Songs About Fucking


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".

Background and recording

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 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.

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. According to Mehan Jayasuriya of Pitchfork, the album "covers a wide range of unusual topics grotesque execution methods, a psychedelic fungus 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."

Artwork

The cover art comes from a Japanese hentai manga.

Critical reception

Songs About Fucking has been called "certainly the most honest album title of the rock 'n' roll era". Lyrical themes on the album include South American killing techniques, psychedelic substances, and how "slowly, without trying, everyone becomes what he despises most".
While the album's title and the sleeve were controversial, according to one reviewer, "as brutal as that cover is, the music is even more so", 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". 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". 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". Trouser Press later called it the band's "finest work" and "their most raging, abrasive, pulverizing record".
When asked by The Guardian to name his top 20 albums, John Peel included Songs about Fucking as his fifteenth favourite album. Robert Plant claimed that the album had made him "an Albini fan," and Albini went on to be the recording engineer for the Page and Plant album Walking into Clarksdale.
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.

Accolades

PublicationCountryAccoladeRank
PitchforkUS"The Top 100 Albums of the 1980s"54
PitchforkUS"The 200 Best Albums of the 1980s"135
Beats Per MinuteUS"The Top 100 Albums of the 1980s"47
TerrorizerUK"Terrorizer Albums of the Eighties"-
The GuardianUK"1000 Albums to Hear Before You Die"-
NMEUK"The 50 Albums That Built Punk"33
RockdeluxSpain"The 100 Best Albums of the 1980s"39
RockdeluxSpain"The 200 Best Albums of All Time"99
RockdeluxSpain"300 Best Albums from 1984-2014"136

Personnel