W.A.S.P. Mainman Talks New Album

Karagiannidis Panagiotis of Metalpaths recently conducted an interview with W.A.S.P. frontman Blackie Lawless. An excerpt from the chat follows below.

Metalpaths: So let's start with the new [W.A.S.P.] album ["Babylon"], of course. What we have here is once more a concept album, right? Would you like to share with us a few things about the album?

Blackie: Well, it's not a concept album. It all started with "Babylon's Burning", the first song I wrote for the record, and that's really why I called it "Babylon", but, it really started when I was watching TV about a year ago and I saw some of the leaders from the European Union and from the other countries around the world talking about this global financial crisis we're going through, and they were talking about maybe it was time for a one world government and a one-world system, maybe a one-world currency, and I thought to myself, I couldn't believe what I was hearing, I thought, "Do these guys understand what they're talking about here?" It's like they've been reading the Bible, because they're talking about Bible prophecy here. So I went back and I started reading Revelation and the Bible and other places in the Bible are talking about the prophecy and I was amazed to how accurate the prediction, the prophecy and the Bible was, talking about a one-world system and a one-world government. I heard just recently one of the leaders in Brussels say that they believe that by the year 2018 they could have everyone in the European Union microchipped. Now, you understand what that means, right? It's very, very scary, and I thought to myself, "These guys are talking about having people microchipped", and I'm thinking "Do they understand what they're saying?" I mean, what they're talking about, this is potentially 666! So really that's where the idea of Babylon came from.

Metalpaths: So the album is not based in Apocalypse, as I thought?

Blackie: No, it's not a concept, but the whole idea of a potential one-world government, but that's only one song in the album. There's other songs like "Crazy", which when you listen to "Crazy", it sounds like a man talking to a woman, but in reality, what I'm saying is it's more of a performer talking to the audience, the performer saying, hey, it's OK to admire what I'm doing but if it gets to be too much and it becomes idol worship, this is what happened to Elvis Presley, this is what happened to Michael Jackson, it's what happened to Kurt Cobain, you end up, the audience ends up, you end up killing these people! Because they all commit suicide, because when they get so big, life has no meaning anymore. And that's what fame does, because fame can be a very destructive thing. I've known a lot of people in this business, and they got very big and it destroyed a lot of them, so it's very, very dangerous when the audience starts putting the performers on a level that is too high.

Metalpaths: And what about the cover of the album? I thought that it's referring to the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

Blackie: That's part of the idea of "Babylon's Burning". You know, I wrote about this twenty years ago, when I did "Headless Children". There is a line in "Headless Children" that says, "Four horsemen sit high up in the saddle and waiting and ride the bloody trail of no return." So, really, I'm revisiting the idea of what that was, because when I heard these European Union leaders talking about a year ago, it made me think about that and I thought, "Are we closer to that Apocalypse now than we were twenty years ago?" And from the things they're saying it seems that we may be, because what they were saying was really frightening! When governments get too big, they have too much power over people, and I understand the European Union and all that, but I think Greece was doing fine on its own; I don't think Greece needed the EU, I don't think Germany needed the EU. It's kind of like America, it's the United States of America. Well, when you look at our constitution, the only thing that the federal government was ever supposed to do was to create army and print money; that's what all the government was ever supposed to do. But the problem is when the federal government gets bigger and bigger and bigger, you lose freedom every day! So that's, really, a lot of what I'm trying to say here.

Read the entire interview from Metalpaths.

W.A.S.P.'s new song "Crazy" (click on player below to launch audio):