ADAC: Grindcore And The Oakland Rangers
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The most recent collaboration between artist Matthew Barney and writer Brandon Stosuy is ADAC, a twin tribute edition to the lives of the maverick American football executive Al Davis (1929–2011) and Seth Putnam (1968– 2011), the misanthropic American grind-core frontman and founder of the band Anal Cunt. Barney and Stosuy have previously organized semi-anonymous events at the former’s studio in Long Island City, New York, which included impromptu metal performances as well as pig roasts, amateur wrestling matches, and art-history readings. ADAC embodies the spirit of these unexpected cultural collusions in a focused zine form.
Al Davis was the coach, general manager, and owner of the Oakland Raiders for nearly 50 years, beginning in 1962. His agressive competitiveness helped found the Super Bowl, in 1967, and his irascible behavior and aggressive coaching gave the Raiders an outlaw reputation and countercultural sensibility. Davis’s motto was simply, “Just win, baby!” And they often did. Accused of lying, cheating, and manipulating, yet reveared by his many supporters, Davis became one of the greatest iconoclasts of American sports. In 1981, Davis said, “I don’t want to be the most respected team in the league. I want to be the most feared.”
Seth Putnam was divisive in the underground extreme music scene, and he did and said many things that are unbelievable. Putnam founded Anal Cunt, often abbreviated AxCx, in Boston in 1988, with the intention of playing only one show of pure noise and no songs, yet the group went on to play for 13 years, authoring grind-core songs with ridiculously offensive titles such as “We’re Not ‘In Da House’ You Fucking Wigger,” “I Snuck a Retard into a Sperm Bank,” or “Ha Ha Holocaust.” Almost every song is less than a minute. Putnam spent two decades concocting progressively more blunt and ugly ways to shock and provoke, in music and in life. “Seth brought some much needed irreverence and danger to metal, punk, whatever,” says former AxCx guitarist Scott Hull. “Deep down, all us metal heads, grind freaks, and punk rockers want to believe that the scene, all the bands and fans, are more than just ‘normal’ people plucking away at instruments, going back to their day jobs. Seth, like it or not, gave us this.”
Like a black-shelled oyster, ADAC is bivalved – one cover takes you through Al Davis’s outspoken and brash world while the other catapults you, with little caution, into the scatological, throat-shredding universe of Anal Cunt. At its center is an insert taken from the interwar French author Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s novel Journey to the End of the Night (1932), the project’s pearl of nihilistic beauty pixellated to illegibility. The only readable passage in the excerpt is a paragraph on remembering how far people can go in the way of “crumminess”: “When the grave lies open before us,” Céline writes, “let’s not try to be witty, but on the other hand, let’s not forget, but make it our business to record the worst of the human viciousness we’ve seen without changing one word.”
ADAC is published by Dashwood Books in an edition of 300 (New York, 2013).
