Through being cruel

Steve Albini gets off the pool table

©2011 Vladimir, used under a Creative Commons license

Steve Albini’s not only a great musician (Big Black, Rapeman, Shellac) and producer (P.J. Harvey, Nirvana, Pixies), he’s also one of the most eloquent people in music. I’ve never read an interview with him where he sounded like a self-aggrandizing chucklehead, an evasive careerist, or just plain stoopid — you know, like nearly every other musician you see interviewed. (It just hit me that when Gerard Cosloy did Conflict, the musicians he interviewed always sounded intelligent, and yes, that definitely includes G.G. Allin.)

So it’s great that he’s on Twitter. A few weeks back, he did a thread that started out with what sounded like a passive/aggressive challenge to somebody who was dissing him for having done what many of us might consider Steve Albini type stuff back in the day, i.e. being purposefully offensive:

steve albini @electricalWSOP

Genuinely charmed by people trying to "out" me regarding stuff that had print runs in the tens of thousands, bands that toured the world, stuff that was already reported on by Pitchfork... whatever. I am not afforded the luxury of secret shame, guys. Knock yourselves out.

But as the thread proceeded, Albini shifted gears: “A lot of things I said and did from an ignorant position of comfort and privilege are clearly awful and I regret them,” he said. “It’s nobody’s obligation to overlook that, and I do feel an obligation to redeem myself… I expect no grace, and honestly feel like I and others of my generation have not been held to task enough for words and behavior that ultimately contributed to a coarsening society.”

I can’t say I was shocked because, frankly, I pretty much knew he had it in him. That is, I trusted he was smart enough that his fiddling with racist, sexist, and otherist tropes didn’t mean he believed in them.

And, if I’m being honest, part of the reason I felt that way is because when I was playing music, I was kind of an asshole myself. I mean, I was an asshole personally and I still sort of am, though time has taken some of it out of me (no idea whether Albini ever had this problem), but also I was an asshole aesthetically. In my writing and performing I was aggro and inclined to give offense rather than pleasure. Everything was either a joke or a torment or a fuck you; my attitude was, I’m not going to sugarcoat it for you assholes, we’re more or less in tune and on the beat, what more do you want?

This was on my mind when I read an interview Albini did recently with Mel magazine that followed up on his Twitter thread. He talks about where he was at when he started playing:

The main thing that I was reacting against was an impulse that I saw in my peers to soften their art and their music so that it would be acceptable within the existing conventions of art and music. What I wanted to do was make music and art that was for its own sake, entirely, and irrespective of what other people had to say about it. It was a reactionary impulse on my part.  The music and art that had meant the most to me had always been music and art that had existed for its own sake. The art that seems to inhabit its own universe where other people’s expectations and perceptions had no influence. That’s what I was trying to do. I was striving for an ideal that this music and this art would be a realm of pure ideas, and that it would be unconcerned with convention or acceptance.

I can relate. Later Albini gets into how he came to play with violent sexual and racist images. At first it sounds like he’s playing it off on the inclusivity of the Chicago music scene: “So for us, we felt like those problems had been solved.” But then he takes the next step:

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.

Albini also gets into who the inheritors of that in-your-face approach are now:

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.

Apart from the good work of thinking these things through — something you’re never gonna get from, say, Jim Goad — it makes me think of the relationship between the “reactionary” artistic approach Albini and a lot of us had, and where it comes from.

Now, me, I think if I were coming up in different era from the 1980s and 1990s, all else being equal, I would have done a different version of the same thing. (Search out every sin, for out of sin comes joy.) But I think environment always gives you a nudge. Anyone coming through the Reagan/Clinton era who was not lashed tight to the mast by something — like a grand vision or a very good manager — was going to be at least a little blown off course by that atmosphere in which moral judgments were replaced by money values and the Great Society by Welfare Reform.

Maybe I’m presumptuous but I take Albini to mean in this interview that he was playing with his ugly tropes because he thought of them as something that could blow up what was in his way, but then found out later that it could also harm real people. I think there’s something to be said about how this ties into the era and its arts, and Greil Marcus has probably said it somewhere; but for now I’ll just say that there’s something interesting about what drives even intelligent and sensitive people living in a rich and allegedly favored land to grab and throw the first available hard object at the nearest pane of glass. It’s also interesting that, after decades and various iterations of that, we’ve landed in a time where the intelligent and sensitive people are actually, increasingly leaning on their intelligence and sensitivity, and the racism and rape jokes have been left to the people who actually believe in them.