WHEN I GET SATISFACTION, YOU WILL GET SADIST ACTION

Peter Sotos has a lot to answer for.

We'll feed you to every hungry bird
We'll feed you to every starving animal
And we'll let them eat fat till they're full
And will let them drink blood till they're drunk
As I tell you:
It's helping
While I tell you:
You're doing the right thing

Whitehouse, 'Cut Hands Has The Solution'
from Bird Seed, 2003

I have this urge to kill
I have this urge to kill any woman

Brainbombs, 'Urge To Kill'
from Urge To Kill, 1999

Punk, especially US underground punk of the '80s, eventually moved out of a postered room in the suburbs and found its way onto college campuses. For some, the white-hot nihilistic energy that fuelled the music dimmed with the wishy-washy peace'n'love, feminist, veg-left agenda. Hardcore was E-numbers and I hate my mom AND the military-industrial complex. Colleges were puritan salad with extra ethics.

All this togetherness and unity and melody was plaid-shirted longhair hell to Peter Sotos; it was the '70s all over again. Sotos responded with Pure: a 'zine exploring the role of the serial killer in society. A liberal conceit at the heart designed to test campus liberals; it explored how the media abuses the victims as much as the killer does, utilising the trash/low-literary aesthetics of hate mail, crime reports, pornographic fantasy – and importantly, first-person 'exploitations' of the acts of murder. It provoked the necessary reaction. Pure #2, the child pornography issue, went even farther: it landed Sotos in jail.



Big Black were among the first to take these ideas and channel them through new nihilistic forms (indeed, guitarist/vocalist Steve Albini and Sotos were friends around the Chicago scene): where punk had been fast and unruly but ultimately consonant, like stilted pop music – Big Black made oppressive, discordant, hellish music. Albini, like Sotos' tracts, would channel murderers (“She's wearing his bootprint on her forehead”) and assholes and losers. In a further act of provocation, Albini would name his next band Rapeman. Concerts would be regularly picketed, criticism levelled, the band broke up before Albini spent the remainder of the '80s & '90s producing huge sellers for PJ Harvey, Nirvana, Pixies, and Page & Plant.

For some, Sotos' influence ran deeper. Here was a writer delving into the last taboos, making lustmord more than a dusty academic concept; scratching out conventional lines of inquiry that combined a love of anti-comic situationist thought and a full cognisance of modern tragedy. He would join British power-electronics group Whitehouse, bringing a volatile neuro-linguistic programming edge to their already bracing music; tracks like 'Why You Never Became A Dancer' a small scale model of psychic confusion of the corruption of aging.



Though overwhelmingly powerful and so cloaked in black irony it is hard to see any real truth, Whitehouse, even when assaulting the senses with white-noise and yelled incantations about Gilles De Rais, maintain a moralist understanding of suffering. They're dissed by scholarly music writers such as David Toop and Simon Reynolds, who maintain a frumpy fusty indignation about their connection with Sotos - yet they maintain an air of defensibility in that William Bennett has had a 30-year career and maintains close relationships with so many liberal and un-extreme persons that he can't possibly be all bad; rather, the Hermann Nitsch of contemporary electronic music.

The same can't be said for Brainbombs. Sotos nicknamed Peter Sutcliffe 'The Streetcleaner': Brainbombs have a song called 'Street Cleaner'. The aforementioned lyrics were the lightest in tone that could be found. All of their lyrics allude to misogynistic brutal murders, mutilation, child sex, or a combination of these tropes. They even have a song called 'Fuckmurder'. It's genuinely troubling stuff: at what point do we say word is deed? Is it ever?

From Hudiksvall in Sweden, the general consensus is that Brainbombs – though serious musicians (if you can ignore their lyrics then they're some of the best garage/no wave musicians anywhere) – are a joke played on record collectors, liberals, feminists, political correctness junkies, and anyone square enough to be offended. The defence: if gruesome horror movies can show mutilation and death, which can be unambiguous, given the wrong editor, then why can't Brainbombs sing “I'm a sick fuck / I kill for pleasure / I'm gonna fuck you dead / Cheap fucking meat / Blood dripping from her cunt / Pus out of her mouth”? The cover to Burning Hell has a dead baby in a coffin on the cover. The broken English of the lyrics somehow make the sentiments appears more detached, more dangerous; more deranged. It is not easy going.



Even if the axe is to fall and we unilaterally decide as people that these things are wrong to say/write/think, then kudos to Sotos, Whitehouse, & Brainbombs (and latter-day writers such as Jim Goad and Adam Parfrey) for re-animating a passionate conversation about words once again. Between the lot of them, nobody has committed a crime of the type they continually reference in their art. But as many have accused Arizona gunman Jared Loughner of being inspired by a climate of heightened rhetoric, does this logic not serve to say that the words of Sotos et. al. inspire a heightened passion about violent murder? That if one person is influenced, it was all a bad thing? Is it even possible to just kick back and enjoy Whitehouse and Brainbombs for their music?

Back soon with something lighter.

Michael Gira's God Complex

I wrote a couple of articles for the University paper/website. After a couple of meetings and unreturned emails and responses that were unforthcoming, I can only assume that they've gone cold on my articles or me - or are simply snowed under with work. Anyway, here is something I wrote about Swans and Xiu Xiu. The tone is more for unfamiliar readers, but I can't be bothered changing it.

Some people love a good lyric. They have them permanently inscribed on their bodies. They whisper them to loved ones in the dark of the night. They stand in for philosophical conceits, political persuasions, and often negotiate the complex space between real feeling and articulation. Me, I usually couldn't care less; it's often just arbitrary condensed syntax that really doesn't mean that much.

Occasionally, lines will snake around your heart, or somewhere a little more cerebral, to take hold. To wit:

“I work hard for everything I own. Everything I own chokes me when I'm asleep.”
“Out of your mind with whorishness, incredibly young, incredibly filthy.”
“Break into the children's hospital screaming 'don't fuck with me! Don't fuck with me!”
“Cut out the infection. Beat up the violator. Gag him, then screw him down.”
“The oil is black and it is thick. Sex is a void filled with plastic.”
“This is the worst vacation ever. I am going to cut open your head with a roofing shingle.”

No, they don't scream 'party' to me either. They're dark, concerned with the grotesque and the violent, attempting a frustrated, futile malediction against a clustering blackness. Against the backdrop of the radio and the overwhelming banality of UK indie's proud underachievers, these are simply words that stand out; be they good or bad.



In the back catalogues of their writers (respectively: Swans, Xiu Xiu, Xiu Xiu, Swans, Swans, Xiu Xiu) these are not necessarily the best, the most novel, or potent examples of their craft. Their words are repulsive because things are awful. This is the world we live in; not that Usher and his ilk Eurodancing their way to the club are not in the same world. It's just that while the world sees Justin Bieber performing 'Baby' inside to a rapt audience, Xiu Xiu's Jamie Stewart sees the barmaid molested in the back-room, the CCTV mysteriously malfunctioning for that day only, the music drowning out the cries. Tell me that it wouldn't happen. Tell me that it hasn't happened already.

In February, Xiu Xiu released their seventh LP, entitled Dear God, I Hate Myself. Fluttering, high drama vocalisms take centre stage against a shifting palette of cold synthesiser, unsympathetic mechanic percussion and abrasive string stabs. The tension is sometimes too much to take: Stewart's vocal tightrope-act balances every track in a state of unremitting drama, a house of cards awaiting the merest zephyr to break the tension. And it never comes. There is no catharsis.

September brought the twelfth LP by Swans, My Father Will Guide Me Up A Rope To The Sky, an audience-funded effort to kick Michael Gira's long-running project back into gear after a decade-long absence. Gira, a singular entity in a world of indiscernibles, would take to the stage in the early '80s and order the back door be bolted and the lights turned off but for a single spotlight. The band would unleash unmitigated chaos, deafening bass thrums and atonal guitars that have more in common with the scrapyard than the stage. As their 1990 live album recalls, Anonymous Bodies In An Empty Room, just before a period of mellowing.



My Father... attempts a clever balancing act between the remorselessness of the visceral and physical Swans and some more overtly melodic, sweeping styles, mostly pulled off to great aplomb. Where Jamie Stewart is a histrionic tenor, Michael Gira is a grave and impassive baritone. If most artists were to announce that a key track on their upcoming record was a seven-minute mini-epic about their daughter, it'd be time to line-up the sick bags. The first four minutes of 'Inside Madeline' batter the listener so thoroughly that the rays of sunshine peeking through at its conclusion are easy to miss.

What is signicant here, then? That these are two albums deep into each band's career whose lyrics reveal their treacly-black auteurs to be fundamentally moralist flaneurs: maybe not Christian by self-identfication, but certainly by de facto action. Those lyrics up there: they're not for kicks or to try and play to the kind of sicko who'd get off on them. Swans and Xiu Xiu have spat naked nihilism in their audience's faces for years now and some of them still don't get it, much like semi-racist Little Englanders don't get Alf Garnett. Now they're spelling it out for us. They inhabit the same moral sphere as Justin Bieber and his exhortations to just 'love you, girl', even though against the banality of the radio, you wouldn't quite notice.