I can’t explain it better than this. Is the Asheville music scene ready?:
A cult icon best known for his fearsome, and sometimes transcendent, stage performances, Genesis was one of the most influential musicians of the UK’s post-punk era. He invented the genre known as industrial music and later helped pioneer acid house and the rave scene, all the while crafting an unsettling persona—shamanistic, sinister, and unabashedly deviant—that would inspire countless acts. His own output never found a mass audience, but as author Douglas Rushkoff, who briefly played keyboards for Psychic TV, points out, “If it weren’t for Throbbing Gristle, people like Marilyn Manson and Trent Reznor would never have existed at all.”
The art world, too, owes P-Orridge a considerable debt. One of his early sculptures, displayed at the Museum of Modern Art in Paris, was a vitrine filled with live maggots that fed on menstrual blood and eventually grew into fruit flies—not exactly Matisse, perhaps, but a hot enough idea that when Damien Hirst did almost exactly the same thing (replacing the tampons with a cow’s head) more than a decade later, the piece instantly launched his career. Genesis was also a performance artist before the genre had a name, doing everything from masturbating onstage to publicly wounding himself in the name of creative experimentation.
Meanwhile, he transformed body piercing from a fetish of the hardcore gay subculture into a mainstream phenomenon. He was an eager student of occultist Aleister Crowley and a practitioner of “sex magick” (credit him, along with Jimmy Page, for giving rock its satanic edge). He experimented with a panoply of narcotics; hung out with William S. Burroughs and Dr. Timothy Leary; and founded a quasi-cult, Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth, which claimed 10,000 worldwide adherents at its peak. He was denounced as a degenerate, a satanist, and a corrupter of youth by the Fleet Street tabloids; charged with obscenity for his indecent mail art; targeted by Scotland Yard amid the ritual child-abuse hysteria of the early 1990s; and essentially banished from his home country. In short, Genesis P-Orridge was, by conventional measures, not merely weird but off the charts. And this was before he had his teeth filed down to tiny points and replaced with solid gold replicas; before the cheek implants; before the boob job.
He and Breyer wouldn’t actually get to talk to each other until the next evening, when they accompanied Sellers to a party at the S&M club Paddles, jabbering away like kids while Jackie ground the heel of her motorcycle boot into some guy’s testicles. On the morning in question, though, there wasn’t time. Jackie had to go to work, and Gen was on his way out. He hadn’t really come to Terence’s dungeon for punishment, anyway; he’d already had more than enough of that in his life.
In February 14, 2003, Gen and Jackie, who’d gone on to change her name to Lady Jaye Breyer P-Orridge, lay on twin hospital gurneys, hand in hand. Having married nearly a decade before, they’d recently come up with a plan to take their relationship to the next level.
The idea behind pandrogeny, as they called it, was for two people to literally become each other—or to come as close as possible. At first, it was a matter of simply dressing alike, going in for the same hairstyle, getting Jaye a set of contact lenses to match Gen’s eyes. But that wasn’t enough. The Valentine’s Day operation gave them matching breast implants, size C. Later, Jaye had her eyes and nose done, and got a chin implant, to resemble Gen. Gen received cheek enhancements and a lip job.
…
Now Gen feels it’s his duty to represent both himself and Jaye on this physical plane; as a result, he’s planning additional surgeries to more closely resemble her. “I need to balance out my energy,” he says.
He’s been wearing Jaye’s clothes almost exclusively—they were the same size, except around the shoulders—and using her cell phone, keeping her outgoing greeting, despite the protests of some of their friends.
Jaye’s spirit has contacted him several times, he says, via the usual paranormal routes: pictures flying off walls, strange vibrations. (He notes that a few friends have witnessed these events as well.) Jaye has let him know she’s waiting for him, but Gen has decided to stick around for now. Time in the other place moves at a different speed, he says. She’ll be patient. In the meantime, she’s instructed him to move to Asheville, North Carolina (a place neither one of them ever visited), and build a compound with some friends. The Queens house is on the market.
Well, since you’re still here, we evidently still don’t have enough.
just what Asheville needs – another F*ing Freak!