Always good for a quote, decent at owning to the times he’s fucked up and contributed to nonsense and, importantly behind a load of great records, Steve Albini has exited stage left.
It doesn’t matter how he died and you probably already know that he’s manned the desk for the likes of Nirvana, PJ Harvey, Pixies, Joanna Newsom, Breeders, Slint, Jesus Lizard, the Wedding Present, Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, and loads of others, fronted Shellac and Big Black also, but we still need to pay tribute to a man who was an important figure in music whether he liked it or not.
A kid who had his head turned around by The Ramones and got involved in DIY gigs and the punk scene, Albini soon ditched his journalism degree and threw himself into the world of zines and local shows, before engineering groups and trying to capture them at their live best, putting the credit on records with “recorded by Steve Albini” rather than ‘produced by’. While being a huge figure in the world of music, he wasn’t one to pay homage to it, readily on record to point out the huge problems within it, refusing royalties on albums and pointing out the myriad of ways in which the recorded music industry exploited bands and artists.
Concerning his most famous work (it’s ‘In Utero’, stop being a hipster and thinking it was something else) he has spoken about the way he went about it, which would perfectly normal for him, but not really ‘industry standard’, which is exactly why a certain type of musician was drawn to him and his methods.
Albini’s methods tended to focus on the fact that he was doing a job for a group rather than taste-making for them and trying to capture an honest sound of theirs, and at the same time, to not overindulge the process and try to record things as quickly as possible.
He said: “I consider the band the most important thing, as the creative entity that spawned both the band’s personality and style and as the social entity that exists 24 hours out of each day. I do not consider it my place to tell you what to do or how to play. I’m quite willing to let my opinions be heard (if I think the band is making beautiful progress or a heaving mistake, I consider it part of my job to tell them) but if the band decides to pursue something, I’ll see that it gets done.”
Good for a quip, Albini recently said “I will always be the kind of punk that shits on Steely Dan” which is a brilliant thing to come out with, even if you’re a Steely Dan fan. It’s exactly the kind of daft, ultimately pointless thing that people should say in the music industry and Albini was well known for such blorts. Of course, with this came accusations of being an ‘edgelord’, and Albini addressed that saying; “a lot of things I said and did from an ignorant position of comfort and privilege are clearly awful and I regret them. It’s nobody’s obligation to overlook that, and I do feel an obligation to redeem myself…”
The frankness of which Albini dealt with himself, the rest of music and the projects he worked on were the things that made him such a magnetic character.
There were dubious band names which will have been reported elsewhere or you’ll just know them already. With that, he said that he had a problem with performative goodness: “I have less respect for the man who bullies his girlfriend and calls her ‘Ms’ than a guy who treats women reasonably and respectfully and calls them ‘Yo! Bitch – the point of all this is to change the way you live your life, not the way you speak.”
Later, he added: “If anything, we were trying to underscore the banality, the everyday nonchalance toward our common history with the atrocious, all while labouring under the tacit *mistaken* notion that things were getting better. I’m overdue for a conversation about my role in inspiring ‘edgelord’ shit. Believe me, I’ve met my share of punishers at gigs and I sympathise with anybody who isn’t me but still had to suffer them.”
When asked about retirement or how he’d be thought of in the future, he told The Guardian: “I don’t give a shit. I’m doing it, and that’s what matters to me – the fact that I get to keep doing it. That’s the whole basis of it. I was doing it yesterday, and I’m gonna do it tomorrow, and I’m gonna carry on doing it.”
We’ve lost a real one-off, and that’s always a sad time in music. If you’re in the business of paying tribute, then go to some local shows, stop entirely focusing on bands who have sold a million records, start a fanzine and support some smaller bands with your whole back put into it.
The Pop Corporation 
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