Cardinal Karin Spaink

by Henk Willem Smits

The first time I saw Karin Spaink in real life was at Paradiso in November 2002. It was an encounter that fits into a strange story. Karin was appointed cardinal at the time. This happened a few months after I had, just like recently, embarrassed the festival industry.

In 1999, I interned at Het Parool, and that was the era of the emerging internet. Everything related to the internet was news. That is how I came across an American musician and priest named Chris Korda, who was perhaps the first to deliver sermons on the internet. He called them Internet sermons. I wrote a short story about it for the Saturday supplement, which at the time discussed a new internet phenomenon every week.

Korda was the high priest of his own church in Boston, United States, with the provocative name Church of Euthanasia. In 1997, he gained some notoriety in the US through an appearance on the Jerry Springer Show. For those too young to know: the Jerry Springer Show was a well-known American talk show from the 1990s that was broadcast in the Netherlands by RTL. Host Springer was primarily looking for controversy, arguments, and spectacle. The episode featuring Korda was titled: I want to join a suicide cult.

Korda’s church was actually more of a radical environmental movement than a religious community. Its motto was: save the planet, kill yourself. The church manifested itself primarily in demonstrations in the US for the right to abortion. Other pillars were euthanasia and suicide. Korda was vehemently opposed to smoking bans in public places and the hospitality industry, although he did not smoke himself. “It’s a slow way,” he said about it.

Besides being a sort of cult leader, Korda was also a musician; he made house music, and he did so creditably. As a musician, too, he did not shy away from controversy. Through a German record label called International DJ Gigolo, he released the single Save the Planet, Kill Yourself.

Three years after I spoke to him for Het Parool, Korda’s name popped up in the lineup of the Lowlands festival. Quite remarkable, I thought. In the preceding years, Lowlands had dealt with people attempting suicide at the festival. I was working for the arts section of the Dagblad van het Noorden at the time and inquired with the organizers why they had booked Korda.

It turned out that the programmer, Eric van Eerdenburg by then, hadn’t the faintest idea what Korda stood for. He said that Korda had been offered to the festival in a so-called package deal, along with a few other artists from the same German record label. They had put the CD on briefly in the office and then said: “Okay, just add it.”

Lowlands was going to cancel Korda, Van Eerdenburg told me over the phone after I had told him a bit more, because he was supposedly “a sick pervert.” Naturally, I wrote an article about that in the Dagblad van het Noorden, and it became an unexpectedly big hit; it even made the 8 o’clock news.

Festival-goers were not amused. Not because Korda didn’t come; virtually no one had heard of his music. Music lovers turned out to be particularly disappointed by the fact that Lowlands programmers do not scour the country in search of the newest emerging artists, but simply received them from music labels in package deals. In 2022, Lowlands was not sold out for the first time in years.

The commotion had not escaped Lowlands’ parent company, Mojo. They saw potential in it and announced a Korda concert at Paradiso for November 13, 2002. This announcement also turned into a scandal. The CDA submitted parliamentary questions and demanded that the concert be banned. That proved legally impossible. However, the Mayor of Amsterdam did announce that plainclothes police officers would keep watch over the crowd during the concert.

Meanwhile, on September 11, 2002, the single “I Like to Watch” was released, in which Korda compared watching the images of the attack on the Twin Towers a year earlier to watching pornography.

Naturally, being still living in Groningen at the time, I went to Paradiso that Wednesday evening. There was no sign of a large crowd; quite the opposite. There were perhaps five or six paying visitors; otherwise, you tripped over television camera cables, and no television news program wanted to miss the commotion. On the sidelines, a handful of ‘plainclothes’ officers were bored to death.

And so there was Karin, as one of the few other visitors. I think Karin and Korda were in contact via the internet, and this was Korda’s first visit to the Netherlands. After his concert, Korda held a press conference in the basement of Paradiso and took the opportunity to appoint Karin as Cardinal of the Church of Euthanasia.

Korda, who now lives as a woman, is still an accomplished musician; in 2020, the influential music site Resident Advisor featured her, and in 2023, it reviewed her single “Not My Problem, I’ll Be Dead.” Her church still exists.

So you can still call Karin cardinal. Korda said the following via a direct message on Instagram: “I’m sorry to hear that Her Excellence must cease working. She is a brave and formidable person and made it much further than many people would’ve in her situation. She is one of the very few to achieve the rank of cardinal in the Church of Euthanasia.”