The Guide #49: Chat Pile’s Why is the protest song of 2022
Chat Pile’s song Why opens with a question so guileless you could imagine a five-year-old posing it. “Why do people have to live outside,” asks frontman Raygun Busch (not his real name, as you might have guessed) plaintively, “in the brutal heat or when it’s below freezing?” The biggest clue that this isn’t an episode of Sesame Street comes from the chaos swirling around his words: churning guitars; brutal, detuned bass; relentless, clattering drums.
Undeterred by that maelstrom, Busch continues with the questions, his voice getting louder and more forceful: “Why do people have to live outside, when there are buildings all around us with heat on and no one inside?” As the central, doomy riff rears its ugly head for the song’s chorus, Busch loses his inhibitions entirely, furiously screaming “Why?” over and over again. “Horror story, real American horror story”, he growls at the song’s climax, a sample of a tornado warning siren ringing away ominously behind him. The protest song is alive and well, and it’s taken the unlikely form of a sludge metal track.
Named after the toxic mounds of mining sediment found worryingly near to residential areas in their native Oklahoma, Chat Pile’s sound is similarly ugly, thick and sulphurous – think the abrasive late 80/early 90s noise rock of Steve Albini’s Big Black, Godflesh and The Jesus Lizard, reinforced by the brutal, detuned riffs of Korn or Will Haven. Lyrically Chat Pile are just as confrontational as they sound, with Busch’s bracingly dark lyrics wrestling with everything from the industrialised meat industry (Slaughterhouse) and mass shootings (Anywhere) to, er, what it might feel like to hallucinate a giant purple McDonald’s mascot into existence when you’re high (the oddly harrowing grimace_smoking_weed.jpeg). Surprisingly, given how uncompromising its contents are, the band’s recently released album God’s Country has attracted a quite a bit of attention, with endless raves on social media and Pitchfork affording it their Best New Music tag.
The whole album is terrific (if possibly a bit of an acquired taste) but it’s Why, with its blunt interrogation of America’s homelessness crisis, that feels like Chat Pile’s calling card. I’ve seen the song criticised online for treating an intractable problem with childlike naivety (the phrase “virtue signalling” has cropped up more than once), but for me its simplistic questions are what makes the song effective, highlighting the absurdity of mass homelessness, an emergency that is treated as the everyday. Like all great protest songs it cuts to the core of the issue with urgency and clarity.
Then again, I suspect Chat Pile might blanch at Why being called a protest song at all – most bands seem to. The term these days seems almost pejorative, associated with overly earnest, overly idealistic try-hards. People have long declared the protest song dead, a 60s relic, out of step with the times. But it can still have potency: look at the songs that soundtracked BLM. As the cost of living crisis nears epidemic proportions and the climate emergency reaches its sharp end, perhaps we need more people screaming “Why” at the top of their lungs, and asking how we got to the place we’re in now.
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