cDc #84
This is a portion of an interview done with Steve Albini of Big Black. The
interview was done at the Big Black/Beefeater show on July 5th, 1987 at The
Graystone. We [G.A. Ellsworth, Scott Sendra and Rachel Brickman] pretty much
set the tape recorder in front of him and let him go.
cDc #84: I want to get into this child abuse thing -- because in the
song "Jordan, Minnesota" you take a strong stance on it.
Steve Albini: It's not like we're trying to make any great statement or
anything... I think it's just pretty obvious -- people
shouldn't be fucking their kids. I mean that's a pretty
manifestive world.
That's just a subject for a song like any other. We're
all pretty interested in ridiculous extremes that people go to
for no real reason, just because they have nothing better to
do. That's a pretty extreme situation, where you have a whole
town of people who are actively involved in kid fucking.
cDc #84: Is that fictitious, or is it...?
Steve Albini: Oh, no. You ought to look it up.
Jordan, Minnesota, 2 years ago, there were 26 indictments
handed down by a district attorney for this group of people,
which is literally about a third of the adult population of
this town, Jordan, Minnesota, who were involved in this
elaborate kid fucking ring.
They would play these weird games, they'd play spin the
bottle, they'd get to fuck each other's kids, and they'd take
each other's kids home and things like that. It was really
absolutely staggering, right?
All these parents got big-ass lawyers, and the district
attorney was afraid that these kids would collapse under cross
examination, like have nervous breakdowns. With domineering
adults screaming at them that they're lying, of course these
kids are going to flip out.
So, they dropped all the charges. Which means all these
kids are going back to their houses, and the exact same shit
has got to be going on. Nothing has changed, basically. I
mean, you guys hadn't even known it had happened -- that shows
you how much publicity there is about stuff like this. And now
all these kids are back in their houses.
cDc #84: And it's all the kids now, because the parents are the people
they're supposed to respect.
Steve Albini: A four year old kid, he has no cognizance of his own
personality yet. He doesn't even know he's a distinct person
from everybody else in the world, and here he is being taught,
basically, that the way people interact is by fucking each
other's kids.
cDc #84: The song "Cables" -- was there any specific incident that
inspired that?
Steve Albini: There are these guys that I used to know in [Hellgate] high
school, in Montana they just really got off on going to the
slaughterhouse for entertainment. Just go to the
slaughterhouse and watch the cows get killed. That was like TV
for them. It was that or go home in the trailer park and get
drunk. Sniff glue. There was nothing else to do.
One time I remember specifically this guy telling me about
this guy who let him drag a cow into the stall. The way they
do it is pretty cool: they take a pressurized gun and drive a
bolt through the snout of a cow, and they clip a cable to
either side of the bolt. And then there's this winch that
hauls the cow into the stall, and then there's a compression
hammer that crushes the cow's skull.
This guy thought this was just about the coolest process
-- all this machinery and technology. It's just another
example of what people do for fun.
cDc #84: What does the "Bitch Magnet" by Dave Riley's name on the back
cover of ATOMIZER mean?
Steve Albini: Bitch magnet! That just means bitch magnet. Whenever we go
anywhere, Dave like has all these women just follow him.
Rachel Brickman: But are they all bitches?
Steve Albini: Well, no. Bitch is just a generic term.
G.A. Ellsworth: You're a feminist, eh?
Steve Albini: Well, I don't believe you have to be completely dogmatic in
your language to think reasonably. Certainly none of us are
sexist in the traditional sexist notions, or have sexist
leanings, right? But because that's understood, we don't have
to keep haranguing on it, to keep reaffirming to ourselves that
we believe what we believe.
So once that's given, once you know what you think,
there's no reason to be ginger about what you say, as long as
you know what you mean. I think that's a really important
thing.
A lot of people, they're very careful not to say things
that might offend certain people or do anything that might be
misinterpreted. But what they don't realize is that the point
of all this is to change the way you live your life, not the
way you speak.
I have less respect for the man who bullies his girlfriend
and calls her "Ms." than a guy who treats women reasonably and
respectfully and calls them "Yo! Bitch!" The substance is
what matters.
People who get the point are going to agree with us
philosophically, and we don't have to explain ourselves to
them. People who miss the point, no matter how much we explain
ourselves, aren't going to understand anyway.
cDc #84: You play Detroit a lot. Is there a reason?
Steve Albini: Oh yeah! Tonight we're playing this show because we want to
finish the video we started a year ago. This video has been
the most doomed video -- everything that's possible to go wrong
has gone wrong.
The last time we played here the lights went out for the
second half of the set, but that was OK because, as it turned
out, at the end of the night when we looked at the tape, one of
the cameras had blown a tube so it was just producing this
incredibly snowy, shitty looking image the entire time.
The time we came to Detroit before that and were
videotaped, some baboon lost the master tape of the video
shoot. There were all these high school jamokes doing the
video taping. One of them like took the tape home to put a
porno movie on it or something -- I don't know.
cDc #84: Is the tape going to be released?
Steve Albini: It should be released on Touch & Go, assuming we get something
salvaged from the three tapes.
cDc #84: We are wondering exactly what the song "Passing Complexion" is
about.
Steve Albini: I couldn't tell you exactly... I could tell you what specific
things in it are....
There's the line, "She would take his children, black and
white, to her own breasts" -- there was an Amelia Jackson
interview on the radio that I listened to once, and she was
talking about how her mother would nurse these white parents'
children, literally wet nurse them. So here's this woman who
is good enough to take their babies and raise them and feed
them off her breast, but she wasn't good enough to sit in their
living room.
There was basically a whole third class of citizens who
were black people who were pale enough to be accepted into
gentile company if they were entertainers, if they were
businessmen in town or something like that. They had passing
complexion -- they weren't so dark that people had to think of
them as black people, they could sort of construe in their mind
that they were white people if it were convenient. If there
was some reason to, they could think of them as white people.
There were only two divisions in society -- the rich,
upper-crust white class or just another darkie, and the
divisions were so obvious, so they all tried to fit into white,
gentile society. That's where the whole industry developed for
hair straightening and skin lightening. Like Porcelana Fading
Cream was originally developed to lighten Negro skin.
cDc #84: That's so warped.
Steve Albini: It's bizarre, but it's real. I think that's the main thing
we're all interested in, for the subject matter for our songs
goes. It's sorta like a Ripley's Believe It or Not. If you
have an interest in things sort of out of the ordinary, and 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. Like today -- we're driving down the highway and we
counted thirty mufflers by the side of the road. Thirty
fucking mufflers! In a span of about four miles. [Laughter.]
Detroit is Muffler Hell. I've never seen that many mufflers by
the side of the road in my life. And where in the world would
you go except Detroit to see that many mufflers?
Steve Albini: [Following a discussion of band economics and such...] So, in
short, we are perfectly satisfied with the number of people who
like the band. It wouldn't bother us at all if half that many
did. I don't think it would change anything if ten times as
many came to see us. It wouldn't change the way we do
anything, it wouldn't change the number of people that give a
shit, it wouldn't change the effect of the band -- it would
just be more bodies. The additional bodies wouldn't care any
more, they'd just be warm.
cDc #84: So you don't think you get through to anyone, there isn't
anyone who can get something from it?
Steve Albini: Well, somebody walking in cold, knowing nothing about the band
might be turned on by it, but I think that anybody walking in
cold and knowing nothing about it is kind of suspect, because
this kind of music has been around long enough so that people
should be aware of what's happening.
Which is not to say everyone should know who we are what
I'm saying is that if only three thousand people should be
enough for us. We have no interest in expanding our audience
beyond the number of people that really give a shit...
If there are ten people in the audience, or a thousand
people in our audience, there are probably only three or four
that catch on. Three or four that have some idea of what we're
doing. Most of them, they may appreciate some of it, they may
like some of it, some of it may affect them physically, some of
it may affect them intellectually, but as far as people
grooving on the same mania, there aren't more than two or three
sockets that any plug can fit into, and we're a very specific
taste.