Big Black is playing a few songs at the Touch and Go Records 25th Anniversary/Hideout Block Party. That is, they are playing among many, er, shall we say highly fucking notable acts. My friend Steve emailed me last night in conniptions, speculating on the identity of the as-yet-unannounced 25th band. Who else could possibly reunite and play at this thing? If one fantasy is fulfilled, why not two? "Is it The Jesus Lizard?" He asked me. Is it Slint?
Such amazing and abiding anger holds warm in the flat soil in the middle. The kids in Chicago, home of haymarket riots and incendiary Vietnam pop political window smashing, Democratic conventions communist in the even and unweighted distribution of walking papers from this mortal coil, the kids in chicago dress like cops to be cool in black leather cop jackets with the city police flag on the arm. The fertile soil across the middle of this land sprouts small things that are forgetful in their too temporary genesis, the ears of corn go brown and leave a dry husk in lieu of calling card or memory, the beans and the grains live but once and do not spring forth again when their green flames turned autumnal are cut from their toeholds in the black and giving earth. But the heat lapping in humid waves at the eyes to the horizon is an old grudge that surges in time to the cold, industrial beefs we carry in our music, in our industrial beats, and the kids in Chicago are flinging magnetic curses like Carl wrote.
Sometimes I feel old and far away from the shitting river city I was born in, her air thick with the dregs and factory farts of corn squeezings hanging humid over the Illiniois, far from that row of tall wigwams "fierce as a dog with tongue lapping for action, cunning as a savage pitted against the wilderness" on Lake Michigan.
Jesus, to wreck the whole world with a scream caught on tape.
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