the point where a lot of that transgressive stuff looks kind of samey, even predictable, and always reminds me of my friend Carl's sarcastic summation of the daily routine of certain performance artists of our mutual acquaintance which was, off with the clothes, on with the jam. This has very much been Lisa's territory, but rather than the usual Re/Search magazine style catalogue of routine shocks to the conservative and sensible, she understands the things she's done and has been able to learn from them and move on, rather than just going around in ever-decreasing poo-stained circles. She's had a tough fucking time too, and a lot of this will ring bells with anyone who has ever been in an abusive relationship, or even a just plain averagely shitty relationship; so it's a tough, even brutal read in places, but rewarding and even curiously uplifting due to Carver's determination to find the good in even the worst of situations, because some times that's really the only option; and she does this without the whole thing reading like self-help literature which in itself seems like a minor miracle. She really knows how to pull a sentence together, and is consistently witty, and has a gift for metaphor - all of which differentiates her work from just about every other industrial music footballer's biography out there.

Speaking of which, for any industrial music trainspotters who might be wondering, Boyd Rice doesn't come out of this one too well, and the same goes for Anton LaVey, but everyone else does, or as well as could be hoped for. The world needs more like Lisa Crystal Carver and Drugs Are Nice will almost certainly be the best thing you could ever buy from the section of the book store where you find it.