Powerful music or meaningless noise? (Part 1)

A quick disclaimer to note: This post will quote songs, lyrics, and themes which include profanity, violence and are occasionally of a sexual nature.

I realise that I have a pretty… unique music taste, liking everything from death metal to blues to rap to classical, there’s barely any genres that I specifically dislike. Due to this, I end up liking quite a lot of more obscure, unique, and non commercial artists that many people would describe as just noise. Because of this, I want to explain my views on these bands, and hopefully help people to see past the ‘noise’ that they currently hear.

In this first post I want to discuss the band ‘Anaal Nathrakh’, an extreme metal band from Birmingham who, according to Wikipedia, fall into the genres of “grindcore, black metal, death metal, industrial metal, and other[s]”. I’ve been a fan of the band for years, but whenever I show their music to other people they either think it’s stupid, offensive, or just simply pointless. The music, titles, artwork and lyrics are often extreme and controversial, so it is understandable why people can be put off, but this is why I want to dive deeper into the meanings and hopefully explain the chaos by delving into 4 of their songs individually. I would also point out that the main lyricist of the band ‘Dave Hunt’ is an intelligent man with a PhD in philosophy, in the area of meta-ethics, so when I explain these lyrics, I can assure you, their meanings are intentional.

I will start with my favourite song of theirs (also the least controversial in this list) called ‘The Joystream’. I’ll discuss the first verse, the bridge and the chorus. The first verse is as follows: ‘No cup from the master’s table / No drop of wine / To sate the thirst of those / You yourselves say were born divine’ The bridge is: ‘How does your bounty taste? / Dining on carrion / What have we done? / Nothing, nothing nothing’ And finally the chorus: ‘Bathe in the joystream / Twenty-nine thousand children today / Tomorrow the world’

These lyrics may sound confusing and meaningless without context, for example, what does the 29,000 children line represent? Well, that’s the number of children who die every single day from preventable causes. This song is a critique of political and religious institutions who claim to care for everyone (you yourselves say were born divine) and yet allow for this statistic to be true. Looking at those lyrics through that perspective suddenly changes the meaning. It may sound like just noise but it’s a form of social commentary and criticism asking how we allow some to live in such luxury while thousands of children die every day from things the rich and powerful institutions could stop overnight.

Hopefully that explanation provided a good starting point for what this band is all about, as this next song has a much more shocking title, but I ask you just to allow me to explain before you make a judgement. This next song is called ‘We will f*cking kill you’, which, like I said, is shocking but it is supposed to be, it’s supposed to grab your attention so you’ll listen to the message. The core message of the song is that human beings are so capable of such good things, such immense kindness and love and compassion, and when you look around at individuals, that’s what you see. However, when you look at human history, at the collective, we seem so violent, destructive and cruel. The song is simply asking, if we are so capable of this kindness and gentleness as a species, why is it that when you look at our history, at our collective actions, it seems to all boil down to one clear message to the world, the environment, to other species… that we will kill them?

The next song I want to talk about is called ‘obscene as cancer’ and, for anyone who is into war poetry will know, this is a reference to the Wilfred Owen poem ‘Dulce et decorum est’. This song is from the album ‘A new kind of horror’, which had the common theme of war (particularly the first world war) throughout. But there are plenty of songs about war across all different genres, so what makes this one different? Well, for me it is the rawness of it, and the genuine anger that can be felt for the unnecessary loss of life during these wars. The song opens with the lyrics ‘What lying sh*t will be said to children guaranteed glory in death?’ This alone shows the raw, powerful emotion behind the song, this isn’t a song about war because it’s an interesting topic, it’s a song about war because it is an emotional, horrific, shocking ‘thing’ that is repeated over and over again.

Thirdly, and with the most shocking, controversial song in this list, is ‘Libidinous (a pig with c*cks in its eyes)’. This song, with its shocking title and lyrics, also has a deeper meaning, and draws influences from the philosopher Freud, particularly his view of the ‘life drive’ and ‘death drive’. The lyrics, similarly to others of theirs, focus on the prevalence of hatred and violence in human society and history, satirically referring to this as an almost carnal, sexual drive in humans. The chorus (with one line in German (italicised), which I have translated for this) is as follows: ‘Tell me of the b*stards (as my fingers probe the ditch) / Tell me of the wastrels (that I may stroke and twitch) / Tell me of the have-nots (squirt your hate into my face) / Tell me of my fellow man (flowing forth in orgasmic bliss)’. While this may sound like it’s just shocking and graphic for the sake of it, there is an element of truth to it, every day, people tune into the news to watch and hear about real violence and wars and disasters, we watch horror films, natural disaster films, war films, we take part in and watch boxing and MMA. We like to think that we’re different, more civilised than the Romans with their gladiator fighting but truthfully we’re no different, there does seem to be an innate desire for aggression in all people.

Finally (you’ll be glad to hear), the final song I am going to dive into is called ‘…so we can die happy’. For this one, however, I am not going to discuss any of the lyrics because I don’t actually know what they are. I want to talk about the story behind the name, as this is the song which got me more into this band, purely because of the explanation of the name. Like the others, although the title might just sound vague and aggressive, the backstory is one of humanity and compassion. Dave Hunt said that he was watching the news, where a report was coming from Syria, from an area which was starving due to a siege and the Syrian government were threatening to use chemical weapons on these civilians. When a child from the area was being interviewed, he said “If they want to use chemical weapons on us, they should just get on with it. But can they make them smell of bread so at least we can die happy?” This quote, from a starving child, already accepting the inevitability of a horrific death stuck with Dave Hunt, alongside his anger at Katie Hopkins (British far right former newspaper columnist) who described the refugees from that conflict as “cockroaches”, so much that he wrote this song as a way to express that anger and despair at what the world was seemingly coming to.

I hope that I have managed to explain this strange, controversial band and do their creativity justice, as well as inspiring people to at least listen to their viewpoints, if not their music. If any of these topics have interested you in any way, their influences include Nietzsche, E. M. Cioran, Hannah Ardent, and Freud, among others.