STEVE ALBINI

taking sides: chilling with peak insanity Gibby vs peak asshole Albini

there was an extensive Kramer interview covering, in part, his tenure in the Surfers, but it appears to have been scrubbed from the internet, it was the defunct believermag dot com site

lots of harrowing Gibby madness documented

― out-of-print LaserDisc edition (sleeve), Monday, November 6, 2023 12:36 PM (four minutes ago)

this one?
https://www.thebeliever.net/logger/three-questions-for-kramer/

thank you, yes! a great read

taking sides: chilling with peak insanity Gibby vs peak asshole Albini

This is no contest, I wouldn’t even want to hang with kinder gentler current Albini.

be careful with using the word "kinder" and "Albini" in the same sentence unless you want to end up on a list

Gibby is a great guy!

I've been lurking this thread for years and it suddenly occurred to me that I don't care about this guy or his music at all. Going to feel good to remove this bookmark!

Posted this in an Nirvana thread, but there was a pretty great interview last week on Conan Needs a Friend w/Albini, Grohl and Novoselik. Worth it to hear them recollect Albini impersonating Cobain and prank calling Gene Simmons, Eddie Vedder and Evan Dando during the In Utero sessions.

omg Whiney

That Kramer article was a good read.

Mike Judge should do a Butthole Surfers movie ala "Tales from the Tour Bus". It is a Texas story.

Albini's one of the few guys who I think actually figured out a way to atone for his past edgelordy behavior so I'm not sure what Gibby is getting at here. everyone knows he used to be like that

Kramer article was indeed awesome, thanks.

Kramer should write a book, preferably including a lengthy ranting chapter about the messy Bongwater break-up. Then another chapter devoted entirely to analysing the work of The Tinklers.

I'd love a chapter about The Tinklers!

Holy shit, I was going to just skim it but there is so much there! Someone should Kickstart a Kramer memoir.

haha glad everyone is enjoying that interview, it is indeed great

"I. Fucking. Quit. This. Stupid. Band"

the best thing i've read in a while

I love things where the person has visited several different musical worlds and is able to describe the feeling of being in each one. Fred Wesley’s Hit Me Fred: Recollections of a Sideman and Joe Boyd’s White Bicycles both come to mind.

the bit at the end about gibby et al being solid gold and not being afraid of death was righteous and made me choke up a little. also love how he is awestruck by paul's guitar solo at the oil kids concert. also he looks pretty blazed in that photo with caetano veloso lol.

xpost OTM, those books rule.

Wonder if Gibby has read page 281 of Miki Berenyi's book.

Why, what's on page 281 of Miki Berenyi's book?

A poop smear

That Kramer article is all time, thanks for sharing. Got some butthole educating to do from here

Educate your butthole.

BhD

Psychic... Powerless... Another Man's SAT

that BH section of the article is like um, dirtbag rocknroll Blood Meridian. i never messed with BH they didn't seem like they were for me maybe i should investigate

i saw rick moody and was "no way THAT rick moody"? ha i lived through his ice storm and he name checks my mom's 70s store in it, freaked out my 1993 brain

As part of the annual WPRB Christmas charity drive, Neal Markowski recorded a four-track EP of Christmas-themed Big Black covers that are brilliant and hilarious. Proceeds go to the One Tail at a Time Pet Mutual Relief Fund, a charity that helps people out with pet-related expenses.

Holiday Cheer Where You Need It

https://f4.bcbits.com/img/a3520026086_16.jpg

Great stuff

christmas tree around
that's something to do

See, see, see I’m a drummer boy. I kill what I eat.

Pretty good Liz Phair zinger from a 1994 Guitar World interview:

GW: Producer Steve Albini seems to be conducting an inquisition, dissing first Nirvana, and Courtney Love, then your friends in Urge, and now he calls you a “slut”. Any comments?

PHAIR: Oh, what does it matter? Supposedly he has some kind of metal plate in his shin, and one of these days…

GW: The electromagnetic principle?

PHAIR: Yeah, I keep waiting for him to attract lightning or something.

and now he calls you a “slut”

ilm hero steve albini

Referring to this letter I imagine

https://chicagoreader.com/news-politics/three-pandering-sluts-and-their-music-press-stooge/

well actually he is only using slut metaphorically to refer to the selling out of the indie scene so it's not misogyny is an actual argument I have seen people make online

I hope he dies soon

He seems like an alright guy these days and I can forgive his past mistakes as he seems apologetic for most of it — plenty of people were edgelords in the 90s and 00s (go back and look at some of the early posts on this very message board for easily obtained evidence) and at least he owns up to it instead of pretending it never happened. Also, he does indeed use “slut” to describe Liz Phair, Smashing Pumpkins, and Urge Overkill simultaneously in the sense that that they brazenly commercialize their music in order to sell records. Sure, that usage still might not fly today but it’s also not what might get implied out of context.

Well he sneers that Phair is “more talked about than heard” (as opposed to, what, Big Black?) – so I guess she can’t win if it’s bad she also tries to sell records(?)

Anyway, Wyman (in the column he’s responding to) writes:

Few would question what I guess would be called the artistic integrity of any of these acts: yet they’ve avoided (Phair), criticized (Pumpkins), or loudly abandoned (Urge) the harshness, vontrariness, and machismo of the underground in favor of a professed desire to sell records.

And y'know, I can get that the Pumpkins may not have been his bag, but he can't deny that the band and Vig put a hella lotta work into an album that was meant to express something personal (to Corgan) and connect w/people... you'd think he would at least respect that(?) And even if he thinks Phair is "a fucking chore to listen to," isn't she a genuinely "independent" artist expressing herself in a unique way? (I have no idea what "a persona completely unrooted in substance" means.)

It really feels like it's all about aesthetics to him. Like, it's just b/c they're not loud & abrasive(?)

As a side note, it's kinda funny to compare what Corgan said the same year – "People don't fall in love to Pavement... they put on Smashing Pumpkins or Hole or Nirvana, because these bands actually mean something to them" – with Albini dismissing the Pumpkins as "stylistically appropriate for the current college party scene, but ultimately insignificant." It's like this recursive pit of "authenticity"-posturing.

That posturing was everywhere in those days and it suuuuuucked

replaced by “identity” posturing. harder to fake (?), still unreliable, still annoying.

For anyone curious, here's Wyman's belated 2013 follow-up to that whole brouhaha:

https://music.newcity.com/2016/03/31/liz-phair-steve-albini-me-the-true-story-of-1993-the-greatest-goddamn-year-in-chicago-rock-history/

In January 1994 Liz Phair is already accused of "commercializing" her music?

It was a different time, lol. I actually remember all that stuff really well, since it was my first year here. It was the peak of "sell out" snobbery. (Which I'm going to posit ended in 2001, after Jonathan Franzen refused to promote "The Corrections" on Oprah.)

the thing to remember is how much many of us really hated that music that seemed real great to everybody else, esp. Urge & the Pumpkins. I still hate that music! Viscerally! when people say eg

the band and Vig put a hella lotta work into an album that was meant to express something personal (to Corgan) and connect w/people

like, ok, but to me that music is utterly dire, just the worst shit in the world. awful -- and it's what we get when the underground surfaces -- that, or, even worse, Urge? for people who'd been digging a pretty killer Chicago scene, that sucked, and that was I think the crux of SA's letter to Wyman: "Artists who survive on hype are often critic’s pets. They don’t, however, make timeless, classic music that survives trends and inspires generations of fans and other artists. There are artists in Chicago doing just that, but you don’t write about them. You save your zeal instead for this year’s promo fixtures." There was a lot of interesting shit goin on in Chicago, but the people who got paid...were BC & Nash Kato. Awful! His dismissal of Phair I think is blinkered by the hype, which was pretty pitched, although I knew a lot of people who thought the Girly-Sound tapes were great and the stuff she did with that material was dull. But Urge Overkill and the Smashing Pumpkins, hating on them is God's work, they're still the worst

something about new left radicalism disintegrating into various isolated local fiefdoms more concerned with policing themselves than in social transformation, and the attendant values into empty and arbitrary signifiers of taste and power and identity and belonging and exclusion

and then I guess something about the final victory of neoliberalism in sweeping all that away too and the associated economic precarity making all this integrity posturing look like the sort of elite indulgence which was probably always a big part of it anyway

idk enough about those bands and their music to hate or defend them but albini's own projects are some really dire colourless shit which I predict will continue not to connect with people in the way that phair's music will (I have soured on her personally lately for a few reasons but her work will continue to be generative and albini will only ever come off worse in spite of his deathbed conversions)

For anyone curious, here's Wyman's belated 2013 follow-up to that whole brouhaha:

Josh, thanks for this link, that was really interesting to read.

I'm a bit more pleased this kind of policing is having a semi-revival (in the form of a suspiciousness of "industry plants" or whatever), and I'd argue rather necessary but it's really weird that re: albini vs urge, it's rarely brought up that they used to be roommates (who did dire colorless shit together)!