“I could just break into tears, the human he’s become.”

October 30, 2023 2:50 AM

"The evolution of Steve Albini", a Grauniad long read about a punk rock personality who is growing past his edgelord youth. Many previouslies, including another post on being offensive, but also Christmas, punk rock ethics, food, the music industry, producing 'In Utero', being pompous, producing records, being offensive (yes, it's a theme), selling out, beautiful sunrises, answering questions, and an even older post with mostly broken links.

If you'd prefer to listen than to read about his change of heart, here he is on Vish Khanna's Kreative Kontrol podcast. (There is more Steve in other episodes of this; the link is to him discussing his past mistakes and how he is taking responsibility for them.) And for a softer side of Steve, he is on Conan O'Brien Needs a Friend discussing the recording of 'In Utero'.

posted by Grinder (32 comments total)

“The one thing I don’t want to do is say: ‘The culture shifted – excuse my behaviour.’ It provides a context for why I was wrong at the time, but I was wrong at the time.”

This is what a lot of middle-aged mea culpa tours get wrong that Albini seems to at least want to get right. Although I feel like he's been saying this for years now -- his redemption arc, like his music, is so underground that media keeps picking up on it as though it's new.
posted by uncleozzy at 5:23 AM on October 30, 2023 [25 favorites]

The Guardian.

The fact that MetaFilter still permits the other “spelling” is misguided and dumb. It’s not funny, and there’s no other reason for it.

The Guardian.
posted by khrusanthemon at 6:03 AM on October 30, 2023 [32 favorites]

The Guardian.

The fact that MetaFilter still permits the other “spelling” is misguided and dumb. It’s not funny, and there’s no other reason for it.

What's the story behind the weird spelling?
posted by Liquidwolf at 7:06 AM on October 30, 2023

An annoying Metafilter-ism I think. I like Steve and I like most of the music he's produced and created. He is also a world-class poker player!
posted by erebora at 7:08 AM on October 30, 2023 [1 favorite]

An annoying Metafilter-ism I think.

No, it's a Britishism that goes back decades. Per Wikipedia: "Frequent typographical errors during the age of manual typesetting led Private Eye magazine to dub the paper the "Grauniad" in the 1970s, a nickname still occasionally used by the editors for self-mockery."
posted by tclark at 7:20 AM on October 30, 2023 [38 favorites]

Do people remember Zune? That was my main music player when I was in high school, and I used their PC software for playing/uploading music. There was also a community aspect to it, tied to your MS account (later migrated to xbox, then eliminated? idk). I could see what other users were listening to, other people could see what I was listening to, etc.

The community was relatively active and I had a few conversations going with random people who shared similar music tastes. One day I got a message from someone who introduced himself as Steve... he saw in my profile that I was listening obsessively to Bedhead and The New Year, and he dug around further and checked out this other band that I frequently listened to called Chin Up Chin Up. He said thanks for introducing him to CUCU, and he was surprised that he hadn't heard of this Chicago-based band since he was based there. Then he said it was great that I appreciated Bedhead/TNY so much. He signed the message off as 'Steve Albini'. I was like wtf.

To this day I have no idea if this guy was trolling me or if it actually was Steve.
posted by extramundane at 7:22 AM on October 30, 2023 [32 favorites]

Albini sounds like the kind of person I'd like quite a bit if I knew him. I'm glad he keeps getting picked up about this – might reach some of the ears and eyes that need to hear that what you say & do is important and that it's OK to grow and own up to your mistakes.
posted by jzb at 7:23 AM on October 30, 2023 [3 favorites]

The Grauniad joke dates from the period when they had a terrifying system involving setting half the paper in Manchester, half in London, then the result being combined by Teletypesetter - hot metal typesetting operated over phone lines.

We now return you to the actual topic of this post.
posted by zamboni at 7:28 AM on October 30, 2023 [15 favorites]

enregistré par steve albini was a post-rock/noise/emo band with jazz influences from Strasbourg, France, formed by Eric Bentz and Vincent Robert (discogs). It's been a while since I've listened, but I remember enjoying them a lot. I have no idea why they used his name but I recommend them.

The spelling of the transphobic rag that provides the main FPP link is a complete derail and, like Xitter, as a corporate entity with hate embedded into the top of its management structure it doesn't really need or even merit defence of its spelling by MeFites in a thread about a musician.
posted by polytope subirb enby-of-piano-dice at 7:32 AM on October 30, 2023 [16 favorites]

Side-note: Chin Up Chin Up ruled.
posted by Ayn Marx at 7:53 AM on October 30, 2023 [4 favorites]

Do people remember Zune?

Only because of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, I think, above and beyond oldsters like me who are still bemused by Microsoft's attempts to co-opt Apple's success with the iPod.

As for Albini, well, I still admire how he broke down how and why bands with standard record-company contracts would never make their advances back, but this part jumped out at me from TFA:

In old interviews, Albini expressed irritation that people didn’t appreciate the subtle nuances of naming your band Rapeman: “The really annoying thing was that the majority of the people on the picket line were precisely the kind of people that we would have liked at the gig – people that politically basically think like we do,” he later said in the book Rock Names.

The old Albini seems to have been someone whose greatest fear was that someone might describe them as "likable", and not even easily likable. I missed this previous thing on the blue, but I think that this one quote from TFA covers a lot of that:

For years, Albini had always believed himself to have airtight artistic and political motivations behind his offensive music and public statements. But as he observed others in the scene who seemed to luxuriate in being crass and offensive, who seemed to really believe the stuff they were saying, he began to reconsider. “That was the beginning of a sort of awakening in me,” he said. “When you realise that the dumbest person in the argument is on your side, that means you’re on the wrong side.”

posted by Halloween Jack at 8:51 AM on October 30, 2023 [12 favorites]

I saw Naked Raygun in Chicago back in the 80s. Not sure if they were on or if it was an opener, but someone was being a bit of a psychotic heckler yelling at the band. Pretty sure it was Steve Albini.
posted by Ansible at 8:53 AM on October 30, 2023 [1 favorite]

Frequent typographical errors during the age of manual typesetting

This became a plot point for a Young Ones episode.
posted by doctornemo at 8:55 AM on October 30, 2023 [6 favorites]

The old Albini seems to have been someone whose greatest fear was that someone might describe them as "likable",

I personally get that feeling of the music he produced too. Like it's got to be real harsh to get rid of the poseurs. And if no one is left, well there's your true fans!
posted by The_Vegetables at 9:09 AM on October 30, 2023 [5 favorites]

Feel like there are so many examples of old punks who've slid down bizarre fashy/libertarian/conspiracist rabbitholes, it's nice to see a cranky sort who's taken a different turn altogether. I like the sound of this older, wiser Albini.
posted by entropone at 9:58 AM on October 30, 2023 [18 favorites]

I'm here for the Steve Albini redemption arc.

I've said for a while that if you don't look back on the person you used to be without cringing, even slightly, you're not growing and changing as a person. I feel like society expects that people will always be the way they know them to be, and that when someone realizes they've been foolish, made a mistake (or a lot of mistakes), then engages in contrition and actively seeks to do better... we don't know how to handle that. It's the inverse of how, when someone is revealed to be an absolute piece of shit, the same sorts of people go "There's no way any of that's true."
posted by SansPoint at 10:03 AM on October 30, 2023 [15 favorites]

So I'm Albini fan from way back (more Shellac than Big Black, but "L Dopa" is a critical piece of my own musical biography) and I love a lot of the records he produced because of the immediacy and intimacy. Like you're standing in the room listening to the songs. And for a lot of those records, the harshness and pointy edges were the point. No one listens to "Rid of Me" for the warm fuzzies ( I hope, and I love that record). But the intimacy thing is for real in other ways. Like, Low's "Secret Name" is one of my all time favorite records, and it sounds like standing around a warm fire during a blizzard. And that's also Steve. I mean. I know we always talk about unapproachable hard edges but like, he also produced this.

And this
posted by thivaia at 10:11 AM on October 30, 2023 [7 favorites]

And this
posted by thivaia at 10:12 AM on October 30, 2023

There's an interview with Albini on Q about recording In Utero, as well as other aspects of his career.
posted by Hardcore Poser at 10:16 AM on October 30, 2023

That Q clip is geo-blocked to Canada - here's an alt link.
posted by zenon at 10:44 AM on October 30, 2023 [1 favorite]

He wasn’t wrong about how fucked the artist/label relationship ship was, still is. I think he used the *blink* tag to illustrate the tiny pittance a band came away with at the end of a year of touring to support a moderately successful album, and it was the best use of the blink tag I can recall seeing.
posted by Devils Rancher at 10:59 AM on October 30, 2023 [2 favorites]

I’ve been working with Edith Frost lately, but haven’t squeezed her for any Albini stories, yet. Maybe he mixed her album when she wasn’t there or something. Anyway, I should go read the article I suppose.
posted by Devils Rancher at 11:01 AM on October 30, 2023 [5 favorites]

16:48 is about where the interview switches to address how approachable the In Utero album was, which he describes as "clearly done artfully and clearly done with intent, and it might be a couple of clicks more aggressive and obtuse than the typical top 40 record of the day... it's not a piece of shit."
posted by zenon at 11:04 AM on October 30, 2023 [1 favorite]

Obligatory Albini & Little Bub interview
posted by phigmov at 11:05 AM on October 30, 2023 [7 favorites]

and an even older post with mostly broken links.

Many of the links (even in the comment section) in said post are broken, but at least one of them still leads to his classic/infamous reviews of albums he produced in a '91 issue of Forced Exposure. (It's also a reminder that if archive.org ever goes away, then we're pretty much screwed). I take it his wording (if not his opinions) might be somewhat different nowadays.
posted by gtrwolf at 1:49 PM on October 30, 2023 [1 favorite]

OMG, the Lil Bub interview! Yeah. I’d definitely like him if I met him.
posted by jzb at 2:14 PM on October 30, 2023 [2 favorites]

I think in the future Albini will be best known for his Lil Bub interview.
posted by ovvl at 5:05 PM on October 30, 2023 [3 favorites]

Somewhat relatedly, David Firth (creator of Salad Fingers and other wonderfully disturbing animated videos) has a video where he also reflects on his youthful edgy-ness.
posted by AlSweigart at 5:46 PM on October 30, 2023

I've always liked Albini. I guess I largely grew up and stopped being a dickhead in tandem with his doing so (publicly, at least) which has made it easy to keep liking Albini compared to a lot of his contemporaries. Aside from Shellac and Big Black being formative for my music tastes, he recorded so many great-sounding albums, often the highlights of the careers of the musicians that made them (at least in terms of production and sound, if not writing).
posted by Dysk at 8:23 PM on October 30, 2023 [5 favorites]

He also has an entertaining Earthquaker pedals 'Show us your junk' video of his collected audio gear and instruments. Skip to 12:19 to see the double of a 16 string guitar he had made for Sonic Youth as a thank-you for taking Big Black on tour. There is Lee Ronaldo discussing the gift guitar from 12:37 replete with inlaid penis with 'Sonic 16' written on it (they are all 16 High E Strings).
posted by phigmov at 8:59 PM on October 30, 2023

Mod note: A few comments removed to quell the "Grauniad vs Guardian" derail. Either use is fine on MetaFilter. Please move on from that aspect, thanks!
posted by Brandon Blatcher (staff) at 5:20 AM on October 31, 2023 [6 favorites]

16:48 is about where the interview switches to address how approachable the In Utero album was,

In my opinion, he throws a lot of shade at Nirvana, perhaps inadvertently. First, he rents the studio secretly saying they are a bluegrass band, but then they show up with a semi-truck full of equipment, which he says a bluegrass band would have less. But Nirvana is a 3 piece punk band and a blue grass band would have the same basic equipment plus a few things they wouldn't have, like pedal steel, perhaps a piano, cases of fiddles. He never really says what Nirvana did with all the extra equipment. I'll posit a theory in a moment, but that line was odd.

The second is the pull-quote, paraphrasing "they were a competent band, knew what they wanted to do, wrote most of the songs ahead of time, etc, sang through all the lyrics in basically one session". But that's not really praise. They had been around since 1988 so it was a solid four years of playing shows. Even if you disagree they are worthy of the 'best of all time' as players (I do), there is no doubt they all know how to play and more importantly, how to coax the sounds they wanted out of their instruments (actually much harder).

With only 12 days in the studio, they must have written and practiced the majority of the songs outside the studio, in contrast to a guy like Tom Petty who would 'jam' in the studio for weeks to create songs. Other big rock bands at time (like Warrant) relied on session players in studio for things like guitar solos - Nirvana didn't do that either. Nor did they (generally) fill out their sound with a 2nd guitar player like other punk bands did (Green Day for example).

If you believe the youtube re-creations of the guitar playing for the Bleach sessions, Cobain was a bit of a gearhead - and coaxed specific sounds out of different guitars rather than relying only on twiddling effects knobs or having a signature guitar he played on most songs. That's probably why they traveled with a truck trailer full of equipment.

So I'm just saying describing In Utero as made by competent musicians writing what they wanted, well that's basically just table stakes. If people don't like it that much, it's not a failure of talent but of content - people just didn't like what they were selling.
posted by The_Vegetables at 7:32 AM on November 1, 2023