Ugly – Big Black – UPDATED
NOTE: Noisy, and lyrically NSFW.
Remember how last week, we featured music seemingly from heaven?
This music is the opposite of that.
And by “opposite”, I don’t mean “hell”. It’s a cliché of course to say that rock and roll is the Devil’s music, but – as seen via both Mick Jagger and Ian Brown – Lucifer is, whatever his other hangups, a creature of elegance and grace and ultimately, order. The Lightbringer was the most beautiful of God’s creations, and has lofty aims that he tries to fulfill – to take his Creator’s place. Something seen in a mirror is simply the reflection of something else – image-reversed, but otherwise identical.
No, the opposite of “heaven” is “human”. Brutal and flawed, chaotic and seemingly pointless.
Or, not pointless:
I like noise. I like big-ass vicious noise that makes my head spin. I wanna feel it whipping through me like a f*cking jolt. We’re so dilapidated and crushed by our pathetic existence we need it like a fix.
Big Black tossed no wave’s guitar skronk, hardcore’s brutal energy, and industrial’s jackhammering mechanized rhythms into a concrete mixer.
The resulting extruded musical product is dense, monochromatic, and deliberately abrasive. The intentionally offensive lyrics are made to match its metallic scrapes. It is resolutely devoid of romanticism.
(I don’t know WHAT is up with those waist straps – an Albini invention? A fad that never caught on? As goofy as it looks, it’s probably a better weight distribution than a shoulder strap, and those guys were skinny, so maybe it just helped keep them upright.)
The video up top is of Big Black’s final show, in a Seattle steamplant in 1987. The sound quality is very good (Albini purportedly mixed the video himself). Young Kurt Cobain and Mark Arm (Mudhoney) can be seen in the audience (31:15 and 52:46), and Kim Thayil (Soundgarden) is supposedly somewhere in there too; one of the guys doing the electronic/industrial music for the intro is Roland Barker of Ministry et al.
More live Big Black, if you haven’t had enough firecrackers and human degradation:
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What are you guys listening to?
UPDATE: This essay, about how Steve Albini spends his Christmases, is a nice counterpoint to this post.
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Post Header Image Credits
YouTube Thumbnail from Big Black: The Last Blast
Atomizer is definitely the good one in that band’s disco. Bazooka Joe is my personal favorite.
The narrator of Jesus’ Son never even imagined for a heartbeat that there might be a place for people like us, and that song affirmed that there indeed was.
I think if you’re going to list the most influential people from that time in music – the people that enabled the then-needed underground music ecosystem to form – you’ve got:
Steve Albini
Henry Rollins
Greg Ginn
Who else?
The people who put out Forced Exposure? Thurston? Watt?Report
I haven’t read Our Band Could Be Your Life yet, I’d probably want to get that for research to answer your question.
Or I need to get this app.Report
Good call. I missed out on Big Black, but Steve Albini was recording Austin bands when I was playing. Big Black makes me think of mimeographed zines, Maximum Rock n’ Roll, and the magazine we got in our swag bag the first time my band played in NYC. I can’t remember where we played—some conference—at a punk club, basically frightened the entire time. Driving out, we got to flipping through the magazine, which in addition to a very sympathetic profile of the distinguished chairperson of NAMBLA, featured a photograph of, of . . .
I give up—there’s no way to describe it on a family blog, even one with an admiring post about Big Black. I had to see the photograph, and it’s just not right that anyone else be unnecessarily subjected to it, even by secondhand description. We tried to dissipate our horror as best we could by speculating about what kind of sweet-talk went into persuading the woman in the photo to do what she was doing onto—into?—the gentleman eagerly crouched beneath her. That’s what Big Black makes me think of.Report
Ewwww. That’s right, kids. Long before 4chan, and 2 Girls, 1 cup, and even the venerable goatse, springing absolutely disgusting imagery on people as a prank and molesting the First had to be accomplished via printed paper.
No such imagery appears anywhere in the linked videos. Just lyrical bile and atonal racket.Report
I was there too! Extremely memorable…Report