Naked Krunch: The Sinister, Sordid and Strangely Scrumptious Story of SavSnaq, Dr David M. Mitchell (Savoy Books 2022)
Genius creates. We can all agree on that. But genius also… connects. And perhaps the greatest literary connection of the past fifty years and more was made when maverick Mancunian publisher Savoy Books began to interrogate core issues around the Holocaust, on the one hand, and crisps, on the other (“potato chips”, in American English).
It was a perfect example of that signature Savoyish celebration of jarring juxtaposition, of high and low culture, the epochal and the trivial, the supremely sacred and the sensibility-smashing subversive. But once the connection was made, yes, it seemed both utterly wrong and utterly right. As Savoy C.E.O. David Britton himself said: “Crisps are rock’n’roll in motherfucking excelsis – cheap, strongly flavoured, and loud!”
And when did Britton first bring crisps and the Holocaust together in the atrocitous atom-smasher of his incendiary imagination? It was in the transgressive toxi-text Fuck Off and Diet (1997). Recall the scene where Lord Horror performs a pas-de-deux with Eva Braun on the burning hull of a cannibal-crewed Zeppelin plummeting parapraxically to its doom on a municipal gasworks in Rusholme. Just before the end of the scene, Horror remarks to Eva in twelfth-century Guipúzcoan Basque: “Fancy a pickled onion?” Eva responds by silently – and synergistically – removing a single dead-Jew-flavoured crisp from her cleavage; sliding it into her mouth; crunching it with a sly wink; then belching Zyklon-B into Horror’s face. He savours the cyanide slay-gas with a sigh of satisfaction even as the Zeppelin hits the gasworks and explodes.
It’s one of the most disturbing moments in one of the most disturbing books ever written. There are no more overt references to crisps and the Holocaust in the remainder of FOAD, but Britton was merely biding his time. As Dr David M. Mitchell describes in the first third of Naked Krunch, although crisps were a seemingly casual component of FOAD, six years later they had become a major motif of what is perhaps Britton’s maximal masterwork, the epoch-eviscerating Basted in the Broth of Billions (2003). Among much else in the book, Auschwitz is a felonious food-factory where Jews are turned into cheese’n’onion crisps, Gypsies into BBQ-Beef hula-hoops, homosexuals into smoky-bacon Pringles (“Once you popper, you can’t stopper!”), and so on. Mitchell conducts a thorough crispological survey of BitBoB, hunting down and hermeneuticizing even the most remote and recondite references to crisps, crisp-crunching and the Holocaust.
Having completed that literary survey of Savoy’s crisp-connecting, he next embarks on a detailed history of SavSnaq, the crispocentric company launched by Savoy to “storm the ramparts of the savoury-snack / party-nibbles market.” One of their early marketing slogans was “SavSnaq = Maximal Munch.” Another was: “You’ll Nosh Nowt Noxiouser.” And they did their very best to live up to the menace of that slogan. Mitchell describes how, in the early days, SavSnaq teetered on the brink of bankruptcy multiple times, as Britton & Co. fought off vicious legal challenges from the Health and Safety Executive after weaponizing a “Burroughs-themed heroin-flavoured crisp range.” Even today SavSnaq has never turned a profit, but Mitchell sets out an unassailable case that SavSnaq’s party-nibbles and savoury snacks have done to food-manufacturing what Savoy’s books and graphic novels had already done to English literature: revolutionized and reinvigorated a sadly and suffocatingly staid and sedentary sector.
In the first edition of Naked Krunch, Mitchell ended things there; in this updated edition, he goes on to examine the continuing impact of Savoy’s crisp-connections on wider culture. To take but one example: radical musicians have embraced Savoy’s incendiary interrogation of crisp-crunch to create revolutionary new genres, including the cataclysmic “crispcore” practised by sensory-overloading sonic terrorists Crunch-E))), who are now widely hailed as “the loudest band in the multiverse.” Dressed in shiny imitation crisp-wrappers, the three musicians of Crunch-E))) each eat a single packet of crisps into an ultra-sensitive microphone on stage. The resultant crunching is then slowed dramatically and amplified enormously before being projected through giant speakers onto an enraptured audience bathed in billowing clouds of cheese-and-onion-scented artificial smoke.
As Mitchell relates, David Britton once joked that every packet of SavSnaq crisps should be “so loud that every motherfuckin’ muncher develops terminal tinnitus.” Crunch-E))) have realized that visceral vision. The band have also explicitly acknowledged their artistic debt to Savoy and SavSnaq by naming their first three albums Basted (2005), Broth (2006) and Billions (2008). But this extra publicity for Savoy has not increased sales of Savoy’s books or of SavSnaq’s products. As Mitchell emphasizes repeatedly in Naked Krunch: Savoy and SavSnaq remain far too dangerous for general consumption.
And they always will. But the counter-cultural cognoscenti will continue to savour every last crumb that falls from super-subversive Savoy’s teratotropicly toxic table…
Previously Pre-Posted on Papyrocentric Performativity…
• Fuck Off and Dienetics… – Headpress CEO Norman Nekrophile surveys Savoy’s satirical saunter thru Scientology…
• Naked Krunch — interrogating issues around David Britton’s Basted in the Broth of Billions (2008)
• Commit to Crunch — a review of Will Self’s Maverick Munch: Selecting a Sinisterly Savory Snack to Reinforce Your Rhizomatically Radical Reading (TransVisceral Books 2016)
Leave a comment