Photo of Crass by Trunt
Noise rock, is, by nature, harsh and nasty. That’s what drew me to it as a teenager: I was an ugly kid living an ugly life so it made sense to me. Though there’s been no shortage of vocal, strong-willed, women (Lydia Lunch, Adris Hoyos, Jarboe, Kim Gordon, Yasuko Onuki and so forth) in and around the scene, much of the music produced has been from a male perspective. Part of noise rock’s appeal is that some of those thundering macho narratives actually pillory a kind of toxic masculinity, its narrators taking on the roles of the men they fear they could become, the men they fear they are. While not overtly political, in these explorations of anxiety and deflation of authority, there is playful, dark cultural commentary going on.
Innovative provocateurs from Crass to Throbbing Gristle to Big Black to Whitehouse have served as templates for many bands that followed in their wake, though those bands' original, political contexts and critical voices have seemingly gotten lost in the replication. What we’ve wound up with are noise bands whose words rhetorically perpetuate violence, the element of satire no longer comprehensible. Absent the social and political context(s) that these caustic forerunners were reacting to, these bands are simply reiterating an empty violence, free of cultural incision.
Defenses of art that claims to provoke, offend, or push social boundaries often reiterate art's right to exist, insisting that since it is creative work it is fundamentally sacred in some way that makes it impervious to critique. Often, anyone who critiques it is written off "just too sensitive", doesn’t get it, or perhaps they "deserve" to be offended. Of course offensive art has a right to exist, and is necessary. All art has a right to exist—but its status as art is not protection from others' opinions. Art’s interpretations by the audience that receives it is as much a part of it as its creator’s intentions.
This brings us to the matter of Chicago noise-rock band Rectal Hygienics’ latest album for Permanent Records. The record itself is above-average musically, though deeply indebted to Brainbombs—and, much like the icons, the lyrics seem designed to push every button I have. As a person living in a genderfucked body that was assigned female identity at birth and has been mostly read as female by society since, Rectal Hygenics’ lyrics are exhausting and painful in a very visceral way. They echo real threats, and very real violence. They are written from the perspective of a guy who really, really hates women—hates himself, too, but aims much of that hatred outward. This is no new territory for the band—their 2012 LP Even The Flies Won’t Touch You leaned even further towards that tack.
The violence that Rectal Hygienics’ lyrics describe is a mundane violence, one that is written personally in my own history; it doesn’t push any boundaries to me because I live with the spectre of it every day. It is the type of violence that has taken the lives of people in my community, people I loved, and nearly my own a few times. Rectal Hygienics' portrayal of violence is not shocking, it’s commonplace. It isn’t new to noise or new to savvy or cynical listeners. It isn’t provocative. The conversations around it are exhausting, and they’ve been ongoing since at least the late '70s whenever the urge to push the boundaries of taste in music meets the urge toward progressive social change.
These two impulses, though, bloom from the same core tenet of punk: that the status quo is, by nature, fucked up. The "status quo" of first-wave punk was its bloated parent, rock'n'roll, which by the late '70s had ballooned and ossified into a cartoonish parody of its once dangerous self. Of course, rock'n'roll is at its genesis just, to borrow from Big Black, songs about fucking, which we all know upset the hell out of the establishment in the '50s.
Panic over early rock'n'roll was panic about race and sexuality. Panic about punk was panic over class and gender presentation. Punk, however, actively took the piss out of everyone, including those who took it seriously, and it did so in the service of both nihilism and progressivism. If you smash something, its broken pieces beg the question as to what to build in its place; the history of Crass, always the provocateurs, gives fairly good insight into tensions within early punk from both the left and the right.
We are at a place right now as a culture where social media has made otherwise marginalized voices audible. Voices that were previously the loudest in the room are being challenged. This is a context that Rectal Hygienics, a band that seeks to be provocative in a very 1985 way, cannot avoid in 2015. No one is arguing that Rectal Hygienics, or bands making albums like this that make empty motions towards something like music trolling, should not be allowed to exist or should be foisted from the scene. But how are lines like "Spoiled fuck machine/ Think you’re on easy street/ You’re a slave to man and what he puts inside of you/ Stinking pack mule/ You smell like shit," from "Heroin Whore", the song which Even the Flies Won’t Touch You derived its title from, supposed to be interpreted? Is it hammy shock and awe or bald misogyny? Are we supposed to sit back an appreciate this as "art" for "art’s sake"?
At a time when violence against women, particularly trans women, is an everyday occurrence—6 trans women have been murdered as of this writing since the beginning of 2015—and doesn’t happen in some other discrete universe, far from these basement scenes—how are we supposed to receive these lyrics as "entertainment" or even "a window into man’s self-loathing"? Why are we supposed to praise them for hypothetically "looking into the dark places of the human soul" when women who write about our biographical experiences with these dark realities can’t even talk to our friends on social media without being interrupted by trolls at best and serious harassment at worst? How is art that mines this territory a challenge in any way? How does it unsettle or disrupt us when it’s just the same exhausting violence we shoulder daily?