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Watch Ministry's "What About Us" video from A.I. here. Ministry’s Al Jourgensen admits that he was a little confused as to why his band had been chosen to appear in the
“I told Steven Spielberg, ‘Dude, there’s been some mistake,’” remembers the be-Stetsoned industrial rock deity. “The band thought it was a porno, that A.I. was like Anal Intruder or something like that. He didn’t laugh at first, but afterwards he saw that we were a little bit nuts. Then there was a new A.I. every day.” For the uninitiated, Ministry have welded high-tech beats with psychotic rock for nearly two decades now. Tracks like the bruising “So What” and “Jesus Built My Hot Rod,” collected on their recent retrospective Greatest Fits, are clearly not anthems for the squeamish. Which might be why A.I.’s original director, Stanley Kubrick, turned to Jourgensen and cohort Paul Barker to write a song by which to tear robots apart for his original A.I. project. “Apparently Kubrick had heard of us and liked us,” says Jourgensen. “Maybe he had heard something from when he was doing Full Metal Jacket. Our name was thrown in a hat. Basically we were the only ones that were not on tour at the time. So we just threw ourselves into it.” When Kubrick died in 1999, his confidant Steven Spielberg stepped in to realize the master’s final vision. Jourgensen was asked to write a song for A.I.’s Flesh Fair scene, in which angry humans destroy “mechas,” lifelike robots they fear will make humanity redundant. Al says it’s the first song he ever wrote by phone. “I got on the phone with the producers,” he says. “They were just talking about like just what kind of thing they wanted. ‘What About Us’ came out of it - the humanity cry of we’re sick and tired of these f*cking mechas running over our sh*t. It was pretty much written on a phone call, which is pretty strange for me.” Ministry were then invited to perform the track in the scene itself, which in turn has become the song's video. “They certainly had boatloads of money,” remembers Barker. “It was an incredibly huge set. You can certainly see it in the video. It was really a lot of fun. However, it was 12-hour days. We needed to be on the set at 7 and then they let everyone go at 7 p.m.” “Spielberg started to get into it by the end,” laughs Jourgensen, “and told Paul and I that if he wound up getting into this kind of music that he is definitely going to hold us accountable. He was kind of pissed, too, because he started to actually like the screaming vocals. Before that I think that Steven’s idea of really hip was … what’s that little band from Ireland, U2?” Ministry themselves are rolling on into the future. While “What About Us” kicks off Greatest Fits, Jourgensen is already assembling the next album from titles like “Trailer Smell” and “Crucial Bitch.” “We have nine songs now that are going onto tape in various states of undress,” he reveals. “We should be done by about fall. The last album that I liked that we did, really, was Filth Pig [1995], and the album before that, The Land of Rape & Honey [1988]. This is the next one in that sequence.” But Al confesses he’s caught the movie bug. “I think I’m going to wind up playing singers of various sorts in bands of various sorts in movies of various sorts for the rest of my life, man,” he laughs. “Danny Elfman move over! Whoever wants to send me some soundtrack work that way, I adore it. It’s a lot of fun to be able to take images like that and see if you can make something cohesive that way.” And how does he feel knowing that, at least if the future pans out according to Steven Spielberg's vision, Ministry will still be terrifying innocents in the next millennium? “We’re already on it,” he says. “We’ve already franchised Ministry, kind of like Menudo or something. A thousand years in the future there will be some form of Ministry 3000 A.D., I’m sure!”
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