STEVE ALBINI

"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

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

by yawning at Goo and moving on to idk Sebadoh or something, again speaking as someone who was there at the time

hell most of my friends yawned at Daydream Nation!

I did not, I loved that shit, but it wasn't until Dirty that I got fully back on board

"few conceive of making less money and finding a smaller audience a price worth paying for underground purity now."

everybody i know who makes music seems fine with this price. western mass for the indie win! except for Dinosaur. they seem to just get bigger every year. they are neil younging the legacy thing. or Stonesing it.
though i doubt anyone i know would use the word "purity" to describe themselves in any way. they just stayed underground. MV + EE for the win!

https://www.discogs.com/release/7770176-The-Coneheads-Colekted-Mix

"This tape will remain in print as long as necessary for 3$. Buying it from any other source for more than 3$ is a waste of your money. Fuck the Discogs nerds, fuck boutique collector culture punk & fuck the Coneheads for not making this sooner. <3 rex inc."

Have:15
Want:174

lol listen on youtube like all the kids do these days

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

I can only speak for myself. I'd heard Sister first, then Confusion Is Sex, then Sonic Death (I traded cassettes with a kid, giving him my copy of Cro-Mags' Age Of Quarrel; each of us thought we got the better of the deal), and when Daydream Nation came out I bought it on CD and it felt like they were getting "big"; I mean, they were on TV! I read about them in Rolling Stone! I saw them open for Neil Young & Crazy Horse! But I didn't like Goo, not because it was on a major label but because it was not as good, and I thought Dirty was fucking terrible, so I just stopped paying attention. But even though SY themselves "graduated" from the NYC underground to being on a major label, the members of Sonic Youth were still around. Thurston Moore would bring noise side projects into the Cooler, or show up at a Peter Brötzmann show at Tonic, or whatever. So they were never cast out as apostates, they were like your friend who gets a good-paying job but he's still your friend.

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

i listened to Goo once and that was it for me. just started listening to Unsane and Eyehategod and anything on Earache instead i guess. for my noiserock fix. or 90s swans. who ruled.

SY always boosted other lesser-known bands, their love of the underground never went away

so kinda like the friend with a good job who buys you a nice dinner every once in a while, or maybe even gets you a job too

e.g. Thurston and Beck playing freakin MASONNA on 120 minutes circa 1994

Btw, I just listened to the first few tracks of UO's Saturation, and... I guess ya had to be there. (It sure doesn't sound like "Oingo Boingo (Weiners in suits playing frat party rock, trying to tap a goofy trend that doesn’t even exist)"; but nor do I hear the offbeat creativity that Wyman writes about. It's fairly generic rock!)

yeah SY people weirdly never lost any cred. cuz they were still into the art thing even back when they were supposed to be rock stars. when i think of all the tiny diy shows that thurston played in the valley here before moving away...nobody needs to do all that unless they are noise lifers. they are liferscenesterhalloffame.

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 don't think this is precisely right although I didn't hear about her until she'd already signed to Matador -- but she was on Feel Good All Over, was hanging out with Brad Wood, asked around and got told "Matador is a cool indie label" per her Wikipedia. "Category error" is a good term here though because I think a lot of reaction to her success was from people who had loved her 4-track shit and thought she was part of team indie when she was just doing stuff and looking for her next move, and that's more on them than on her.

Fwiw, she sent those tapes everywhere – Teenbeat, etc. Matador was the label that stepped up.

I can't really recall the T&G or Drag City crew jumping into any of the early '90s purity debates, but I can't believe either label was neutral. But then, I was surprised at how relatively magnanimous Bruce Adams from Kranky was in his memoir/book "You're with Stupid." Here's a good passage:

The poster at Jim’s Grill told a small part of the tale. It showed Smashing Pumpkins posed at the back of their van, equipment stacked up, with “ON TOUR NOW” emblazoned at the bottom. A white rectangle extends across the bottom of the poster, a standard design element that allowed local promoters to fill in show details. The quartet was doing their roadwork, “getting in the van,” to paraphrase the book by Black Flag’s Henry Rollins. Smashing Pumpkins played the same venues as ostensibly “cooler” bands did. They played for free at the tiny Blackout Records store. Their mix of ’70s arena rock gestures and bubblegum pop was no more or less legit than that peddled at the time by other bands. Why then was animosity directed toward the band? It grew as the Pumpkins’ trajectory upward became more and more apparent.

Was it because Billy Corgan was reputed to be “difficult”? He didn’t bother to hide his ambitions, or his artistic control over the band and what he later called an “attack posture.” Smashing Pumpkins were quickly taken on as management clients by Joe Shanahan, owner of the Cabaret Metro club—the venue every band wanted to play. Choice bookings at the club followed. One example was opening for English punk rock legends the Buzzcocks in November 1989, a highly coveted gig.

When I was 43, working at Touch & Go, the Minneapolis trio Arcwelder opened for a Smashing Pumpkins show at Metro and were eager to display and mock a list of requests from Corgan posted on the door of the band rooms backstage that began with an entreaty for silence in the dressing rooms before Smashing Pumpkins played. It was a demanding and controlling list, but Arcwelder did accept Corgan’s invitation to open the show. Their house, their rules.

Was the source of the hostility that Smashing Pumpkins avoided the gatekeepers? In fact, they jumped the gate altogether, scoring a Sub Pop single and then signing with the quasi-indie Caroline Records and positioning themselves to move up to major label status. There was no lip service offered to any independent ethos, no mea culpas for arena ambitions.

Say what you want about the music or Corgan as a person, Smashing Pumpkins presented their fans with carefully considered branding and packaging that obviously reflected Corgan’s interests and aesthetics.

Adams also quotes someone who makes this good observation, contrasting Seattle with Chicago: “Nobody came to Chicago to sound like Smashing Pumpkins or Liz Phair.”

Adams also writes a lot about Phair, btw. As I remember it, a lot of the reaction to Phair was as rockist as it was sexist. That she couldn't sing, or couldn't play, and needed Brad Wood to cobble together her album. Her first released credit I think was singing with Ashtray Boy (who were on Feel Good All Over), and as I heard it it took forever to get her vocal take. That's pretty small potatoes, imo, but maybe accounted for some of the resentment when she took off.

Here's Wyman's original piece on Guyville, which he links to in that 2016 essay and says was the first interview w/Phair... it's worth reading the final paragraphs, b/c all of Phair's quotes are really something (and pertinent to the discussion).

thanks those are some great quotes

although the whole "is writing about monogamy/romance/hot sex/bad sex feminist?" thing is painfully 90s and I hope we're over that now

I'm sure another factor in the reaction to her was rock dudes being uncomfortable with the mirror she holds up to them in the lyrics. she totally has their number

(I don't know the class dynamics of these scenes but I assume that was also a factor. she's very easy to like in that article but there are some very rich white feminist moments in her memoir which has complicated my fandom a bit. I think albini might actually now be better than her at saying the right PC things and I don't know what to do with that thought)

i don't know if there's much of a class distinction between the players in this piece--they're pretty much universally from upper middle class (or higher) backgrounds as far as I can tell

rich kids with transgression fetishes vs rich kids who are always already woke because they went to a fancy college

My take is: edge lord Albini is an annoying twerp that should stfu and woke Albini is annoying boomer that should stfu.

young albini should write an angry noise song about what a p-whipped f-word old albini has become

somebody shoulda posted about isentity posturing upthread lol

identity

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.

To Left's point above, in my experience, class difference is often a factor here, too. Of course, Liz Phair disproves this theory somewhat