Avow/Disavow

Now here this: this text is about the extreme metal subgenre, grindcore. For those of you who are not yet metal-heads, the creatures forming extreme metal’s die hard audience, it is necessary that you read a little about its background. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grindcore, and www.anus.com are decent resources. Additionally, use www.metal-archives.com and the google to research the bands Napalm Death, Repulsion (from Flint, MI), Disrupt, Discordance Axis, Nasum, and most importantly, Pig Destroyer. I recommend you listen to at least three grindcore songs prior to reading this edition of UltraMegaSound (try these: Napalm Death plays "You Suffer (But Why?)," Repulsion plays "The Lurking Fear," Pig Destroyer plays "Naked Trees,").


To listen grindcore is to hear the sound of senseless perdition. It’s fantasy Hell. Light up and burn up on vile and thick guitar distortion, like oil slick on a gull, like lung cancer, like the crust of desert death sweats. What kind of ludicrous animal seriously desires to attend to the world in such a way? Comedians, disgruntled government computer spies, and civil engineers sick of their civility. Sure, they like some beautiful things (Springsteen, Chomsky), but who cares? They are addicted in public; they are stomping on a mess; they are mad, gibbering apes with public educations planted solidly in overlarge brains, seeing a prison wall behind everything.

You can fully engage with grindcore in two ways: you can honestly hate your shitty life, detest the systematic oppression you see everywhere, find psychosis in everybody you love or hate, and then shut up and go to work until you explode; or you can bear the brunt of your shitty life, systematic oppression, and the psychosis of those you love by being at a grindcore show with all the energy you can summon from your mortal body. To engage with grindcore is to immerse oneself in worldly irrationality until it hurts. The music is secondary. The real difference is in the resignation of the former approach to bare the weight and horror of insignificance to the death.

Henry David Thoreau said most men lead lives of quiet desperation. A desperate man resigned to live out his plight is like a guard in his own prison. He keeps his gun loaded with non-lethals. The real stuff is in a locker, and another guy, not a supervisor or a manager per se, but some kind of superior keeps a key on the ring on his belt. If things get too hairy, if too many connections are made, the lights won’t go out, memories are beginning to organize themselves, if the violence over which he watches (keeping the guard distracted from his addictions to sleep, waking, bathing, coffee, meal 1, commute, chatter, forgotten misery, face time, market share, branding, meal 2, e-mail, shitting as entertainment, breaking, breeding, meal 3 at a sensible restaurant, preventative maintenance, laughing at TV, chums, pals, cohorts, drinking and watching sports, pool, girls and boys, old songs, weekend projects, and waiting to die) has disappeared except for a few idle threats, supplies in the office are missing, or no one talks in the showers, then the locker comes open. The guard spends months lying in wait for that locker to dart wide like a clam in heat or a chest of pirate treasure. And then…finally, some action! This man, in his desperation to fight off all of his lies as they come into view, fires at will with a state-issued Remington model 1100 shotgun from the locker. But all the cages are open, the mattresses are on fire, there shivs and shanks coming out of the air, and a brick in a bed sheet swinging into his face. Had he paroled his better demons, let them march out into the world to live with the rest of us, he might have found his guardianship at a monument of human spiritual unity. But because he hesitated, he is smashed to a pulp by ethereal climbers and mercenaries alike. This is the grind of the willing oppressed.

JR Hayes doesn’t strike me as necessarily happy with petty satisfactions, but he is not interested in grand ideas either. He is an American, perhaps the most fully American man I’ve ever met, who can see that the government’s agents are just prison guards, but can’t imagine any action other than to wait out his term. So he posts no guards on the prison of his mind.

The inmates were all born there, out of the ether of JR’s experience. It seems that the architect who built JR’s prison never saw a need to leave, and so failed install a door. The guys get by all right. Someone, a while back, had the bright idea to plant some seeds they found in the kitchen; they built a trellis in the shop and shived and shanked the ground into turned-over soil. It took a year to make a garden big enough to sustain any people, and it’s still not enough to keep the many that are left. Every Wednesday there’s a lottery to see which seven guys have to give up their meat for the lives of the others. So the whole population of better demons and bitter angels is slowly dying, and will go on that way until there are no more than the garden will feed.

There are no new guys in the JR’s prison, but you can still hear screaming in the night. Most of the terror comes on Monday, because on Tuesday they all celebrate the dying. They get together and build skyscrapers with Mesa/Boogie stacks. They beat on every can, stump, and wall. They crow violence to the stars. When they get tired, they lie down and sleep where they stood.

Wednesday nights are orderly, and even a little sweet. Everyone got a number when they arrived. Every number is duplicated on a square of paper cut out of one of the books some guy found in a drawer in the office, and each paper square is laminated with Scotch tape. These scraps are floating in the water runoff barrel out behind the main office. Everyone gathers out there, away from the lights and fires they leave burning in the yard. One guy volunteers to pick seven pieces of laminate out; another guy hands him matches or a lighter. He flicks a little fire into being and calls out seven numbers as casually as he can, and everyone slowly spins their heads around, looking with a mixture of sadness and delirious relief at the guys walking forward.

Everybody, no exceptions, steps forward when his number is called. If a guy were to refuse then there would be the guards all over again. One thing the guys sure can’t stomach is the idea of having guards again. So they sing the songs every Tuesday, chose and chop up their brothers every Wednesday, and tend the garden all the rest of the week. And on Monday they hate it all so much they can’t breath until they scream the suffocation out of their body.

* * *

Pig Destroyer doesn’t really play shows. It’s too hard to stand still and gape at the mere spectacle of their performance. Shows are for statues, and concerts are for hearts plus brains plus clapping hands equals entertainment. Pig Destroyer makes collapse, combs rubble, boils blood; they play rotations: organized, consensual exchanges of position between guards and prisoners. We don’t watch. We are inmates in the pit, admins on the console and working the door, and the guards ignore their world falling apart because of the implicit promises the music makes that they will not get involved. We climb the stage like a guard tower, seize the mic like an empty gun, we dive away without considering just who is doing the catching. For others it’s like a holiday or a new coat of paint. For me it’s like cliff diving off the outer wall and discovering that it goes straight down forever.

It is not ironic that the men behind Pig Destroyer are exceedingly nice. Blake Harrison worked everything short of magic to get me backstage at the Feb. 4 LA event. JR and Brian both sat for interviews and were genial and sweaty in the same way one should be after a particularly satisfying workout. I asked a variety of silly and devastating questions to which I received a variety of devastating and silly answers. I tried to lead JR into describing artistic and political intentions that he doesn’t have, and which I only imagined because I engaged with his band in exactly the way he intended: by seeing my own interests reflected in the band’s intensity. But he insists he doesn’t make art, because it’s just grindcore.

I believe that art is in its right place philosophically when it advocates an ideal or a vision, and I find an artist believable when they make their ethos evident. JR doesn’t consider himself either an artist or an intellectual, which is news that probably only surprised me. I believe in Pig Destroyer and for the last month I’ve been trying to figure out why. Since this blog is not yet widely read, and should this sentence make it into a periodical it will most likely be removed by a judicious editor (unless he is a good enough person to feel guilty simply for the reading of it), it is safe to assume that there are few to no avowed metal heads in my audience yet. It will be hard for those who are not addicted to guitar distortion to understand just how much righteous power it holds (for a taste refer to all prior entries). For avowed metal heads, it might be disconcerting to read what must seem like a senseless intellectualization of a musical form that almost defies basic characterization. The crossroads of these two positions is where my belief stood, waiting for me to bare my soul in the night for a pittance of vision.

In phonetics, the fundamental is the lowest pitch in a harmonic series, and forms the basis for the information and action, or the timbre if you will, of any musical note. The fundamental of Rock and Roll music is rebellion. It is a simple and brutal reaction against perceived class oppression, given voice by a set of tools derived from the existing empowered-class-approved set. The “hardest” and “heaviest” subgenres of rock are those that most embody this anarchistic fundamental: hardcore punk, grindcore, noise, rap-music, etc. Bands that fall into these subgenres are, in the context of a Musicsociety constructed as a function of social class, easily classified as a kind of anti-music, with some bands (Discharge, Skitsystem, Anti-Climax) going so far as to self-classify in this way. For a group like Pig Destroyer, the very timbres they work with constitute a political action.

However, such action may be problematic because it only utilizes tools granted to the oppressed by the oppressor; JR Hayes seems to me to be a true American because he possesses both a dangerous artistic intention and a striking need to rebel, and also because these two factors seem opposed to one another. There is a little nobility and poetry in JR’s art because it is so deeply restless. During our interview, JR only discussed art in abstracted, idealistic terms. Given that, it makes sense then that he doesn’t consider the music of Pig Destroyer to be art. The predominant effect is to translate profound restlessness into movement. This is politically and philosophically valuable because one cannot disengage with one’s environment while listening to grindcore. If you turn on the radio today, ninety-nine percent of the music you listen to will ask you to turn off everything else. It is quite impossible to tune out or relax while listening to Pig Destroyer. In fact, it is practically impossible not to seriously listen to Pig Destroyer if it is in any way audible.

Art created for pleasure out of dishonorable intentions creates the hidden nihilism at the heart of American philosophical and political apathy. Pig Destroyer’s anti-art is noble because it cares so hard despite its assumption that escape from one’s nightmare is impossible. Perhaps it is the use of oppressor-granted tools that creates this perception. How can one create a vision of being beyond oppression when the one’s essence is deeply rooted in it? When all you have to work with are oppressor-tools, then all visions look like reflections of oppressor-desires. Pig Destroyer’s poetry is that they craft the greatest, and therefore most anarchistic, extremity of rock and roll’s fundamental rebellion. And if you think their music sounds hopeless now, consider this: if what I say is true, and if rock ever succeeds in destroying its oppressors, then its necessity would no longer exist, and rock and roll itself would truly die.

Hesitation Is A Reverie: 0:11 on the left side

I am perched on the cupped hands of a man-child; six-foot-five and probably three hundred pounds large. He stoops low and gracefully. His motions are practiced and comfortingly precise. He must be the lifter at all the shows. He is wearing a tan shirt and glasses, making him the most approachable person in the place. He is only too glad to foist my body on the frenzied crowd. I lift off his shoulders as if I were climbing a fence. Gravity takes over and the people below me are working hard to keep from being crushed. I paw and the clamber over denizens of the pit, the sounds of guitars and drums and screaming are now deafening above the absorptive human layer. I knee someone in the head and in response they take a solid hold of my stomach flab and squeeze and shove. I take a breath and steady the lights in my eyes. I grab at the matt black around the middle stage monitor, trying to leave the cable runs steady and to pull myself out of the crowd’s weakening grip.

I am successful, emerge onto stage right, and then am standing stock still in front of guitarist Scott Hull. He doesn’t remember five years ago when an over-zealous power-violence fan at a NYC show pushed me onto the stage. That night the crowd filled in the gap, making escape impossible. He let me sit at his feet, watching his hands chop and peel the night’s riffs. Tonight, I’m going to take a flying leap. You can’t intellectualize a decision like this. You don’t even have the option of making a different decision. You are on stage, Max. Your choice is fish. Hesitation is a reverie, and in grindcore, reverie lasts less than a second.

It’s mostly like diving into a pool. You hit a layer of outstretched hands and breathing becomes impossible. You don’t register the shock until you are sinking, reptilian brain screaming “SWIM! SWIM FUCKER!” This is all wrong. No one wants you to claw at the chop or kick your feet. You roll onto your back, trying to give them an even surface to push against, or maybe just something broad to absorb the shock when they drop you. Because they ARE going to drop you. Coordinated and thoughtfully throngs will help you land on your feet as easily as they scoop the fallen from the bottom of the mosh. The terrified and unprepared drop you on your head. Their bodies buckle or they run, silently squealing to the sides. Six feet from the axis of your right ankle, your head sweeps to the floor like an overripe apple.

I hope I looked like a free and happy madman as my head hit the concrete. Crowd surfing is definitely for the faint of heart.