weird. they refer to paul as “Ion Barker”.
When I met Paul in '83, everyone called him Ion.
[reply][reply]He then goes on to describe his “solo” band, Programming the Psychodrill. Which seems like it would’ve been really fucking cool.
They had 2 tracks, i think, one of them’s in Robocop in the club scene when Robocop gets Leon Nash. This is it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2seGZa6wU78
http://www.discogs.com/PTP-Rubber-Glove-Seduction/master/19757[/quote]
I know who/what PTP is/was. But certainly not what he describes in the article.
[reply]
He’s never understood industrial music, despite Big Black being an influence on it.
Can’t say I agree with that at all. Industrial, in it’s purest form, is about blowing your mind and overloading the senses (similar to psychedelia). The early groups (Throbbing Gristle, Cabaret Voltaire, Whitehouse, Nocturnal Emissions, Maurizio Bianachi) did this perfectly, and with little to no use of disco beats.
What Albini doesn’t like is the dance end of industrial, that an awful lot of them adopted. Here’s his take on Cabaret Voltaire (who of course went in that direction:
So good at the start… very warm place in my heart for them and kindred spirits like Metal Urbain etc.
Nag Nag Nag, Red Mecca, Three Mantras, Live tape all impeccable and a big inspiration for me. The later grafting of the noise electronic aesthetic onto club music destroyed this whole branch of music by providing an easy, consistent framework and audience, and almost every electronic band that survived into the 80s adopted it.
That whole shift was probably the worst lemmings-off-a-cliff act in all of music. Worse than when everybody added a disco song to the setlist. Worse than when every UK band added that ridiculous Madchester shuffle. Worse than autotune.
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OK, fine, he got first generation industrial but that’s not where the genre has spent the bulk of the last 35 years.
He sounds like a folkie from the '60s who’s still mad about electric guitars.
OK, fine, he got first generation industrial but that’s not where the genre has spent the bulk of the last 35 years.
He sounds like a folkie from the '60s who’s still mad about electric guitars.
And you can argue that he has a point, as the genre (in terms of larger, more prominent acts) has stagnated thanks to this attitude. The original bands of that ilk (Skinny Puppy, Ministry etc) still sound amazing to this day. But not their various clones.
Certainly, the likes of Coil, Helm, HEALTH, James Welburn and Teeth of the Sea have thrown up more interesting and exciting “industrial” music in the last 20 years than the likes of FGFC820, Manson and whoever you care to lump them in with.
[reply]
weird. they refer to paul as “Ion Barker”.
When I met Paul in '83, everyone called him Ion.[/reply]
Really weird I never knew this. Glad I do now!
The best part of the interview is Ian’s pronounciations of Jergensen and Rifflin.
Ian MacKaye is honestly my hero. I look up to that guy at embarrassing levels. Consequently, I just always assume he’s infallible and smarter than me.
ian mackaye and steve albini = drugs bad
cool
thanx for reminding me why you are old bloated and boring …
I like a lot of music from both of these guys, but I find it sad that neither of them understand electronic dance music. But I guess it’s not for everybody.
I do wish Albini didn’t talk as much about bands or albums being objectively “good” or “bad”, like all the kids did in junior high school. He acts like there’s an objective scale, but if I genuinely like Cabaret Voltaire’s Crackdown better than Mix Up, I guess he’d think I’m a bad music fan. Not that that keeps me up overnight or anything.
Albini was cool enough to agree to this:
http://thequietus.com/articles/18882-powell-vs-steve-albini
Here’s a post by Albini:
I will attempt to articulate my dislike for dance music.
In the form music appeals to me most, it is an attempt to express something. Not necessarily concrete ideas, and not necessarily even discernable content, but it expresses the creative impulse, and within it something unique about the people making it. I think this applies across the broad spectrum of my tastes, from Bill Withers to Converge. From Buddy Holly to Whitehouse. From AC/DC to Nina Nastasia. From Hank Williams to the Stooges. There is something in their music that while expressing their creative impulse captures something unique to them. I get the impression that the music (certainly the form of the music) is subordinate to the impulse to make it, and in many cases is irrellevant. The ideas or their expression are not bounded by the form.
Dance music is denied this sort of possibility, because it is functional music. It must function as a backdrop to a specific activity, dancing, for which there are fairly rigid boundaries. I know much is made of artists who “test” or “ignore” those boundaries within the genre, but that they are there to be tested is evidence I am right.
I find a similarly easy dismissal of jingles, video game music, etc. It is functional, bounded, and so incapable of provoking in me the feeling I get from music made for its own sake.
I guess that’s it. You can either make music for its own sake, or you can make music to serve a function. I find myself unmoved by functional music. I noticed this when disco as a genre came into being. Prior to that, people danced to music of many types that could be danced to. After that, an industry supplied music that was music only in the formal, dictionary sense. It was functional above any other consideration.
This music became the background sound for dancing in clubs, and from that developed a narcissistic, vacuous club culture that I found (and still find) repellant. The best thing that can be said about disco and the later club scene is that it gave the gay community a sense of vitality and greater cultural influence than it had been allowed previously. I think that is a great social development with an atrocious soundtrack.
The children and cousins of that scene are the roots of dance-oriented electronic music, and I find the family resemblance too much to bear.
As the idiom developed, the music became more and more about the novelty of certain sounds and treatments, ridiculously trivial aspects like tempo and choice of samples, and the public personae of the makers. It became a race to novelty. I find that kind of evolution beneath triviality. It is a decorative, not substantive, evolution.
Even the name is misleading. Dancing itself is unbounded. There are infinite possibilities for movement, pace, form, gesture, posture, etc. Many cultures exploit this in ceremonial dance music or traditional dance music. I find it ludicrous that, given such an open expanse of possibility, the genre “dance music” is so predictable and so hidebound. If I had an interest in dancing, it would not be limited to music that inspired bouncing in 4/4. The haunting nature of some waltzes, the awkward, tricky beauty of the Tarantella, and even the joviality of the Hava Negila are all evidence that there is more to be had from dancing than this, this fodder.
You may say that dancing is dancing, and it doesn’t matter to what. I agree, going that far. But the music danced to, in its own right, can be listened-to, and when I do that to dance music (contemporary electronic dance music and its variants), I find little else in it, and parsing its variants out is an un-stimulating taxonomic exercise for me.
Trying to be all intellectual and high-brow about it just makes it seem like he has his mind made up about dance music without ever having to listen to it.
Great essay, Ruts!
I very much agree.
And it doesn’t mean that such “music” isn’t pleasurable and fun, but it has taken the idea of “music” and isolated it from the idea of creative expression and turned it more into a manipulative math or science.
Like you said, despite the result being effective and fun (because it uses an unimaginative formula tested and proven to make your booty move) it is devoid of meaning and emotional content. I think this can be proven easily in the fact that people can auto tune any news clip of the day, add some generic beats and boops and it’s another catchy tune, just as danceable as the last top 40 hit.
This doesn’t mean that there are not “dance” songs with emotional drive and content, but for the most part this genre (yes, I include much of the “industrial dance” stuff in the same category as this DJ crap like Tiesto, David Guetta, etc.) is deliberate, artificial, and dishonest.
I think he makes it sound like every album needs to include a 5 page manifesto on the reasons and motivations for recording it and the artist’s intentions for their album. That’s great if you don’t ever want to have any fun with it.
But as to his overall point, Music is always made in confines, Whether it be adhering to a specific dance beat, staying within the rules of strict “rock” music, or sticking with guitar/base/drums as your only instruments. All music has a function, whether it be dancing, conveying of ideas, or therapy for the author. One function isn’t necessarily better or worse than another, it’s all in the eye of the beholder. Remaining in the confines of a genre isn’t a bad thing, it just means you need to work harder to make it stick out from the crowd and be interesting.
I guess my overall point is that he and I obviously look for different things in music (though there is certainly some overlap). It’s the judgementalism that I find very off-putting. I can’t get into stuff like Rapeman, but I’m not going to dismiss it as “worse than autotune”. I could write some dissertation with all the reasons that my viewpoint is superior, but it all comes down to people like what they like.
[reply]weird. they refer to paul as “Ion Barker”.
When I met Paul in '83, everyone called him Ion.[/reply]
thanks for the info.
Thanks for the Ion references. I totally missed it back in the day…oh well & good to know since he is using it quite often now.
same here.
i like certain dance music.
I make my own music. Were Albini to listen to most of it, he’d hate it call it “mechanized dance music” despite the fact that I have no reservations that anyone on earth will ever actually dance to it. I just like using those kind of beats and sounds.
I’m sorry Albini doesn’t find any emotional resonance in that type of music, but I do. And lots of other people do as well.
I’ve never been a fan of Albini’s “music” and could care less about his so-called talent as a producer too.
All that being said . . . . I’ve always found his hateful self-assurance and black and white judgment of everything to be quite refreshing. I’m kind of the same way. If I think something is shit, I really couldn’t care that other people like it. It’s shit to me and I can’t really understand why other people have such a profound love of shit.
I get kind of tired with people that soft sell their opinions. I don’t take Albini’s words as gospel. Heck, I likely disagree with the angry little prick on 90% of stuff he says, but he owns his opinions like a champ and doesn’t care that he comes off as an irritable douchebag. And if people feel threatened about said douchebag’s views on disco or punk or whatever . . . well, that’s just kind of sad.
Rev,
Totally agree. I like a lot of the stuff he criticizes. Albini has never been of the “to each their own” school.
At the same time though, I really do like his own work. I’m a huge fan of Big Black, Rapeman, and Shellac (and the Jesus Lizard records he produced are awesome). I think I mentioned in a previous incarnation of the Albini discussion that, while Al has made some music that I like WAY better than anything Albini has done, I’ve liked all of the music Albini has made, whereas I can’t even come close to saying that about Al. But I like all kinds of music, including lots of stuff that he routinely criticizes, including “dance club” industrial. Obviously a lot of it is shitty, but that’s true of ANY genre isn’t it? Most music in most genre’s is a steaming pile.
Gunnar,
You don’t like any Albini stuff?
And I agree with you too. With the above caveat, I find him endlessly amusing, and I think we need more cranks like him. Just because they aren’t right all the time, doesn’t mean that a crank or two aren’t necessary.
But while I don’t give a crap if other people don’t like what I like I also don’t give a crap if people like stuff I think is crap. It’s two sides of the same coin really. If people like shit, more power to em. I couldn’t care less.
Gunnar,
You don’t like any Albini stuff?
That’s probably a bit premature of me to say. I’ve not found anything that I thought was particularly exciting or interesting to me.
Except . . . . I did recently watch some Big Black videos on YouTube and they did a song called “Bad Penny”. They were really on fire and I liked the weirdness of Albini’s style. He looked like some angry nerd that got overworked in the engineering department and just went absolutely postal. He had some weird ass improvised guitar strap thing which was basically rubber tape or something, wrapped tightly around his abdomen. It was bizarre, but also really cool and unique.
But for the most part I just haven’t even bothered to try to understand why people think he’s so great. I’ve listened to some stuff here and there but hardly any of it connects.
When it comes to Albini, I just stay committed to hasty judgement and my own opinion of “facts.” I’ve read a bunch of his comments about people or bands “selling out.” Which always reminds me he produced a damn Bush album. What a jerk.
I’ve got Big Blacks “Songs about Fucking” (is that what it’s called?) and it’s fine.