STEVE ALBINI

internet radio y'all

(should be archived on mixcloud though)

This is a long but really good Twitter thread. Rather than embed, I will quote.

Thread:
I work in an arcane field where the job requires specific technical knowledge, built on a ladder of understanding and breakthroughs going back over 100 years. It's not immunology but it's not nothing.

A couple decades ago there was a christian panic about something the press started calling "backmasking," an outgrowth of the similarly absurd panic about subliminal messaging and advertising, about which I could also talk about for too long but will not now.

According to the panic, Satanists were hiding messages in music by recording secret messages, only audible if the music were played backwards, but somehow still perceivable and persuasive on listeners. Such messages were blamed for drug abuse, teen suicides and cult behavior.

This became a Big Deal. There were articles and TV shows about it, proponents mounted conferences, did public demonstrations and lectures, and eventually there were a core of believers who were convinced of the problem and adamant in outrage.

There is an excellent inclusion of this in J0hn D@rni3ll3's excellent novel Wolf in White Van. Of course people like me, professionals in the recording field intimately familiar with the process and technology of recording, knew it was all horseshit.

Regardless, "secret messages" retained popular appeal and a few lawsuits were even pursued, one against the band Judas Priest, lent credibility by the passion of the people who believed in it, despite that they had no expertise or evidence, and an unlearned and credulous public.

In order for something to appear on a record, forward or reverse, it would need to be recorded onto the master tape, and debunking it should be as simple as going through the tape track by track and demonstrating that there was no demonic message there.

So this is exactly what Judas Priest did. They played their master tapes in court, showed the track sheets and other documentation, had their engineer testify that he was never asked to record any satanic messages, all that. You would think that would put an end to it but no.

It was actually kinda close. link to Rolling Stone article

As an expert in analog recording, I know there is no way for these things to have been done surreptitiously or other than by the normal methods of recording, but lay people don't know any of that. They could be convinced there was some other, secret, conspiratorial way.

Judas Priest are a good example of why debating the willfully ignorant is a fool's errand. It's expensive and exhausting to have to disabuse people of patent bullshit they are attached to. You have to educate people who do not wish to learn and do not trust you.

You have to start with Maxwell's equations and the theory of electromagnetism, teach them about the persistence of polarity in magnetic domains, explain the mechanics and design of magnetic recorders, the process and handling of masters in a studio and the chain of custody...

for master tapes that represent an investment of sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars. You have to answer their ignorant objections continuously. And in the end they will just shrug and say, "I don't think so," and that will be that. They will remain unconvinced.

Okay, maybe that record didn't have backmasking and secret messages, but what about *this* one, or *this* one, or *this* one. Maybe that master tape didn't have a secret message track, but what about all the tapes we haven't examined?

You say there would be some evidence of the recording having been done, but couldn't it be done some other way? I recall a lawyer in the Judas Priest case arguing that the message in question was made as a composite of sounds including the vocal, guitar and hi-hat...

...ie the engineer did a cryptic reverse-speech soundscape collage, hidden within the apparently-normal recording of a rock band, for the purpose of inducing teen-agers to commit suicide. Every aspect of that argument is beyond absurd, yet it had its day in court. Literally.

So this fact-averse mindset persists, whether about evolution, vaccine efficacy, gun control or cryptic satanism. No matter how thoroughly an absurdity is shown to be bullshit and nonsense, its advocates will insist that didn't happen.

Indulging the "DEBATE ME!" shitheels does nothing to further the truth. It is exhausting because its purpose is to exhaust you and no credible person should do it.

The evolution of Steve Albini: ‘If the dumbest person is on your side, you’re on the wrong side’

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2023/aug/15/the-evolution-of-steve-albini-if-the-dumbest-person-is-on-your-side-youre-on-the-wrong-side

premise flawed, surely even dumb people believe that Zeppelin rules

the evolution of a man approaching retirement & belatedly realizing stuff most of the rest of us figured out by age 13

To paraphrase Spinal Tap, Albini has moved on from a state of arrested development to the preserved moose stage of his career.

tl;dr

Lol JiC

It's a good summary, that piece, though I raised an eyebrow at "Surfer Rosa" described as having a "radio-friendly sheen."

the evolution of a man approaching retirement & belatedly realizing stuff most of the rest of us figured out by age 13

― waste of compute (One Eye Open), Tuesday, August 15, 2023 7:49 AM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

i feel like he can't win, if he doesn't do the contrition thing, he's a piece of shit, if he does he should have done it earlier.

He should have done it earlier, but I'm glad he's done it.

If he's good enough for Kim, he's good enough for me.

It's not just that he's come clean about his bullshit, he actively works to help people. He's been delivering Christmas presents to needy kids for twenty something years and who knows what else he's done that he doesn't talk about.

It's pretty easy to write someone off and he's not a perfect person, but he's working on it a lot harder than most people.

xp sure i agree 100%. i guess thats the corner you paint yourself into after 40ish of writing & saying bigoted stuff.

*40ish years

He may be a good guy now, but he just Posts Too Hard, IMO. Like he hasn’t outgrown that “certain type of guy” urge to authoritatively proclaim his opinion on various topics, in a way that personally grates. In the brief time I spent on Bluesky, running into “Albini as main character” wuz an early indication that it wasn’t the place for me.

One of the weirdest (and amusing to me) Albini beefs was with math.
Not math rock, but math.
He really did not agree that 0.999... is equal to 1.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/0.999...
Like even when confronted with proofs I think he still stuck to his position on aesthetic grounds.

I hope his personal reconciliation project still leaves room for keeping funny beefs going.

I mean he's always beefed with math. Have you not heard New Number Order?

is everyone here familiar with the incredibly creepy shit he wrote in that german tour diary? i don't wanna go into specifics here as it's really dark, but you can google it if you like. i know he's taken ownership of a lot of the sketchy shit he did and said when he was younger, but i don't think he's ever addressed that and it's probably the most disturbing thing i've read about him. maybe he has addressed it, maybe it was just him being as provocative as possible but idk

My recollection of reading that diary is Albini as narrator is uncharacteristically taken aback with a tone of "this is some fucked up shit" even when he's an active participant.

In the more funny beefs column in the same diary, he didn't like Robocop because it wasn't dumb enough.

The original or remake?

he didn't like Robocop

So much for Albini's rehabilitation.

Possibly the legendary tour diary is linked elsewhere on this thread, but anyway you can have a chucklesome read of it here:
https://web.archive.org/web/19990220185254/http://http.tamu.edu:8000/~cwb2900/www/BBDiary.txt

I linked it a while back, it's definitely a big part of his contrition nowadays

It's not just that he's come clean about his bullshit, he actively works to help people. He's been delivering Christmas presents to needy kids for twenty something years and who knows what else he's done that he doesn't talk about.

OTM. This alone is far more than most people I know, but he's very politically active around Chicago, doing shit for the common good.

(I thought this PSA from a few years back was hilarious. Never would've pictured him doing something like this.)

*far more than what most people I know generally do

its fun to find the limits of which people do and dont receive grace

His big thing today (and my fault for not avoiding the discourse on Bluesky) is how terrible all music on the radio sounded in the 80s (“a bestiary of shit sound”); with side notes on why he hates Prince and the Rolling Stones.

He’s just so much That One Guy we’ve probably all known or worked with; and it bums me out to see such takes rewarded with so many eager responses rather than regarded with a shrug. But I the music conversation on social media is generally “take”-based, so he fits right in as a main character I guess.

(if his reasons for hating Prince and the Rolling Stones were interesting, it might be different, but it’s just “bad music,” etc.)

I think I’m just mildly triggered by dudes who very bluntly express “this is terrible, I hate it” opinions with little or no analysis (or interest in actually *talking* about it), and you can sense how much they relish doing it.

Im always reticent to express my extreme admiration for Steve Albini because his results, aesthetically, differ so extremely from the results of my own work, but his commentaries about music biz and methodology have informed me more bluntly and effectively than any other individual; I’ve maintained a no-royalties policy on collaborative work my entire life, for example. Nitpicking the digressions of an aging individual to find the cracks and break the pottery does not appeal to me in the least

Hmm I want to go into this more bc this feels like an unusually uncritical approach to someone who’s made this a cornerstone of his rhetorical approach for much of his career (and in more harmful ways in the past)

Hating Prince is a capital crime in Minnesota iirc

I'm guessing he just heard a Don Henley song in the CVS this morning and decided to be a crank about it. I've done worse.

Someone's going to emergency, the other's going to ILX

Because we can't embed bsky posts...

https://i.imgur.com/gJBCT3D.jpg

I don't know about the others, but I got the sense Albini's Prince-hate was informed more by Prince apparently beating women. There's a video where he's doing some weird commencement speech and he sort of randomly drops that in there, but that section was scrubbed and I always wondered if he walked that back or the venue did.

Fwiw, here’s his elaboration on Prince:

https://i.imgur.io/KMb0AgG_d.webp?maxwidth=640&shape=thumb&fidelity=medium

…and for completeness (since I mentioned both), the Stones:

https://i.imgur.io/lSH8YSg_d.webp?maxwidth=640&shape=thumb&fidelity=medium

It’s the snidely maximalist rhetorical flourishes that set me off, more than the opinions themselves (his take on ’80s production techniques could obv even be “interesting,” if it weren’t delivered in a way that just makes me think, “OK, man”).

fwiw he elsewhere scorns prince as being a shitty person and domestic abuser

which . . .

Music journalism, 1986: "The "R#peman" vocalist took time out from recording "Pray I Dont Kill You F#gg#t" with his "Run N#gg#r Run" project to express his distaste for Prince's attitudes towards women."

The true irony is that a lot of Electrical Audio's gear is from the 80's. Especially studio B

God, you guys

If he posted here you’d be like “ban St3ve Alb1ni” and be done with it

As a business consultant for lower tier musicians, let him speak. As any kind of critic- musical social or political, he has no cred.

As a rock (or music in general) critic, he just doesn’t have any really interesting takes even when I agree (as with his Steely Dan tweet and I’m sympathetic to hating the sound of ‘80s radio). His stance on everything is entirely predictable in the mode of early ‘80s record store guy.

Henry Rollins is the same sort of cranky guy but when he talks about music he’ll start praising plenty of stuff that doesn’t slot into the outward appearance of hardcore mook.

Litigating Steve Albini relitigating Prince to relitigate Steve Albini

Sidebar from Old Man Tweets at Cloud --
The Paul Giamatti show Billions latest episode inexplicably opens with a Shellac song. I wonder if they took Albini at his word that he'd prefer people not ask for his permission to use his music and do whatever they want with it as long as he doesn't have to get involved, and what the rest of the band might have to say about that.

Disappointing cantaloupe (morrisp) at 3:52 3 Sept 23

I think I’m just mildly triggered by dudes who very bluntly express “this is terrible, I hate it” opinions with little or no analysis (or interest in actually *talking* about it), and you can sense how much they relish doing it.

Sidebar from Old Man Tweets at Cloud --

I believe he was skeeting at the cloud, technically.

God, you guys

If he posted here you’d be like “ban St3ve Alb1ni” and be done with it

― Snoopy is a cat, who lives in a cage (flamboyant goon tie included), Sunday, September 3, 2023 12:32 AM (six hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

otm

I have no patience whatsoever for this dude