ABSTRACT
It all started with Anal Cunt. That is probably neither a sentence you thought you’d ever read in an academic text, nor is it one we thought we’d ever write in one. But it is true anyway, and so this introduction has to start with it, since what it is about started with it, too. One day, over the very unpopular food in the cafeteria at the Amerika-Institut of LMU Munich, we compared notes with some colleagues on what might be the most outrageous and offensive music. No such discussion worth its salt can occur without reference to Anal Cunt, a band who were very strong contenders for the disputed title of ‘the most offensive band in the world’ until main member Seth Putnam died in 2011. Abbreviating their own name to A.C. on album covers was about the only concession the band ever made to the rules of the music market or good taste. Their first EPs—such as the 88 Song EP and the 5643 Song EP—do not feature any song titles or even songs or lyrics that were written before the recording process, and the music fully deserves the ‘noisecore’ label (a genre that has its roots in what could be considered a classic of unpopular culture, Lou Reed’s 1975 album Metal Machine Music). When Anal Cunt signed to the Earache record label, they discovered what would become their trademark: while their short songs, usually under a minute in length, never quite reached the musical excellence of grindcore greats such as early Napalm Death or Brutal Truth, their song titles ensured their place in the history of extreme music. Adolescent, nihilistic, ridiculous, and (self-)ironic, Anal Cunt perfected the art of the titular insult, trying to indiscriminately offend everyone, including their own fans, their record label, other bands, any social minority or majority, and even themselves. Their 1994 album Everyone Should Be Killed begins with ‘Some Songs’ and ‘Some More Songs’, but also already includes gems such as ‘I’m Not Allowed to Like A.C. Any More Since They Signed to Earache’, ‘When I Think of True Punk Rock Bands, I Think of Nirvana and the Melvins’ or ‘Selling Out by Having Song Titles on This Album’. Their 1997 album I Like It When You Die presents their trademark use of the second-person address in song titles such as ‘You Keep a Diary’; ‘You Are a Food Critic’; ‘You Have Goals’; ‘You Play On a Softball Team’; ‘You Go to Art School’; ‘Your Best Friend Is You’; ‘Your Favorite Band Is Supertramp’; ‘You Live in a Houseboat’; ‘You Are an Interior Decorator’; ‘You’re Old (Fuck You)’, ‘You (Fill in the Blank)’ and the classic ‘Your Kid Is Deformed’, which is even a pretty good song. The next album, Picnic of Love (1998), did yet another unpopular thing by offering lyrics so sweet they make your teeth hurt just by reading them, with song titles such as ‘Saving Ourselves For Marriage’; ‘Greed Is Something That We Don’t Need’; ‘I Couldn’t Afford to Buy You a Present (So I Wrote You This Song)’; or, ‘In My Heart There’s a Star Named After You’. Yet, the album that followed, It Just Gets Worse (1999), turned out to have a prophetic title, and with this record the band pushed things too far, for critics and fans alike. Like many underground bands in extreme music scenes, their relative popularity was heavily dependent on their cultivation of unpopularity, with music that was too noisy and lyrics that were too offensive for most people, pleasing those in the know who wish to irritate, if not shock others with their taste in art (a phenomenon not limited to youth cultures, but also found in high culture, perhaps exemplified best by Dadaism).
