Of Latent Headbangers
Heavy metal is not a minority interest. As rock music generally receded from the cultural center, heavy metal came in its wake to appropriate those remnants most worthy of distinction. Each remnant retained its distinction after acquirement, and not all distinctions were equal in merit or desirability. Some bands (like Whitesnake and Disturbed) embraced metal in hopes of achieving an easy glory. Other bands (like Killing Joke and Black Flag) were condemned to metal for aesthetic crimes. Still other bands (like the Melvins and Converge) were metal in spite of themselves. But whether exiles or standard-bearers, the Heavy Metal Parking Lot is a vast one. Like all good hegemonic forces, metal is capable of accommodating considerable variety.
But even a hegemon must have its fundamentals if it is to survive. A famously inarticulate aesthetic like metal, as I have tried to show elsewhere, establishes its fundamentals by example rather than by creed. To say that any one example prevails over the others is to invite contention, particularly because certain of those others are almost impossible to prevail over. Metallica performing in Moscow before over 1 million late-stage Soviets in 1991 is considered a singular triumph for the genre entire, to say nothing of the country that exported it. Yet it was Pantera that opened up for them that day, and they have an equal if not greater claim for defeating the Communist menace.
It’s not hard to argue otherwise, as Pantera was five months away from releasing Vulgar Display of Power, to this day the purest distillation of metal ever committed to tape. It is the zenith of its genre just as The Queen is Dead, Ariel, and Macbeth are of theirs. Its achievement is not simply rooted in the band reaching their technical peak, conveying their strongest ideas with the most unrestrained creative confidence, but in its total force. Albums like … And Justice for All or Appetite for Destruction have attained popularity through their aspirational appeal. “This is what you could be,” say these albums, “with sufficient commitment.” Vulgar Display dwells beneath them less by its quality than by its declaring something more radical, and more innate. “This,” says Vulgar Display, “is what you already are but have allowed society to repress.” These are metal’s fundamentals at their most uncompromising and inclusive.
My subject at hand is not, of course, the greatness of Pantera. It is a necessary preface nonetheless to show the forces contrasting my actual subject, grindcore. For while every hegemon has its core mission, and can tolerate diversity, so too does it have its malcontented minority, one that embodies every extreme the hegemon celebrates but which turns them inside out and stretches them to the utmost limit of its reason and its taste.
An Introduction to Devastation
Grindcore suffers from a double dilemma. Not only is it difficult to describe to ears that can’t discern it, it is also nearly impossible to conceive of, even if it is presented in the most concrete terms. Such as when Napalm Death appeared on the BBC children’s show What’s That Noise? in 1989, performing two songs, including the famous one-second four-word “You Suffer,” and prompting complaints from angry parents against what was very obviously a sick prank. For even in a time when heavy metal and like music was under the severest public scrutiny liberal democracy permits, no band of that kind could possibly be that ugly or that brutish and still expect to be taken seriously. This was not an emanation of mass culture, but satire of it.
Yet Napalm Death was a real band with a new album to promote. And far from the dyspeptic conceits of Armando Ianucci or Chris Morris, grindcore had a distinct lineage. Emerging in the mid-1980s—with Napalm Death in Birmingham, UK and Repulsion in Flint, MI—the grindcore aesthetic coagulated out of several streams of the extreme underground of the time. It took its primitive structure from hardcore punk, its precise speed from thrash metal, and its artful impenetrability from early industrial. More succinctly, it takes the metal-punk pair-bonding of Slayer, Discharge, Motörhead, and others to bewildering levels of violence and exactitude. From Napalm Death, grindcore spread rapidly throughout Europe, North America, and Asia. And while some bands have managed to reach a distinction around the level of their catalyst, even a well-trained ear will not always detect those variations immediately. Grindcore is the most monolithic rock subgenre ever created. Most of them, to paraphrase one critic’s hilarious assessment, are barely distinguishable from a water faucet going at full blast for 30 seconds.
This is all to say that the offended, baffled British parents were not per se incorrect. Indeed, who would take such a thing seriously? Not even some of the grindcore bands themselves could manage to do that. But that presupposes a desire for legitimacy. Fair enough, given that metal bands across the sonic divides easily identified by a shared the force of vitality that Pantera crystalized so well, even when a given band’s core message is rooted in its opposite. Heavy metal is as sincere as it is overelaborate and humorless—or it is nothing. But dwell long enough among grindcore’s many if not always various manifestations, even for just like a minute, and a different agenda emerges. One that prizes brute force over operatic complexity and devastation over vitality. That it neither aspires nor expects to be taken seriously by anyone does not preclude its own standards of seriousness.
Repulsive Telegrams
The best way to assess grindcore’s aesthetic and substance is first to set aside what they are not.
That grindcore seeks extremes and intensity is simply redundant. That it is minimalistic is merely technical, and also insufficient. Grindcore is not trying to achieve more by simply doing less. Minimalism may be a more suitable descriptor for thematically metal artists like Low and Roman Candle-era Elliott Smith. With grindcore there is always something more to its less. You find that there is a difference between subtraction and taking away—between minimalism and deprivation. For while it is one thing to reduce something to its skeletal elements as a vulture would a carcass, it is quite another to take an elemental aspect of social life and, in effect, desocialize it; to isolate from all it depends upon and which is dependent upon it and record the outcome. Consider what the early grindcore bands had done with politics.
Napalm Death was not political in sense that most punk bands and their offshoots were political. Neither the neo-romanticism of The Clash, the pop situationism of the Sex Pistols, the Marxist polemics of Gang of Four, the sardonic liberalism of Dead Kennedys, nor the self-stitched communitarianism of American hardcore were adequate to their vision. Their roots were coherent, to be sure, growing as they did out of the radicalism of Crass, the brute rhetoric of Discharge, and the prophetic dystopianism of Killing Joke. This created a curious effect wherein it is impossible for Napalm Death to think in centuries, as many of the most revered metal bands do, but are still able to wield the moral weight of consequences accumulated over time.
From Enslavement to Obliteration came into the market in 1988, at the opposite end of punk’s and Thatcher’s codependent ascension. The pessimistic upheaval of the former and optimistic upheaval of the latter had given way to a stasis that cancelled one another out. Amidst the complacency, Napalm Death’s anger was untimely but not backward looking. Forsaking the easily responded-to sloganeering of their predecessors, Napalm Death buried their message under then-vocalist Lee Dorrian’s dual action indecipherability, switching between either guttural or throat-searing growls. Read on their own their lyrics are telegrammatic. “A chronic complaint of dimness/Prevails your profound ideology/A romantic vision of a ‘master race’/Attained through coercive forms of authority,” goes “Unchallenged Hate.” “What’s perspicuous on the surface/Is artificial inside/When views are merely symbolic/Of an image you hide behind,” Dorrian screams on “Lucid Fairytale.”
The effect is hardly programmatic whichever way you consume the message. Initially I’d thought it was prophetic. It at least makes use of prophecy’s condemnatory nature. Of having a vision to impart but no sheen or accreditation undergirding it. A vision that is bleak, with a style that is repulsive. It runs exactly contrary to the tenor of the moment at which it is heard. The true prophet shows an indifference to tact and boasts a deprivation of moral authority. They are counter-authority.
Grindcore broke through the great contentment of the ‘90s with in a collective ominous blast. If there is one unifying theme of its sound it is urgency. At a time when most people thought life was beginning anew, the grindcore bands countered that time was actually running out. Written off as vulgar and barbaric, it would be difficult to argue now that they were not simply foretelling of unforeseen but oncoming barbarism, of a stark shift away from calm functionality, away from eloquence, away from reason.
Moral Oblivion
In metal, fidelity to ideas is not as strong compared to the fidelity to the immensity of the ideas upon the listener. You do not know with any exactitude the ideas Pantera meant to transmit through “Walk,” “A New Level,” or “Fucking Hostile,” only that you become indomitable when you press “play” for any of them. It follows quite naturally over to grindcore, whose sonic deprivations have a way transferring from tape to nerve, whether it’s those of Napalm Death, Pig Destroyer, Human Remains, Carcass, Fuck the Facts, or Agoraphobic Nosebleed. In each band, as in each listener, certain impacts may be many and subjective in the particulars. Though in the broader sense grindcore seeks to accentuate to its listener ways of being ugly.
Being ugly may occur from different points of reference. Most obviously the listener of grindcore is set upon by a surrounding, external ugliness. Civilization is a cute, complacent veneer that, once torn down, finds suffering is the norm and absence passes for substance. You see this in the most direct, cerebral dependents and peers of Napalm Death. “The clowns are now the ringmasters backed with the arsenal of the economy,” went Assück in 1991. “Our ears are plugged when we speak the tongue of reality/Failure to accept the truths, we speak of peace but push civilization to the edge.” You find yourself desocialized from wide-scale dependencies you were assured were to be binding in perpetuity: living in peace never to be disturbed, supported by prosperity never to dwindle, and under the protection of force never to be used. “Super powers/Threat of war,” goes a Terrorizer song released, rather hysterically, in 1989. “World wide peace/Dream is gone.” The external ugliness replaces metal’s empowerment with grindcore’s complicity. It is a deprivation by you.
For some, or perhaps most, grindcore interlocutors, being left to contemplate the devastation they have apparently helped to enable is condemnation enough. But strains of the genre that have evolved beyond their social-minded predecessors know that this not quite how it works out. For the more personalized, subjective grindcore bands—like the churning turmoil of Godflesh, the motivational demotivation of Burnt by the Sun, and the Juvenalian juvenilia of Anal C—t—ugliness seen from without eventually seeps inward. It functions in a similar way to Rousseau’s concept of “moral liberty,” where you are lifted up from the servitude of “impulsion of mere appetite” into the freedom of “obedience to the law.” The grindcore band, in its modified version, plays the intermediary between the social self from which it pulls you away and the ugliness into which you are sunk down. Internal ugliness is a deprivation of you, wherein the weight of condemnation—of shunning, of exile, of the lingering portent of oblivion—is most acute and for which there are no plausible means against adjusting.
Black Friday at the Atrocity Emporium
No grindcore band is under the obligation to clarify themselves beyond their needs. The same freedom does not extend to those who remark on grindcore from a respectful distance. A dual dilemma of their own arises where vigilance against confusion must be heightened in addition to maintaining a rhetorical severity nearly equal to that of its subject. I do not know to what extent I have succeeded, but hope that I have not made it possible for moral deprivation to be one and the same as moral depravity, fusing the remedy with the illness. Nor do I wish to suggest that grindcore’s deprivation is the dissident against metal’s affirmation. If the former irritates the latter ceaselessly, it does so in the hope of giving it aid.
There is a point where that aid has its limits. American society, through any cataclysm your actions might indulge, may be a thing of the past. Every detail that made it distinctive is now gone, and you along with it. It is all a tragic vestige, a husk of the once-overwhelming and not a little vulgar hegemony of its own, and with no apparent hope of being brought back to life in some recognizable form.
But lo! A successor population appears. From where, no one can guess; for, again, you are not around to find out. The expedition spreads out, taking stock of the strange terrain, exploring the emptied buildings, noodling with ditched cars, consuming our deathless Twinkies. But perhaps, in the process, an unusual discovery is made. Or rather, discoveries.
Improbable though it may be, let’s imagine that the explorers regroup with artifacts, and two of them have each found CDs. One holds Vulgar Display of Power, while the other just happens to hold that album’s exact psychological and moral counterpart, Brutal Truth’s Sounds of the Animal Kingdom. Because, as I fear I must remind you, all of us have died by your negligence, we cannot know just how this is processed: if they know that the albums must be heard, if they find the means to hear them, and if they hear them in the proper sequence. But after all this talk of deprivation and ugliness, we may hope that they have the capacity to discover not two opposed visions, but one great vision that fell hard, and an atrocious vision that came—a bit too late in this scenario, alas—to its rescue.