Seth Putnam, the mastermind behind endlessly controversial grindcore band Anal Cunt, died Saturday of a heart attack at the untimely age of 43. The singer’s death was confirmed by his publicist, Kim Kelly, who broke the news via her Tumblr. Kelly praised Putnam as “the grindcore GG Allin,” a man who “lived and died by his own rules.”
This is patently obvious to anyone who’s ever so much as glanced at an Anal Cunt record. The band’s songs rarely made it past the 50 second mark, intense sandpaper blasts of pure noise centered around Putnam’s stomach-churning shrieks that usually boasted titles as hilariously offensive (or just plain offensive) as Anal Cunt’s name. “Phyllis is an Old Annoying Cunt”, “Everyone in Anal Cunt is Dumb”, “You’ve Got Cancer”, “Your Kid is Deformed”, “Wind Chimes Are Gay”, and “I Lit Your Baby on Fire” are just a few of the literally hundreds of blunt, baiting compositions A.C. churned out in their day.
Despite Anal Cunt’s penchant for blind shock, Kelly has issued a call for peace in the wake of Seth Putnam’s death.
“I want to remind everyone that no matter how outrageous and controversial his musical career has been, Seth was still a human being with friends and family that loved him,” Kelly wrote on her Tumblr. “I’m hoping that the Internet will remember that. This is a very sad and trying time for those that knew him, and the last thing they need to see is an outpouring of message board hate.”
Seth Edward Putnam was born to Barbara Ann and Edward R. Putnam in or around Boston on May 15, 1968. His musical career began in the mid-’80s when he began playing bass for thrash metal act Executioner. In March of 1988, Putnam put together his own noise outfit and dubbed it Anal Cunt, deciding on the name because it was “the most offensive, stupid, dumb” moniker he could imagine. By August, Anal Cunt had recorded their first release, 47 Song Demo, which was a mere nine minutes long and boasted no song titles. Thrash labels began showing interest after the same year’s 88 Song EP, but the band rebuffed any record deals as the members had never planned for any kind of longevity. AxCx (as they came to be known in less liberal circles) split up shortly thereafter.
Alas, the clarion call for disruptive, politically incorrect noise proved too loud to ignore, and Anal Cunt reformed in 1991. A European tour scheduled for that year became an unmitigated disaster when drummer Tim Morse quit the band on the eve of the overseas jaunt; Putnam and guitarist Fred Ordonez decided to go ahead with the tour anyway, but none of the drummers they met on the road and tried to fold into the band could play their style of grindcore fast enough. Thus, most performances found a frustrated Putnam and Ordonez getting drunk, not playing their songs, and fighting with agitated attendees.
In 1993, Anal Cunt signed to Earache Records and released their first full-length album, 1994′s Everyone Should Be Killed. The cacophonous white noise AxCx perpetuated was changing around this time, mutating into something that could occasionally be mistaken for real music. This was captured succinctly on what is probably Anal Cunt’s most well-known record, 1995′s Top 40 Hits, which features inexplicable and lightning-fast covers of 1970s Billboard staples “Stayin’ Alive”, “I’m Still Standing”, and “Escape (the Pina Colada Song)”. Anal Cunt also offer a version of the theme from The A-Team on Top 40, crediting the song’s original writer as “Some Guy.”
Whatever humor could be gleaned from Anal Cunt’s material—including 1998′s joke acoustic record Picnic of Love—was generally overshadowed by Seth Putnam’s vile public persona. In 1993, the singer was arrested for hitting a woman in the face with his microphone during an Anal Cunt show in San Francisco. Whereas most people might feel ashamed of such an outburst, Putnam immortalized the incident by releasing a live recording of the concert in question entitled Breaking the Law. A 1996 altercation with Six Feet Under vocalist Chris Barnes spurned Putnam to brand Barnes a “gay midget faggot” and to write the similarly erudite dis track “Chris Barnes is a Pussy”.
“Chris Barnes is a Pussy” is actually one of the least offensive offerings on 1999′s It Just Gets Worse, a record that proved to be the atom bomb in Anal Cunt’s war on good taste. Understandably worried over potential backlash from material like “I Sent Concentration Camp Footage to America’s Funniest Home Videos” and “I Gave NAMBLA Pictures of Your Kid”, Earache Records censored some of the album’s content while simultaneously dropping Anal Cunt from their roster. The band embraced the controversy, titling their follow-up EP Defenders of the Hate. Defenders boasts a few songs that seem to suggest AxCx was nothing more than an act designed to enrage p.c. watchdogs (“All Our Fans Are Gay”, “If You Don’t Like the Village People, You’re Fucking Gay”), but there’s still a boatload of blatantly insensitive material present (“I’m Glad You Got Breast Cancer, Cunt”, “Ha Ha Holocaust”).
Anal Cunt broke up for what appeared to be the final time in 2001. Three years later, Seth Putnam nearly died of a drug overdose brought on by his crippling depression. The singer spent a month in a coma after mixing a fifth of whiskey, $200 worth of crack, some heroin, and a two month supply of Ambien. Paralyzed from the waist down once he emerged from his unconscious state, Putnam required months of physical therapy to regain any kind of mobility. Yet, in true Anal Cunt fashion, the singer famously declared that being in a coma was “gay” and “fucking stupid” in his first post-recovery interview and promised he would not stop playing the song he once wrote mocking coma victims, 1997′s “You’re in a Coma”.
“I don’t want people to think I’m a hypocrite,” Putnam told The Boston Phoenix in that 2005 feature. “I don’t want people to think that I can’t make fun of myself.”
Putnam began performing with Anal Cunt again even before he was up on two feet, shrieking from a sitting position during a June 2005 gig. A handful of new AxCx releases followed, the most recent being 2011′s Fuckin’ A. Fuckin’ A stands as the band’s most commercially viable record to date, a basic four-on-the-floor hard rock exercise whose song titles pale in terms of straightforward offense to the Anal Cunt of yore (the worst of the lot is the ho-hum “I’m Gonna Give You AIDS”). Putnam’s bilious screeching remains in tact, though, a barely intelligible cascade of throat-searing action.
Outside of Anal Cunt, Seth Putnam was involved with a slew of different bands over the years, including but not limited to Satan’s Warriors, Impaled Northern Moonforest, Full Blown A.I.D.S., Cuntsaw, Post Mortem, Vaginal Jesus, EYEHATEGOD, Buzzov-en, Haggis, Killslug, and Seven Minutes of Nausea. Additionally, Putnam contributed his trademark vocal stylings to recordings by more mainstream acts such as Pantera, Corrosion of Conformity, Napalm Death, Brutal Truth, Slapshot, Today is the Day, and Thor.
Putnam is survived by a wife, Julie, whom he married in 2008.
Despite the series of musicians who passed through Anal Cunt’s ranks, Seth Putnam was always the man at the helm, the “brains” behind the underground metal scene’s absolute bastard sons. Like GG Allin before him, Putnam lived to not just push people’s buttons but to relentlessly mash them with gleeful abandon. There may be no redeeming social value in songs like “You’re Pregnant, So I Kicked You in The Stomach” or “I Went Back in Time and Voted For Hitler”, but at least they kept such debates alive and gave us something truly fascinating/meaty to discuss while the rest of the world was gasping at the cornball antics of bigger “shock” bands like Marilyn Manson. Seth Putnam was really indispensable as a figure to loathe, love, or be confused by. Plus, the guy could scream with enough character and depth that you didn’t necessarily always get a migraine when you listened to him.
Of course, eulogizing Seth Putnam in such a manner is the exact opposite of the singer’s trademark style. It would undoubtedly be more fitting to hurl a blanket insult at his followers in the same sneering, juvenile manner with which Seth approached the majority of his art. Here goes:
You’re dumb for mourning a guy you didn’t even know (fuck you).
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