In October 1966 an enormous colliery spoil tip was perched on a mountaintop, above the small village of Aberfan. It had been there for over ten years, slowly getting higher and heavier. After a period of heavy rain, the spoil turned into a black, thick slurry and poured down the hill into the village, tearing through homes and the local primary school, which was full at the time. Over 100 children were killed and dozens of Aberfan residents also lost their lives. Can you imagine it, the sound of the tons of slurry and rock careening toward you? Capitalism has always seen the bodies of the working class as fuel -- theirs were the hands that had dug out the same coal whose spoil then buried them alive. The coal mine near Aberfan was closed in the late 1980s but mining continues across the world as extractive capitalism seeks more fuel for its fires. Chat Pile takes their name from the heaps of dolomite and limestone waste that is produced as a by-product of lead and zinc mining, particularly around northern Oklahoma. Chat is deeply poisonous and some 500 million tons of it are around the lead mining belt of the United States. You can still see heaps of the stuff around the world, horrifying geological reminders of the scars in the ground, full of blood and mineral resources.
Chat Pile’s album, “God’s Country” understands industrial and working-class history as a horror story. The opening track, “Slaughterhouse” with its screamed refrain of “hammers and grease” underscores the desperation we might feel to get outside our history: ‘if only we could fly away/and live in different skins,’ — but we can’t, can we? It’s not just the mines and factories that are haunted but the people are too, “Everyone’s head rings here/And there is no escape/No motherfucking exit,” howls Raygun Busch on the vocals, sounding absolutely fucking anguished. From there the album moves into “Why,” — a track that has gotten some memetic pushback on social media for its earnest vocal delivery but what gets mocked as a kind of liberal naivety in the song’s politics misses the band’s sly sense of humor. “Why do people have to live outside,” asks the band, but the unspoken answer is that we know why they do -- it's for very similar reasons that working-class miners died and poisonous chat piles sat next to homes that were decorated with lead paint. Why do people have to live outside? Because of the real American horror story that is capitalism in God’s country. The song keeps pushing you as a listener to confront this question — not just to try and get you to care a little more about the colossal and casual cruelty towards the unhoused (although that in itself would be enough) but to recognize that this is simply a symptom, that you already know why even if you don’t want to admit it.
We are told that capitalism is the only system that works, but as Mark Fisher pointed out the costs of it working seem to be phenomenally, almost pathologically high, particularly in the sheer mental stress and anguish it inflicts upon us all. “Pamela” is a song about death and suicide, with another wrenching, almost spoken word vocal. It beautifully explores the sheer contingency of life and the awful, crushing, and inescapable realization that I can do so little when confronted with the social and structural problems we are all trapped in. As the song puts it, “I want you to know right now that I loved you/When you left it almost killed your mother, but/Something inside me propels me forward/A kind of rage you just never get used to.”
When the social and political structures that might be able to do something with that rage are destroyed, what is left is a kind of depressive fatalism. None of the particular brand of misery showcased in “Wicked Puppet Dance” is unique to Oklahoma, thanks to people like the Sackler family and a healthcare system that sees people simply as an asset class. God forbid you simply not have enough money to keep living or to be free from pain. No wonder the song opens with “His skin is all fucked up but he cooked a nice batch/Everywhere in the walls new roach babies hatch.” From drugs to guns in the shift into “Anywhere” that again returns to the sheer almost incalculable un-fucking-fairness of this system:
”At first your hand was in mine/There, smiling and walking/Then the world split open/Think there was brain on my shoes”
“This can’t be real life”, runs one of the final lines and there’s something so deeply powerful about the realization that things don’t have to be this way. To borrow a quote from Eugene Debs that my friend Kyle is very fond of, The world is not right and to insist upon that not-rightness is to begin to waken ourselves to our own Utopian dreams. This can’t be real life simply because it should not be.
It’s a theme that “The Mask” picks up, a chilling horror song about what sounds like a robbery that turned into a bloodbath:
“Open the safe in the back before more people die/It didn’t have to be this way and honestly if you listen to me/And follow instructions, this will all be over soon/And how about this? You won’t even hear it.”
In a system of dehumanization, death, environmental degradation, and inescapable alienation the song’s screamed refrain of “Sirloin Stockade'' and references to animal slaughter functions as a brutal and visceral reminder that to capitalism we are all just so much meat to be fed into its gears. “I Don’t Care if I Burn” is another almost spoken word piece, a revenge fantasy about the retributive violence upon all those who have upheld that system that makes life so impossible. “I think about killing you every day” and the tone of the song is so peaceful until a scream that functions like a goddamn jumpscare. You can present yourself as calmly as you like but just look outside and try not to fucking scream at the world until your throat is choked with your own blood: IT IS NOT RIGHT.
I think it’s easy for all of this to come off as really serious, but the band is far from sanctimonious or preachy precisely because they have a good sense of (gallows) humor, something which is absolutely a necessity. The final track makes that the most explicit: the wonderfully titled “grimace_smoking_weed.jpg” -- it’s a song about closing off the world and getting high as shit till the “Purple Man” won’t leave you alone. It’s both really funny, horrifying, and… sad too: “Ok, it’s true/I wanna wear your flesh/When I look through my eyes/I wanna be/You/I’m a monster too.” As the song goes on the absurdity heightens:
Purple man
Stop coming into my room
Stop looking at things that aren’t meant for
You
I’m twisted
And frail
Broken up
I’m purple
I’m the purple man, too
Grimace
It’s a Kafka story rewritten by American consumerism, depersonalization, and commodification of subjectivity colliding in a moment both absurd and terrifying in equal measure. ”I don’t want to be alive anymore/Do you?” asks one of the last lyrics in the song as the band tells us, “You weren't supposed to see this/But here it is.”
Now you’ve seen, now you’ve heard it, the record demands a response from the listener.
As someone who lives in the suburbs of OKC and has followed you for some time, it's great to see you write about this band!
For a horror story local to this band (and me), check out the real life, town-that-is-a-chat-pile that is Picher, OK: https://quirkytravelguy.com/visiting-picher-oklahoma-ghost-town-toxic-waste/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picher,_Oklahoma