Watch this video while I figure out how to say this.
I may talk too much. It's not manly, as many other men have made plain to me.
I often talk about about how I became a Korn fan mostly in the feverish aftermath of having first seen the video for "Thoughtless," in which a young Aaron Paul, bullied relentlessly and bewitched toward vengeful fulfillment by a sub-dermal Jonathan Davis, Carrie-fies the prom. In that video the protagonist Paul finds himself depicted in his high school yearbook's superlatives under "Most Likely To…Take A D*ck." This was pretty much Korn picking up where, much earlier, songs like "Faget" and "Clown" left off: JD and the boys scoring the inevitable rage that follows finding oneself, as a "man," failing the mandate of manhood or masculinity and being doubly destroyed for it. Enduring the myth of any one monolithic manhood is the initial destruction.
"Manhood = do drag but make it a drag & drag everyone along with you." Recently, the occasion for this equation came upon me when a trans woman friend recounted how a cis man, dissatisfied with how she wasn't somehow sufficiently submissive or responsive to his demands for time and tone, flipped the switch from sweet attentiveness to aggressive denigration, calling her a "man with tits" and worse. Luckily(?), this abuse was verbal and she's alive to talk about it.
You're not supposed to talk about how it's possible your partner has erected the concept of his masculinity over the scaffolding of being terrorized and sexually abused as a child by a male family member, a roughneck hulk of a man who was known as "good" and "fun-loving," adored by his own children, and quietly feared by the men and women closest to him. You're supposed to let your partner decide he's healed from this in his own way, that no therapy would help him accept that it wasn't his fault, that expressing "feminine" mannerisms as a kid in no way invited what happened, in no way explains why other male family members didn't protect him, even when they knew about it. And when your partner asks you why you have the impulse to seek help from other people when, yes, he himself sometimes scares you? Because, he says, he'd be "man enough" to handle it alone. Because you're not supposed to talk about this.
I’m free / I’m fine / Don’t ask / me in / Don’t tell / your friends / I / Trust and bleed
Reiterated in the lyrics of Chat Pile's latest single "Masc" is an anxiety-turned-deep shame of speaking, of vocalizing. After the razor-throated onslaught of the previous single "I Am Dog Now," Raygun Busch seems especially muted; his mutterings go unruptured until the last 30 or so seconds—when the pressure that has had nowhere to go but up finally and necessarily breaks skin. With the forthcoming album Cool World dropping on the 30th anniversary of Korn's debut, Chat Pile might be reluctant to be placed too squarely within Korn's legacy of crashing sonic volatility against lyrical candor to expose the wrecked experiment of the red-blooded American male—and with the help of horror cinema's (literal) catharsis. But I can still listen behind "Mask"
I know it's pathetic to be singing this song … so don't do it … and I know that I'm free to do whatever I want
and "The Mask"
I can hit a lot harder if you wanna find out
It won't matter to me none, do you wanna see?
Line up the animals!
[…]
all the animals we've worked through
and this new face, and I can see the Heartland's wholesome foursome's efforts toward honest fellowship in vivisecting masculinity's fallacies. Maybe it's just what I wanna see.
Breaking their found-footage-inspired conventions, the music video for "Masc" instead seems to render visible all the subjects Chat Pile usually talk/banter/banshee about. On hiatus are the VHS tape static, cooler palettes, Spirit Halloween blood, location-based massacres-in-waiting, and predominant browns. In its place: a Motel Hell/Texas Chainsaw hyper-ballad, a pig-headed vanitas, a grinning incision, closeups on moist stares, sweaty primary colors, while caricatures of good ol' boys cartoonishly (though not too fictively) pound beers and prime each other to punch faces. Still a truly Chat Pile collage, it's like the cop from "Crawlspace" and the Arby's organ donor from "Rainbow Meat" and Mr. Rodan from "Lake Time" were invited to have family dinner in the trunk from "Dallas Beltway." With the Stars & Stripes ablaze in every periphery, every intention has been given to the disparate, absurd images stitched into continuity here by one guy and one girl. This video, directed by Stephen Mondics, is on reference overload, inviting the viewer to bring along what they know and to co-create what it can be—not so much a narrative as an interior topography, a mess of self, walking around impersonating something reasonable and put-together.
I'm putting things together.
I never wanted to see Györgi Pálfi's Taxidermia (2006); it just happened. But after the unrated imagery depicting grotesqueries of competitive speed eating, pig-fucking, and avant garde embalming initially scandalized my eyes and guts, I recovered and realized I was watching the story of fathers making monsters of their sons—not by being perverse/depraved/violent but by making themselves inaccessible or secretive to their children who were nonetheless paying whatever possible attention, quietly setting aspirations. (I feel like Joseph Campbell or somebody said once that the monstrosity of dragons was circumstantial: sure, they had scales, claws, and fire-breath, but more so they were solitary, secret creatures known to hoard what was coveted.)
I caught you laughing again
I know I’m lower than scum
I need to keep my mouth shut
Before I look fuckin dumb
Sometimes it's hard to talk about the monstrous methods men use to experience intimacy with other men when intimacy with other men is something I desire. Entering these contexts usually requires a kind of dismemberment of myself and others: I have to amputate some essential emotions and demeanors; I have to sew in some inauthentic behaviors, graft them on like pig's skin. If I have an interior monologue that's a little too gracious, scrape it out of my skull and replace it with a handful of hateful screws that, until it resembles another man's, makes the sound of my own voice unbearable. Frankenstein myself about in pieces. Spill blood instead of tears and act like it's milk. Keep a gag in through all of this. And somehow I get to believe that this nonverbal, ramshackle biohazard is the deific, Olympic apex of human evolution and also naturally attractive. Meanwhile I've repressed how I resent being a fraud among frauds who quietly concede that fraudulence is fundamental, so I have an erotic appetite for destruction that lets me vicariously entertain being beaten utterly apart, exploded like a pumpkin. Some men love boxing, moshing, watching slashers. Some men love going to war. Either way, "don't talk about Fight Club."
Let's talk about the vacant expression of the video's protagonist, how it clashes with the acute elation or moroseness of those around him. The woman we're meant to believe is beloved to him appears to abide his android apathy with equal disappointment. She takes polaroid portraits to reflect him back to himself, to see if he'll see what she sees. The scenes in which these two languish are juxtaposed with his three buddies being general stooges, flexing and chugging and hugging it out 'til eventually they summon his Good Time Charlie. Why does he save this face for the guys? Which face is more of a mask?
Context matters a fuckload.
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part 2, for example, catches most of its hell because it's a sequel and therefore invites comparison simply by existing. It's too camp, too comic, too colorful, too unquiet in the ways that its seminal predecessor—which staked its claim as a hard-hearted answer to the derivative melodrama of its horror contemporaries—was not. Similarly, "Masc" contends with its position in Chat Pile's catalogue, the novelty and current brevity of which presses this song into immediate comparison with the band's previous commentaries on masculinity, wherein Busch has largely deployed parody and persona to address its themes.
In "Brutal Truth" (from the 2021 split EP with Portrayal of Guilt), the speaker's preoccupation with status is rivaled by a compulsory lack of human compassion.
The brutal truth is
That I’m just a simian strutting around in a 4K suit and cumming
In their eyes, I’m normal and social
But when someone is screaming
While they scream I just act like I’m fuckin
Dumb
The speaker of "Crawlspace" (from the 2019 EP This Dungeon Earth) self-identifies as Oklahoma City cop, a Christian, a single dad who eats microwaveable dinners and just wants to "be a good person" but also reminisces dissecting a stray dog and fantasizes:
What it would be like to see a face cut open
What it would be like to see a body cut open
What it would be like to see my body cut open
What it would be like to see my body dissected
While these previous tracks detour into burlesque details such as monkey suits and Busch's doing his best Seinfeld when bluesing "Whose line is it, anyway," "Masc" mines arguably the same territory where we're left with the speaker begging to be cut open, but it seems to forsake parody as an approach. Busch sounds genuinely too put off to clown about it, such that the chorus comes like a recited self-delusion:
I’m strange
I’m wild
I’m free
I’m fine
This intentful reticence feels detectable in the instrumental arrangements; nobody's out of pocket because this is a feeling that's imperative to keep contained. The grime grated out when Cap'n Ron's sawtoothed digital kit attack taps Stin's ultra-treble doesn't ooze from the track's cracks as much as enters as if intravenously injected. And admittedly I don't know how to talk about how Luther Manhole manages to string together a sonic chamber that feels simultaneously nerve-wracked, vaulted, claustrophobic, and fucking certain—the guitar's presence being spectral from a peripheral flutter to a boiling paranoia to full possession? But something about that second verse-chorus transition (I need to keep my mouth shut / before I look fuckin dumb) is awfully familiar with the alienating texture of feeling oneself in the midst of performing, that clarity coming on, the big low…
What is up with Leatherface's ebullient chainsaw dance, to which the "Masc" video makes one of its ultimate homages? What stems that ecstasy? The sequel, of course, accords that it's sexual, but I think that's intended (as is the majority of the movie) to mock critics. Hell if I know. It's hard to talk about whether men can access ecstatic moments without pursuing violent delights. To be out of body when being beside myself is already reprehensible. What's a man beyond a body frightened of—yet maybe fiendish for—the feeling of being cut open?
An aspect of Chat Pile's growth, it seems, might be their revisiting the subjective terrain the band already tends to more incisively and with different emotive interests, which is a kind of risk and range I think we don't give artists enough credence for. They're sharpening. Sometimes you gotta do it / say it again 'til it sinks in.
