STEVE ALBINI

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

It’s hard to imagine having a coherent underground scene in as big a city as Chicago.

Billy Corgan came from a pretty working class family, iirc. Per the Bruce Adams passage, Corgan may be a dork but no one could say the dude didn't hustle for his success.

It makes me like a organ a bit more to know that noise scencesters were threatened by his music

Ha Corgan

ah time for the quarterly Albini debate

Within 2 years of that letter he flew to Abbey Road to record Bush, he's fairly pliable with his ethics/taste crossover.

Billy's apparently moved onto threatening the pro-wrestling community -- I wonder who else would have been involved in both besides Bob Mould?

Chris Jericho?

Oh I just remembered CM Punk finagled Albini into doing his horror movie soundtrack.

Rick Rubin is a huge wrestling guy.

he's not that big

Fuckers in school telling me, always in the barber shop
"Nash Kato ain't 'bout this, Kato ain't 'bout that"
My boy a BD on fucking Electtic Audio and them
He, he, they say that slut don't be putting in no work
Shut the fuck up, y'all ain't know shit
All y'all motherfuckers talkin' about
"Nash Kato ain't no hitter, Nash Kato ain't this, Nash Kato a fake"
Shut the fuck up, y'all don't deal with Touch & Go
Y'all know that he got caught with a ratchet
Shootin' at the police and shit
He been on probation since fuckin' I don't know when
Motherfucker, stop fuckin' playin' him like that
That band savages out there
If I catch another motherfucker talking sweet about Nash Kato
I'm fucking beatin' they ass, I'm not fucking playin' no more
Know them sluts roll with Liz Phair and them

https://www.horrorgeeklife.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/Randy-Savage-Vinyl.jpg

Urge Overkill may suck, but "Sister Havana" is a jam imo

They do not suck.

scene fragility is always a thing. everyone likes it when people are skipping rocks across the water, people get upset when someone just chucks a big rock in and disrupts what they thought was a calm surface

Within 2 years of that letter he flew to Abbey Road to record Bush, he's fairly pliable with his ethics/taste crossover.

He has said that the huge fee for the Bush album helped him subsidize Electrical Audio and keep costs lower for Indie bands.

He’s not selling out.. he’s buying in!

The Smashing Pumpkins have been recording at Electrical Audio recently fwiw.

Sluts

“Recorded and produced at Electric Audio p/b Bush”

The rates are very reasonable!

Probably just repeating the points from the the good JCLC posts upthread, but the Wyman pieces linked here really are shot through with a subtext of "Isn't it cool these folks will be rich and famous soon!" that I find off-putting.

It's not hard to detect a "the local scene is the minor leagues, and I care about the major leagues" tone, which annoys me, but especially when the local scene in question is Chicago in the 90s

That's not even getting into the whole "Courtney Love tried to lure me into Nash Kato kicking my ass" stuff in the retrospective piece, or referring to Humboldt Park as "Urge Overkill Territory"

Who could forget the famous Urge Overkill/Latin Kings alliance?

ah time for the quarterly Albini debate

feels kind of like we're on an every 2-3 month cycle with this lately

I still think about that time somebody direct messagef me on America Online in like 1998 because I was in a chat room about the breeders

he said hi I'm Steve Albini, I was curious to see you in this chat room, I'm trying to find out more about what people think about this music

and I gave him my thoughts

I always wonder, it couldn't have really been him. but also, to what end would a person have lied about that. the '90s!

well there wasn't a whole lot more to do online in the 90s

Albini was on the chugchanga-l mailing list in ‘94-‘95 as I recall