The Origin of the Feces

The Origin of the Feces is the second album by Brooklyn band Type O Negative, which was released in 1992. The album was produced to sound as if it had been recorded at a live show by adding crowd noises, banter with the fictitious audience, and even a song stopping because the venue supposedly had a bomb threat called in. This was done to simulate some controversy the band had on tour in Europe for the Slow Deep and Hard tour. The band is well known among fans for weaving this type of dry humor into their often gloomy music.

Some of the songs are fresh arrangements of tracks that appeared previously on Slow, Deep and Hard. Many of the song names have been deliberately miswritten. The song “Gravitational Constant: G = 6.67 x 10-8 cm-3 gm-1 sec-2 ” is titled “Gravity”, and the wry “Unsuccessfully Coping With The Natural Beauty of Infidelity” became “I Know You’re Fucking Someone Else” from the chorus. This is likely a reference to constantly bad liner notes of typical bootleg live albums, and the way people expect song names to come from chorus lines.

This album also started the tradition of Type O Negative including cover songs stylized in their distinct gothic-doom sound. The album includes covers of Black Sabbath’s “Paranoid” (which also halfway through the song contains the main riff of Black Sabbath’s “Iron Man”), and Jimi Hendrix’s “Hey Joe”, which has been adapted into “Hey Pete” for frontman Peter Steele.