Blood Duster’s Fisting the Dead

This account of Melbourne porno-grindcore band Blood Duster's 1993 debut album Fisting the Dead positions the "pure evil filth" album as a subcultural object at odds with Australia's cosmopolitanism.

With track titles invoking explicit language and lurid imagery, Fisting was deliberately offensive. Drawing on interviews with the band, this book considers the subcultural work of causing offence in a sub-genre of extreme metal where offensiveness is a requirement. Fisting’s liner notes announced “BLOOD DUSTER DOES NOT CONDONE SEXISM” – apparently at odds with the lyrical material and the band’s image. Through a consideration of how Blood Duster mobilised humour and exaggeration, Rosemary Overell considers how Fisting might work as a critique of the misogyny it loudly declares.

Blood Duster’s debut also indicates other contradictions – their crusty, subcultural, grindcore status was legendary, but they were signed on an art-noise label (Dr Jim’s Records), which proffered them to avant-garde music lovers. Further, in the cultural and political context of Prime Minister Paul Keating's progressive government's push for cosmopolitan middle class creative production - the 1990s Australian iteration of the "culture wars" - where does such sordid music fit in? Fisting, in its vulgarity and contradictions, offers an insight into the subcultural politics of gender, taste and cultural value.