GWAR arrived Saturday night to punish New Haven, Connecticut with their final performance of a two-year tour. After a surprisingly great performance by opening band “3 Inches of Blood” (Think Pantera with Sebastian Bach as lead singer), the band of monsters known as GWAR emerged from the smokey darkness at 9:15. By 9:17 the thrashing, screaming fans had trampled the double barricades separating the all ages area and the over twenty-one area. By 9:20, whirlpools of wet, black hair and pink flesh immediately swallowed kids whole and a screaming full-grown man was carried out by security, having broken his leg badly enough to have the bone jutting through the skin. Next, a hideous caricature of the pope wandered out to bless the audience, only to have both hands severed by the guitar player, Beefcake the Mighty. As the band began to play, the pope bumbled around the stage spraying the audience with about five gallons of blood. “If this was the first five minutes,” I thought, “What the hell else am I going to witness here tonight?”

Then lead singer, Oderous Urungus, stopped the music… “Wait all you FUCKS! Shut the fuck UP!” The crowd paused slightly. “Now I don’t know if you all think this is funny or not, but a pregnant chick is already dead tonight because of you guys!” The crowd cheers, “But luckily, the baby is still alive… oh wait, what? Nope, the baby’s dead.” The crowd goes wild. After Saturday’s show, Osama Bin Laden, Hitler, Jesus, the President, and Bam Margera are all “dead”. So are a various assortment of mutants and mentally challenged chaps. Each one dying in their own disgusting way and spewing a different bodily fluid onto the crowd. My clothes are thoroughly tie-dyed and two days later my arms are still dyed blue from what GWAR lovingly refers to as “digestive juices”.

GWAR’s music is the soundtrack to their stage show, more of a theatrical performance gone wrong than an evening of aural pleasure. It’s about as far on one end of the musical spectrum as “Legally Blonde, The Musical” is on the other. Lots of guttural heaving and growling, mixed with thunderous guitars and booming drums. Funny enough, it sounded great to me, perhaps in the same way anything would sound better after escaping the jaws of death. Trying to survive being crushed to a pulp in a mosh pit makes a person appreciate life and gives everything you experience afterwards a glossy haze it didn’t have before. You feel a bit of camaraderie with the foes you just threw yourself into the pit to battle against, and everything in your life seems a little easier, albeit, less exciting.

So I start to wonder, does humanity have a death wish? Will we gleefully line up to face our own demise as GWAR likes to suggest? Will we invite the end of the world upon ourselves dumbly as blackness washes over? If you look at the world today it would seem to suggest that at the very least people are content to taunt death. Seeing how close one can toe the line seems to be the only way many people feel alive. With all of the death and voyeurism in media, it is easy to see why GWAR jokingly considers their killing rampages, “Satisfying a consumer need”, because “the human race is in love with self destruction.” Global warming could be one day more cruelly punishing than anything GWAR could dream up, yet many still go on pushing the envelope, as we refuse to make any serious changes in our daily lives to help affect the outcome. Naively staring at the sun as we do at GWAR thinking, “It’s just a joke right? That thing won’t really kill us, will it?” Well punk, the sun, like GWAR is a mighty awesome force and you best respect it, because also like GWAR, it can melt your face off whenever it damn well pleases.

GWAR Official Site
Sean Moeller Interviews GWAR in 2005