Page 1 of 6 Queensryche’s Operation: Mindcrime (1988) 33 1/3 series proposal (31st December 2008) Alex Burns [email protected] or [email protected] PO Box 1216, Fitzroy North, VIC 3068, Australia 1. Project Outline & Commercial/Cultural Significance 1.1 “The Mission” “Much to my consternation, I found myself feeling envious of *Kerry+ Noble’s faith, even as I was horrified by his cult’s plots and crimes. I wanted to keep talking with him. I wanted to understand how a person so obsessed with good and evil, with such strong faith, could be led so far astray.” ― Jessica Stern, Terror in the Name of God: Why Religious Militants Kill (2003), p. xv “I don’t remember yesterday . | I just remember doing what they told me . .” ― Nikki in “I Remember Now”, Queensryche’s Operation: Mindcrime (1988) What compels ordinary individuals to commit acts of terrorism, genocide and politically motivated violence? Counterterrorism researcher Jessica Stern came face-to-face with this puzzle in March 1998 when she interviewed Kerry Noble, the ex-propaganda minister for the Christian Identity militia the Covenant, Sword and Arm of the Lord (CSA). For Stern, it was a moment of insight. After the interview, Stern concluded that Noble and others were recruited and influenced by group dynamics: ‘extreme doubling’ in which the organization’s leadership destroys “the recruit’s ability to empathize with his victim, encouraging him to create an identity based on opposition to the Other.” (Stern, p. xvi). Stern found precedents in psychiatrist Robert J. Lifton’s study of Chinese ‘psychological totalism’ during the Korean War, Nazi doctors, and Aum Shinrikyo’s senior scientists, who conducted covert research into biological and chemical weapons. Others who have interviewed ex-terrorists and genocide perpetrators—Ehud Sprinzak, Mark Juergensmeyer, Andrew Silke, John Horgan, Samantha Power, Albert Bandura, Marc Sageman, and others—echo Stern’s discovery. Or they may have heard Queensryche’s Operation: Mindcrime and reached the same conclusion. [If they had, the sieges at Ruby Ridge in 1992 and Waco in 1993 might have had more peaceful outcomes.] Page 2 of 6 1.2 “Spreading The Disease” “I guess Warhol wasn’t wrong, fame fifteen minutes long | Everyone’s using everyone, making the sale.” ― Nikki in “Revolution Calling”, Operation: Mindcrime “Selling skin, selling God | The numbers look the same on our credit cards.” ― Nikki in “Spreading The Disease”, Operation: Mindcrime Operation: Mindcrime (hereafter Mindcrime) explores the indoctrination of heroin junkie Nikki from an alienated and disillusioned social activist into a “death angel” hit-man by “underground revolution” leader Dr. X, and Nikki’s betrayal and disillusionment when ordered to kill prostitute/lover Mary as a loyalty test. Nikki confronts Dr. X, discovers Mary dead, and is then arrested and blamed for an assassination wave of political and religious leaders. Confined to a hospital Nikki struggles to piece together his indoctrination, and to discover his innermost secret: Who killed Mary? The usual ‘rock journalist’ spiel for Mindcrime goes something like this: the 1988 concept album by Seattle band Queensryche was their artistic and critical zenith before the commercial success of Empire (1990). It features the band’s ‘classic’ line-up notably the song-writing team of vocalist Geoff Tate and lead guitarist Chris DeGarmo. MTV’s Headbanger’s Ball, Kerrang!, Rolling Stone, Q Magazine, Metal Hammer, PopMatters, Mojo and Revolver have all ranked Mindcrime highly in lists of influential rock operas and progressive metal recordings. The album’s supporting cast bolster its ‘seminal’ status: Callan actor Anthony Valentine as the sociopathic Dr. X, pop songwriter Pamela Moore as the tormented Mary, Eric Clapton/Enya sound mixer James ‘Jimbo’ Barton, Rush producer Peter Collins, and lush orchestration by the late Michael Kamen (Pink Floyd’s The Wall, Metallica’s S&M). Mindcrime proves how the individual elements fuse into a greater, memorable whole. In retrospect, Mindcrime’s ‘hearts-and-minds’ conversion of fans was achieved partly through a ‘breakthrough’ campaign waged by then-managers QPrime in the music industry media. Queensryche had already signaled this with the cyberpunk/postmodern-aware precursor Rage For Order (1986). QPrime’s founders Cliff Burnstein and Peter Mensch engineered this media-savvy manipulation through MTV videos, iconic album design by Reiner Design Consultants that looked back to Storm Thorgerson’s Hipgnosis graphic design for Pink Floyd, and cross-over tours with Def Leppard (Hysteria) and Metallica (. And Justice For All). The record labels EMI and Capital Records have given Mindcrime several ‘afterlives’ including Operation: LIVECrime (1991), a 2003 digital remaster, and a 2006 box set. Over the next two decades, Queensryche revisited Mindcrime in several forms, from the suite arrangements on Live Evolution (2001) to the sequel Operation Mindcrime II (2006) and the hometown performance Mindcrime at the Moore (2006). These are only the most obvious reasons why Mindcrime is culturally significant; the necessary ‘foreground’ to the story I want to explore for 33 1/3 readers. Page 3 of 6 1.3 “Anarchy-X” “One night in a bar called St. Supice, I met the man who became Dr. X. The cold, calculating, vicious personality of this man still makes me feel uneasy as I write this. His character and alleged involvement with a terrorist organization coupled with other personalities I had met on my travels truly were the inspiration for this record.” ― Geoff Tate, liner notes to 2003 Capitol Records reissue of Operation: Mindcrime “Too much bloodshed, we’re being used and fed | Like rats in experiments.” ― Nikki in “Suite Sister Mary”, Operation: Mindcrime Why does Operation: Mindcrime have a broader significance? In the triumvirate of Dr. X, Nikki and Mary, Queensryche’s Geoff Tate demonstrates a counterterrorism enigma: the ‘screening’ process to recruit new members, who undergo a deindividualisation process. Counterterrorism researchers have rediscovered this key process, such as Albert Bandura’s studies on the Baader-Meinhof Gang and the Weather Underground (moral disengagement), Philip Zimbardo’s epochal Stanford Prison Experiment (situated character transformation), David Grossman’s study of desensitisation training (killology), and Jessica Stern’s face-to-face interviews (extreme doubling). However, Tate’s narrative makes this process emerge visibly from the shadows. The result is that Operation: Mindcrime becomes a ‘meta-album’ that like the ‘meta-fiction’ of H.P. Lovecraft, Isaac Asimov and Umberto Eco, captures oblique, dangerous insights in fictional form. Framed by the Platonic anamnesis or self-remembering of “I Remember Now”, Mindcrime’s tracks document the processes identified by Bandura, Zimbardo, Grossman, and Stern. “Revolution Calling”, “Operation: Mindcrime”, “Speak”, “Spreading The Disease” and “The Mission” capture Nikki’s ideological radicalisation at Dr. X’s hands. The romantic-idealist arc of “Suite Sister Mary”, “The Needle Lies”, “Breaking The Silence”, “I Don’t Believe In Love” and “Eyes Of A Stranger” capture the personal costs for Nikki and Mary. “Underground Revolution” becomes a no-win game. Although he doesn’t explicitly state it, Tate’s description above and his Montreal, Canada, location at the time suggests that his model for Dr. X was a recruiter and propagandist for the Front de Liberation du Quebec (1967-70), a short-lived right-wing paramilitary group that waged a violent campaign in October 1970 including the assassination of a Canadian politician. This fits Mindcrime’s narrative and Nikki’s actions, and if confirmed by Tate, would strengthen the rock opera’s conceptualisation of terrorist psychology and initiation. (Tate also references German revolutionary anarchist Johann Most in “Freiheit Overture” which opens Operation: Mindcrime II). Page 4 of 6 Philip Zimbardo’s recent study The Lucifer Effect: How Good People Turn Evil (2007) is useful for framing Mindcrime’s narrative in three different dimensions. The rock opera begins and ends with Nikki’s brutal hospitalisation an exemplar of Zimbardo’s “administrative evil” (pp. 381—382) reminiscent of the anti-psychiatrist Thomas Szasz. Much of Tate’s background narrative is about Zimbardo’s “system evil” as an ‘enabling environment’: Reagan-era corruption and political zero-sum games such as the Iran-Contra affair, the collapse of the bank BCCI, fallen televangelists such as Jimmy Swaggart, and the ‘Greed is Good’ wave of corporate mergers and leveraged buyouts. Finally, Dr. X’s “Underground Revolution” embodies the ‘situational evil’ which turns Nikki’s disillusionment into sociopathic hatred before Mary becomes his super-ego conscience. Mindcrime’s narrative can also be understood as a prism for an open-ended discussion of how counterterrorism has evolved from its Year Zero in 1968 to the Obama Administration’s re- evaluation of the Bush Administration’s “War on Terror”: • The disillusioned Nikki mirrors a criminological tradition in counterterrorism, from Ted Gurr’s ‘relative deprivation’ thesis to William L. Pierce’s call for ‘lone wolves’ and Mark S. Hamm’s belief that terrorism is best treated as crime. • Dr. X exemplifies Simon Reeve and Michael Ledeen’s separate analyses of Al Qaeda as ‘terrorist entrepreneurs’, possibly Marc Sageman’s ‘Bunch of Guys’ theory about the 7/7 bombers, and definitely Jerrold M. Post’s psychological profiling of political leaders. • Dr. X’s “Underground Revolution” illustrates