Big Black
Big Black was an American punk rock band from Evanston, Illinois, active from 1981 to 1987. Founded by singer and guitarist Steve Albini, the band's initial lineup also included guitarist Santiago Durango and bassist Jeff Pezzati, both of Naked Raygun. In 1985, Pezzati was replaced by Dave Riley, who played on Big Black's two full-length studio albums, Atomizer (1986) and Songs About Fucking (1987).
For the bodyguard and television personality, see Christopher Boykin. For the percussionist, see Big Black (musician).
Big Black
Big Black's aggressive and abrasive music was characterized by distinctively clanky guitars and the use of a drum machine rather than a drum kit, elements that foreshadowed industrial rock. The band's lyrics flouted commonly held taboos and dealt frankly—and often explicitly—with politically and culturally loaded topics including murder, rape, child sexual abuse, arson, racism, and misogyny. Though the band's lyrics contained controversial material, the lyrics were meant to serve as a commentary or a display of distaste for the subject matter. They were staunchly critical of the commercial nature of rock, shunning the mainstream music industry and insisting on complete control over all aspects of their career. At the height of their success, they booked their own tours, paid for their own recordings, refused to sign contracts, and eschewed many of the traditional corporate trappings of rock bands. In doing so, they had a significant impact on the aesthetic and political development of independent and underground rock music.
In addition to two studio albums, Big Black released two live albums, two compilation albums, four EPs, and five singles, all through independent record labels. Most of the band's catalog was kept in print through Touch and Go Records for years following their breakup.
History[edit]
1981–1982: Formation and Lungs[edit]
Big Black was founded by Steve Albini in 1981 during his second year of college at Northwestern University.[1][2][3] Albini had become a fan of punk rock during his high school years in Missoula, Montana, and taught himself to play bass guitar in the fall of 1979, his senior year, while recuperating from a badly broken leg resulting from being struck by a car while riding his motorcycle.[2][4] Moving to Evanston, Illinois the following year to pursue a journalism degree and fine art minor at Northwestern, Albini immersed himself in the fledgling Chicago punk scene and became a devoted fan of the band Naked Raygun.[1][2] He also DJ'd for the campus radio station, from which he was repeatedly fired for playing loud and abrasive music during the morning time slot as well as not completing the required logs.[5][6] He also wrote a controversial column titled "Tired of Ugly Fat?" for the Chicago zine Matter, publishing confrontational rants about the local music scene which polarized readers into either respecting or hating him.[2][5]
Style[edit]
Music[edit]
Big Black's music challenged convention, pursuing an abrasive sound that was more aggressive than contemporary punk rock. Albini explained that the band strove for intensity, stating that their goal was to make "something that felt intense when we went through it, rather than something that had little coded indicators of intensity. Heavy metal and stuff like that didn't really seem intense to me, it seemed comical to me. Hardcore punk didn't really seem intense most of the time—most of the time it just seemed childish. I guess that's how I would differentiate what we were doing from what other people were doing."[60] Both Albini and Riley described Big Black as a punk rock band.[20][61][62] AllMusic has associated their sound with both hardcore and post-punk and described them as influential to indie rock[2] as well as pioneers of noise rock[63] and post-hardcore.[64]
A major component of Big Black's music was the drum machine. Rather than attempt to make it emulate the sound of a normal drum kit, the band chose to exploit the idiosyncrasies of its synthetic sounds.[14] On many songs Albini programmed it to accent the first and third beats of the bar, rather than the second and fourth beats typically accented in rock music.[14] "The effect was a monolithic pummeling, an attack", says Michael Azerrad, "their groove, normally the most human aspect of a rock band, became its most inhuman; it only made them sound more insidious, its relentlessness downright tyrannical."[14] On tour, the sound engineers at many rock clubs were befuddled by the drum machine, afraid that it would not work with their sound system or would blow out their speakers, and the band would have to coerce the club owner or threaten to cancel the show in order to get them to put the drum machine through the monitors.[31]
The band's guitar sound was also unconventional. Albini was determined to avoid the "standard rock stud guitar sound", and achieved a signature "clanky" sound by using metal guitar picks notched by sheet metal snips; the notch causing the pick to hit each string twice, creating the effect of two simultaneous guitar picks.[9][14] Durango remarked: "I always thought that our guitar playing was not so much playing guitars, but assembling noises created by guitars."[14] He and Albini respectively billed their guitars as "vroom" and "skinng" in the liner notes for Atomizer.[28] Mark Deming of AllMusic remarks that "The group's guitars alternately sliced like a machete and ground like a dentist's drill, creating a groundbreaking and monolithic dissonance in the process."[2]
Big Black's music was influenced by a number of genres and artists. Albini was a fan of punk rock bands including Suicide, the Ramones, the Stooges, and Naked Raygun.[2][4] When Riley joined the band in 1985 he brought with him a funk background, having worked at a Detroit studio where George Clinton and Sly Stone had recorded.[65] During their career Big Black recorded cover versions of songs from a number of styles including post-punk, new wave, funk, hard rock, synthpop, and R&B; these included Rema-Rema's "Rema-Rema", James Brown's "The Payback",[66] Wire's "Heartbeat",[67] Cheap Trick's "He's a Whore",[43] Kraftwerk's "The Model",[43] and the Mary Jane Girls' "In My House".[66][68] The sound that Big Black forged for themselves, however, was wholly original: Azerrad remarks that "the band's music—jagged, brutal, loud, and nasty—was original to a downright confrontational degree. Big Black distilled years of post-punk and hardcore down to a sound resembling a singing saw blade mercillesly tearing through sheet metal. No one had made records that sounded so harsh."[69]
Lyrics[edit]
Big Black's songs explored the dark side of American culture in unforgiving detail, acknowledging no taboos.[2][70] Albini's lyrics openly dealt with such topics as mutilation, murder, rape, child abuse, arson, immolation, racism, and misogyny.[2] "That's just what was interesting to me as a postcollegiate bohemian", he later remarked. "We didn't have a manifesto. Nothing was off-limits; it's just that that's what came up most of the time."[71] Many of his songs told miniature short stories of sociopaths doing evil things that the average person might merely contemplate.[29][60] Some, such as "Cables", "Pigeon Kill", and "Jordan, Minnesota", were based on real events, or things that Albini had witnessed during his Montana upbringing.[16][29] He compared the stories to Ripley's Believe It or Not!, saying that "If you stumble across something like this, you think 'This can't be!' But it turns out to be true, and that makes it even wilder."[60]
Big Black discography
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