STEVE ALBINI

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)!

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.

JCLC – Wyman’s argument in that long piece is that he wrote about such artists constantly, and Albini was attacking a strawman by claiming he was hyping up bands like the Pumpkins (whom he didn’t even praise in the column SA was responding to), Urge (whom he apparently thought were great, for reasons unconnected from any commercial potential), and Phair (who was pretty marginal in “commercial” terms, and whom Wyman was into since she was a nobody).

Is that response accurate? Honestly asking…

(As a non-Chicagoan who only knows Urge from that corny Pulp Fiction cover, it seems weird to see them discussed as some sellout band. Looks like they had a minor rock hit?)

"Sister Havana," yeah.

Thanks for this Wyman piece. Excellent reading.

dire colorless shit

Oh, it had a color, lol.

Xxpost I definitely knew of UO as an underground act in the late 80s. I don’t know if they were any good then, but a lot noisier.

Albini produced an Urge album iirc, and said they didn’t know what the hell they were doing

Yeah, Wyman goes into detail in that piece about how those guys used to be tight, and then had a falling out (same with Wyman himself, apparently… It’s worth doing a Ctl-F for an incident involving Courtney Love)

UO and SP have always sucked, I was there

Liz Phair has always been great

corgan is an insufferable weirdo but smashing pumpkins were still a top tier 90s rock band, i'd easily take them over every single grunge act for instance. of course albini would hate them though lol, especially with corgan being pretty unashamedly open about his commercial ambitions

a top tier 90s rock band

hard disagree, sorry

JCLC – Wyman’s argument in that long piece is that he wrote about such artists constantly, and Albini was attacking a strawman by claiming he was hyping up bands like the Pumpkins (whom he didn’t even praise in the column SA was responding to), Urge (whom he apparently thought were great, for reasons unconnected from any commercial potential), and Phair (who was pretty marginal in “commercial” terms, and whom Wyman was into since she was a nobody).

it's hard not to revert into the heavy sectarianism of the time on this -- I have a FB friend who, when posting music he hated in the 80s, will say "I despised this then, but there was a war on" -- and it's a silly way to think of things, of course, but it's also metaphorically accurate. For people reading MRR, mapping out tour routes, booking their own shows, resisting the norms of the industry, the question of what the underground looked like, what it meant, what its values were, these seemed pressing. (Plus, the people reacting were very young, and while they were good at not sounding naive, young people are naive.)

With that sort of "I tend to inhabit a person whose opinions I no longer entirely share" caveat in place, the Wyman piece, while a great read, still seems full of things that bear scrutiny. For example:

Before Nirvana, pressure had been building a long time. Back in the 1980s, there were all these cool bands—the Pixies, Sonic Youth, the Replacements, Hüsker Dü, Black Flag, Fugazi—and gazillions more lost to history. Some of the music was tuneful, a subspecies of mainstream rock or even pop; some was harsher, with subject matter to match.

Here’s the thing, though. Whatever the sound, none of this stuff got played on commercial radio. Period.

Right -- that was the point of the underground: trying to build something different, avoiding commercial radio. "We lost the war," as my FB friend would put it -- few conceive of making less money and finding a smaller audience a price worth paying for underground purity now. But on our side, then, MRR was running pieces about, e.g., EMI's connection to the weapons industry. The whole world of mainstream success was regarded with severe skepticism, and it felt like there were other ways to make a living, reach people, and not have to feed that machine. The underground wanted to do things on handshakes and good will. Naive! But when it's working out, it's magic. Wyman is always-already beginning from the proposition "good music should find the largest audience possible." It's a deeply boomer stance, and it is, word for word, what the label guys said when they bought you dinner: "Don't you want your music to be heard by as many people as possible?" But those guys didn't actually mean "your music," they meant "the version of your music we think we can sell people, and pay you 18% per unit on." This stuff really rankled within an underground that was legitimately attempting to conceive of a self-sufficient economy, one involving independent labels, distribution cooperatives, tour routings that straight up did not exist before Black Flag and the Minutemen carved them out of a Thomas guide, 50/50 splits on sales (completely unthinkable on majors then and now; at least one big remaining indie who I know still pays exactly that).

But Wyman's position is, this underground music is actually infiltrating the culture, becoming viable - viability is great! That position was poison to people who sought to protect their scenes and to see them grow into new possibilities. Now, scenes actually can't be protected, they're ephemeral, the thing that actually kills them is time, nothing to be done about that. But for people who were and sometimes still are lifers in the underground, the consolation-prize quality of the music -- Pumpkins, Flaming Lips, what the Buttholes become instead of what the Buttholes were -- that was a bitter pill to swallow, because it's really just good old "nothing gold can stay," you know. So, Wyman's "I was already covering that stuff" is partially accurate, but ideologically, the more likely something was to have mainstream appeal, the more interesting it was to him. That's fine, but within a roiling scene facing centuries-old questions of what happens to scenes over time, it was a position worth interrogating at least, and, usually, attacking.

There's a great deal more in the Wyman piece with which I'd take issue but this I think is the framework that describes the tension.

JCLC, what makes Wyman's stance "deeply boomer" as opposed to a combination of "late capitalism" and an artist's ego?

JCLC, what makes Wyman's stance "deeply boomer" as opposed to a combination of "late capitalism" and an artist's ego?

It's the Jann Wenner stance exactly - we're changing the world by taking over the institutions, by putting our guys in the places where the old guard were. This is what the boomers will say to this day, what Wenner said I think in that cancel-me interview -- we changed the world, we changed the culture. Factions within the underground of the time differed on this question, of "changing things from the inside" (very common phrase then, and the one I think of as boomer) vs. "building our own structures" (these did & do tend to rely on already extant structures, whether actual IRL space "structures" like VFW halls or business structures like chains of distribution or the post office). but the boomer stance is absolutely "the system is fine, it's just that the wrong people are running it," imo, and that's Wyman all day, who thinks the good people are in charge once they're putting out records he likes.

That makes sense.

"We're replacing Ike with the New Frontier!"

I remember when it was controversial that Matador signed a distribution deal with Atlantic (where, incidentally, Bettina was working before she started Thrill Jockey). But I've also heard the stories of, say, Husker Du being on tour and unable to find copies of "Zen Arcade" in the shops. (I also know the thrill of, c. this exact period of time, coming across someone with a cache of TMG cassette releases on Shrimper).

It's the Jann Wenner stance exactly - we're changing the world by taking over the institutions, by putting our guys in the places where the old guard were. This is what the boomers will say to this day, what Wenner said I think in that cancel-me interview -- we changed the world, we changed the culture.

But Wyman doesn't say thise(?) He says that Cobain wondered why it wasn't cool to be heard on the radio, like his rock heroes were, etc. I mean, I'm not a boomer myself, and this is exactly how I felt about a band like R.E.M. becoming popular when I was in high school – I thought it was great! And not for anything to do with "changing the culture," but b/c they deserved to be heard by as many ppl as possible.

If anything, in that long 2016 piece, Wyman seems (or at least claims to be) totally uninterested in the system that results in records being put out, and is solely focused on the records themselves. I'm sure there's a valid critique of that position, but it's not the Wenner schtick at all.

yeah, aero, I think you're reading way more into Wyman than he admitted in his essay -- unless you know him or are referring to other essays. He doesn't even come off particularly starry-eyed or idealistic here.

yeah, aero, I think you're reading way more into Wyman than he admitted in his essay

it could be! I don't know him, but I am sort of rehearsing the feeling "we" (I was very small potatoes at the time) felt about it. I'm beginning from the bit I quoted:

Here’s the thing, though. Whatever the sound, none of this stuff got played on commercial radio. Period.

to which I think the scene's response, and one I still agree with, honestly, is: so what? How is that important? When you make this point, do you not assert "it's good to get commercial radio play, bands matter more when they get that" -- which is a bullshit assertion, bands can and did make seismic changes without a single commercial radio spin. Even leaving the indie neighborhood aside, metal, at the same time and in fact a little earlier, was proving the same point: commercial radio doesn't matter to a scene, it's immaterial.

Yeah, tbf, when the alt rock thing happened it's not like I upped my radio listening or anything knowing I might hear REM mixed in with Verve Pipe or Candlebox or Marcy Playground.

like, and this sort of thing:

The next six months or so, as expectations grew for the release of the album, were delightful. I had the tape and could lord my possession of it over everyone else. I tracked Phair’s every local appearance and delighted in the exasperation I sometimes heard. Phair and I kept talking, always as reporter and subject, and all of the conversations were taped. I knew the record would be a critic’s darling, but in Phair herself you could see the makings of an actual star.

expectations grew...where? among whom? for what, exactly? it's clear (and it's fine! just trying to frame things here) that for him this was an exciting time in which an artist whose work he likes is about to break big. that's a familiar energy, narratively, people dig it. except in the underground, where they hate it, and not because they're jealous, either.

I think he says the thing about commercial radio to make his point that Albini is being narrow-minded by disparaging these artists’, well, artistry, and asserting that they’re just trying to hit it big:

If these three artists didn’t have their own sound in their heads, they would have all behaved much differently and recorded much different albums. Urge wasn’t pretending to be grunge; Phair wasn’t pretending to be Madonna; Corgan wasn’t pretending to be the Cure. What I said in the essay was incontrovertible: Here were three artists who had some semblance of artistic integrity, who were trying to make their way in a complex world and displayed the neuroses to prove it.

I think it's really a stretch to claim that UO in particular had "some semblance of artistic integrity", they always wanted to be big/make money and was about it

Well I can’t speak to Urge, but we’ve talked on here a lot about how R.E.M. were always very clear that they were aiming big. Does that mean they don’t also have artistic integrity? Aren’t they a definition of a band that found success while maintaining it? Albini seems to think these are mutually exclusive; Wyman (and many of us music fans) don’t…

I disagree with literally your entire worldview, we've done this before

We have(?) Interesting

I guess to cement it – to me, it’s self-evident why it would be exciting to see an artist like Phair poised for success; and I can’t wrap my head around the “underground” idea that it would be bad for audiences outside a particular scene to hear great music.

probably instructive to read the column to which Albini is responding, Wyman's initial shot across the bow: https://chicagoreader.com/music/not-from-the-underground-1993-in-review-hitsvilles-top-ten/

The line on Chicago’s 1993 contributions to the national pop firmament–Liz Phair, the Smashing Pumpkins, and Urge Overkill–is that they’ve in effect agreed to disagree on musical approaches, making for a fractured “scene” with little cohesion. This is true, but their stylistic differences mask the philosophical ground that unites them and seems likely to influence a second wave of bands from Chicago in 1994: an explicit rejection of much of the insularity that increasingly characterizes underground music and the fringes of underground music in America.

this is probably what sets him off; the conclusion of that graf --

Yet each artist had to grapple with what’s supposed to be a dichotomy between being popular and beeing “alternative.” Once it became apparent that the line between the two was blurring, the rear guard from the underground–which I would define as deliberately nonpop, whereas I guess alternative would be relatively personal music that doesn’t necessarily exclude pop–tried not only to keep them clear, but to make a big deal about which side of the line you were on. This, of course, is bullshit, and these artists took a stand and the resulting heat to prove it.

is the one Albini refers to repeatedly in his letter. I personally still think "the line is blurring" is a false claim -- an alternative is necessarily something other than what's popular, until somebody says "no, 'alternative' is a category" -- but that act doesn't actually "blur the line," is just appropriates actually descriptive language in order to exploit its commercial potential. these, again, are the issues which, for Chicago undeground people in the clubs seeing bands better than the Pumpkins, Urge, & Phair multiple times a week in '93, rankle & inspire overheated responses.

like, another way of describing the Chicago scene at that time is there were those who viewed it as a springboard to international fame & success, and those for whom the work, while sometimes happily profitable, is decidedly not that -- for whom the point is largely local. and Chicago, at that time, was right there at the middle the "next Seattle?" lottery candidates, with Wicker Park rents climbing & hip storefronts going in, etc., stuff that wouldn't happen in Wmsburg for several years yet. Wyman found it exciting to be at a nexus like that, to be listening and writing in such a moment. Fair enough! Others liked what was weird and different and non-viable about the scene, and believed to some extent that lines between the mainstream and "what we do" were worth policing.

lol speaking of Wicker Park, this seems relevant

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2nMPaOEB_QI

I've been listening to a lot of excellent recent "egg punk" and the willful obscurity of many key participants (the song above being a great example) seems like it fits in to this discussion somehow

Also with several noteworthy exceptions we don’t need to trot out to prove me wrong, it was largely a sausage party to use the parlance of the times.

Had to say it and I’m not trying to derail but I can’t let it go! The sausage party was all there was unless you had the wherewithal of say Liz Phair and her endurance for tolerating insults. I think that was the article where the author called her a “weird woman in a bar”

yeah there is no denying that at all. it was a deeply, deeply bro scene

Might be relevant, might not, that much of the "scene" (as such) in Chicago at the time, from the Albini/Touch & Go crew to the Baffler People's Front, actively pushed back pretty hard at the next Seattle claims, at least as I remember it. A lot of the bands that bore the hipster/snob (I was a snob) brunt did so I suspect because in part they successfully bypassed their gatekeeping to leap to the front of the pack. Where, of course, a lot of the hipsters/snobs didn't want to be, anyway. There was this real dismissal of the usual suspects as being suburban interlopers, or the bands that signed deals being unworthy/untested/unproven (not to diss, I dunno, Fig Dish). I would talk to publicists all the time about Chicago bands, and when I asked where they were from they'd say, like, Naperville.

Albini's had a refrain that no, we weren't these anti-success scolds and actually everyone was happy when someone in the scene found success and broader exposure, and even made a point to bring it up in the Conan interview, so is this revisionism? Who were people unreservedly happy about making it big if not the careerists? I'm guessing B-52s? Devo?

(not to diss, I dunno, Fig Dish)

I lol'd

I agree with everything JCLC has said in this thread today, ftr; it tracks 100% with my experiences on the NY/NJ hardcore scene, within the late 80s/early 90s metal scene, and as a distant observer of the NYC underground (Sonic Youth/Pussy Galore/Swans/early White Zombie et al.). The point was absolutely not to "have hit records", not even hit records "on your own terms", whatever the hell that could possibly mean; the point was to make your sound and get it in the hands of the few dozen freaks who wanted/needed exactly that singular weird thing at that time.

So how did the scenesters respond to SY’s success?

fwiw afaict liz phair herself never asked to be part of the "scene", never shared its values, was always shameless about wanting success on her own terms and was only kind of accidentally "indie" by virtue of her early songs being weird and lo-fi (unless some of that is her own later revisionism) so the weirdly personal and blatantly gendered reaction from the pigfuckers seems to be based on a category error and maybe some resentment that she seemed to be "bypassing" their whole system

I agree with that take on Phair, also she got a big early boost from the fanzine community similar to e.g. Daniel Johnston in a "these tapes are great you gotta hear them" way so there was definitely some (deserved) indie cred there

DJ of course is another person who clearly stated their desire for stardom from the get-go