Steve Albini

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:

“its stupid simplicity, the clubs where it was played, the people who went to those clubs, the drugs they took, the shit they liked to talk about, the clothes they wore, the battles they fought amongst each other… basically all of it, 100 percent hated every scrap… The electronic music I liked was radical and different, shit like the White Noise, Xenakis, Suicide, Kraftwerk, and the earliest stuff form Cabaret Voltaire, SPK and DAF. When that scene and those people got co-opted by dance/club music I felt like we’d lost a war. I detest club culture as deeply as I detest anything on earth. So I am against what you’re into, and an enemy of where you come from.”

 

Don't Stay In 💌

Get on our guest list for news from 5 Mag and you'll never miss a thing. It's free and we don't sell your shit. ✅

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.”

““[Anyone who thinks] that taking ecstasy and dancing with a bunch of teenagers out in the middle of a cow pasture is some sort of political statement … that’s so utterly preposterous on its face that anybody who takes it seriously has got to be completely brain-dead. I suppose while under the influence, even an idea as ridiculous as that can maintain your attention for a short period of time, but there’s got to be some hours of the day when these people aren’t on drugs.”

 

Fifteen years later he found dance music still twitching and pulled out his bat to deliver a few more whacks:

“I basically hate dance music, and I don’t mean music of traditional dances like folk music, I mean music made since the disco era for the purpose of dancing drives me insane. When I’m forced to endure that music, it’s about the only music that actually irritates me.”

 

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:

“Interestingly, here in Chicago the term ‘house’ originally just meant music that would get the room (the house) excited. House music could as likely be deep cuts from old soul records as disco tracks, live hotmixes or Kraftwerk. Like the term ‘punk’ (or most things, really) once it lost its original meaning and got formalized into a single style it lost most of its appeal.”

 

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

RELATED ARTICLESMORE FROM AUTHOR