Although his son George W. Bush ruined the rerun, George H.W. Bush waged the first Gulf War, and stirred up a hornet’s nest in the process. Not because of preemptive strikes or missing WMDs, but because of a September 11 speech citing the conflict as one step in producing a “New World Order.”
It wasn’t long until industrial titans Ministry sampled the speech and stole its title for “NWO,” one of the Chicago’s agitator’s roughest tunes and, strangely enough, its highest charting hit.
The track shared space with other pounding anthems like “Just One Fix” and the peerless laugher “Jesus Built My Hotrod” on Ministry’s excellent 1992 effort Psalm 69: The Way to Succeed and the Way to Suck Eggs. It remains one of the legend’s finest releases ever.
The video for “NWO” was equally incendiary, mashing Bush’s speech, the Rodney King riots, and probably a truckload of smoke machines into a reel that MTV would never play today, probably even on MTV2. Things were different back then, as Bush’s speech and Ministry’s music reminds us. What will they look like tomorrow? Tune in next year.
This article appeared at WIRED