In praise of disgust
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I love disgusting metal. I don’t love disgustingly bad metal; there’s a difference. The revulsion I feel upon hearing the latest plastic surgery disaster is not pleasurable. The revulsion I feel upon hearing filth from the bowels of hell – that is very pleasurable.
How can revulsion be pleasurable, you ask? Just Google “disgusting” and “erotic” together. They are birds of a feather. There’s fucking, there’s fetishes, and there’s jail time – it’s a spectrum. The boundaries are the human body, and the question is to what degree to violate it.
Thankfully, sonic perversions don’t yield any sentence harsher than perpetual celibacy (and visual starvation on blogspots with Minima Black templates). When I step back and think about it, it’s a little weird. I’m not normally into disgusting things. In fact, I’m sort of a neat/clean freak.
OK, maybe I’m just a freak in general. But even a cursory Google trip around the planet of disgust shows that maybe I’m not such a freak. Disgust is often named as one of the basic emotions. Psychologist Robert Plutchik classified it as the opposite of “trust”, which is interesting if applied to taste. Do I love music of distrust? Do I like any music of trust? Somehow things like Sublime and 311 come to mind. I think I distrust music of trust.
What is “disgusting”, anyway? Dictionary.com says: “causing disgust; offensive to the physical, moral, or aesthetic taste”. I like it already. Of course, once “taste” gets involved, it’s all subjective. I suppose “pedophilia” and “pediphilia” aren’t equal even in the land of subjectivity, but thankfully we’re just talking about guitar music. You think my bands suck, I think your bands suck, that’s the metal baseline, good.
Metal-wise, “disgusting” does mean something specific to me. Dirt is necessary but not sufficient. Many heavy bands have dirty tones without being disgusting. Atmosphere is also necessary. “Disgusting” must have a stench. It must raise the eyebrows of spouses (or drive away potential spouses). And it must have low end. “Disgusting” grabs me by the balls. It attacks from below. I think of the Sandworms in Dune and the fleshy greenhouse of David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ.
Beautifully disgusting metal records, the first three that come to my mind:
Incantation – Upon the Throne of Apocalypse
Deathspell Omega – Kénôse
Profanatica’s last record, helpfully titled Disgusting Blasphemies Against God
But metal doesn’t have a monopoly on “disgusting”. Drum ‘n’ bass (and by extension dubstep) prizes “disgusting” so much that it has a term called “screwface”, made for when one hears a particularly nasty bass line. (See, e.g., this shirt.) Screwface exhibit #1 is Ed Rush & Optical’s “The Medicine”. I’ve fast-forwarded to the sludge bath of a breakdown at 4:25. It’s basically an update of Black Sabbath’s “Electric Funeral” vibe.
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Ed Rush & Optical – “The Medicine”
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Frank Zappa was also no stranger to the joys of sick sounds. In an interview with Guitar Player magazine, he discussed working with a chamber ensemble that was particularly open-minded:
One of them is the woman from Australia who is also the oboe player. And one afternoon, I imagined this awful sound that could be created if one were to take a didgeridu and play it into a partially filled coffee pot. And I asked her whether she would do it. She said yes, and let me say, it is truly nauseating. I was laughing so much I had to leave the room.
So “disgusting” need not be erotic, perverted, or even serious; it can just be funny.
But perversions and humor are intertwined, and they’re both forms of release. That’s what disgusting music affords me. It “goes there” so that I don’t have to. My mind can work out grotesqueries so that in real life I don’t enact them. Think things are going badly? Your life cannot possibly be as bad as a Carcass or Impaled album cover. Be glad that the people in your life don’t all have John Tardy’s voice. (Admittedly, that might be cool for a second.) And be glad that you have a world of disgusting music from which to choose. Get nasty.
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