December 27th extract from "Totally Shuffled-A Year of Listening to Music on a Broken iPod"
Big Black-Fish Fry-Songs About Fucking
There are very
few artists who don’t live with a certain level of compromise and who don’t,
for the want of a better phrase, piss about. There’s always some sort of deal
to be done with record companies, agents, managers, promoters etc-the whole
paraphernalia. What may have started for them as pure music and pure art and
for the love of music, is gradually eroded until they are subsumed into the
same old ways. All protestations about how they are different and oppositional
ring a bit hollow when they move from an indie label to some major (for a shed
load of money), and then come out with the line that the major label
understands them better and the indie label were both a bunch of amateurs and
acted worse than a major at the same time. (Mark E Smith of The Fall, my
favourite band ever, is especially guilty of this; but in his defence he is not
alone, and possibly he’d had a drink at the time. Anyway, The Fall go through
record labels quicker than Chelsea FC have recently gone through
managers). I can think of only two bands
that remained stubbornly outside the system and succeeded. Crass clearly went
their own way but really, in the end, their lonely furrow ended up with them
fading away somewhat, certainly on a creative level. The only other example
that springs to mind, (though I’ll bet there were others), were Big Black.
Big Black didn’t
mess around at all and, unlike Crass, they called it a day when they were on
top of their game. Big Black didn’t sign to any record company; they owned
their own music and released their records. They had a unique deal with
Homestead Records of Chicago; rather than the label owning the recordings, they
were simply licensed to release Big Black records for a limited period of time.
Big Black had no manager, booking agent, producer, road crew etc. There were
just the three members of the band and a drum machine. As they didn’t have
anyone else but themselves to consider, all the decisions they made directly
affected only them-and all the money they either made or lost was their own
money. Because they had no drummer, they didn’t need a van to transport all
their equipment from gig to gig. They
just sorted the venue out themselves. Set up their gear and played. Very loud.
And as Steve
Albini, founder of Big Black stated, this methodology spoke for itself. Nobody
told Big Black what to do and nobody took any of their money. All of this would
be very laudable and fine in itself, but wouldn’t have counted for much more
than a different way of working if the music was no good. Or even if it was
simply mediocre. However, it’s true to say that Big Black produced, over a
couple of albums, a few E.P’s and singles, some of the finest, hardest, highest
principled, loudest and most exciting music I’ve ever heard. There was no-one
really like them and I doubt that there’ll ever be anyone again.
Get/see/read "Totally Shuffled" here
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