I came of age in a time when record producers had become just as important as the artists they worked with.
From hearing Phil Spector and George Martin records on AM radio in my earliest days, to the work of masters like Roy Thomas Baker, Phil Ramone and Alan Parsons in the 70s, to the trailblazing work of postpunk visionaries like Brian Eno, Steve Lillywhite, Martin Hannett, Martin Rushent, Mike Thorne and Hugh Padgham, my ears were showered with some of the greatest sounds ever put to tape.
These men were more like great film directors than simple sound engineers, and many became de facto members of the bands they worked with.
Those sounds trained my obsessive, detail-oriented brain to be able to tell the difference between these men's work, as well as the difference between a record made by a real producer and a knob-twiddler. But the explosion of MIDI in the 80s kind of went too far in the direction of total artifice, and that in turn inspired an equally unpleasant backlash.
"Inspired" by the studied stupidity of hardcore - especially the gutter/trash recordings of Black Flag and other SST bands - Eighties indie and grunge really pissed that pride in craft away, as making cheap and lousy-sounding records became a point of pride amongst the talentless rich college kids pretending they were working-class musicians.
And nobody made cheaper and lousier-sounding records than Steve Albini.
This was a sore point for me, since his Emperor's New Clothes approach - which was just a clever way of disguising his tone-deafness and lack of imagination - ruined a lot of records I would have otherwise enjoyed.
Speaking of which, Martin Atkins' palace coup wrested control of Killing Joke from Jaz Coleman, who was probably off somewhere killing goats with his mind. Atkins then hired Ministry/Revolting Cocks crooner Chris Connelly, who inexplicably went into Bowie-mode instead of flaunting his pitch-perfect Johnny Rotten impression.
Sadly, Atkins' notorious penny-pinching ways resulted in some half-baked and badly-produced recordings. Meaning he hired Steve Albini to do what he does best: make everything sound cheap, muffled and tinny.
Which is a shame, because Geordie handed over some of his most arcane and sulfurous "riffs" for the occasion ("riffs" meaning his "unspeakable channelings from the Old Ones").
I know I give Steve Albini a lot of grief sometimes, but I actually believe he’s an Andy Kaufman-tier Situationalist genius. How else can you explain how he was able to get a lot of big stars to spend a lot of money for the honor of having him ruin their records?
I don’t know how Albini got his weird and unearned rep for being the punk rock George Martin, but good on him for milking the suckers. I wonder if his scorching manifesto on the organized crime syndicate known as the record industry inspired him to infiltrate the Death Star and sabotage a number of very expensive projects as payback for the industry's sins.
That said, my admiration for Albini’s subversive superpowers stops whenever he got behind the desk with a real artist. Like with PJ Harvey and her ex-girlfriend-from-hell concept album, Rid of Me.
I guess Albini’s super-compressed and equalized-to-death methodolgy might suit some of the many fake Fugazis he worked with, but producing isn’t just sliding a few faders and squelching everything into a gray paste. A good producer coaxes great performances from artists. And so it is that most of the live performances of Rid of Me songs have PJ sounding markedly superior to the recorded versions.
It also appears that it was Rid of Me that fueled Albini’s ascent from indie clock puncher to premier league prankster. He apparently sent it as a warning an indication of how he'd produce In Utero. Happily there were real producers waiting in the wings to clean up the mess Albini made of it.
Well, as best they could.
And need I mention that Albini was a particularly extreme kind of Branch Covidian?
Before he died, he got involved with some Twitter drama too tedious to relate here, but it did inspire this tweet:
As Coyotl mentioned, Albini's born-again Wokeness may have been a way to get folks to forget just how off-the-charts offensive Albini had once been.
The name Rapeman was taken from the Japanese manga series The Rapeman. Albini discovered the manga through a friend who ran an import business, and found its combination of rape fantasies and the superhero genre "simultaneously utterly repellent and fascinating."
Brace yourself for the inevitable rationalization:
He described it as "the product of decades of repression and misogyny being expressed through a different cultural tradition." He named the band in a deliberate attempt to repel audiences and do the "opposite" of bands that were desperate to appear on MTV.
Which might have flown had Albini not already written lyrics like this:
I would like to wrap your hair
Around your neck like a noose
I would like to wrap your legs
Around my neck like a lock
You are my precious thing
Thing of speed and beauty
You are my precious thing
As long as you remain beneath me
It gets worse. So much worse.
During performances of the Atomizer track "Jordan, Minnesota", about a child sex ring scandal, Albini would sometimes pretend to be a child being raped.
While singing these lyrics, mind you:
Stay with me, my five year old
Stay with me, play hide and seek
Stay with me, my five year old
This is Jordan, we do what we like
And this will stay with you until you die
And this will stay with you until you die
This will stay with you until you die
And I will stay with you until you die, yeah
(Suck daddy)
(Suck daddy)
(Suck daddy, suck daddy, suck daddy)
As we see in the Epstein emails, the cruelty and degradation is a major part of the allure with these sickos.
THE EPSTEIN EXPLANATION
For the life of me, I still don't understand how Albini built a rep off his Big Black records, which have always sounded godawful to me, even more than his later work.
But by the same token, I've never been able to fathom why so many luminaries found Epstein to be so captivating, when he always came across as a midwit.
But maybe the Albini mystery could be solved in a similar way to the Epstein enigma. What do I mean by that?
Well, I'll just drop in a couple screenshots from a Xwitter post from 2020:
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