A very print-unfriendly band

I was exceptionally upset to hear about the death last June of Seth Putnam, lead singer of Anal Cunt (or AxCx). For some reason, his death wasn’t reported that widely in the mainstream media, and in my post-teenage years my involvement in the metal scene has been dramatically diminished, so his passing passed me by. I loved his band more than can possibly be explained in anything approaching logical terms, but I hope to make you want to listen to them anyway.

I rarely make it through an entire AxCx album, and never in polite company. I generally dip in and out for about 5 minutes or so before having to not listen to anything else for a couple of hours. To call this band challenging is similar to calling World War II bad: undeniably true, but so wildly understated as to make the description seem fatuously incorrect. Simply reading the track listing of an AxCx album is an uncomfortable experience, and most of the song titles are un-printable. For the full horror experience, I recommended going to the Wikipedia page for their 1999 opus, It Just Gets Worse.

If you manage to do that without contacting The Daily Telegraph, I would recommend popping the album on. The songs are the logical-extreme of what can be considered music, and that is exceptionally dependent on how loosely one is willing to define “music”. Their sound consists of a completely distorted guitar being played semi-randomly with blast-beat drums and incomprehensibly screeched lyrics. The songs have little to no structure and barely last more than 40 seconds. They are undeniably the most difficult band to listen to ever. It is impossible to take them seriously and herein lies their beauty and the root of their enduring success. AxCx were, for their entire 23-year existence, a joke, and the joke itself is the key to their survival.

It’s not to say that Seth Putnam and the various others that joined him in the band’s line up over the two decades hated extreme metal and were maliciously attacking it, rather they realised that by making music that was so offensive it could only be justified by having horrific lyrics and song titles, and vice-versa. That the joke itself was never explicitly stated made it all the better, with a notable moment being the release in 1998 of Picnic of Love, an album of acoustic guitar, falsetto vocals and song titles such as ‘I Respect Your Feelings as a Woman and a Human’.

It’s not entirely clear who the joke was on. Perhaps on the people who don’t get the joke, or it’s actually on the people who do get the joke but listen anyway. If you think about it too hard however, you realise that you’re trying to derive some profound definition of satire from a 47-second long segment of white noise and screaming entitled ‘I Pushed Your Wife in Front of the Subway’ by a band called Anal Cunt and get the sneaking suspicion that the joke is in fact on you.

In conclusion, the band isn’t actually very good. But to be honest, being good isn’t really the point of them. One doesn’t listen to an AxCx album for the music in the same way one doesn’t buy a Bugatti Veyron to use as a car, or an Apple Mac to use as a computer. It’s about the concept behind the product as opposed to the product itself. Anal Cunt are just about being monstrously offensive in every possible way, and by fully committing to the cause, become so much greater than their sum of their parts.