You have recently landed on Earth from Uranus, and are trying to familiarize yourself with the basics of Earthling culture. And so along the way you hear about rock and roll, but you have no idea what it might be. A passer-by advises you to ask about it from those weirdos who gather in that cafe up there, above "Carpisa".
You ask me if it is free, explain your problem to me. Okay, I'm counting, but rock and roll can (and again can't) be explained in thousands of ways, because it has thousands of faces and sides.
And yet, maybe it's best this way.
There's a song about that. Kerosene, they perform it Big black, a not particularly long-lived gang of freaks from the early eighties. The song is certainly not among the thousand greatest rock and roll hits (or, God forbid, "evergreen"). Maybe not even among the five thousand. They had never even heard of the band anywhere where "just normal rock and roll" was heard. And that's okay: "normal rock and roll" is the most petty-bourgeois music in the world.
However, however: here, listen to Mr. Uranche is what it sounds like: twenty seconds of schizophrenic guitar strumming ushers you into a dark storm where several wild guitar necks come at you like pirate ships, and singer Steve Albini, first on vocals as if it were normal, and then with an increasingly stronger, more furious, desperate roar, he evokes the very core of an existential angst, by no means only personal and private.
At the same time, the song is packed with so much sonic trinitrotoluene that it wakes up the dead, makes you dance, and blows you into the stratosphere. If from the first to the last of her three hundred and sixty-odd seconds you don't go into silence, even with yourself, you must have some serious problem. Don't worry, most have it.
By the way, Steve Albini did all sorts of other things, with Big black, Rapemen, Shellac. And got to be one of the most important and controversial producers in the world.
"Controversial producer"?! You can, when you're Steve Albini.
On Tuesday, he arrived to die, at the age of 62. I gave Uranc an audio cassette with 90 minutes of Big Black, a dear memory. He spins it on his toes and enjoys it.
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What is happening in the country and the world, what is in the newspapers and how to pass the time?
Every Wednesday at noon In between arrives by email. It's a pretty solid newsletter, so sign up!