I want to talk about two bands that don’t usually get mentioned in the same sentence. White Zombie should be a familiar name to most. Best remembered today for serving as the springboard for director/musician Rob Zombie’s career, the band was a formidable force in the early- to mid-90s, helping to bring heavy metal to the masses with a pair of platinum-selling albums: La Sexorcisto: Devil Music Vol. I and (deep breath) Astrocreep 2000: Songs of Love, Destruction, and Other Synthetic Delusions of the Electric Head.
But before the hit singles, before getting plugged by Beavis and Butt-head, before signing to Geffen, and before moving to California, White Zombie was a modest noise rock band from New York City. Zombie and band co-founder (and then girlfriend) Sean Yseult spent a good chunk of the 1980s self-releasing records of testicle-twisting scum rock, playing shitty New York clubs, and rubbing elbows with bands like Sonic Youth.
Around the same time, Cop Shoot Cop was staging a proto-viral marketing campaign by plastering cryptic posters blazoned with their band name throughout the city. While beloved by fans of noise punk and industrial rock, Cop Shoot Cop have drifted into almost criminal obscurity (due in no small part to the fact that their discography has been out of print for many years). They gained some notoriety for their unusual lineup, replacing the guitar — the central weapon in nearly every rock band’s arsenal — with a second bass guitar, and complementing it with a sampler (or two) and whatever scrap metal or detritus percussionist (and current Swans drummer!) Phil Puelo felt like pounding on.
While the two bands ended up in very different places, they share more in common than might be apparent on first glance. First off, since C$C kicked off in 1987, they and White Zombie moved in the same circles (in fact, White Zombie played shows with Black Snakes and Dig Dat Hole, two bands that featured future C$C founders Jack Natz, Todd A. and Puelo, respectively). Both groups were snapped up by major labels during the alt-rock boom of the 1990s (though C$C was a little too slow in migrating towards a more mainstream rock sound, a failure that eventually led to poor album sales, irreconcilable tensions between band members, and a terminated contract). Finally and most significantly, both groups made extensive use of electronic sampling: White Zombie songs were loaded with audio tidbits from grindhouse cinema and campy horror films; Cop Shoot Cop made similar use of found audio, often arranging them into collages in lieu of recorded vocals.
I haven’t been shy about my love affair with Rob Zombie’s old band, and one of my absolute favorite songs by the group is Astrocreep’s “Real Solution #9.”
Back in high school, I’d never heard anything like it. Delighted as I was in White Zombie’s use of B-movie clips and fragments, I had to admit that they often occupied a somewhat superficial place in the compositions, serving as an intro or a coda to a song, or helping to fill out an otherwise sparse bridge. “Real Solution” was something different, though. Here, the band’s sometimes cartoonish fascination with cinematic horror collided headlong into the horrors of the real world. The constantly recurring lyric “Who will survive and what will be left of them?” is the legendary tagline from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, but most of the rest of the song’s trappings are derived from Zombie’s long-standing fascination with Charles Manson. The “#9” is an obvious nod to “Revolution #9,” from the Beatles’ White Album, which Manson saw as a prophetic document of the coming race war, and the track is peppered with excerpts from interviews with the Manson family.
The opening sample from a recorded statement by convicted murderer Patricia Krenwinkle sets the tone. Isolated and forced into a loop, that three word phrase “I’m already dead” takes on a grim musicality, weaving itself into very fabric of drummer John Tempesta’s beat. But it’s during the song’s bridge where White Zombie really outdo themselves. They lift from the long-running reality/exploitation television series Cops an exchange between a police officer and a woman (?) who appears to be in the throes of religious ecstasy, the cadence of her frenzied ravings syncing eerily with the groove Jay Yuenger and Sean Yseult are grinding out. It wasn’t the first or last time the band would incorporate a sampled vocal hook into a song, but it was without a doubt their most refined and effective attempt.
It would be well over a decade before I was introduced to Cop Shoot Cop, but hearing tracks like “We Shall Be Changed” and “Disconnected 666” took me immediately back to those joyously wasted hours spent pouring over Astrocreep 2000 as a teenager. My favorite of all C$C’s collage tracks would have to be “Relief” from their 1991 sophomore album White Noise.
The vocal samples, culled from some kind of church addiction support group, are chopped into an incongruously catchy hook and set against a backdrop of wailing sirens. The marriage of grim, some might say tasteless, source elements with EDM-inspired groove seems like a pretty clear precursor to what White Zombie wanted to accomplish on “Real Solution #9.”
I have no way of knowing whether Cop Shoot Cop’s audio experimentalism had any influence on White Zombie’s later work. After all, horror movie samples were finding their way into White Zombie’s music as early as 1987’s Soul Crusher, and there were certainly other artists engaging in similar exercises around this time. Still, the bands’ shared history and mutual flirtations with industrial rock make drawing such a connection seem very tempting indeed.
