The History of Comedy Grind
- Story by Anthony Bartkewicz
Decibel investigates the history of humor in grindcore—seriously
Paging through Decibel or any other metal mag, you’ll see a lot of crossed arms, corpsepaint-accentuated scowls and the full range of metal facial expressions: the Five of Us Could Easily Beat You Up face; the Yes, We Are Very Deeply Into the Occult face; the You Have Caught Us in the Midst of Brooding face; the We Dare Not Look Into the Camera (Except for the Guy Who Is Staring Intensely at It) face. You know ’em. When confronted with these band photos, my girlfriend, who is not into metal at all, will inevitably ask, “Are these guys serious?” And the answer, almost always, is yes, they are. Metal is SERIOUS BUSINESS. Funny metal makes people wonder about ironic intentions, and it just seems unmetal most of the time. Funny metal is, like, Lordi and hair-metal jokes on VH1—i.e., not really funny at all.
Some combination of absurdity, physical comedy, and the fact that it’s only even tolerable to maybe .001% of the world’s population has turned grindcore into possibly the last refuge of humor in extreme music. Even deadly serious bands like Napalm Death recall laughing at the preposterous speed of their rehearsals. Why is grindcore the only metal genre where it’s OK to laugh at yourself?
Stormtroopers of Death, a side project with Anthrax guitarist Scott Ian and drummer Charlie Benante, Dan Lilker from Nuclear Assault (also later of Exit-13 and Extra Hot Sauce), and roadie Billy Milano, were the starting point for the crossover of metal and hardcore punk (see this month’s Hall of Fame for more) and an early force for humor in extreme music. “I don’t think there was a band that inspired us to have funny lyrics,” says Lilker. “We just decided to do something really obnoxious and humorous because that’s the kind of people we were. Some of the hardcore bands back then had funny lyrics; they weren’t all serious and political.” On Speak English or Die, an album generally not owned by poseurs, Milano went all loudmouth Archie Bunker over some of the sweetest mosh riffs in history on stuff like “Pre-Menstrual Princess Blues,” “Pussy Whipped” and “Douche Crew.” There was also the title track and “Fuck the Middle East.” Twenty-two years later, Lilker still has to explain that “Speak English or Die” was, y’know, a joke.
“We were having fun, and it was also kind of an interesting sociological experiment to see if we’d get responses from the people we thought we would,” he says. “Sure enough, we pissed off the guy who ran Maximumrocknroll, Jello Biafra… stuff like that. Of course, there were some people who thought the lyrics were serious and they loved it, and that was a little scary—these right-wing types like, ‘I thought you were serious!’”
Four years before S.O.D., four guys in New Jersey who’d caught the end of ’70s punk with a group called the East Patterson Boys Choir started up a new band in 1981 that went for goofiness and satire over all-out offensiveness: Adrenalin O.D. “When we started, it was a little serious,” guitarist Paul Richards recalls. “I was just starting to write songs. After you get a few songs under your belt, you can see what’s good, and, eh, not so good. Writing a song is hard enough; writing a good one is harder. Trying to figure out what to write about is the hardest. It turned out that the songs I liked the most were the ones with the stupidest lyrics. So I followed my muse and wrote even stupider songs. I believe I reached the pinnacle of stupidestness with ‘Youth Blimp.’ It’s been downhill ever since.”
A.O.D. were stupid, but the smart kind of stupid that has room for satire like “Corporate Disneyland” and “Clean and Jerk” alongside the astoundingly moronic “Rock ‘n’ Roll Gas Station.” “A.O.D. complained about everything from politics to cops to jocks to the stupidity of society in general,” says big fan Chris Dodge, formerly of Spazz and funny-core band Stikky. “That could describe any band from Black Flag to D.R.I., but A.O.D.’s approach made it original, and by using humor, made the message more palatable. Also, I stole the idea of wearing a Goofy hat on stage from their drummer.”
“Why did funny songs have to suck?” Richards asks. “Why was it that only someone like Weird Al doing parodies of popular songs or lame country crap like Ray Stevens could be funny?” Adrenalin O.D. were funny, but they were also FAST. Pre-grindcore superfast—or, as Richards calls it, stupidfast. “We didn’t consciously set out to be funny; we set out to be fast as hell. When we were on tour and really limber, we would look at each other before a song like ‘World War 4’ and say, ‘Play it as fast as you can!’” says drummer Dave Scott. “The songs would be so fast we would end up cracking ourselves up at the end.”
Adrenalin O.D. and S.O.D. were coming from different places humor-wise, though guitarist Bruce Wingate points to a likely common influence: “I think there’s an entire unacknowledged subculture that originated in the New York/New Jersey/Connecticut region based on the TV channels WPIX, and WOR-TV,” he says. “White Castle, The Honeymooners, Carvel commercials, monster movies... everyone from the Dictators to the Ramones and the Beastie Boys referenced it.”
Still, A.O.D. had more of a point than pure stupidity. “There was always an element that acknowledged that the conventions of hardcore needed to be challenged and mocked,” Wingate says. “It was an attitude we copped from ’70s punk.” Not everyone appreciated the challenge. “One critic wanted to ‘bury us up to our necks and run over us with a lawnmower,’” remembers Richards, “‘just to see how funny we thought it was.’”
It’s kind of funny, if “Satan’s Trampoline” or “Sumo Rabbit and His Inescapable Trap of Doom” are your speed. It might be a British thing. Across the Atlantic from New Jersey, Chris Flint of the UK thrash band Scrawm “devised the concept of Lawnmower Deth from the bottom of a beer glass,” recalls Deth’s vocalist Peter Lee (a.k.a. Qualcast Mutilator). “Influenced by the antics of Bathory and the like, he devised the most ludicrous way to die in metal, via lawnmower.”
Lawnmower Deth goofed up thrash metal with absurd lyrics, dance interludes, lots of lawnmower jokes and probably everything that seemed funny to them for a couple of minutes. Somehow they ended up on Earache, alongside a bunch of serious-business bands. “The grind bands certainly didn’t get us,” Lee writes, in Qualcast Mutilator mode. “Being on Earache was bizarre, as I know we really pissed off most of the bands there. Sure we got on with them, but musically they hated us. Godflesh, Cathedral, Morbid Angel… now they were serious! If you find Nocturnus funny, you will understand why Lawnmower Deth had a home. Nocturnus is still funny, yet they thought it was awesome.
“We were just punk rock and metal kids having a go at what we loved,” he says. “Was this not what the scene was about? Nothing to do with taking the piss, just getting up and do[ing] it. However, as the serious guys became more serious, the targets just became easier. I remember being really affronted by Slayer’s use of fighter planes in a video to glorify war—and I love Slayer. I used to get riled by those who got on their soapbox complaining about the scene when others were off their arses doing it (no matter how badly) writing zines, organizing gigs, playing in bands. The press thought we were either taking the piss, good time entertainment, shite or art. I love the fact that certain elements of the press thought [it was] art—hysterical. I was once compared to Zappa and Beefheart—now who was taking the piss?”
As more and more thrash, punk, hardcore and early grindcore bands formed throughout the ’80s, some inevitably went for the stupid and the gross-out. “Soiled Depends,” frontman for the very funny goregrinders Putrescence and scholar of all things grindcore, credits Canadian sick jokers Dayglo Abortions with defining offensive humor in metal. “The lyrical subject matter from this Canadian institution—bestiality, pud poundin’, and mom quenching her thirst with bags of urine— really set a tone for me,” Depends says. “The Dayglos paved my way to grindcore bands like Aspirin Feast, who did ‘Kill It With a Skillet,’ a song about infanticide. And Heist: ‘Brain is dumb, dumb is fun, skull is dumb, I am dumb!’ The ability to turn music that sounded like Infest into a brain-damaged, foul-breathed and not very funny Dr. Seuss seemed like work matched only by true polymaths or those gifted in many different mental areas.”
Other grind bands went for a sort of absurdity of form. Scott Hull started Agoraphobic Nosebleed, “amidst all the noisecore tape trading back in the early to mid ’90s—bands like Genital Masticator, 7 Minutes of Nausea, Anal Cunt, Meat Shits, cramming a billion tracks onto a tape.” Hull briefly joined Anal Cunt to play on 40 More Reasons to Hate Us, by which time A.C.’s shtick had devolved (or maybe evolved, I don’t know) from the fairly witty “Abomination of Unnecessarily Augmented Composition Monikers” and “Guess Which 10 of These Are Actually Song Titles” to blatant offend-anybody titles like “Kill Women,” “You’re a Fucking Cunt” and “Your Family Is Dumb.” (The cover of Manowar’s “Gloves of Metal,” a duet with Phil Anselmo, is still a work of conceptual brilliance.)
“Seth [Putnam, Anal Cunt vocalist] would probably step over any line you put in front of him, and then he’d call you a fag for putting the line in front of him,” Hull says. Agoraphobic Nosebleed, despite lyricist Jay Randall taking offensiveness to a surreal level Hull calls “rambling, drug-addled, Hunter S. Thompson crossed with Peter Sotos lyrics, sometimes retarded, sometimes brilliant” and going far enough with some domestic-violence lines that a Rolling Stone reviewer flipped out, does have boundaries. “We’re limited to what each person in the band feels comfortable with. Obviously Richard [Johnson], who was in Enemy Soil, isn’t really into concepts involving putting LSD in baby bottles for infants, but he gets the sense of dark humor enough to sing them. We’ve had to talk about not giving a shit if people think that’s us or not. I think we decided that if people think that’s what we’re legitimately about, fuck it. Let them. We’re not out to make friends; we’re just out to give you a headache.”
To date, only one band has stood up and proudly declared itself “comedy grind”: 7000 Dying Rats. 7KDR is actually a sorta-supergroup with a shifting lineup, currently boasting dudes from Lair of the Minotaur and no-wave terrorist Weasel Walter (Flying Luttenbachers, XBXRX), and scoring a surprising amount of ink in Decibel for such a dumb joke. An album review, an “Upfront” feature, and now they’re in a “think piece” about grindcore? What the fuck? Anyway, multi-instrumentalist Toney Vast-Binder calls the “comedy grind” tag “something that we made up to make fun of people who couldn’t get over the non-metal aspects of our music. Their reviews usually start with some variation of, ‘Why can’t these fuckers stop fucking around?’”
7KDR’s Season in Hell did somehow score an appearance from Neurosis’ Scott Kelly. Like His Hero Is Gone or My Dying Bride, Neurosis are one of those bands where it’s hard to imagine a member even cracking a smile, let alone hanging out with the authors of “Grind Fluffer.” “In their day, even Vikings probably launched mead through their noses after a frightened, hapless Norman tripped and decapitated himself on an unused, upright plowshare,” Vast-Binder says when asked how they convinced Kelly to participate. “I think even Vikings needed to giggle now and again.”
Dan Lilker, who’s still active in grindcore bands, says, “A lot of bands are really groomed now. Like metalcore bands that start out young and go right into being on a label and touring, have their videos going straight to Headbangers Ball; they think they have to be serious about it.
“People can be funny even if their band presents a very different image,” he continues. “When I first met Fenriz [Darkthrone], he had a walkman on and was listening to comedy CDs, laughing to himself at the bar, drinking beer. People aren’t always what they seem.”
“The people who enjoy playing this music still haven’t found enough ways to tell the audience and the rest of civilization, in the words of Sockeye, to buttfuck their own faces,” Soiled Depends summates. “Frankly, whatever the fuck DragonForce is writing about seems infinitely more stupid and less relevant to the advancement of society to me.”
“Who the hell wants to listen to that shit?” Weasel Walter replies when I ask why grindcore is the only extreme metal genre to embrace its own funniness. “We like good songwriting and pro-attitude bands like Trivium.”
