90's Hit Parade #9

Ministry - Jesus Built My Hotrod

Truth be told, I'm not a HUGE Ministry fan. I think there's a lot of good stuff on Twitch, The Land of Rape and Honey and The Mind is a Terrible Thing to Taste. I have a very clear memory of the first time I heard "Stigmata," on Album 88 while driving home from the mountains. I kept saying "What the fuck is this?" and "It sounds like the Butthole Surfers doing disco!" It's a great fucking song. So is "Hizbollah." But they only really have one masterpiece, and that's "Jesus Built My Hotrod."

This song dropped shortly after I moved to Athens. It's always associated with "Smells Like Teen Spirit" in my head, the two songs came out about the same time, and I remember one Friday night when they played them back-to-back on WUOG, and man, did they sound great together. The version on the 12" (embedded above, mostly because the official video is unembeddeble) is superior to what eventually came out on the album, but both versions rock so hard. All the harsh nastiness of Ministry's industrial sound is married to a killer rock-n-roll record, with vocals by Gibby of the Butthole Surfers, samples of Jerry Lee Lewis and Dennis Hopper, a killer steel guitar solo that sounds like ZZ Top jacked up on meth, growling rhythm guitar riff...man, just crank this song up, and forget about the lousy industrial-metal album it came off of.