Day 2: Anal Cunt – Top 40 Hits

Today it snowed. That is, a blizzard hung over the city, shutting down most infrastructure and making everybody kind of freak out. The bus I take home from work was canceled, so I had to walk home. It was a picture-perfect winter wonderland: the snow was amassing on every surface possible, and was so thick in the air that lights caught in it took on a spectral presence. Cyclones of snow that looked like errant tornadoes whipped through intersections. Cars crept timidly and spun their wheels trying to get up hills. The freeway was lined with motionless headlights and taillights for miles in either direction. As I stood on the overpass, Anal Cunt’s Escape (the pina colada song) screamed in my headphones. Where the music had initially threatened to ruin the loveliness of the walk home (not that the music itself bothers me too much, but rather that I was on I think my 15th repeat of it) it finally just made me smile.

I don’t feel like I have to say much about the music. They’re called Anal Cunt. There are no cellos or harmonicas. If you haven’t heard them you would gain literally nothing from doing so. They would probably annoy you. I like annoying music and they annoyed me.

I did find myself enjoying it in some ways. If I was gonna spend the entire day listening to it, I wanted to make the best of it. The album even got a number of chuckles out of me. But I will never listen to it again if I can help it.

Interestingly, I found some sharp contrasts in my feelings about this album and yesterday’s. While yesterday’s tended to bore and annoy me in spots, and got really, really tiresome after the 15th repeat, I never minded this one nearly as much. Which is odd, because Belleruche’s music is rife with things and sounds I like. It’s kind and seductive. It wants to split a cab back to its place and dry hump with you in the back seat, not even caring that the cab driver is leering in the rearview mirror. Despite all of that, I just couldn’t care about it at all.

Yet I found myself enjoying the kind of dumb fun Anal Cunt seemed to be having. I imagined a bunch of permanently-stoned smiling dudes kicking each others’ instruments. And while that doesn’t necessarily sound like my idea of a good time on its own, and is probably a bit of a generous presentation of what kind of people these guys are, the idea that they have been at it pretty much continuously since 1988 is oddly endearing to me. I’m not sure how literally to take their profoundly offensive, well, everything; I want to believe they’re just having fun shocking people and that none of what they say or do means anything, but it’s probably more realistic that a 22 year long musical career consisting of calling people fags and being flagrantly racist is a bit too long to be a protracted goof.

Anyway, the whole comparison got me thinking about how I find myself playing devil’s advocate a lot, especially with music. A band like Belleruche doesn’t need me to believe in them; they’re sexy, talented, and cool enough to handle themselves. Some part of me, though, wants to grant a band like Anal Cunt more respect just for so willfully flaunting their abhorrence. In a 38-minute long album full of screeching and noise, my brain was jumping on what genuine riffs there were and enjoying the hell out of them for the brief time they appeared. A lot of this probably had to do with the fact that I had to listen to this album all day. If I could have I probably would have just had a day without music.

The scene on the freeway overpass that I described earlier, staring down miles of halted infrastructure, seeing nature unraveling the systems by which we try to master it — this was one of the loveliest things I have ever seen in my life. Any other day I might have had some nice, epic, string-laden soundtrack to it and have really soaked in the cinematic quality of the whole moment. Today I was bobbing my head to Anal Cunt‘s cover of American Woman, and was fully grounded in reality.