C is for cookie

Despite the fact that I lack any serious musical talent, I think I could be a pretty good frontman for a grindcore band. Especially the ones that seem to be in vogue with all the crust kids. You know – bands that have pseudo-ironic lyrics and songs that don’t clock in over 45 seconds. Bands with names like Raw Sewage, Anal Cunt, and Napalm Death, grunting into a microphone pretty much typify the genre. There’s also the extremely high-pitched flipside, where you’ve got a chick yipping over the same chugga-chugga machine riffs that sound like an unbalanced washer going through the spin cycle.

Of course, you can make all of your songs completely serious, calling them something like “The Reticence of Your Salvation Is My Destruction.” You say the song title, add another line such as “You can’t take this any further” and drag the end of “further” out into a grunted scream, then end with “ugh!” There’s your song. Five more of those, and you’ve got half a split 7″. Ten more, and it’s your own EP.

What to title the EP? You can’t call it Monkeys Ate My Penis, because that was a song on the split the band did with a jazz-fusion-crust act from Florida two years ago. Sample lyrics to “Monkeys Ate My Penis” (actually, all the lyrics to “Monkeys Ate My Penis”):

“Monkeys ate my penis
Monkeys ate my penis
Monkeys ate my penis
Shouldn’t have painted it yellow.”

It charted on a metal show on a college radio station in Oregon, if memory serves. Failing that, you do what the Ultimate Warriors did for a split on Moo Cow Records and devopte most of your songs to pop culture figures. “The Olson Twins” lyrics are nothing more than “Gremlin, you look like a gremlin.” In theory, you could devote an entire record to songs about Tom Selleck. You’d lead off with “Magnum, PI”:

“We love you Magnum
Not Higgins
Not Higgins
Not Higgins
We love your mustache
Thomas Magnum!”

Make sure it’s on vinyl, limited edition, and in some obsessive-compulsive amount of colored vinyl: 100 on red, 100 on white, 100 on marble purple, and 100 on black, with a test press on clear taupe. Now you’re ready to start your own grind band! Go forth and have fun.

the Ultimate Warriors – “Mr. Fuji’s Magic Dust