Steve Albini hated dance music, and “hated” was the word he used. He “100 percent hated” it, the people who made it, and the people who would willingly listen to and perhaps even enjoy it.
Albini, who passed away of a heart attack at his Electrical Audio recording studio on May 7 2024, had subjected his life and some of his statements to a withering self-critique in the last few years. The headline of one article about it, “The evolution of Steve Albini: ‘If the dumbest person is on your side, you’re on the wrong side’ sums up his live-tweeted reckoning rather well. I haven’t kept up to date with anything on that platform in months but I don’t think he ever took back what he said about house music as music for morons.
Steve Albini hated dance music the way a Christian hates sin and a toddler hates bedtime on a school night. Like many of his hatreds, Albini’s hatred of house music went way beyond personal taste to an searing indictment of everyone and everything responsible for unleashing this on the world.
This broke into the mainstream a few years ago when the artist Powell was clearing a sample of a recording of Steve Albini introducing a song at a gig for his ’80s band Big Black. Powell received a reply directly from Albini which rattled out of his inbox and onto a billboard which cheekily reproduced Albini’s critique of house music, the people that made it, the people that listened to it, the places they went, the clothes they wore and presumably their parents, all ancestors and any descendants they may have. He hated:
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This was new to some but not new to anyone who shared the Chicago airspace with the vitriolic Albini for any of the last three decades. Michaelangelo Matos compiled some of Albini’s greatest diss tracks against electronic music for those who missed the precursors that lead to Powell’s viral marketing campaign. Early Chicago rave zine Reactor (edited by Dave Prince, who would go on to do some things) interviewed Albini in 1993 at the peak of his notoriety. Punk, he objected, could be taken seriously on a “significant” level. To take dance music seriously was a “delusional pretension. There really is no substance to it.”
Fifteen years later he found dance music still twitching and pulled out his bat to deliver a few more whacks:
In a Reddit AMA from 2012, he offered this three sentence historical overview of house music, the first of which is totally wrong, the second of which is pretty much dead on and the third of which is a not-at-all unfair critique:
The truth of it though? A lot of people in the dance music scene in Chicago admired Steve Albini, not least of all because he was something like the grandee audiophile that all other audiophiles aspire to be. His ethics and his investment in what he thought was really important are shared by most people who are worth listening to. He was an unbelievable champion for artists and for fans — the two groups in the industry, he thought, that actually mattered. Everyone else — the lawyers, the agents, the managers, the PR — were at best a nuisance, most likely a gatekeeper and at worst a parasite.
And almost everyone around in those days had and still has friends or colleagues in common with Steve. There was a huge crossover between scenes in the late ’80s and ’90s, centered particularly around two legendary cultural touchstones: the Wax Trax record store and Medusa’s nightclub.
If the things he said about your favorite music or artist offended you, it was entirely possible to ignore Steve Albini. He wasn’t on TV, rarely on the radio, and seemed entirely willing to forego publicity altogether. But it would have been dumb to totally ignore him — even dumber than to take all of the shit he talked at face value.
I think a bunch of electronic music producers really wanted Steve Albini to get it, and understand why this music could appeal to people the way it does. I don’t think he ever did. But toward the end of his life he at least allowed that his perspective was just one person from a rather unusual background, globally speaking, and people who grew up somewhere other than Montana and in some time other than the late ’70s and early ’80s probably thought different, and were sometimes even right.
Photo: Mixwiththemasters, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons