The Seventh Seal

And when he had opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven about the space of half an hour.
And I saw the seven angels which stood before God; and to them were given seven trumpets.
And another angel came and stood at the altar, having a golden censer; and there was given unto him much incense, that he should offer [it] with the prayers of all saints upon the golden altar which was before the throne.
And the smoke of the incense, [which came] with the prayers of the saints, ascended up before God out of the angel's hand.
And the angel took the censer, and filled it with fire of the altar, and cast [it] into the earth: and there were voices, and thunderings, and lightnings, and an earthquake.

Revelation 8:1-5



Happy seventh blogaversary, G&P.
Like Barry Bonds and Mark Maguire’s homerun records, this blogaversary will always come with an asterisk (unfortunately not that Asterisk*) next to it since I basically took half a year and just fucked off. And since I’ve decided to give this yet another go, no one could accuse me of being prolific. But G&P keeps creeping along as I find the time between work, family and a toddler who seems to have skipped a grade and jumped straight to the terrible twos and then taken up permanent residence there. While I don’t have the time or energy to bang out three or four posts a week like I used to (at this point three or four a month would be a triumph), I still have this weird urge to scribble the words about the grind and send them out to the interhole in the hopes of reaching likeminded mutants who have this insatiable need to grind and the analytical compulsion to take the music apart, poke around in its innards and figure out how it all works. Setting out to write the greatest grind blog on the internet is a bit like aspiring to be the tallest guy in Munchkinland, but that’s my dream and fuck it I’ll give it a shot.
I’m genuinely grateful that you guys have stuck around despite all the ups and downs and long silences lately. I hope never to lose appreciation for the fact that all of you take time out to stop by to talk about this stuff with me. It’s a privilege to find a community that shares my interests and has provided me the support and feedback necessary to keep going. So, as always, thank you to all of you. I really do appreciate it all.
So hopefully things can pick up a bit in the next year.  I’m balls deep in my next in-depth project story (and it’s slowly kicking my ass) and I have a couple of interviews up my sleeve coming in the not too distant future (i.e. between now and the inevitable heat death of the universe). Mostly I hope I can keep finding new ways to look at grind that spark my interest and hopefully yours too. I’ll keep plugging away at G&P as long as I can find the time and energy because the interest is there on my part and hopefully yours too. I’ll write some more just as soon as I beat this pasty guy in chess. Or maybe Battleship.

Six, Six, Six

Happy sixth birthday, G&P, you gigantic time sink in my life.
Just a couple months ago I couldn’t imagine reaching this milestone. I was burned out, lethargic, my writing sucked ass and I was ready to just chuck the whole damn thing. But here I am marking the sixth anniversary of the blog. Funny how things change in the course of a couple of weeks.
So once again, I want to take stock of it all so I never get complacent and forget what an amazing privilege this has all been. I just want to take the time to thank every one of you for stopping by and reading, indulging me in all of this. Thank you for chipping in and making this fun. I wouldn’t be here and I couldn’t do any of this without your support.
Thank you to every awesome band that’s ever sent me stuff to listen to. I apologize again for taking so fucking long to get around to writing about you. I know it’s only gotten worse lately. I’m working on that, I promise.
Thank you as well to everyone who’s ever done an interview. Those are definitely my favorite parts of this. I wish I had the time and energy to do them more often. I’m working on that too. I especially want to dive back into the long, in depth band histories again, provided Lil Grinder will give me the time.
After six years, I kinda feel like I just now really understand what I want the blog to be and where it should go. It’s taken half a decade to maybe figure out what my niche is. Hopefully you guys dig it and stick around.
A couple months ago I gave serious thought to packing it all in because I was tired and burned out. Nothing was really exciting me. I found my inspiration again just before I was about to pull the trigger. I can still envision shutting it all down one day. But then it will be on my terms and not in a fit of pique. Until then, I’m just going to enjoy the opportunities the blog has opened up for me and take it all as it comes.
Thanks everybody for making it happen.

Five: Look Back in Anger

You're hurt because everything is changed. Jimmy is hurt because everything is the same. And neither of you can face it. Something's gone wrong somewhere, hasn't it?
John Osborne
Look Back in Anger
1956

Five. Fucking. Years.
It blew my mind when I realized that the blog's fifth anniversary was rapidly approaching. Holy shit. Some days it feels like forever. Plenty of other days it just feels like I'm a clueless n00b flailing about with no direction or purpose. But somehow another blogaversary is upon me.
So once again, I have to thank every single one of you who had dropped by, read my maundering, left a comment, sent an email, answered an email or shared a kick ass album recommendation. I've been listening to grindcore (probably more than is healthy for a well-balanced person) for a hell of a long time now and for some reason I just don't get bored with it. Not a day goes by where I'm not listening to it, thinking about or jotting down notes for stories and ideas I want to develop later, interviews I want to do, trends I want to dissect.
I've met some truly amazing people, interviewed some personal inspirations and found a fascinating community of like-minded freaks over the last five years. So that's what you've given me even though I've written some absolute bullshit over the years. In honor of my fifth anniversary, here's the top five failures I slapped my name on.

Something's Bugging Me

Hey let's start at practically the very beginning, my very first Grind in Rewind back in 2007. I'm not here to recant picking Pig Destroyer's Phantom Limb as album of the year (some of you hate it; I still really dig it). Nope, the facepalming failure comes further down the list where I round out the top five with Total Fucking Destruction, Sayyadina, Graf Orlock and ... The Locust. Yes, I like The Locust. I think they're completely underrated for how innovative they were. But 2007 was also the year Insect Warfare put out World Extermination, an undeniably kick ass album that I'm sure will be lauded as a genre classic with enough time.
Early on in my blogging career I fell into a pitiful trap: pointless contrarianism. I stuck The Locust on my best of list as a way of thumbing everyone else in the eye, but there's absolutely no way it should have been on the list lieu of Insect Warfare. Going against the grain doesn't mean you're an iconoclast. Sometimes it just means you're an idiot who's trying too hard.

Latin Implosion

I wanted the first story I ever wrote for the blog, about grindcore's relationship with the military, to be the template for everything that came after. I wanted to move beyond album reviews and band interviews (while I see the value in both of those to provoke fascinating conversations) to strive for something deeper and more topical. I wanted to do more stories about ideas and trends than necessarily about bands and their latest record. Not every idea was successful. Which brings us to the underbaked failure that was my story about Latinos in grind. It was a decent enough idea that just never really gelled into something more profound than ... hey look at all these latinos who grind. The only good thing I can say about that story is that it introduced me to Jerry Flores of Excruciating Terror/Bloody Phoenix who is one of the coolest, most helpful people I've met in grind. Lo siento, senores.

Feminism Uber Alles

And then there was the pointless sexism in the lede of my Infect review. That was just unforgivable, unfunny and a total asshole move. I'm better than that. I swear. For all our blather about how progressive and accepting we claim punk and grind are, women still have to put up with enough bullshit without me piling on with sexist bullshit in a lame attempt to be funny.

Your Album Reviews Suck

I've mentioned before that I suck ass when it comes to writing brutal reviews of shitty albums. It's actually something I've been consciously working on. I try to be more critical because everything can't be the most brutalest brutality that ever brutalized. Sometimes you have to point out that shit kinda sucks. But that was really hard for me at first. So I pulled punches on my reviews of albums like F.A.M., Confusion and Agenda of Swine (especially Agenda of Swine). I doubt I've listened to those three records a total of 10 times since I wrote my reviews. In fact, ever since then I've deliberately tried to slow down, spend a few weeks with an album before I even begin jotting down notes for a review so hopefully by then I can have some sense of how an album holds up to repeated listens rather than getting swept up in first impressions.

Punk Ass Bitch

Hey, the halfbaked assholery isn't completely behind. Here I was indulging in it as recently as July.
Like I said before, I'm constantly jotting down ideas for posts. Some of them need months (occasionally, years) to marinate before they come to fruition. A lot of them radically change from my first conception as I develop them. And then there was How Low Can a Punk Get?, a post I banged out over a weekend about punk tropes that really bother me. That was definitely a post that could have spent quite a bit more time in the incubator. Case in point, Trey Azaghthoth's Quake III Clan schooling me on how I had completely misunderstood Black Flag's "White Minority," which is probably something I could have figured out with like half a second of fucking Googling. And obviously, I completely missed that lighthearted, humorous tone that I was shooting for.
Luckily, you guys and gals are the kind of readers that will push back against my poorly conceived bullshit and keep me honest. I appreciate you calling me out and putting me back in my place when I've completely lost the script.

So there it is. Five years. Five examples of completely public failure. Hopefully the next half decade goes more smoothly than the first, but I guarantee I'll probably be able to write the exact same post in another five years. I'll just go ahead and apologize now.

Four More Years! Four More Years!

Four years and four laptops later (yes, I just destroyed another one last week), and I feel like I'm only beginning to harness what the blog is capable of. I started blogging for a simple reason: as a reader, I was disappointed in what was already out there. Link farms and poorly constructed reviews abounded. And while I've authored more than my fair share of poorly constructed reviews, in my naiveté /arrogance I decided I could bring something new and insightful to grindcore. How successful I've been, I'll leave to you. You guys keep reading and hanging around, so hopefully I'm not completely wasting your time.
From my very first story, a discussion of metal heads' relationship with the military, I wanted to do something different, dig a little deeper. Not every post lives up to that standard, but that has been my goal and my template.
In an era of instant musical gratification, I consider most reviews superfluous. They're filler, a chance to start conversations about what like about music rather than a "this sucks," "this rules" summation. In fact, I've moved on more to Bandcamp/demo releases simply because I think those bands are more worthy of attention than the latest big budget release from a (relatively) giant metal label. They're pretty good at their own promotion. While I think reviews are declining in importance, those are the posts that keep the blog fresh week to week and buy me the time to work on the longer, more involved pieces that I prefer.
Looking back, a happy confluence of life experiences has pointed me in this direction. I have a degree in English, with plenty of emphasis on textual criticicism. As a result, I'm enough of a postmodernist to believe the distinction between high and low culture is purely artificial. All cultural artifacts are equally deserving of critical scrutiny to better understand how they work, what makes them successful and the role they play in culture and society.
Falling off the academic track post-graduation, I tumbled into journalism, which I thought would be another notch on my impressive resume of random jobs (ice cream truck driver, phone repair, Christian day care; ask me about it some time). Though I had done some work at the college paper (an unreciprocated crush on the editor; don't ask me about it some time), I had always considered journalism hack writing because I was an arrogant literature snob. To a certain extent I still do, but here I am a decade later, still doing it.
What journalism has taught me is how to extract information and present it in a coherent form. My literature degree taught me to poke in the cracks and muck around with the innards of things. I came to that realization recently while reviewing my latest project, which I hope to announce soon. It's consumed the last six months of my life, and I think it will be the culmination of everything I've set out to do so far.
So for the fourth anniversary of G&P I simply want to thank all of you for sticking around during my learning curve, giving me the platform, time and feedback necessary to shoot for some personal goals. When I am finally ready to announce that project, it will be the result of not only my work, but all of you as well, for the space and support you've provided. I've grown as a writer and a thinker because of your feedback. Thank you for making that happen.

Happy Blogaversary to Me (and all of you)

Yesterday was the blogaversary 'round these parts.
In light of that I want to thank anyone who's clicked a link, dropped a comment or contributed to the really awesome conversations that have been developing around here in the last year. You ladies and gentlemen have contributed to some truly fascinating discussions that have helped me not only refine my thoughts, but often that challenge my own thinking on this funny little critter we call grindcore.
And as with last year, a look back at the whole idea that got me blogging in the first place.

Two years in, where is Grind and Punishment going? Well, now you can all look forward to my terrible twos.

Characterized by toddlers being negative about most things and often saying 'no', the terrible twos may also find your toddler having frequent mood changes and temper tantrums.

To help you cope with this normal stage in your child's development, you should always remember that your child isn't trying to be defiant or rebellious on purpose. He is just trying to express his growing independence and doesn't have the language skills to easily express his needs. This can also be the reason why your toddler frequently gets frustrated and resorts to hitting, biting, and temper tantrums when he doesn't get his way.

Forget what I said about all that simple joy stuff; this sounds like way more fun.

A Blogaversary and a Bedtime Story

Happy blogaversary to me.

So one year and about a dozen thoughts of quitting later, it’s time to pull aside the curtain and reveal G&P’s s33kr1t, mystical origins. Gather ‘round, kiddies, Uncle Andrew’s gonna tell you a story.
Oddly enough it all starts with my brother, who, despite his H.I.M. tattoo fetish, really ain’t that that bad of a guy. Usually. The thing is, dude, a single father of two, is currently serving his third rotation in the Middle East as we speak (two tours spent in Qatar, the first in Baghdad). Briefly excusing his horrifically bad musical taste (again, H.I.M. tats), while he’s been gone we’ve actually bonded had some fairly interesting convos re: music, insanely violent Asian action films and, natch, the war, which tends to generate some all around mixed feelings in everyone involved.
But what has all this to do with blogging, you ask, impatient as I waste both pixels and your time navel gazing. Like I said, mixed feelings about the war. While I’m a little to the left of Kropotkin, myself, I do tend to find it annoying that my beloved punk and metal tend to be a tad lazy in addressing the complexities of political life in the 21st Century. Instead we’re usually left with stale ’80s sloganeering and lazy, reflexive attacks on the usual suspects: generic politicians, generic bankers, generic businesses and theo old standby, the military, usually with no appreciation for subtly, nuance or just generally taking more than 10 minutes to pen an original thought to anchor generic grind song about how the system sucks No. 12,342,479,987,498,374.
So, knowing there were a couple of guys who actually had combat experience working the grind scene, I hit them up for interviews, thinking I could just shop the story to some webzine for $30 and call it a day. And while just about everyone I approached graciously agreed to do interviews with some no name guy in D.C. without a magazine or even a lousy Blogspot account to his name. Writing the story was a snap; that’s what I do for a living. But after a few months of absolute fucking silence on behalf of every zine editor and web site manager I approached, I got pissed and the blog was born. I had a story I believed in, just nowhere to get it out. So after dashing off a regrettably lame blog name (I’m a huge Dostoyevsky devotee but Notes from Underground was already taken), voila, G&P became unnecessary music blog No. 34,329,238 to grace the intertubes.
Here I am a year later, and once again my brother is working 12 hour shifts six days a week in the desert, facing the possibility of being stop lossed, missing my upcoming wedding, missing Christmas with his kids, possibly missing his son’s fifth birthday, leaving my parents – who should be planning for retirement but instead have been potty training yet again – to watch one of his kids for him.
Given America will be hitting the polls in about two weeks and the frenzy of the final days of election ’08 is all but guaranteed to suck any substance out of our political discourse, I wanted to revisit what metalheads who have served on the front lines in Middle East wars current and past actually had to say about war, music and making the two mix.

I hope to hell I have no reason to post it again next year. Meanwhile, Mr. I-Know-How-to-Win-Wars-But-I-Won’t-Tell-You-How, go fuck yourself.