Where Salient takes a look at an album that was out of sync with the prevailing musical zeitgeist at the time of its release, but has managed to gain new lustre with the benefit of retrospect.
1987: Big Black – Songs About Fucking (Touch & Go)
“I think I fucked your girlfriend once / Maybe twice, I don’t remember / Then I fucked all your friends’ girlfriends / Now they hate you.”
But you didn’t really fuck her, did you Steve? Not once, not twice, not ever. And the reason you don’t really remember it very well is because IT NEVER HAPPENED.
How can I be so sure?
Because I’ve seen this.
In a weird way though, that desperately dorky-looking bum-bag encapsulates everything that was great about Big Black. Speaking bluntly, Albini and his pals were a bunch of loser no-hope nerds who were jaded about everything that was happening in music during the early-mid ‘80s. Or at least everything that was in any way unethical, pretentious, or which didn’t sound like the aural equivalent of being brutally savaged by a rabies-infected pit bull.
And just like that bum-bag, no aspect of their music was appealing (at least not in the conventional sense) because they were, in short, noise masochists, whose cheap guitars produced the same effect as biting on tinfoil: short stabbing blasts of pain. The subject matter of their songs was equally distasteful. Take ‘Colombian Necktie’, whose title literally references the practice of slashing your victim’s throat and pulling their tongue out through the gash. Its isolated opening chord sounds equally horrific. But for all their sonic and lyrical obscenity, the members of Big Black weren’t even remotely badass in any way, shape or form. They weren’t killers, rapists or thugs, just angry dudes with bad physiques who were compelled to do something a little different from their contemporaries.
And yet, you just can’t help but get a huge kick out of listening to these pathetic dorks rage about how “Sometimes you know you want to fuck somebody up / Sometimes you just want to fuck.” I guess it’s because playing the sadist can sometimes be pretty fun. With Songs About Fucking Big Black showed us why, with each song functioning as a cathartic expression of fantasy, an empowering means of escapism from both their, and our, otherwise banal forms of existence.