May 10, 2024

What We Talk About When We Talk About Steve Albini

Note that this is a very un-royal we here...

Dear Darlings of Dames Nation,

We come to you to honor the memory and cultural legacy of a great American crankypants and shaper of The Culture, the recently late and deservedly legendary music engineer Steve Albini. We (Dame Sophie & Dame Karen) nearly tripped over ourselves cross-texting each other on Wednesday with the news of Albini’s sudden death by heart attack at the way too-young age of 61. 

For readers who aren’t particularly into indie and alt-rock of the 1990s, Albini was a musician (Big Black, Shellac, another extremely unfortunately named band we won’t name here) but more importantly (to us) he produced engineered lots of critically beloved, if not commercially rewarded, albums of that era. Some of the most famous include the Pixies’ Surfer Rosa, Nirvana’s In Utero (an exception to the commercial success rule, as it was the follow-up to their culture-shifting Nevermind) and PJ Harvey’s Dig Me Out. 

Below, some Dames Emotional Processing and Trenchant Critical Remarks:

Dame Sophie: I would like to get off this ride (death announcement from Pitchfork)

Dame: Karen: I know I was just about to write you!!!!

DS: UGH
TOO GODDAMN YOUNG

DK: How was he only 61?!?!?!

DS: Deffo a sound of an era guy
RIP & also let’s all go get our heart health checked regularly!

DK: For real — also the epitome of not selling out, which set such a vibe into motion. He didn’t take royalties?!?!?? Like just imagine. Imagine a modern producer hating being called a producer and refusing to take royalties!

DS: Impossible! That was such a point of pride for him & now I think any producer would laugh in the face of anyone who even suggested it. Jack Antonoff? Can you imagine????? I’m chuckling just thinking about it.

DK: Ahahahaha

DS: I struggle to think of anyone who would turn down money on the table these days. IN THIS ECONOMY???

DK: Well, yes, there is that too .

After that exchange, I (Dame S) went to listen to some of Albini’s work – in accordance with the laws of the era of my youth, I like Nirvana and I really like the Pixies, and I’m into that one PJ Harvey song that everyone knows  (which was not an Albini production) — and you know what I realized? I’m more knowledgeable about the Albini Way & Vibe than I am versed in his actual sound engineering work! I’m guilty as charged with this unambiguous violation of the Alternative Culture Laws of the 1990s, and I will pay my fines accordingly, and as such, I feel 100% fine in saying that his actual sound preferences were too skronky for the very pop-oriented likes of me. If you didn’t come to party (that is, furnish indelible melodies), don’t bother knocking on my door (kindly get the hell out of my earphones). 

His credo was also too morally stringent — I was only partially kidding when I joked about being unable to imagine not accepting royalties. That’s the result of lots of factors, one of which is that I don’t consider artistic skills, or the ability to work with an artist to usher an idea from notion to finished work as strictly utilitarian, or as having value only at the time the work is completed. People who make music, including the sound engineers, are doing creative work, and when that work resonates with audiences in times and places beyond its original creation, I think that’s wonderful on its merits and deserving of remuneration. It’s noble to offer to take a plumber’s day rate (do you know how much those folks make?! it’s nothing to sneeze at!) 

More Insightful Damesy Chit Chat

DK: Let’s not forget his “sorry I was an edgelord” apology tour. 

[Note from Karen: I’m being overly flip here. As I rant in just a few lines from here, the bar is so, so very low but that doesn’t make his 2021 Twitter thread any less remarkable. He noted, among many other things, “I expect no grace, and honestly feel like I and others of my generation have not been held to task enough for words and behavior that ultimately contributed to a coarsening society. For myself and many of my peers, we miscalculated. We thought the major battles over equality and inclusiveness had been won, and society would eventually express that, so we were not harming anything with contrarianism, shock, sarcasm or irony.” He expanded on this in a great interview with Zaron Burnett in MEL Magazine. 

The above quote sums up so much of ‘90s whiteness, both within and way outside of indie rock. Speaking for myself, this contrarianism and irony felt like, well, raging against the machine and as if I was witnessing some of the intoxicating unrest and rejection of the mainstream that punk had brought about, which I rued having missed out on due to being an infant and child during its peak. It was a welcome tonic in the face of mainstream popular monoculture that was a bastion of blandness — just look at the Billboard Top 100 from 1991, also known as The Year Punk Broke but you’d never know it from this chart, to see what I mean.1

Part of what makes Albini’s famous 1993 Baffler essay “The Problem With Music”  so invigorating is his ruthless takedown of the ways in which this blandness became the norm. The paragraph about “trying to sound like the Beatles” is particularly invigorating. His refusal to take royalties for engineering makes more sense when he breaks down how major labels screwed most bands financially. 

Anyway, I was (and remain, tbh) a naturally very angry, pessimistic person with a dark sense of humor and a fine collection of giant chips on both shoulders and I loved a lot of the shit he talked about in that Twitter thread and interview. I took great pride in my ability to absorb and even thrive within the constant shock, one-upmanship, and, yes, coarseness that were omnipresent. I was not alone. Obviously, white privilege and a lack of interaction with or even knowledge of culture outside of a very narrow point of reference were hard at work here, and there has been very little public consideration of or reckoning with the harm it caused, hence Albini being such an outlier. As we all know all too well by now, a bar being extremely low doesn’t mean an onslaught of people lining up to clear it.]

DS: That’s interesting to explore for sure. Something I read in Pitchfork alluded to how unusual he was in his approach to apologizing for having been an edgelord and I was like “great that he did that, and also Tom Petty definitely did so with scarcely any fanfare…I didn’t have to think hard about this, Pitchfork.”

DK: “The bar is literally on the floor, thanks for the reminder, Pitchfork.”

DS: “Confederate flag is bad, noted Floridian acknowledges.” It’s only a headline when a famous white dude who doesn’t strictly *need* to acknowledge some welcome personal growth experiences that growth. More of that journey, please, and sure, let’s document it as a reminder to everyone that we can, in fact, change our minds over time, but let’s shift the tone of that coverage, shall we?

Lest we get too grumpy, ourselves, I do want to note areas of agreement with Albini, particularly his well-reasoned passion for physical media, both as shareable evidence of human ingenuity and creativity, and as a means of preserving culture. This whole interview is worth watching, and his argument about the longevity of analog recordings is particularly resonant:

He’s 100% right about the value and necessity of everyday historical records that are endangered, chief among them daily newspapers in markets outside large cities and alt-weeklies — not just their existence, but preservation and archiving so that future curious people can learn about the past. We have been and will no doubt continue to be firmly on record on the delights and the necessity of physical media, no disagreements with our good man in the navy boilersuit there!

I do think he gets a little too far up his own tushie with his dismissal of art created with popularity in mind. I’m not immune to the argument, particularly in the context of being on guard against a monoculture that reverts to a mean of blandness. It’s more that I’m allergic to blanket dismissals of music written with a view towards pleasing the ears of a large audience as “trivial”, which reeks of snobbery, ageism, and privilege.  

Some more Albini links Karen saw and enjoyed:

Of course Matthew Perpetua comes through with a playlist: The Steve Albini Sound! “A playlist collecting highlights from his large body of work that I believe highlight his highly distinctive style and ear for dynamics. It features music by a lot of crucial figures in alternative music — Pixies, PJ Harvey, Nirvana, Breeders — as well as several key recordings by post-rock, punk, metal, and singer-songwriter acts.” 
Spotify
Apple Music
YouTube

I like this 17 Essential Albums list from Rolling Stone — I’m a little more of a skronkhead than Sophie and PJ Harvey’s Rid of Me, Superchunk’s No Pocky For Kitty, and The Breeders’ Pod are probably in my own Top 17 albums list. I love that Albini said the following to Marc Maron in 2015: “I think [Kim Deal] has an absolutely magical voice…I think she is a genius, and she thinks about music in a unique way. I consider myself very close to her in terms of her musical existence. I really admire her, and I’m proud of that association. The Pixies, as a band, they were fine. Whatever.”

Ha!

Clip from an Anthony Bourdain interview omg — in a Chicago episode of Parts Unknown, of course

A special tribute to notable sandwich lover Steve Albini by David Swanson for Notable Sandwiches [I too am a true Monte Cristo devotee.]