Music

Steve Albini taught thousands of musicians that ethics and politics are embedded in business and art

Producer provided a counterpoint to those stars who preach while avoiding tax or the consequences of their own work practices

Steve Albini came from a politically conscious Chicago punk scene that shunned the mainstream as vapid and shallow and the music industry as essentially exploitative. Photograph: Brian Cassella/Chicago Tribune/Tribune News Service via Getty Images

Patrick Freyne
Mon May 13 2024 - 06:00

In 1993, Steve Albini, who died this week at the age of 61, wrote an article for The Baffler that was treated like a sacred text by many bands in the 1990s (the “many bands” in this sentence includes my band).

The piece was called The Problem with Music. It was an excoriating screed against the music industry that began by asking the reader to imagine a trench “of runny, decaying sh*t” across which bands must swim to get a large record deal. It is, in a very real sense, pungent prose. What distinguished Albini from most ranting punk iconoclasts, however, was the fact that he goes on to explain in great detail the economics of a “big” record deal, breaking down, line-by-line, all the money that goes to middlemen and charlatans and, ultimately, the meagre figure that ends up with the band. It ends with the sentence: “Some of your friends are probably already this f**ked.”

Albini was resolutely DIY and independent. He came from a politically conscious Chicago punk scene that shunned the mainstream as vapid and shallow and the music industry as essentially exploitative. He was opinionated and profane. He is, most famously, the producer who turned down millions in royalties on Nirvana’s last record In Utero on a point of principle.

The reason that Nirvana wanted him in the first place was because in the world of Chicago punk, hard-core and indie music he was already a towering figure. He was the songwriter, guitarist and singer with a series of uncompromising punk bands: Big Black, the offensively named Rapeman and finally Shellac, the band he was about to go on tour with before his fatal heart attack. I wasn’t cool enough to be into Albini’s bands when I was younger (I’ve loved many of those records since) but I ate up many of the records he recorded on the side as a musical engineer: the Pixies’ Surfer Rosa, the Breeders’ Pod and PJ Harvey’s Rid of Me.

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He hated the term “producer” – he preferred “engineer” – but he essentially produced those records. His job, as he saw it, was to efficiently document a band’s sound. He liked big live drum kits and dynamic guitars. He treated the voice as just one more instrument and didn’t foreground it in the ways a more radio-friendly producer might.

Steve Albini with Shellac on stage at Primavera Sound 2014 in May. Photograph: Jordi Vidal/Redferns via Getty Images

After the big success of Nevermind, Nirvana were struggling with the realities of fame. It made sense that they’d want to work with someone like Albini to ground them. Albini’s letter to the band outlining his methods is another piece of samizdat from the punk underground. It’s included in the second volume of Letters of Note. In the letter he explained how he prefers to work – quickly, professionally, focusing on the band’s wants and needs, leaving room for accidents and mistakes – and he predicted, quite accurately, that the label executives would be frightened by the album’s production and would want to re-record or remix it (in the end the band remixed the two singles).

He also asked that he not be given “points” (royalties) on the album, just a good fee because he believed taking a percentage of a band’s income was “ethically indefensible”. He always did this with bands, just not often in cases where it was so financially significant. “I would like to be paid like a plumber,” he wrote. “I do the job and you pay me what it’s worth. The record company will expect me to ask for a point or a point-and-a-half. If we assume three million sales, that works out to 400,000 dollars or so. There’s no f**king way I would ever take that much money. I wouldn’t be able to sleep.”

He never regretted his decision, though it ultimately cost him millions, and he never went on to take “points”. He established a studio, Electrical Audio, in Chicago. He literally helped to build it. Whenever a band with a budget wanted to work with him, he would ask for a decent rate. Over the years he recorded iconic acts like the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, Low and Mogwai but he also continued to record much smaller independent bands at more affordable prices. He was in the phone book. You could call Steve Albini if you wanted. He was not, like most big-name producers, a distant millionaire. I knew several Irish musicians who were recorded by Albini. Dublin stalwarts Joan of Arse were recorded by the same man who recorded Nirvana after he recorded Nirvana.

He had his blind spots. Like many punks of his era, he liked to be shocking for shocking’s sake (remember that terrible band name above). Some of his early lyrics and statements from the 1980s and 1990s don’t stand up very well. They were uttered in a spirit of high irony in a bid to shock a somnolent status quo, but even he didn’t think that that was a good excuse.

When you realise that the dumbest person in an argument is on your side, that means you’re on the wrong side

—  Steve Albini

In 2021, he issued a series of thoughtful tweets repudiating many of the things he once said and acknowledging that not only were those statements wrong now, but that they were also wrong at the time. He wrote: “A lot of things I said and did from an ignorant position of comfort and privilege are clearly awful and I regret them ... For myself and many of my peers, we miscalculated. We thought the major battles over equality and inclusiveness had been won, and society would eventually express that, so we were not harming anything with contrarianism, shock, sarcasm or irony.”

In an excellent Guardian interview last year he put it more simply: “When you realise that the dumbest person in an argument is on your side, that means you’re on the wrong side.”

[ Steve Albini, alt-rock musician and producer who worked with Nirvana and Pixies, dies aged 61 ]

The people who worked with Albini loved him. He created incredible, groundbreaking music but he was also important because he stood for something. He had an ethos. He taught thousands of musicians that ethics and politics are embedded in business and art whether you want them to be or not, that there’s meaning in how you create as well as in what you create. He provided a counterpoint to those stars who preach about good causes while avoiding tax or the consequences of their own work practices. Albini’s musical practice was a good cause. He taught a generation of DIY musicians to understand the means of production, that artists are part of a community to which they have responsibilities and that there is dignity in their labour. A lot of artists were influenced by Albini. None of them regret a thing.

Patrick Freyne

Patrick Freyne

Patrick Freyne is a features writer with The Irish Times

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