STEVE ALBINI

Except they're not, because he sternly chided them for moshing and crowd-surfing.

"Oh noes, Steve doesn't like some bleep-blorp music! We need a thinkpiece!"

Pretty sure the Quietus thing does not qualify as a thinkpiece.

It doesn't but I am assuming one is coming

that mackaye interview was excellent thank you.

Thinking it's weird and acting all baffled because someone articulated the view that club culture is stupid and detestable is baffling and weird. A firmly entrenched view that clubs and dance music are unassailable is much more bizarre.

Albini surmised that someone was just trying to scrape up a bit of interest in their record. Rote response from him. Bingo! Get the Quietus to scratch a tiny piece of content out of this pretend-beef, without which the story would be "someone just made another house record".

― everything, Tuesday, September 29, 2015 1:42 PM (5 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is otm.

i like quite a bit of albini's projects.

powell using the email correspondence as a tongue-in-cheek marketing scheme is pretty off-putting. i'm interested to see what he does with it in the music video.

Powell makes techno, not house. There's a world of difference

It also sounds quite a lot like Cab Vol, SPK and DAF (sort of)

'It' being the music that Powell makes

to the last, i grapple with club culture; from hell's heart, i stab at club culture; for hate's sake, i spit my last breath at club culture

I do think that its noteworthy that he does not seemed to have budged an inch from 1986 or so. I suppose the club culture that he would have had more proximity to would be…like, white people with peacock-ish haircuts dancing to Information society, maybe?

Not that what he dislikes is indivisible from black culture, but he seems to completely lack any inclination to engage with black music post…like what exactly? There was this oral history of whichever Tortoise record awhile back, where one of the guys related talking to him about house music or a remix or something to him, and he was indignant or bewildered that anyone would do such a thing. and while I was around him once or twice growing up in and being peripherally involved in the 80s Louisville scene, the first I ever heard of him was in Spin, inveighing somewhat questionably about "beatbox rap."

Powell sounds like the whitest thing ever tbh.

Big Black covered James Brown.

Also Rick James.

I suppose covering the odd r'n'b standard is still considered pretty rad in some parts:p

facebook discussion on Xhukk's page mentions that indeed Powell makes the kinda shit he might dig.

he simply couldn't simply say "yes" or "no thank you." he had to pedantically explain his decades-old grudge against music intended for dancing to a guy who likes what he does but who he had to cast as his ideological opponent. not consonant with his more avuncular role as a facilitator for younger musicians…gotta be G/B/D, I guess.

he obviously did this guy a favor by giving him a shitload of free PR, idg how this can be interpreted any other way

he gets to a) play the role of "Steve Albini" (which he clearly enjoys) and b) this guy gets a ton of attention, it's a win-win

and everyone is stupider

I'm gonna go check out electrical audio boards… I reckon he will have no opposition as such today…

why would anyone ever do that for any reason

Is this really a shitload of free PR and a ton of attention? Pretty sure Powell gets more press at this point than Albini does.

well I'd never heard of him before

(not that that's indicative of anything than my own cloistered existence)

go to electrical audio? when his stans are not sucking his dick or complaining about the 80s/90s midwest milieu having passed its prime, it can be pretty interesting, particularly from a gear perspective, which ILM doesn't rilly fuck with. they love to talk about "Tone attorneys," the lawyers who go to chicago blues bars, venerate Eric Johnson and buy paul reed smiths and rare aluminum guitars that those guys can't afford.

"why would anyone" go to EA?…xpost

oh cool a sausagefest inside a sausagefest

nah i'm being a smartass i'm sure the gear talk is great.

anyway powell is ok and also "white" in the sense that a lot of white dudes in the uk and germany are reverent about detroit and chicago, also part of a club culture of which there are many all over the world, many more in fact than there are of aging midwestern u.s. blowhard cultures.

idk about that aging midwestern US blowhards still seem to be kicking a lot of ass afaict

well I'd never heard of him before

I hadn't either and what I heard through laptop speakers while eating lunch sounded great (also in the vein of the noisy stuff Albini likes)!

he has a track called 'Wharton Tiers on Drums'

Obviously it's weird for him to go on an unsolicited rant, but perhaps he's responding to something specific in the original email. Who knows? I'm just glad that Albini's back to being predictably Albini! It got confusing there for a while, what with his cooking blog and his pro-streaming interviews!

I guess my core idea of "Albini-isms" is colored by all the homophobic shit he said in interviews in the '80s, y'know, when that was still cool.

― incredibly middlebrow (Dr Morbius), Tuesday, October 4, 2011 10:50 AM (3 years ago)

club culture has never meant dick to me either but ymmv

there's so much music that's part of 'club culture' but also working against it that's just as noisy and underground as he wants, but who cares.

yeah, it seems like he would like it, unless nothing can change his unbending, reflexive disdain the ostensible means by which it was produced…

SA responds to on board: the guy who challenges him is not a native english speaker and so there is some mild condescension from Albini's sycophants…

http://www.electricalaudio.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=66456

"What I said is that I hate club music and culture, and always have. That's it.

I also hate the Tea Party and its culture. I hate Football and its culture. I hate the White Power movement and its culture. I hate shopping malls and their culture. I hate the Confederacy and its culture. I hate fancy restaurants and foodie culture. I hate reality TV and whatever culture it displays or inspires. I hate pop music and its culture."

can we poll steve's hates?

too many poptimists on ilxor. "i hate pop music and its culture" will win because snark

somewhere on that EA thread, albs expands on what it is that he dislikes:

I am objecting to the music and the timewasting/preening/showoff/drugging/profiteering/status-seeking/taxonomically-obsesseive/faddish/stylistically rigid/conceptually barren aspects of club culture, and again, the unbearably stupid music. If it has emancipatory potential, that would be great and I couldn't possibly object to it.

I love, for example, the way disco gave the gay community an avenue into mainstream culture and a platform for unironic flamboyance. Hated discos themselves and the much larger non-gay disco audience of silk shirt cokeheads, ditzy chicks and the upper crust having a spin. Hated it hated it hated it. That music was fucking awful. Those clubs were hell. Those people and the mob that profited off them were the fucking worst. Nice one Sylvester.

This correspondence had similar overtones, but it's about the ethics of civet poop coffee
http://sprudge.com/a-letter-from-steve-albini-39266.html

LIKES: civet poop coffee
DISLIKES: civet abuse

if anyone is in the have-opinions-for-money game and isn't too busy today there could be a good hot take fashioned out of Steve Albini and Claire Danes' respective attitudes to club culture

I like a lot of the music that Albini hates but dance clubs stress me out so I can't fault him for feeling the way he does

"What I said is that I hate club music and culture, and always have. That's it.

I also hate the Tea Party and its culture. I hate Football and its culture. I hate the White Power movement and its culture. I hate shopping malls and their culture. I hate the Confederacy and its culture. I hate fancy restaurants and foodie culture. I hate reality TV and whatever culture it displays or inspires. I hate pop music and its culture."

Man is a culture denier huh? #corbynJokes

"stylistically rigid"

says the guy who has been making the same record for the last 30 years.

Yeah, if there's ever a word that encapsulates Albini and his MO it's rigid.

I think Albini's response is pretty spot on, actually, although obviously I love a lot of dance music. He let the guy do what he wanted to do, and gave him material for a video and ad out of it to boot (albeit inadvertently). I'm just amused by the fact that it's a story that Albini hates club music and club culture: of course he does, he's got one of the most dyed-in-the-wool aesthetics of any musician ever, and he's been a crotchety old man about what he believes in since his 20s.

http://i.imgur.com/UMveCfs.jpg

he would not be kissin' up to gays in his 20s; i was there

i think there is something sorta charming about having this position in 2015

― ♛ LIL UNIT ♛ (thomp), Tuesday, September 29, 2015 8:26 AM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

really? what if Billy Corgan said the same thing? ... .... ... .. .

Wonder if he also hates metal for being similarly "stylistically rigid".

probably!