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Steve Albini has died

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Re: Steve Albini has died

#121

Post by moomin »

touseol wrote: post #115
rurban wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He was a legend as musician, and as producer, despite destroying PJ Harvey's Rid of Me. What a major fuckup! Anyway, the way he talked and explained the music business was always legendary.

I didn’t start listening to PJ Harvey until later in her career, but Rid of Me is one of my favorite albums. It had a sort of harshness that put me off at first, but once I got past that it really grew on me, and now that perceived harshness is an inseparable part of the final product for me. I don’t know how much of that to attribute to Albini or what the album might have been with a different producer, but what it…

I love the sound of Rid of Me, with one major exception: the radical volume changes on the title track and Highway 61. I 100% don’t understand what was going on there; it makes it impossible to listen to without riding the volume control and it bears no resemblance to how it was performed live.

Re: Steve Albini has died

#122

Post by antod »

nonrandomstring wrote: post #77

In my mind, Albini holds a plain speaking American slot besides Hunter S. Thompson, for the similarity of these remarks: "I imagine a trench, about four feet wide and five feet deep, maybe sixty yards long, filled with runny, decaying shit." - Steve Albini "The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There's also a negati…

> Wish there were more Steve Albinis in the tech world, confident going their own way and not sucking up to big-tech pedlars of digital dross.

Thanks for colliding those two worlds into each other for me in a way that never occurred to me. I think the tech world needs it even more than the music world does. eg the way free software and open source's wins have been diluted and sidelined by big tech and big cloud.

Re: Steve Albini has died

#123

Post by internet101010 »

ilamont wrote: post #3

Hard to overstate Albini's influence, both as a musician and producer. Big Black? No one was doing stuff like that in the mid-80s. His production on PJ Harvey's Rid of Me took her compositions to a new level. He also produced a lot of very fine albums in the 80s and 90s by the Pixies (Surfer Rosa), Nirvana (In Utero) and various albums by The Jesus Lizard, Superchunk, and others. Yes, he was cantankerous. Marched to…

I heard about him on the Foo Fighters HBO docu-series that came out in I think 2015? The one thing that stuck out to me was that he considered what he did a trade in the sense that artists paid for his time and he did not get royalties.

Re: Steve Albini has died

#124

Post by greenie_beans »

breput wrote: post #17

"I would like to be paid like a plumber: I do the job and you pay me what it's worth. The record company will expect me to ask for a point or a point and a half. If we assume three million sales, that works out to 400,000 dollars or so. There's no fucking way I would ever take that much money. I wouldn't be able to sleep." [0] https://news.lettersofnote.com/p/nirvana

i was once in a debate about capitalism and labor, and this letter was cited. this letter doesn't show the nuance of how he ran his business. here's an article with more insight about his ethos: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/brick-by-brick/20150...

> “Think about it this way: My business is a business of the first type, where everyone involved feels like they’re working on a common project. Everyone involved feels like we are equally valuable. When our clients come in, and they don’t see that there’s a power structure or a hierarchy; nobody has the big office or anything. Everybody is working together as comrades on this project.”

> “The remuneration is very equitable. Everybody gets paid the same. I make the same amount of money in a month as the newest employee that we have. So there is a fundamental difference between that and virtually any corporate structure. But you can’t expect people who feel like they are less valuable to a corporation, who feel like their effort, their input, and their opinion means less than someone else in that corporation. You can’t expect those people to jump in and all be pulling for the same results, team players. Because you have defined for them that they are not all pulling for one thing, that they are not team players. You have defined their role for them as subordinate.”

Re: Steve Albini has died

#126

Post by [deleted] »

laurex wrote: post #117
tptacek wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's apologized at length for his edgy band names, song names, and zine takes which happed in his early 20s. https://melmagazine.com/en-us/story/steve-albini-counsel-cul...

Yes, he evolved! But that work (fwiw more the actual lyrics than the band name itself) still is part of a legacy.

[deleted]

Re: Steve Albini has died

#127

Post by caf »

arp242 wrote: post #28
zzzbra wrote: post #20

This is hugely surprising. 61 is not old man. Is it me or does seem like the Gen Xers in the so-called counter culture are less long lived than their Boomer counterparts?

That some boomers like Ozzy Osbourne are still alive is just a freak accident. There have been plenty of baby boomer people who died comparatively young. Longevity is part genetics, part lifestyle, and part just dumb luck. Unfortunately Steve just got a bit unlucky, or bad genetics, or both. Or maybe in spite of his alcohol- and drug-free lifestyle he just had a really bad diet.

Lemmy and Prince being two that come to mind immediately.

Re: Steve Albini has died

#128

Post by yterdy »

mycologos wrote: post #108
tonymet wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

context?

People kept flagging threads announcing Kobe's death when it happened back in January 2020, claiming they were irrelevant to HN. In the end, I think they all got deleted. In contrast, Terry Jones got his own black bar a few days beforehand. For some reason, he was deemed extremely relevant to HN. I appreciate that keeping HN from devolving too far into angry shitposting requires subjective moderation, but I thought a…

You can search and find a few from the day, but the flaggers specifically targeted the posts with multiple comments. The only ones specifically focusing on the death that are still accessible only have one or two comments. A few tangentially about the accident or his philosophy slipped through.

I remember seeing complaints in replies to people mourning, saying absurd things like, "I've never heard of him before," and, "He's not important/famous enough."

To this day, I don't know what combination of "hackers' general disdain for athletes" and "internet's general disdain for black people," caused this response. I struggle to think of another explanation.

This is a good perspective from around that time:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22166309 (archive link: https://archive.is/nzFGy)

Re: Steve Albini has died

#129

Post by prpl »

Before hacker news, for me, there was the electrical audio forums. It was probably one of the most interesting places on the internet, and of course Steve with his hat avatar was a big part of that.

Re: Steve Albini has died

#130

Post by selimthegrim »

tialaramex wrote: post #52

I knew (of) him first and best for the essay "Some of your friends are probably already this fucked" (aka "The problem with music") which I was introduced to at about the point in my life where some friends are in bands and a few of them try to go commercial, but fortunately these particular friends had all read The Manual† and this essay by Albini. † https://www.amazon.co.uk/MANUAL-How-Have-Number-Easy/dp/1899...

I remembered the essay but only now connected it with the author.
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