Review Summary: And on that holy day, and on that bloody day, were you a witness?
On October 12, 1990, at the cathedral of St. John the Divine, body bared and bathed in blood, Diamanda Galas delivered a searing, tormented performance of a human nightmare. With only minimal backing, a drum, some samples and a synth, Galas painted a terrifying portrait of those suffering from the AIDS epidemic, and a bloody indictment of those who, through religious hatred, would deny them compassion and care. But what Plague Mass evokes, once all the nightmare convulsions and shrieks and pulses have been dug through a bit, is a deep sense of human empathy and grief in all its rage and pain. There’s little in this that resembles the stereotypically male posturing, the phallocentric wallow in violence and glory that’s found in much extreme music. This is an album of grief and fury, the expression of one enduring an injustice, making the hatred of others her shroud and her power. As she watched her brother die of AIDS, as she watched the malignant hypocrisy of the church denying any solace to her loved one while claiming to represent the human incarnation of love, what could she do but don the mantle of that institution’s old enemy, in order to hold up a mirror to it?
There is more to this performance than catharsis, more than an emotional purge or exorcism, more, even, than the cloaking of oneself in a diabolical power. If someone were to reduce this to a tedious collection of horror-film musical tropes buried under some pretentious vocal acrobatics, as some have done, that someone would be missing the forest for the trees. There is an intent to alienate, to isolate herself here, to detach her expression from any tether that could leave it open to categorization, and thus, dismissal. Galas’ often expresses her interactions with others in combative tones, she rarely voices her reactions to criticism in terms of anything other than contempt, she speaks of her artistic expression as stemming from a desire for solitude. In that sense her expression is bordering on the solipsistic in its refusal to seek a common ground with her listeners. Galas almost demands that the listener experience her on her own terms. Having, in recent years, rendered Armenian, Greek and Assyrian poetry into her live performances, in their original language, she has tried to maintain the original intent and expression of those works without the marring that any translation would do to them, regardless of whether the audience can understand them or not. It’s this disregard for whether or not her audience “gets” it that makes Plague Mass a piece of art that is integral to Galas in a way few works can be.
I can say, without undermining the purpose of the whole thing, that there is a horrific quality to Diamanda’s music, in the subversiveness of her intentional mangling of an incredible vocal ability through her gibbers and whispers and howls, a perversion of what some might call a god-given talent. The bombast with which she flings the words of patriarchs back into their faces, the strident, imperious regality with which she pronounces her damnations, the broken, childlike way she repeats her brother’s last words, in all of these she embodies a spirit of righteous fury, an abandonment of all artifice, and an almost total sense of compassion and grief. Her voice, much more a weapon than an instrument, becomes in each of its startlingly diverse expressions, a different facet of the AIDS crisis, all in the name of its most marginalized victims. In casting her polemic in the tones of blaspheme and horror, in subverting the language of Scripture in order to use it as a weapon, Diamandas gives full expression to a rage against the stark injustice against those whom Christ would have said to embrace above all.
The irony in all the blaspheme and blood is that Plague Mass becomes something of a negative theology, in the sense that Diamanda spells out explicitly what God is not, what God cannot be, if the church’s claim to His divinity is to hold true. Galas has more than hinted that her intent for her Red Death trilogy was not against Christianity itself, although she herself is in no sense religious. In that strange sense, Plague Mass is a far more Christian work than what many within the church, whether Protestant, Catholic or the Greek Orthodox in which Galas was raised, were doing in response to the AIDS pandemic. By far her most devastating indictment, and the one that should pierce the deepest, is the simple line, in the language of an old hymn: “and on that holy day, and on that bloody day, were you a witness?” By casting the dying victims of AIDS in the role of the dying Christ, the innocent unjustly condemned, tormented and killed, the condemnation of those who “did not do unto the least of these” is one that should strike deep for anyone who makes a claim to faith.
