Years ago, when I was working at the Center for Writing and Rhetoric at Claremont Graduate University, we started naming our meeting rooms after deceased musicians. I think it started with Lemmy: The Lemmy Kilmister Memorial Library. There were others, and I can’t remember them all. We had two rooms (three if you used the partition) and within a few years, every room was named in a regular rotation. But Steve Albini deserves the whole writing center.
Steve Albini has been a constant presence in my musical life. Before the algorithms, I would look through liner notes of my favorite albums and curated “If you liked this…” lists on All Music to find music new-to-me. I think I worked backwards to The Jesus Lizard from Made Out of Babies and then from The Jesus Lizard to Big Black. If you’ve never listened to Big Black, they set the template for what every noisy guitar band has tried to emulate since. Albini’s guitar (more often than not, shrieking in syncopation against the beat of a drum machine) sounds like a chrome buzz saw, or some angry mechanical wasp. His lyrics are abrasive, sometimes without direction, just angry. L Dopa fixed me, all right?
But much of his influence I discovered after the fact. Once I got to Big Black, I learned more about his audio engineering. He’d recorded those Jesus Lizard albums that led me to him, two of the Made Out of Babies albums, too. He produced the best Nirvana record, In Utero. Stuff that I’d listened to for years took on a new light when I saw his name. Pixies, The Breeders, Neurosis, and a hundred one-off records for bands that, ironically, were drawn to his recording style precisely because he seemed to have a pretty light touch. This probably wasn’t always the case (one of the members of Slint was famously unhappy that Tweez was over-engineered, something Albini, himself, agreed with), but his recording style tended towards letting bands sound like what they wanted to sound like. This tendency was matched by the politics that informed his whole business. Flat-rate recordings when possible, credits as “audio engineer” rather than producer, lots of well-argued screes against the music industry’s treatment of artists.
The album he recorded that is most important to me is likely among his least consequential. In high school, my friend and I made regular trips across the mountain to Carson City where we would hit the same places in close to the same order: Borders, Best Buy, Target, Panda Express. At Best Buy, I saw what is, to this day, my favorite album cover with my favorite album title. The Fear Is What Keeps Us Here by Zao. That friend and I still regularly repeat the name “Zao” with ever-increasing levels of confused southern-twang, and despite saying it back and forth a million times by now, we will likely never approach the sheer insanity of the cashier’s tone as she handed the album back to me with my change. We sat in the car and skipped from song to song, laughing as each track started with the vocalist’s same scream. But I kept listening, and every few months or years when I revisit it, I’m struck by how normal it sounds as my tastes have changed. Years later, I would watch a YouTube clip of Albini talking about him and his friends ordering Ramones albums from the local electronics store. Together, they would laugh and laugh at the absurdity of the act—the self-same onetwothreefour that Dee Dee (I think it was Dee Dee, maybe Joey) would start nearly every song with. But they kept listening. Albini recognized something that I was still figuring out, that the silliness which drew me to music that is clearly silly—and angry, mean, violent—facilitated some kind of joy. And that it wasn’t an act of imitation to sit with music you didn’t get until you did.
Much of his later public persona (on Twitter, in interviews) was about grappling with music that you got just fine. Albini’s music, for all the ways that it helped to develop some kind of brash, noisy, Touch-And-Go template, also reflected a callousness that worked contrary to the supposed emancipation of Gen X’s politics. Band names and lyrics played coy with misogyny and racism, bolstered by the implication that this ugliness was meant to be commentary, not endorsement—recordings, not reproductions. In a context where white guys griping about “cancel culture” has become an expected tactic of their late-career resurgence, Albini’s reflection on the issue remains the most salient expression of what it means to develop, from your own body of work, full of nihilism and scorn, a duty towards compassion:
“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 of society. For myself and many of my peers, we miscalculated. We thought the major battles over equality and inclusiveness had been won, and society would eventually express that, so we were not harming anything with contrarianism, shock, sarcasm, or irony. If anything, we were trying to underscore the banality, the everyday nonchalance toward our common history with the atrocious, all while laboring under the tacit *mistaken* notion that things were getting better.”
I don’t make music anymore, and I never really made good music. But all the ways that I care about music lead back to Steve Albini, and for that I am forever grateful.