Big Black - The alienation of alienation

Steve Albini (Pasadena, CA, 1962) works as a sound engineer for the best American alternative or underground bands. In a 20-year career, 300 albums to his credit, that's 15 a year, more than one a month. For about thirty of those albums he was also officially the producer. On 12 albums he's the author of the music and lyrics and the performer, limited to vocals, guitar and rhythm-box. Half of these came out, between 1982 and 1988, under the name Big Black (two more would later come out under the name Rapeman, four under the name Shellac). All of Albini's albums would be reissued by Chicago's Touch And Go Records.

Since 1980 Albini has lived in Chicago (Evanston neighborhood).

Skinny, derelict, bespectacled, ugly, Albini is the most important figure on the American alternative rock scene. Today everyone knows him, everyone wants him. And he maintains a gruff modesty, at times hardened around the very complex that caused it: a nihilism so internalized it doesn't even leave breath for suicide. The music that results from this belongs to the post-punk generation, to the hardcore generation - music that stands as the alienation of alienation. As the preservation of a post-mortem state. But it isn't hardcore: strictly speaking, hardcore is only Albini's nature (and his voice: faint, frail, adolescent, forever suffering and screaming), because his music runs parallel to that of Chrome: just as Chrome represent the industrialization of garage-rock, so Albini represents the industrialization of hardcore. Between the ages of 18 and 20, Albini, in Chicago, had taken up a career as a music critic (enrolled at Northwestern University), and had struck up a friendship with the guys from the newborn hardcore band Naked Raygun (1981-1991), in particular with Santiago Durango and Jeff Pezzati. Though surrounded by many, Albini always remained a loner. A loner, as he presented himself on his first, desperate EP, where all the elements and forms of his future career, both as musician and as producer, are already present: synthetic, distorted sounds (industrial rock and noise, mutually cancelling each other out via Joy Division), unpleasant, anti-melodic, suffering and apathetic at once, rhythmic and psychedelic or unintelligible.

Albini plays noise. The lyrics of his songs possess a hyperrealism that ends up being transfigured by an excess of nausea. His is a metaphysics of nausea and disgust. His is an aesthetic of ugliness, one that every now and then remembers to conjure up beauty (a riff, a hint of melody) but only so as to make its submersion and suffocation within the tangle of brute reality all the more desperate and searing. His music is ugly because life is ugly. Albini's conception of his own existence and his own art can be pictured as a grinding mill that, out in the desert, must keep on grinding regardless (and this is hardcore; punk, by contrast, exists in the midst of society). Albini is a Christ with no Christians, because in the situation he finds himself in he cannot redeem absolutely anything. The only meaning, in all this, is the absence of meaning. Albini's postmodernism is not a path toward the bestiality of primitivism, but the bridge of sighs toward an atheistic, icy, cancerous apocalypse. Industrial (or synthetic) hardcore: Ministry, Nine Inch Nails, Marilyn Manson would be unthinkable without Big Black (Swans make a metallic industrial. Albini's industrial differs from Gira's in that it has to do not with metal but with electricity, not with bombs but with machine-gun fire, not with machines but with bestial impulses). This is Albini's new wave, this industrial path is his road to post-hardcore; a road that, over time, he would have to share with the noise of Mission Of Burma, the crossover of Fear, the Joy Division-isms of Flipper, the jazz of Minutemen, the blues of Pussy Galore, the reggae of Bad Brains, the atonality of Slint.

Within an innate nihilism that is by now harmless precisely because it is innate, Albini is afflicted by two suffocating complexes: sex and insomnia. The sexual complex stems from having to do everything for sex, only to be left, once it's over, with nothing but a fistful of repugnant flies; "fuck" for Albini is a mere vox-media, the non-sense found precisely in the search for sense. For Albini it's as if the only possible path to sex were autoeroticism, yet this could only ever be experienced as a form of rape. Albini's misanthropy is a mask for his tragically necessary misanthropy, needed to understand the sexual world from the outside while still remaining within the human. The insomnia complex — a state perpetually and irreparably in sleep debt, of conscious sleepwalking, of a nightmare with eyes wide open, of late and deep hours — symbolizes that alienation of alienation which finds no catharsis in suicide and which, wretchedly, keeps one suspended. In this sense, industrial for Albini is, besides hardcore, also a path toward the dark.

Albini's songs are made of noise, not sound. They are deformed and misshapen, which is precisely why none is strictly better than another. No Albini song is better than another, because they are all authentically monstrous, and within that monstrosity none is greater or lesser than another. Albini's anti-aesthetic (a mirror of his immorality) has gone beyond the categories of better and worse. Moreover, every one of Albini's efforts is charged with a surplus of intelligence and adolescent transcendence that, even amid the bestial, the feral and the unintelligible, still demands a further value judgment (hence the compassion Albini feels for the listener, which turns into empathy on the listener's part for Albini).

Albini is a master of style both in his approach to guitar and to voice: the former is systematically detuned, acidic, atonal, timbreless, unpleasant, anti-riff, convulsive, imploded, as if trying to build an ambient-noise backdrop beneath the synthetic drum-machine; the latter is cadaverous, morbid, adolescent, in tune and always carrying the tone of something inhuman or already dead, whether in the scream or in the gasp.

Albini is formidable live, where he lets show his whole being as a Tantalus of nothingness, his whole ingrained nature, cold or unfeeling as the only honest and true gateway to compassion.

Albini will never look kindly on people like Sonic Youth, who, after having turned noise into art, would presumptuously like to turn art into noise, and only for shady purposes of popularity or pseudo-intellectualism.

Lungs (EP), 1983. Six tracks, 21 minutes. Steve Albini (vocals, guitar, rhythm-box).

Albini's first great masterpiece and manifesto is "Dead Billy" (3:27), a lullaby for a private holocaust built around a progressive, acidic synthetic tinkling, a fixed and repeated guitar motion, and a helplessly expressionistic voice. Neither Nine Inch Nails nor Marilyn Manson (especially the latter) will manage to add anything to what a twenty-year-old Albini says here. The rest of this record, cut in a run-down building on the outskirts of Chicago just 15 days after Albini bought his first guitar, is an almost complete preview of the coming decade of underground music: the great dirge of reification ("Steelworker" – 4:15), the acid serpentine ("Live in a Hole" – 3:01), the robotic synth-pop ("I Can Be Killed" – 4:27), the otherworldly syncope ("Crack" – 3:57), the pogo of ghosts ("RIP" – 2:21).

Bulldozer (EP), 1984. 6 tracks, 16 minutes. Steve Albini (vocals, guitar, rhythm-box), Santiago Durango (guitar), Jeff Pezzati (bass).

The masterpiece is "I'm a Mess" (1:56), an orgasm of fatalism saturated with its own motif (something Nirvana would later take note of). The other tracks: a possessed garage number ("Cables" – 2:40) where the full weight of adding bass to Albini's music first emerges (from here on it's this instrument that will carry the harmonies, while the guitar loses and finds itself, always self-destructing, in ever more perverse distortions); an android power-pop cut ("Pigeon Kill" – 1:47); a tunnel into the nightmare of the electric chair framed in exotic-western tones ("Texas" – 4:02); a blistering declamation amid the glow of TV tubes ("Seth" – 3:32); an ode to inconclusiveness and inconsistency ("Jump the Climb" – 2:59).

Racer-X (EP), 1984. 6 tracks, 18 minutes. Steve Albini (vocals, guitar, rhythm-box), Santiago Durango (guitar), Jeff Pezzati (bass)

The masterpiece is "Sleep!" (2:42), a Minor Threat turned inward on itself, and thus more stifling than cathartic. The other tracks: the gangrene of impotence ("Racer X" – 4:00); the plunge into dissatisfaction ("Shotgun" – 3:28); social dissonance ("The Ugly American" – 2:41); a hallucinated zombie chorale set to a near-rap cadence ("Deep Six" – 3:14); the sabbath of unhappiness ("The Big Payback" – 2:29). On every track Albini's guitar cuts and stitches the rhythmic gut like a pair of blunt scissors that tear rather than slice, and a thread that piles up scraps rather than joining them.

Atomizer, (LP) 1986. Nine tracks, 34 minutes. Steve Albini (vocals, guitar, rhythm-box), Santiago Durango (guitar), Dave Riley (bass). The two masterpieces are: "Jordan, Minnesota" (3:20), a sadomasochistic circle of disco rhythms (held together by wails) and clattering guitar; "Kerosene" (6:07), a measured epic (carried by spoken-sung vocals and synthetic effects left to supply the riffs that the guitars systematically violate and shred) of beyond-alienation as an after-world (through post-suicide) that will find its mirror image in the Rapeman masterpiece "Budd". The rest of the album maintains, as ever, an extremely high trash-craftsmanship (trash that at times weeps, and so moves you): the cannibal quadrille "Passing Complexion" (3:04); the vomited, shriveled grunge of "Big Money" (2:29); the flagellation, carried by one of the saddest (semi-)riffs in history, amid the nauseating grayness of one's own squalid room, "Bad Houses" (3:07); the array of noise-torture that is "Fists of Love" (4:21); the skeletal heart-pounder "Stinking Drunk" (3:27); the neurotic calamity in the vein of Birthday Party, "Bazooka Joe" (4:43); the as-ever semi-improvised live cut (Albini never really makes "songs") "Cables" (3:48).

Heartbeat, (single) 1986. Three tracks, 6 minutes. Steve Albini (vocals, guitar, rhythm-box), Santiago Durango (guitar), Dave Riley (bass). The masterpiece is "Things To Do Today" (1:44), one of the most convoluted blues-industrial tracks ever recorded. The other tracks are an 8-year-old Wire cover from Chairs Missing ("Heartbeat" – 3:48), and a rollicking instrumental that turns Duane Eddy into an android ("I Can't Believe" – 1:03).

Headache (EP), 1986. Four tracks, 12 minutes. Steve Albini (vocals, guitar, rhythm-box), Santiago Durango (guitar), Dave Riley (bass). The masterpieces are "My Disco" (2:52), which injects violence and terror into the Albini-style sound (thereby anticipating its future outcomes), and "Ready Men" (3:51), which opens the heart from the suffocating confines of the run-down outskirts into wider, but no less anguished, spaces. The other two tracks are a spastic disco number, "Grinder" (2:24), and a rant like a solemn Foetus ("Pete, King of the Detectives" – 2:43).

Songs About Fucking, (LP) 1987. 14 tracks, 31 minutes. Steve Albini (vocals, guitar, rhythm-box), Santiago Durango (guitar), Dave Riley (bass). The three masterpieces are: a noise-surrealist gallop (note the irresistible central riff, like an anorexic rockabilly) yet still fixated on existence ("Colombian Necktie" – 2:14); a hiccup of absolute, measured, hoarsely mourned sorrow ("Pavement Saw" – 2:12); a garage-industrial gem somewhere between Cramps and Pussy Galore ("He's a Whore" – 2:37), the "song about fucking" par excellence and, alongside "Kerosene" and "Budd", an absolute Albini masterpiece. The other tracks are once again of the highest order; moreover, they bring Albini's formless rock (Albini's non-rock) to formal and expressive perfection, sanding down its last "English" leanings (Joy Division, Killing Joke) and allowing him (through massive injections of sonic violence and outrage) to open the door to the emerging blues-hardcore phenomenon of Pussy Galore. "Power of Independent Trucking" (1:27) is a maniacal fuzz torn apart by an equally maniacal rhythm (one of Albini's most savage and fastest tracks); "The Model" (2:34) is a moving cover of Kraftwerk (Man-Machine, 1978); "Bad Penny" (2:33), with its calvary of non-sense, leans more toward the first Big Black album; "L Dopa" (1:40) is a skin-deep rhythmic indigestion; "Precious Thing" (2:20) is contemplation as noise-appendicitis; "Kitty Empire" (4:01) is the flaying enslavement of fate looming overhead like a gang (no need to name-drop Reznor and Manson again); "Ergot" (2:27) is an utterly exasperated psychedelic drill; "Kasimir S. Pulaski Day" (2:28) is a pathological, infected dark track in decomposition; "Fish Fry" (2:06) is a frenzied, synthetic, apocryphal garage number; "Tiny, King of the Jews" (2:31) is the final tears over spilled milk, is what this album represents and thus is not (and so it is art): a prison of boredom, bulimic affection, post-ejaculation senselessness, broken condoms, forced and flavorless exchanges of fluids and mucous membranes.

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