It’s hard for me to articulate, but there’s a friend of mine, Peter Sotos, who’s written extensively about abuse and murder and things of that nature. A lot of his writing is extremely difficult to read. It’s repellent. You’re brought into the mind of a sadist, pretty convincingly. And I feel like that experience, reading that stuff, is shocking to your core in the way that the horrors of the reality of those things should be.
That was Big Black’s draw for me. Albini didn’t just sing about darkness and evil. As an artist, he threw himself into it. He articulated something that’s very hard to articulate. Their music captured what he describes in the paragraph above. He wrote unapologetically from the standpoint of a perpetrator who has utter contempt for his victims. I hadn’t heard anything similar before and anything similar since. There was a long time, 10-15 years, where I couldn’t listen to them. I listen some now but it’s still much harder to do so than when I was young.
Big Black covering James Brown –