The Gen X Belichick of the studio

Steve Albini is someone whose influence over guitar-based rock music (a genre of admittedly declining cultural importance) was so great it can be hard to grasp if you weren’t there. If you were used to the gates-and-sequencers way in which drums were almost always recorded in the 80s, hearing Dave Lovering’s crisp, stinging snare on Surfer Rosa was a revelation:

Amanda Petrusich, who is also excellent on both sides of Albini the recovering edgelord, links to a fascinating video in which he describes how he got that sound:

I don’t know that Albini deserves our generosity on these matters, but one gets the sense that, as a younger man, he was driven by a kind of crazed frustration with polite society, all the ways in which we have defanged and neutered ourselves. In the end, that anger is also what fuelled his work. Albini would probably have found it unbearably pretentious of me to drop the word “vocation”—he didn’t even like “producer,” and avoided it assiduously—but no other engineer was quite as attuned, in an almost metaphysical way, to the humanity of recorded music, its senselessness and magic, the truths it could crystallize or reflect back at us. The creation and consumption of music serves no plain biological purpose—how utterly reasonless and inexplicable that we do this at all! How beautiful! Albini was a ferocious champion of preserving that purity, awake to all the ways in which our sharpest and best instincts are endlessly and tediously eroded by corporate machinery, by external meddling, by our own fears and insecurities and self-regard. He was not polite about his policing of those forces. They received no quarter in his studio. He seemed to despise record labels, especially the big ones. He once told Nirvana that he wanted to be “paid like a plumber”—meaning he didn’t want anything to do with points or percentages, just a flat fee for services rendered. He remained opposed to the monetization and degradation of creative spirit. It’s easy to deride this sort of staunch incorruptibility as a Gen X relic, incompatible with the way we live and consume now, but I find it awesome. Whatever Albini did in that studio—the way he placed a microphone; the particular manner in which he tracked a snare drum, so dry and testy, so good—was focussed on cutting through bullshit. Who does that anymore? We Auto-Tune; we filter. We blur reality until we don’t know which end is up.

Recently, the entire typewritten letter that Albini sent Nirvana prior to the “In Utero” sessions has been making the rounds on social media. Integrity is an undervalued and under-considered quality in art these days; somehow it has come to seem childish to insist on ethics while navigating the marketplace. I can’t help but marvel at Albini’s certitude on this front. When Nirvana made “In Utero,” in the winter of 1993, they were one of the biggest and most important bands in the world. Albini didn’t give a fuck. He was interested in making music that was free, as he wrote to the band, of “click tracks, computers, automated mixes, gates, samplers and sequencers.” He believed in a kind of lunatic freneticism, an immediacy, the notion that the more a song was worried over, the less potent it became. “If a record takes more than a week to make, somebody’s fucking up” is how he described it. Mostly, he didn’t want to genuflect to boneheads in suits who didn’t know anything about punk rock. “If, instead, you might find yourselves in the position of being temporarily indulged by the record company, only to have them yank the chain at some point (hassling you to rework songs/sequences/production, calling-in hired guns to ‘sweeten’ your record, turning the whole thing over to some remix jockey, whatever . . .) then you’re in for a bummer and I want no part of it.” There was no amount of money or fame that could entice Albini to compromise. How many artists can we still say that about? “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 fucking way I would ever take that much money. I wouldn’t be able to sleep,” he wrote. (“In Utero” has sold at least fifteen million copies.)

Another interesting thing about Surfer Rosa is that Albini apparently didn’t like it:

Steve Albini produced one of the greatest albums in rock history, and he wanted everyone to know that he hated it.

“A patchwork pinch loaf from a band who at their top dollar best are blandly entertaining college rock” was how he described the Pixies’ 1988 debut, Surfer Rosa, which he helmed. “Their willingness to be ‘guided’ by their manager, their record company and their producers is unparalleled. Never have I seen four cows more anxious to be led around by their nose rings.”

It was 1991, and Albini was—by choice!—writing this for the magazine Forced Exposure, within a column detailing his thoughts on various albums he had worked on. As Albini explained before his “pinch loaf” diatribe, potential future slander was literally part of the deal with him. “When I am hired to record a band,” Albini wrote, “I make it plain to my clients that I do not wish to be associated with their charming little records. I will do a good job for them, but that does not include shouldering any responsibility for their lousy tastes and mistakes.”

[…]

There is some irony to the fact that a world-class hater like Albini—someone who, if his old roommate is to be believed, used to literally answer the phone with “Fuck you!”—also lived his life under a strict moral code. The most obvious way this code manifested itself was that Albini would effectively negotiate himself out of money before starting any project, rejecting the industry norm of producers taking a percentage of an album’s future profits. As he saw it, an album is the band’s creative work, and his job was only to help them manifest it.

The fact that he didn’t care for one of the greatest records he recorded is actually instructive about why he was so good at his job. In the same way that peak Bill Belichick developed gameplans based on the talent and matchups available on a given week rather than trying to impose a System, Albini’s genius was in allowing bands to sound the way they wanted to sound, and both fuck me and fuck the label if they don’t like it. And while many of Albini’s most famous records are raw and punky landmarks like In Utero or Rid of Me, he was far from a one-trick pony, also producing prog-that-was-called-“post-rock”-because-prog-was-unhip records by bands like Slint and Don Caballero. He wanted artists to be themselves, and if that artistic self was intricately constructed 5-songs-in-56-minutes prog in which a harp is the lead instrument, he could nail that too.

Gen Xers sometime make too much of “authenticity,” but in Albini’s hands it could be a useful and valuable concept. It could also mean just being an asshole — as he would come to recognize — but he left a great artistic legacy and was gone way too soon. R.I.P.