Songs About Fucking is the second and final studio album by American rock band Big Black, released in 1987 by Touch and Go Records. The album includes a rendition of Kraftwerk's "The Model" in a remixed version from that which appeared on Big Black's then-recent single. The compact disc of Songs About Fucking added the other side of that single, a cover of Cheap Trick's "He's a Whore".
Steve Albini has said that Songs About Fucking is the Big Black album that he is most satisfied with. In a 1992 interview with Maximumrocknroll magazine, Albini said:
The best was side one of Songs About Fucking. I was real pleased with the way we did that. We just hopped into the studio, banged all the songs out and hopped out. Didn't take long, didn't cost much, just real smooth. Side two we recorded at a more leisurely pace and I think that hurt us. And that Cheap Trick song got on the tape and the CD by accident, and we just left it on.
The band had already decided to split up before the album was recorded, prompted by guitarist Santiago Durango's decision to enroll in law school and the band's desire to quit at what they felt was a creative peak.[1]
Music and lyrics
In the book Gimme Indie Rock, music journalist Andrew Earles assessed that Songs About Fucking is "the heaviest, most lyrically poignant, and hardest-rocking" entry in the Big Black's discography.[2] According to Mehan Jayasuriya of Pitchfork, the album "covers a wide range of unusual topics [such as] grotesque execution methods, a psychedelic fungus [and] cats. When sex does appear in these songs, it’s usually as a means of getting at something darker, like perversion, domination, or violence. Save for Albini’s occasional bursts of black humor, the album is unrelenting as it plumbs the depths of depravity; a more accurate title might have been Songs About Cruelty."[3]
Songs About Fucking has been called "certainly the most honest album title of the rock 'n' roll era".[14] Lyrical themes on the album include South American killing techniques ("Colombian Necktie"), psychedelic substances ("Ergot"), and how "slowly, without trying, everyone becomes what he despises most".[14]
While the album's title (commonly blanked out when displayed in shops on its release)[citation needed] and the sleeve were controversial, according to one reviewer, "as brutal as that cover is, the music is even more so",[15] and it was considered "as dark and frightening as the band name suggests" by another, Treble's Hubert Vigilla, who goes on to say "Songs About Fucking is loud, it's abrasive, it's unattractive in the extreme... So really, it's everything that made Big Black so great in the first place".[16] Dave Henderson of Underground magazine gave the album a 2.5/3 rating, calling it "a napalm attack that sticks to your skin like burning party-jell, spiced with hundreds and thousands, a prickly sensation that's as all-consuming as it is repellent".[17] Reviewing for The Village Voice in April 1988, Robert Christgau found Albini's innovative guitar sounds undeniable: "That killdozer sound culminates if not finishes off whole generations of punk and metal. In this farewell version it gains just enough clarity and momentum to make its inhumanity ineluctable, and the absence of lyrics that betray Albini's roots in yellow journalism reinforces an illusion of depth".[18]Trouser Press later called it the band's "finest work" and "their most raging, abrasive, pulverizing record".[19]
In Gimme Indie Rock, Andrew Earles said that the album is "a certifiably essential part of any record collection, especially those that trod in indie rock's heavier paths." He credited the album with having an influence on the "aggro" and post-hardcore oriented sect of the underground rock movement.[22]
↑ Leland, John; Robbins, Ira; Rabid, Jack; Sprague, Deborah; Strickler, Yancey. "Big Black". Trouser Press. Retrieved July 12, 2020. As Big Black was splitting up, they released their finest work: a second actual LP, Songs About Fucking. As if to go out kicking, screaming, howling and biting, it's their most raging, abrasive, pulverizing record, with only an excellent and ironic guitar take of Kraftwerk's "The Model" providing any relief. Albini's screeched vocals are so low in the mix they're just another instrument. Obsessing as usual on the excessive and bizarre side of human life, his stories remain mini horror movies set to the punishing, scathing guitar attack. Lyrically and aurally like Atomizer, it's liable to alter your perceptions.
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