From Blown Speakers

Saturday, June 01, 2024
this is my farewell transmission

I already shared this first part on Twitter, but I remember bussing down from Richmond to Zulu Records. I had read somewhere that the guy who produced In Utero had been in a bunch of bands and I wanted to go check them out, because I loved In Utero and before there was even Napster, let alone streaming, you could go to Zulu, grab a stack of CDs and they'd let you listen to them with headphones from one of the small army of discmans at the front counter.

I picked Big Black's Songs About Fucking. I think I picked it because I thought the album title was funny (it still is). But I remember putting the headphones on and this came blaring out and I had my wallet on the counter before the song was even halfway through.

After that, I started checking out anything Steve Albini was involved in. But I also started finding out that so many albums that I already loved had his hands all over them: Surfer Rosa. Rid of Me, Goat, Pod, to name a few.

I started paying attention to what Steve Albini said--and he was a good quote, so even before he became kinda omnipresent on Twitter, you could read what he said. I digested "The Problem With Music" and quoted parts of it like it was the gospel (it still kinda is).

I gravitated towards his brand of nihilism.

There's a sample of a JG Ballard quote on one of my all time favourite albums, the Manic Street Preachers' The Holy Bible (Albini engineered The Holy Bible's spiritual sequel A Journal for Plague Lovers 15-years later): "I wanted to rub the human face in its own vomit and force it to look in the mirror." And all the nastiness in, not just his songs, but what he said in a lot of interviews seemed to capture that sentiment. It underscored how I felt as well: there's so much ugliness in the world and it's unfathomable, how can everyone just go about their lives like nothing's wrong?!

There's still something to that. You know, recently, I caught myself lamenting the fact that I was sick and had to skip Pearl Jam, but also there's a fucking genocide happening, so who gives a fuck about not hearing "Black" live for the 10th time? It was the kind of thought that left me angry. At myself. At **gestures wildly**. At everything.

The difference between now and then is that, instead of lashing out everywhere, that kind of realization makes me at least try to lash out in a slightly more focused way.

In one of the many pieces remembering Albini, Pussy Galore's Julia Cafritz said this:

He wisely grew out of a lot of the sort of dumb shit that we all do when we’re young. But then he replaced it with really smart shit. He was an extraordinary human being in terms of sheer intelligence and the power of how he would focus that. Everything was quick. And I knew him when it was all brutal. What’s interesting to me is that as he grew older and softer, he didn’t lose any of that edge. It just was put to better use.

And, obviously along with his insanely consistent musical output, that is one of the reasons, I've continued to hold him in such high esteem, long after I'd become wary of having any "heroes" to speak of. I've luckily changed a lot since that afternoon at Zulu and Steve Albini is one of the people I'd admired partially for some wrong reasons that changed along with--or perhaps more accurately ahead of--me.

My favourite character in Ted Lasso is Roy Kent, because I don't think there's a lot of value in being nice, but there's certainly a lot of value in being kind.

I imagine Steve Albini would hate that comparison, but he's one of the people that helped me form that conclusion.

Rest easy, Steve. But stay angry.

now playing: PJ Harvey - "Rid of Me"

posted by Quinn @ 1:27 a.m. Comments:0

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