STEVE ALBINI

I kid. A Dead Milkmen lyric

_I wonder how much of this just comes down to “I don’t like to dance and as such this music is confusing to me”_


This was definitely an obstacle for me until I bought a drum machine and started trying to make electronic music - no one can see you dance poorly to your own 808.

i’d respect him a lot more if he just proactively did some ‘splaining rather than (condescendingly) being charmed by people outing him.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZLr5EXyoQCE

_I am absolutely the wrong audience for this kind of music. I've always detested mechanized dance music, its stupid simplicity, the clubs where it was played, the people who went to those clubs, the drugs they took, the shit they liked to talk about, the clothes they wore, the battles they fought amongst each other..._

Oh sorry, I just traced the comment back to the song in question. Lmao, Steve.

I always wondered about that last bit in particular "the battles they fought amongst each other", as opposed to the complete lack of conflict and backbiting in indie rock circles?

my favorite part of that has always been his reference to Xenakis before lamenting "When that scene and those people got co-opted by dance/club music I felt like we'd lost a war." yeah, it was really sad when dance music co-opted the Xenakis scene. we all shed a tear.

Guy’s eternally narrow view of what counts as “worthy” music is kinda sad at his age. I have to imagine some great affront happened to him at a dance club that he will never, ever forget.

I don’t think his public reckonings with wokeness have been bad though on the whole. Been unusually insightful and honest when it comes to these things kinds of things, particularly for someone from that space and age. He was from birth a cantankerous old man and he’ll forever just Not Get certain things, but I don’t doubt he’s trying.

I'm not Captain Save a House but I actually remember Powell sounding closer to the noisy artists that Albini was praising than the 'stupid simplistic' club music he probably had in mind. I imagine he didn't actually listen.

I did discover Powell bc of this incident so there's that.

I'm not Captain Save a House but I actually remember Powell sounding closer to the noisy artists that Albini was praising than the 'stupid simplistic' club music he probably had in mind. I imagine he didn't actually listen.

xpost

Captain Save A House heh.

I’d be fine if I never had to listen to that track Insomnia again (Powell has his moments tho). But Albini was name checking early Cabaret Voltaire while poo-pooing the song? It sounds quite similar.

That whole Odd Future thing tho, my god. Maybe there’s some grey area about his intent there but that’s a pretty fucked up hill to die on in 2021.

Also Circa1916 otm and yes Al Jourgenson may well have turned more than a few peeps away from electronic music. Big Black opened my ears to Ministry tho so screw ‘em both.

That’s funny to me as I don’t think there is a huge gap between Big Black and Revolting Cocks and post-Twitch Ministry!

Narcissism of small differences etc.

Well yea I mean “stigmata” was like a flip of “racer x”

In Chris Connelly’s book he puts it the other way — says Steve albini’s “piously heterosexual” indie rock threw down the gauntlet in a way that had a trickle down effect on jourgensen that lasted for years (sort of, it seems to me, implying albini made jourgensen kind of insecure and it explains his push toward metal)

A journalist took Albini's Twitter declaration "I'm overdue for a discussion about my role in inspiring 'edgelord' shit" and asked him for an interview. The results are worth a read.

I admit that I was deaf to a lot of women’s issues at the time, and that’s on me. Within our circles, within the music scene, within the musical underground, a lot of cultural problems were deemed already solved — meaning, you didn’t care if your friends were queer. Of course women had an equal place, an equal role to play in our circles. The music scene was broadly inclusive. So for us, we felt like those problems had been solved. And that was an ignorant perception.

That’s the way a lot of straight white guys think of the world — they think that it requires an active hatred on your part to be prejudiced, bigoted or to be a participant in white supremacy. The notion is that if you’re not actively doing something to oppress somebody, then you’re not part of the problem. As opposed to quietly enjoying all of the privilege that’s been bestowed on you by generations of this dominance.

...

In our circles, nothing was off limits. So, it took a while for me to appreciate that using abusive language in a joking fashion was still using abusive language. And it was genuinely shocking when I realized that there were people in the music underground who weren’t playing when they were using language like that and who weren’t kindred spirits. They were, in fact, awful, and only masquerading as intellectuals. That was one of many wake-up moments.

...

That was the fundamental failure of my perception. It’s been a process of enlightenment for me to realize and accept that my very status as a white guy in America is the product of institutional prejudices, that I’ve enjoyed the benefits of them, passively and actively. And I’m responsible for accepting my role in the patriarchy, and in white supremacy, and in the subjugation and abuse of minorities of all kinds.

...

I’m less concerned than I was 30 years ago about trying to make an experience extreme. Specifically regarding the anti-woke comics today, the uncomfortable truths that they’re expressing are genuinely, almost exclusively, childish restatements of the status quo. Or they’re pining for sustaining the status quo that they feel is threatened somehow. I can’t think of a more tragic or trivial comic premise than: Things should stay the way they are. That’s the absence of creativity — it’s a void rather than a creative notion. It’s fundamentally conservative and anti-progress. And I strain at finding humor in the idea that things should not get better.

I wish that I knew how serious a threat fascism was in this country. At that time [the 1980s under Reagan], there was a phone-in hotline for the America First committee that you could call; they were on the South Side of Chicago, and it would play a racist diatribe as the phone message. Everyone in our circle was dismissive of those as being these ridiculous country bumpkins. There was a joke made about the Illinois Nazis in The Blues Brothers. That’s how we all perceived them — as this insignificant, unimportant little joke. I wish that I knew then that authoritarianism in general and fascism specifically were going to become commonplace as an ideology.

That was interesting, thanks.

Seconded

thirded.

and i'm sure there may be some skepticism but in this year of lowered expectations, nice to at least see someone with a problematic past not revert to the "uh oh cancel culture, folks!" response

he has been working to redeem his past for a long time.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/why-i-havent-had-a-conventional-christmas-in-20-years_b_8614568

also supporting women. he took my ex wife on the road with shellac as tour support on a uk tour a few years back. she was more or less completely unknown and it was a life changing experience for her.

that's great!

That's a really good interview, he's obviously thought about all of this a lot and seems very sincere.

Good on him, seriously.

Yeah, a lot of the things he said are things I've been thinking about lately, especially with regards to some of my older friends who are late Gen X and were relatively open-minded people, even activists in their younger days, but still did all the "edgelordy" bantery jokes because they could, and are now floundering when presented with more modern-day attitudes, even rebelling against them in their middle ages; truly believing we're becoming a society of snowflakes who can't take a joke etc etc...

I don't think this is necessarily a case of becoming more conservative as they get older. I think they see themselves as continuing along the righteous path they've always been on, even the path has curved a little, i.e. "social justice is the oppressive force, the same kind of societal indoctrination I used to fight against in the eighties and nineties when the censors were trying to ban video nasties and sex scenes and slap stickers on hip-hop and metal albums" etc.

But these are not the same things. The Mary Whitehouses of this world were trying to protect some sort of old fashioned, almost Victorian values of "decency". Gen X were largely about rebelling against such stuffy, repressive ideals most likely enforced by their parents. It was a dutiful countercultural signifier to be shocking, to break these taboos, to be "authentic" without sugar-coating or genuflecting to notions of decency.

But Albini is absolutely right: You can only do this from a point of privilege. Ironically spouting racist words, making rape jokes, or just generally being a provocative edgy so-and-so is only something people do if they're naive and sheltered enough not to have considered the real effects and implications of what they're saying. And to say "relax, it's just a joke" compounds that.

Gen X were largely about rebelling against such stuffy, repressive ideals most likely enforced by their parents. It was a dutiful countercultural signifier to be shocking, to break these taboos, to be "authentic" without sugar-coating or genuflecting to notions of decency.

^Good post – but as someone who never understood the "intentionally being a dick" impulse (or, thankfully, ever really encountered ppl like that), I'm still not sure this explains it? Weren't many parents of Gen X open-minded types who were young in the Sixties?

Gen X parents were older than that generally

Which isn't to say the Boomer parent/Millennial kid pipeline doesn't have its own set of problems

Well yeah

I appreciated this.

I don't think the Gen X thing I mentioned was supposed to be thought of as "intentionally being a dick" rather than a revolt against ingrained attitudes of which perhaps their parents were the last to defend. The whole slacker ethos was in part political: deliberately dropping out of society, turning one's back on the stuffy, clean-cut mores and values of the earlier part of the century: "Fuck you I won't do what you tell me" etc. Unfortunately that gets unpacked and interpreted a number of ways, so yes, it often did boil down to a lot of intentional dickishness, in the same way as "Fuck you I won't do what you tell me" eventually became batoned over the years into "Everything is fucked, everything is fucked/All I wanna do is break stuff" (although that's more of an early millennial anthem but I hope you get my train of thought)

Yeah I hear you. I guess I'm young enough (late Gen X / straddling the Millennial line) that I've never really understood or related to that older Gen X slacker/rebellion ethos.

yeah, i feel similarly, also near that age but a very early millennial, a pioneer for the new 1000 years. there was no one there to explain the gen x / slacker thing, so i basically understood it through pop culture - how the simpsons would portray sonic youth, stuff like that. the rebellion thing didn't really connect with me - i'm still not sure there's a direct connection between the "slacker" thing and "political rebellion" thing. the idea to drop out of society has been part of every generation since the boomers, at least, right? and slackers didn't even do that (it seems to me), they just kind of thought caring about stuff was inherently uncool

anyway, don't mean to go on a tangent about "slackers", i know that's not central to dog latin's point

I thought part of it was sort of a reaction against the excesses and materialism of the '80s – like, "We're just gonna hang around Austin" (literally, in the movie Slacker) "and do what's satisfying as a lifestyle, not strive for the conventional trappings of success"?

Which I guess in a way would be rebelling against their parents' path (for some)...

From the sounds of it I'm roughly the same age as you and apparently I'm on the absolute cusp of what is generally defined as Gen X/Millennial, and while I know it's wrong to out too much stock in these marketing concepts, I feel there's a marked distinction in attitudes between friends who were a few years older than me growing up and people younger. This might be a UK thing, but there didn't seem to be so much of a stigma about "dropping out" among those I knew who were in their late-teens/early-adulthoods in the early-90s. They would go travelling or live in a squat or get an arts grant or just go on the dole. I'm a bit too young to remember myself, but from what I'm told, going on the dole was just a thing people did from time to time. I even had friends a few years older than me who wore their lack of work ethic as a badge of pride. Anyone younger than me would have been abhorred. And the stigma around benefits has increased so sharply since then that even people who genuinely deserve social security and government money are painted out as scroungers in society.

But yes, we're digressing here. Or maybe not... The same UK slackers I'm thinking of, who were, as I say, self-professed countercultural types with strong (I would say) antiestablishment, if not quite-far-left values, are now the ones moaning about cancel culture and snowflakes and blah blah

The Mary Whitehouses of this world were trying to protect some sort of old fashioned, almost Victorian values of "decency". Gen X were largely about rebelling against such stuffy, repressive ideals most likely enforced by their parents. It was a dutiful countercultural signifier to be shocking, to break these taboos, to be "authentic" without sugar-coating or genuflecting to notions of decency.

Maggie Nelson's new book has an essay about art, which I haven't read in full, but I found this line to be interesting and illustrative of shifting attitudes:

"The twentieth-century model imagined the audience as numb, constricted, and in need of being awakened and freed (hence, an aesthetics of shock), where as the twenty-first-century model presumes the audience to be damaged, in need of healing, aid, and protection (hence, an aesthetics of care)."

That is interesting. I mean, you could apply a whole bunch of theories here but maybe there's a noticeable cycle of breaking/fixing going on in societal art ove the generations which would be interesting to look at. I certainly find the whole turn-of-the-millennium era of pop culture interesting because a lot of it really does feel like the apex of unapologetically provocative excess: Limp Bizkit, Tom Greene, Blink182, superclubs playing Ibiza trance anthems, the rise of pop songs specifically about money, Eminem etc. To 19 year old me (who had grown up with 90s punk, hip-hop, rave, metal etc) it felt like all that stuff was overshooting and missing the point: It felt like an extreme apex, endpoint and farce of the stuff I had previously enjoyed, like someone heard Rage Against The Machine and thought "Yeah these guys are really angry about something, probably their breakfasts or something" and copied it and 'roided it up and took out all the politics and had a big hit with it. All that kind of stuff felt to me like the logical conclusion of "shock values" because it had no agenda other than to shock or provoke little more than an apolitical sense of energy and excitement that was nevertheless aimless.

... Blink-182?

I'm sorry, was there more than one band that went by that name

no see they're Blink-182-1, you're thinking about Blink-182-2

I think you're thinking of Black 47.

You're thinking of the Blink-182 from Earth 31.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0SqhSfx2TkE

John Mayer (of all people) said something recently about David Letterman in this interview that got me thinking along similar lines:

Letterman was this trusty depot: 5 nights a week you could hang out in this place where, if you were a bright person — but one who also didn’t want to use their intelligence manipulatively — you could watch someone use their intelligence for entertainment purposes. Basically misappropriate their intelligence! I grew up in Fairfield, Connecticut, and if you grew up in New England and you were bright, there was a good chance you were going to go into some dark art, like become a defense attorney. But Letterman was sending up erudition by misappropriating it for nonsense, and I always found that heroic.

The idea of misappropriating talent and entitlement feels like something Letterman and Belushi brought to Gen-X American men.

And where the edgelord business ties in, as a model for Gen-X men to imitate, is the idea morrisp said of "intentionally being a dick" -- from Dr. (fun honorific!) Hunter S. Thompson to Bill Murray, being kind of a self-aware dick and leaning in to the entitlement.

Thanks for that Maggie Nelson quote, jaymc — loved it so much I ran out and got a copy of her book of essays you mentioned, On Freedom.

I've ordered it too.