The Problem With Music, Redux

Steve Albini was a true artist advocate and an inspiration

I’m having a hard time processing Steve Albini’s passing. I’ve read so many moving posts - he meant a lot to a lot of us. To many of my friends he was a personal friend and collaborator. I’ve never met him, but he’s meant many different things to me over the years, but I’ve always thought of him as someone unafraid to tell the truth (or at least HIS truth) about the music business, which he describes as an “administrative business structure that’s syphoning money [that] always seemed artificial and unnecessary, and I’ve spent my life trying to remove its influence.” This is, in my opinion, central to who he was, so I wanted to examine it a bit more.

It’s so weird that he’s been a subject of interest to me for over 40 years, and I never met the guy. I saw Big Black live in Boston in probably 1987 (at The Channel with Pussy Galore - come on, historians…do your thing). That’s the only time I’ve ever laid eyes on him. Years before that I used to read his stuff in the Chicago fanzine Matter. I found his takes fascinating because he did not hold back. I’d have been terrified to meet him back then because he’d probably make some withering comment about my band being shite. And he would have! That’s who he was. He made awful comments about bands he worked with, bands I loved. But I liked his records, and I often delighted in his over-the-top opinions.

Quick anecdote that I’ve shared recently, since both individuals have recently passed away. I remember hearing that Albini was hired to produce the first Pixies album. I felt bad for my friend Gary Smith, who was Pixies’ first champion and producer. Freda, Juliana, and I went to Gary’s place for dinner in early 1988 and we found him in a somber mood. What’s wrong, we asked. “Oh, it’s a disaster,” he said. “I got the new Pixies album, and Steve Albini completely RUINED it.” Juliana said, “Can we hear it?” “Oh….I guess so,” Gary said. “But it’s really just so upsetting, such a tragedy.”

Gary pressed play on his DAT player, and the room filled with the now-familiar explosion of David Lovering’s drums on Bone Machine. We sat in silence and listened to the entire Surfer Rosa album for the first time, maintaining our poker faces while Gary shook his head and muttered about this and that. Then we had dinner as the mood lifted with talk of our own recording project. When we left Gary’s apartment a couple hours later, we walked in silence towards the Green Line. Finally Juliana spoke.

“So what did you guys REALLY think about that Pixies album?”

“OH MY GOD, IT’S SO GOOD” we said, practically in unison. And then we talked about it for the rest of the night, wishing we could get another listen. That’s when I knew Steve Albini was a genius. He fucking NAILED that album, which literally changed music.

Like some of the greatest thinkers and innovators in music, Albini came from punk rock. His ethos is punk. Punk is where I learned that the music business could be egalitarian. U.S. hardcore punk in the late 70s and early 80s was music by kids, for kids. There wasn’t really any money in it at the time, so it had a purity. Musicians, label owners, engineers, show promoters, fanzine editors…we all did what we did because it was fun, and important, and OURS. People who came out of that culture and mindset are some of the most artist-focused, fair-minded people in music. The most effective and ideological have had an enormous impact on the industry decades later. Albini is one of those people, and he held on to his ideology straight through - even when he stood to make enough money to be set for life.

His 1993 Essay, The Problem with Music, made a big impression on me during that strange time when major labels got into the punk business in a huge way. It really messed with my head, going through a full-press major label courtship knowing my band (Blake Babies) was probably doomed. We took all the meetings, had all the nice dinners, made the demos, listened to people tell us how great we were, then we broke up. I came out of that enchanted by the process, thinking maybe I wanted to be an A&R guy for a major label. I actually pursued it a bit, realized I could probably open those doors with some effort, leverage my status as a young dude from a cool band. But after reading Steve’s essay, I wasn’t so sure. It made me look in the mirror, then peek behind the curtain and see that it wasn’t something I wanted to do after all.

A&R Scouts

Within a few years I was signed to a major label - sort of - and it wasn’t a good experience. I met more and more musicians who had bad experiences signing major label deals. Many of them felt disappointed, but in some cases the deals produced no music and literally ended bands. As I delved into the business side of music out of necessity to understand my own situation, I realized that it really was that bad. I managed to get myself out of my record deal with a lot of effort, but it filled me with a passion I still hold today to shine a light for artists trying to navigate this thorny business. That’s why I went to law school. Lots of people thought I was nuts at the time - including my parents. But I saw law practice as a way to attain the ability to actually have influence, and to work for artists in a way that put me truly on the artist’s side. I’ll never know what Steve would have thought of this conclusion, but his essay helped me get there.

Although I probably dodged a bullet by not pursuing A&R in the early 90s, I’ve managed to do some version of A&R my whole career - including for a record company - in a way that I feel has mostly been fair and balanced towards musicians. My career has been an effort to serve, in service of artists and in service of my own ever-evolving values about music and musicians. It’s easier to do that when I’m inspired by these incredible artist advocates like Steve, Ian MacKaye, Mike Watt, Paul Mahern, and other punk rockers who have remained true to their ethos.

As I’ve re-read The Problem with Music, I’ve been thinking about how much has changed while so much has remained more or less the same since he wrote this essay over thirty years ago.

What I Hate About Recording

“Tape machines ought to be big and cumbersome and difficult to use, if only to keep the riff-raff out. DAT machines make it possible for morons to make a living, and do damage to the music we all have to listen to.” He wrote this during the first real decade of digital recording. DAT machines weren’t even capable of multi-track recording! Now morons can make decent-sounding recordings using only voice prompts. This statement has aged pretty well.

I caught up with a friend last night who works on the policy side of music. She told me about her talented teenaged daughter who was trying to make her first record. She’d recorded the tracks very simply herself using a basic digital program. She sent it to several different engineers to mix with instructions to keep it simple and natural, with examples. None of these mix engineers could follow the directions - they all insisted on “tightening up” the track through quantizing, tuning everything, and compressing the life out of the recording…making it sound “modern” (in a way that will cause it to sound dated almost instantly). Their process made it impossible for them to follow a client’s simple instructions. Natural recordings of music captured in its environment have become a niche. Albini’s approach of capturing music as naturally and authentically as possible stands in stark contrast to today’s norm. And yet, many of his recordings are timeless classics because they captured the music naturally and authentically. This is so important for musicians to understand.

For the record I don’t agree that producers need to be engineers. Many of the best producers have relied completely on engineers to capture sounds (surprised he didn’t call out Rick Ruben here - he’s the best example). Many producers bring value due their musicianship, insight into arrangement, instrumentation, and performance. That said, it’s crucial to have someone in the process who actually understands how recording equipment works rather than relying on plugins and other digital tools. If we lose the ability to capture sounds with a microphone in a room, we might as well just hand the process over to AI models.

There’s This Band

Believe it or not, things actually got considerably worse in the difficult years for the recording industry. Albini wrote this summary of deal process and terms before so-called “360” deals existed. In the early 2000s, when recordings didn’t have a clear future as a profit center, record labels insisted on commissioning other revenue streams such as touring. I sat in the audience at SXSW 2003 and listened to the head of business affairs for a major label field a question on why artists should sign a 360 deal. He answered “Because you need us…you need us to exist.” We all sat in silent disbelief at his cluelessness. But in a sense, we still sorta DID need them. So we often did the deals with gritted teeth.

I considered that moment a nadir in my low respect for major labels, and I steered many artists into independent deals because the terms were way better and they often did a great job developing artists. However, I’ve softened on major labels in recent years because it’s possible to negotiate very artist-friendly deals that feel more like partnerships than the locked-up deals of the (even recent) past. Why? More independent options bringing competition. Major labels still have the greatest resources around the world and the cash to break artists. It’s a different world - at least for the moment. Structures have changed that have changed the power dynamic, but majors still have a unique ability to build superstar careers. I’m really happy to have survived in this industry long enough to experience the shift in leverage. It’s a wild feeling to negotiate deals that feel relatively fair and balanced. That said, my job as artist counsel is extremely important, because “risk management” on the label side, at least with respect to financial risk, is often a zero-sum proposition. We can identify and manage risks, but for true developing acts the power structure will likely always favor the company. But at least it feels more honest and balanced these days.

One thing I think he gets wrong, from my own experience, is the deal memo. I’ve only been handling music deals for 20 years so it might have been different in the 90s, but I’ve never heard of an artist making a deal with an A&R person before lawyers get involved. A deal memo is an outline of basic terms that are actively negotiated by lawyers on each side. I can’t imagine an in-house lawyer for a major label - these are usually very good and very risk-focused lawyers - seeking to enforce something that is essentially a back-of-napkin deal from an A&R scout. TPWM casts the lawyers as mostly complicit in the scam, and in some cases from my own experience as an artist that is deserved. Nevertheless, there are some fantastic lawyers representing artists who are instrumental in moving the industry standard in ways that favor creatives. If you pursue a deal with a label, label service company, publisher, etc., be sure you find one of them to help you manage risk.

It took balls to speak truth to power like Albini did in TPWM. Just as it took an impressive measure of ideological purity to walk away from back-end earnings on huge albums he recorded such as In Utero and Walking Into Clarksdale. It’s also remarkable that an engineer of his stature and reputation would record anyone who booked time at his Chicago studio, Electrical Audio. His body of work - the number of influential and massively enjoyable albums that he engineered - is truly humbling. I expect, however, he would minimize his role and say he was just doing his job. That sort of humility is all too rare in our world.