I love Cows. Not the ungainly mammals that stand in fields and stare at you blankly as you pass by in your car, but the defunct Minneapolis band that gave us so many great hardcore/noise tunes during their tenure on this planet. They had it all; a berserker lead singer with a penciled-on handlebar mustache who played the bugle; songs such as “Shaking,” a hilarious cover of “Shakin’ All Over” in which said lead singer (Shannon Selberg) takes it up the ass (opening lines, “Yo girl, I love it when you make my asshole bleed”); and enough sheer psychotic energy to power an insane asylum.
Oh, and they also came up with an album cover for 1991’s Peacetika that was half peace symbol and half swastika, which was guaranteed to offend the tender sensibilities of most everybody, to the extent that I’m actually afraid to buy the t-shirt lest I be accused of being Josef Mengele. And who could forget their romantic heartbreak tune, “I Miss Her Beer”?
Perhaps the greatest of the songs in Cows’ remarkable canon is “Hitting the Wall,” an out-of-control noise fest that proceeds at a V2 pace and alternates verses, with Selberg singing one in an utterly unintelligible screaming rush that reminds me of the vocals on the first Meat Puppets album, and the next in a completely coherent manner. In the video Selberg wears an unsightly lady’s wig and his trademark fake mustache and battered cowboy hat, and skinny as he is, demonstrates all the pugilistic swagger of a guy who could pummel Henry Rollins.
The song’s theme is simple; Selberg is down and out, and everybody and everything is against him. He gets beat up, fired from his job, beat up again, robbed, shouted at by his dad who encourages him to “get out there and fight, man!”, chased by rock-throwing kids, and ends up “laying by a dumpster drunk and beaten/With nothing at all/People point at me and say I’m sickening/I’m hitting the wall.”
And then Selberg takes the song out shrieking like a banshee in a convincing demonstration of rage and self-loathing. Which is the funniest thing about it. Selberg had the remarkable ability to channel all the rage the band summoned up back at himself, while at the same time casting a baleful stare at the audience that said, “Anybody wanna try me?” In short he was impossible to read. A jester? Probably. A violent sociopath? Perhaps. I spoke with him on the phone once, and he sounded reasonable enough. Like a careerist plugging a new record. But everything he told me about how his album was going to be a great fucking album, in the immortal spirit of Marvin Gaye, was completely unhinged. But I truly believe HE believed it, and I’ve always loved him for that.
Cows deserved better than they got, what with songs like the hardcore “Cartoon Corral,” part of which Selberg sings in a completely bizarre cartoon voice; “Whitey in the Woodpile,” another Cows artifact designed to offend; and “Dirty Leg,” a pulverizingly loud song about, I think, a dirty leg. But I’m still betting on “Hitting the Wall” as their career hallmark. It summons up all the rage of an early Black Flag song but is bigger and better, if only due to Shannon Selberg’s uncanny ability to make it sound like he’s puking and speaking in tongues simultaneously. It may not be, as Selberg held, great fucking music, but it sure as fuck was fucking great music for the kinds of fucking people who don’t give a fuckity fuck.
