A heart attack felled Seth Putnam on Saturday at the age of 43. If the man's name is not familiar to you then chances are, especially if you had even the vaguest connection with metal, you know his band's name all too well: Anal Cunt. And if you know A.C., chances are you know their song titles (sample: "I Made Fun of You Because Your Kid Just Died") and their lyrics (sample: "If she doesn't do the dishes or get you another beer/ Then punch her in the face and throw her down the stairs") better than their music. They're one of those "infamous" bands that everyone quotes and hardly anyone actually listens to.

Anal Cunt began blurting out minute-or-less chunks of crude, noisy, hyper-hateful grindcore in 1988. If they'd released one album of this sort of thing, they'd be a cult footnote among metal fans. Instead they turned into a weird cross-subcultural touchstone, just out of sheer perverse fuck-you longevity and intensity. Because even in a subgenre known for pushing metal to its limits in terms of both sound and subject matter, Anal Cunt attempted to alienate people longer and harder than any of their peers. It almost seemed to distress Putnam when people enjoyed his music. And so he spent two decades concocting progressively blunter and uglier ways to shock and offend anyone who wasn't Seth Putnam.

"We've been around for 21 years now," says Anal Cunt's Seth Putnam, looking calmly out at a modest, late Sunday night Public Assembly crowd. "I'd like to thank all our fans for being here. This song is called 'All Our Fans Are Gay.'" Add it to the list, basically--is Seth Putnam calling you gay more or less offensive than the triple-header of "Body By Auschwitz," "Ha Ha Holocaust," and "Hitler Was A Sensitive Man"? Is it OK to laugh when Putnam dedicates "311 Sucks" to "a bunch of wiggers we hate"? And what to make of AC's excellent "American Woman" cover, dedicated to all the "fine ladies in the crowd"?