BIG BLACK: SONGS ABOUT FUCKING (1987)
1) The Power Of Independent
Trucking; 2) The Model; 3) Bad Penny; 4) L Dopa; 5) Precious Thing; 6)
Colombian Necktie; 7) Kitty Empire; 8) Ergot; 9) Kasimir S. Pulaski Day; 10)
Fish Fry; 11) Pavement Saw; 12) Tiny, King Of The Jews; 13) Bombastic Intro;
14) He's A Whore.
And by «fucking», Steve Albini, of course,
conveys all the possible meanings of
the word, literal as well as figurative. The album title may sound a little
exploitative these days, but it fits the music, the lyrical subjects, the
atmosphere fairly well — at the very least, it's a much more appropriate title
than Songs About Making Love or Songs About Sleeping Together, which
wouldn't be a Big Black-ish title at all.
Ideologically, the record never departs far
enough from the internal logic of Atomizer,
the basic formula remaining the same — jarring, aurally disturbing guitar
tones, deranged vocals, and stories of various types of sick fucks
(particularly truckers — Albini seems to have a special bone against the honest
trucker, as if he'd spent all his childhood being molested on the highway). But
since these stories come in all sorts of different varieties, this keeps the
moods and melodies fresh and diverse enough to make up for another thirty
minutes of stimulating musique-noire
entertainment. Even though this time around, there is no central masterpiece
like ʽKeroseneʼ to act as a reliable anchor, and all the dirty vignettes just
roam around in a slightly disconcerting manner.
At least one of the creative decisions is quite
bizarre, but fascinating: I have no idea how the band came around to covering
Kraftwerk's ʽThe Modelʼ, a song that originally made perfect sense as a part of
The Man Machine, with its electronic
equation of a glamor model with a human robot — here, electronic futurism is
replaced with BDSM guitars, so that the story of the submissive model ends up
on the same plane of being as the story of the fornicating trucker and the
story of the Colombian necktie. Additionally, we get good proof that Albini's
«clang guitar» can be used fairly well to play pop-style lead melodies, even if
the whole thing is more of an ironic experiment than a serious attempt to
branch out.
Slightly more serious are some experiments on
the second side of the album, which Albini would later describe as relative
failures, at least in relation to the more spontaneous, free-flowing, punky
songs on the first side. In particular, ʽKitty Empireʼ stomps along like some
sort of arrogant «progressive hardcore» epic, taking the life experience of
«King Cat» as a likely allegory for something less cuddly and cutesy and
pinning it to a slow-moving, grinding industrial nightmare that gradually
builds up in intensity, then cuts out abruptly just as you were beginning to
hope for an apocalyptic climax. But as «epic» as it tries to be, the song is
just too monotonous to overwhelm the senses — and no matter what they say about
him, «King Cat» just does not sound like a scary enough personage to perfectly
match the brutal repetitive riff pattern of the song. Maybe ʽGoblin Empireʼ
might have been a better fit, but that'd be too much fantasy for these guys.
Much more effective, I think, is ʽFish Fryʼ,
also on the second side, which contains the album's most daring piece of art
news — a story of a murderer hosing his truck after chucking the dead body out
in a nearby pond — and sets it to one of the album's most head-wrecking
melodies, where Albini's mutilation of his high strings is like a manipulation
of sharp psychedelic needles twitching in your brain; even by Big Black's usual
standards, the song is an impressive bit of psychological-physiological
torture. Lyrically less explicit, but musically even crazier, though, is
ʽErgotʼ, where Albini is trying to provide the musical equivalent of a
particularly violent onslaught of St. Anthony's Fire — you'd have to consult
an actual sufferer to understand how close he got to achieving the right
effect, but if you listen to this stuff loud enough in headphones, twitching
and occasional spasms are near-guaranteed.
That said, it is terribly hard to dedicate
space, time, and opinions to individual songs on here, even if most of them do
have their own individuality — like the seven deadly sins, or the individual
members of the Manson Family. So let me just conclude by saying that, on the
whole, the album is a little deeper, a little more ambitious, a little more
image-risking than its predecessor, but possibly not quite as directly
hard-hitting, either. And that's good — considering that Big Black only managed
to release two original studio albums, this gives a good opportunity for the
fans to live their lives fighting over which one is closer to «the true Big
Black». Personally, I cannot decide, so I just give the whole album another thumbs up,
despite the fact that I'd certainly refuse to answer the question «do you really like Songs About Fucking?» in a straightforward manner — it's a
trick sort of question.
Check "Songs About Fucking" (CD) on Amazon
Check "Songs About Fucking" (MP3) on Amazon
Happy Valentine's Day!
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