#73: The story of Skinny Puppy
And Snarky Puppy for that matter
“Wot’s all this then?” As I mentioned a few weeks ago, I’m folding the stuff I did in the bonus BNBs into the main one. In practice, that means we’ll occasionally divert from the usual roundup of band names to do other stuff—like in this case, dive into the origins of Skinny Puppy (as we’ve done for Death Cab for Cutie, King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard, Fartbarf, Jimmy Eat World, and others). Thanks, as always, for reading.
There isn’t much to the name Skinny Puppy—no deep meaning to decipher, no ostensibly clever play on words, no message hiding in an anagram. It’s not a reference from or allusion to some important artistic work that’ll make you feel stupid for not knowing.*
Skinny Puppy is simply a tidy adjective-noun combination, a perfectly symmetrical four syllables.
But nothing about Skinny Puppy is tidy or symmetrical.
The Canadian-bred industrial icons—currently on their supposed final tour—have spent the past 40 years pulling a bait and switch, crafting frequently impenetrable, often inscrutable music that the U.S. government allegedly used to torture prisoners in Guantanamo Bay.
If the image of an emaciated pup conjures Sarah McLachlan’s heart-tugging SPCA commercial, the reality of Skinny Puppy is frontman Nivek Ogre tearing apart a stuffed dog on stage, as he did while touring for 1988’s VIVIsectVI. Don’t fret; he’s a longtime animal-rights activist, and there was a whole story to it: “Onstage, Ogre plays the role of laboratory vivisectionist, then enlightened man, realizing the evil of animal experimentation,” Staci Bonner wrote in Spin. “Finally, Nivek transforms himself into the tortured animal, in a desperate attempt to convey ‘the inner workings of the mind under the strain of vivisection.’”
It’s because I purchased VIVIsectVI as an adolescent that I know what vivisection even means, though Merriam-Webster makes it sound even more sinister: “animal experimentation especially if considered to cause distress to the subject.”
Sarah McLachlan’s commercials were effective and all, but the SPCA could’ve worked with Skinny Puppy for something avant garde and potentially traumatic!
Skinny Puppy is not to be confused with the Grammy-winning jazz collective Snarky Puppy, who coalesced at the University of North Texas more than two decades after Skinny Puppy was a thing. The correlation between the two names seems obvious, but it doesn’t sound like bandleader Michael League was aware of his puppy-monikered forebears.
How did you come up with the name „Snarky Puppy“?
I didn’t expect the band to play more than a few gigs, so I chose this name (which my brother had considered for one of his bands years before). But now we’re stuck with it!
In a feat of tour routing, both Snarky Puppy and Skinny Puppy were supposed to perform in Pittsburgh the same week about a month ago. The skinny ones had to cancel because multi-instrumentalist cEvin Key was ill—or, judging by this old tweet, maybe Pittsburgh wasn’t big enough for the both of them?
The story behind Skinny Puppy’s name isn’t much different from their snarky cousins. S. Alexander Reed writes in Assimilate: A Critical History of Industrial Music:
As the story repeated in Skinny Puppy interviews goes, cEvin Key (born Kevin Crompton) and Nivek Ogre (born Kevin Ogilvie) met at a party in Vancouver in late 1982, went and recorded the song “K-9” on a lark, and saw the next day that in their drunk session they’d written the name “Skinny Puppy” on the tape.
Here’s the problem: That’s an actual story, and I said there was barely a story. Reed immediately notes that it’s untrue; Key came up with the name more than a year before meeting Ogre. Chances are the duo made up the other stuff because, hey, you need something to say in interviews.
Writer Alan Ball attempts to dress it up in Skinny Puppy: The Secret History, writing, “The name can be interpreted many ways, the most popular being that the band’s view of the world is similar to that of a hungry, abused and neglected dog.”
Sure, that’s apropos, if way too on the nose. As he discussed in a 2007 interview, Ogre is a pathological adopter of infirm animals (a wolf?), and his lyrics are—at best—world-weary.
But there’s no need to put much thought into it. Skinny Puppy comes from the long tradition of band names chosen with little consideration. Most of those artists come and go with little fanfare. That Skinny Puppy lasted so long making such brazenly antagonistic music is kind of miraculous.
*I can imagine some über-nerd sniffing, “Actually, ‘skinny puppy’ was Sidney Lumet’s nickname for John Cazale’s character in Dog Day Afternoon. I’m surprised you didn’t know that.” Shut up, imaginary cinephile. You’re out of your element.
OTHER NEWS
Bad name update. “It’s getting to a place and a time where I’m getting ready to close the Weeknd chapter,” said Abel Tesfaye, a.k.a. the Weeknd, in an interview with W Magazine. “I’ll still make music, maybe as Abel, maybe as The Weeknd. But I still want to kill The Weeknd. And I will. Eventually. I’m definitely trying to shed that skin and be reborn.” Good idea, because “the Weeknd” is a patently boring name, and hey, “Abel” gets one of the National’s best songs stuck in my head.
On brand. BNB alumni and new 4AD signees Cumgirl8 recently released a video called “Cicciolina” about Ilona Staller, a.k.a. Cicciolina, an adult film star and Italian politician. Wikipedia tells me Cicciolina was not only Jeff Koons’ muse, but that several bands have written songs about her.
Also on brand. Speaking of King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard, their new album has a commensurately preposterous title: Petrodragonic Apocalypse; or, Dawn of Eternal Night: An Annihilation of Planet Earth and the Beginning of Merciless Damnation. The cover art can’t help but seem understated by comparison.
POST-SCRIPTS
When I saw Skinny Puppy for the first time in 1992 at the Unicorn in Houston, cEvin Key threw his drumsticks into the audience, and one hit me in the face. I was thrilled.
Turns out there’s a “highlight reel” from that tour on YouTube, and I’m also thrilled to have my crazy memories from that show validated.
My 10-year-old daughter overhearing the start of that “Dogshit” video above: “Is someone being murdered?”
It’s weird shade to be throwing with the quotation marks in “style,” cEvin Key. I don’t think anyone has used Snarky Puppy’s music to commit war crimes.
Staci Bonner wrote about Skinny Puppy many times for Spin. She also sued Spin’s former owner, notorious creep Bob Guccione Jr., for sexual harassment and won.
Holy shit this is terrible. The Onion makes it look easy, y’all, but it ain’t.