Down a lonely side street... (Driving Game Detour)
5It is with a heavy heart that I report the passing of Steve Albini. For those of you who know of his work, you know he was hugely influential in the 90’s music scene and helped create a great deal of the music we all love.
He helped engineer for Nirvana, Pixies, The Breeders, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Mogwai, the Jesus Lizard, Don Caballero, PJ Harvey, The Wedding Present, Joanna Newsom, Superchunk, Low, Dirty Three, Jawbreaker, Neurosis, Cloud Nothings, Bush, Chevelle, Jimmy Page and Robert Plant (as Page and Plant), Helmet, Fred Schneider, The Stooges, Owls, Manic Street Preachers, Jarvis Cocker, The Cribs, the Fleshtones, Nina Nastasia, The Frames, The Membranes, Cheap Trick, Motorpsycho, Slint, mclusky, Labradford, Veruca Salt, Zao, The Auteurs, Spare Snare, Foxy Shazam, etc.
As a memorial to his work, I’d like to throw out a detour from our long-running Driving Game. I ask that you follow the same rule for this single-thread detour. No need to check the cheat sheet, dupes from the main game will be allowed but try not to repeat in the thread, and as a special rule for this one, make sure the artist was connected to Steve Albini.
Thanks for playing.
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Kicking off with a track he engineered:
Pixies - Where Is My Mind?
It’s worth noting that you don’t need to find a connection to this song specifically (or any other here) since every song on this thread should be connected via Steve himself.
/youtube Page & Plant - Shining in the Light
Nirvana - Frances Farmer Will Have Her Revenge on Seattle
/youtube shellac - the end of radio
Heard on the way to work on a local college radio station–I think a faculty member commandeered the mike.
Big Black - The Power of Independent Trucking
Lots of photos of Steve in this video. This was his first band.
He worked with so many great musicians. This really does
nirvana - serve the servants
I’ve always had deeply mixed feelings about Steve Albini. My introduction to his music was a homemade cassette with Lungs/Bulldozer on side one and Racer X and a bunch of random punk tracks on side two. Next, I was given (well, lent and then kept) a couple of issues of Forced Exposure because Lydia Lunch was featured in them, which also had some articles by him, so I learned about why he had the police called on him for possession of child porn and the first time he slept with a groupie. So I was familiar with him as an abrasive asshole before anything else. I picked up somewhere that he hated Steely Dan, and that point we’re enemies. And frankly, I mostly listened to '70’s glam and krautrock in the '90’s, so his producing output was not particularly on my radar. But, you know, spend enough time listening to Big Black and it never really leaves you. You’ll be walking around, minding your own business, and suddenly find yourself thinking I’m a STEELWORKER I kill what I eat or honey I’m a mess, what a useless set of legs.
About a decade or so ago I read an interesting interview with him at the av club as part of their “hatesong” series, where he talked about why he hates Cher’s Believe, and it was really interesting because he talked about how it opened the floodgates to autotune overuse. And that was not the angle I was expecting from the notoriously acerbic Albini. A little later I was thinking about Steelworker and how it perfectly embodies a certain unpleasant, youthful nihilism one finds in certain corners of the internet, and looked up some more interviews with him, and found out that he totally mellowed (sort of)! Still an unrepentant asshole, but one who had really thought through his work, and understood that while he was fine with offending and alienating people who thought he was serious, it wasn’t really great when the audience was people who thought he was serious and liked it.
An interesting, complicated and challenging artist.
Anyway, here’s the very first Steve Albini song I ever heard:
/youtube big black - steelworker
Why not?
/youtube rapeman - just got paid