Did you know that Napalm Death holds a Guinness World Record? No? Was it the longest guitar solo that made it? Prettiest voice? Read on to find out.
I’ve been on a Napalm Death kick lately, and upon listening to their “Scum” album, for a moment I thought my CD skipped when it got to the song “You Suffer“. Of course, in reality I haven’t listened to an actual CD in ages, so I knew it couldn’t have skipped, and I took upon my investigative skills to learn if I could have stumbled on the shortest song of the genre that likes it short.
I could have just asked our Guido or Chris. because the guys are walking metal encyclopedias, but I wanted to earn my non-existent pay check, so I did some pretty hard work (checking out a Wikipedia article, of course).
The fun part: The song is exactly 1.316 seconds long, and it holds the record in the Guinness Book of Records as the shortest song recorded ever. It was written by Nicholas Bullen (Nik Napalm) and Justin Broadrick, and the lyrics to the song are “You suffer, but why?”.
“You Suffer” was largely a comedy thing, one-second song. Utterly retarded. It’s ridiculous, but it was hilarious. We played that song in front of 30 local kids, like, every weekend. We played that song 30 times. It was a laugh. – Justin Broadrick
The song also got a video for the 20th anniversary re-release of “Scum“, and it effectively beat out Brutal Death‘s Collateral Damage video as the shortest one, though it’s not clear if it had officially been recognized as the shortest video ever.
The not so fun part: As with many Wikipedia articles, I couldn’t find any legitimate source for this claim (including the Guinness World Record website), so take this with a grain of salt — not the short part, it’s short alright, the world record part.
And finally, see the video and hear the song:
