My Penis Is Made of Dogshit: "The Abortion"

Here is a band who revolutionized the art of being awful. Hell, just read the band, song, and album names again. Still, anyone can offend; it’s the band’s music that makes all the shittiness transcendent. Their first album, Satan’s Pregnant Again, was musique concrete for fourteen year olds weaned on Blink-182, all random swearing, gibberish, and some stabs at rudimentary musical performance. It encapsulated the name of the band and the mission statement of the legendary label they record for (Wikipedia, ho!: “to defy or ignore all criteria that people generally adhere to when it comes to considering audio”). But somewhere between albums the ability to turn shit into gold, or at least to delve into the fecal depths of horribleness and find the bizarre complexity underneath, was honed and refined until the point where hip indie cats are now calling them the Beatles of shitcore.

On The Abortion, then, we find to our surprise some kind of structure amidst the thirty second bursts of screaming and broken mandolin. Gone are the random jabs and incoherence. Suddenly we have a concept album, something about feminism and college. There are not one but two “full album remixes” that blend the whole thing into increasingly chipmunked oblivion. There’s a hidden track of sped-up overheard conversation. It’s all actually kind of, um, catchy. And at the core is “The Abortion,” a quiet space among all the other angry ruckus, the instant catchphrases, melody squeezed ex nihilo from household objects and overused vocal chords. “The Abortion” tones it down, hopping over picked acoustic guitar, then makes way for an actual Jamaican (or so the liner notes insist) who raps a few bars before disintegrating into laughter. And that’s it. And it’s brilliant.

And so, if My Penis Is Made of Dogshit represents the quandary between titles and music, let’s place equal weight on either end of the scale in this case. These ridiculous titles provide the context for the band’s postmodern stew. It’s hugely profound to find such giddiness and relief in a song as forebodingly titled as “The Abortion” (as opposed, for example, to the gurgling frustration of “Satan Considers The Unpopular Birthing Clinic”). Perhaps salvation can come through death? Wait a minute—hasn’t salvation always come through death? And if so, why not in the hands of an eloquent, anonymous toastmaster, greeting us softly and with laugher, gently taking our hands and coaxing us along to eternal freedom and making dead baby and scat-porn jokes all the way?