The following is a Designated Cheerleader piece by @AmateurDan for the Best Album of 1991 tournament. I hope you enjoy it, and I hope you follow the link to vote in the tournament. Thanks!
Mr. Bungle is not welcoming. When you look at the album cover of their self-titled debut, you are greeted by a painting of probably the grossest clown ever. There’s nothing really wrong with the guy - his eyes aren’t bleeding, he doesn’t have snot running down his lips, he doesn’t look overtly threatening. He’s regular human filthy. He’s unkept; messy hair sprouting from behind an obvious, wrinkled bald cap; facepaint applied unevenly and thinly, so you can see the face behind it; skin splotchy, yellowing like a 25 year old couch in the house of a smoker who goes through three packs a day. He’s holding a lit match in front of him, and he’s looking at it in a way that’s hard to know what he’s thinking. Maybe he’s got a cigar in his other hand. Maybe he just enjoys staring at the flame, the purity of it absorbing the wood until nothing remains. Maybe he’s thinking about burning your house down. The mystery makes the whole thing more unsettling. In fact, Mr. Bungle is so committed to that cloying feeling of disgust and uncertainty that they provide not just one clown for your viewing pleasure, but three - two more flanking either upper corner of the album art, their faces blurry to contrast with the main one’s hyper-reality. It doesn’t feel good.
The music isn’t much better in this regard. The album starts with an audio prank - 30 seconds of silence (so you turn up your speakers), then the sound of glass shattering, then stomping metal chords partnered with merry-go-round keyboard, morphing into a twisted horror movie theme, and eventually leading you to Mike Patton’s nasal voice describing the thoughts of some sort of horribly disfigured protagonist. It’s….a lot. The lyrics throughout are nonsense; locker room talk, food-based sexual innuendo, various descriptions of internal body movements. In between every actual song is a combination of random noodling, field recordings, and samples of either porn or crime movies. Because of this, the album, clocking in at almost a full CD’s possible length, overstays its welcome by at least 15 minutes, and that’s if you can stomach the very particular sound that the band is serving up.
But if you can? You’re in good company. When I was in high school I wondered what the combination of my two favourite genres at the time - thrash metal and 3rd-wave ska - would sound like. Mr. Bungle gave me the answer. It would have chicken-scratch guitars, next to heavy metal breakdowns, next to harmonized saxophone lines. It would continue the Zappa-esque tradition of prodigal musicians playing ridiculously complicated music about the dumbest, most juvenile things possible. It would sound sort of like a Looney Tunes VHS, played at the wrong speed, with the magnetic material starting to flake off the tape. It would be extremely fucking sick.
A lot of you are probably going to be very turned off by this album. I can’t blame you. But every once in a while it’s good to be reminded of what music can be, and what it can do. Often we stick within our genre limits, and that’s okay - there’s a lot of depth and enjoyment to be gleaned in the details of a well-known form, whether it be a specific guitar tone, or the way a singer enunciates a word, or where a rapper sits on the beat. Similarly, it’s good to blow up those limits; to stretch your ears out as far as they can go and see what you come back with. I implore you to do this - to come live in the muck that Mr. Bungle are so devoted to on this album. You might emerge covered in shit, but at least you’ll know what it smells like. You might even like it.
