In memoriam: As a ’90s producer and music tastemaker, Steve Albini was brutally honest — and usually right

a lot. The first time I met him was about 30 years ago. I was a graduate student at Northwestern University and assigned to interview somebody, and I had just bought “In Utero,” Nirvana’s follow-up to its blockbuster album “Nevermind.” Albini was the producer of “In Utero,” and one of my favorite albums, The Pixies’ “Surfer Rosa,” and so I called him, he agreed to chat, and while I remember little of what he said, I remember we talked for hours.

He was vintage Gen-X sarcastic, ironic, contrarian, defiantly principled. One of the best things ever written on music was Albini’s“The Problem With Music” for the Baffler, in which he laid out finances, empty promises, unnecessary flourishes. It opens with quite the metaphor: a band standing at one end of a trench filled with waste and at the other end is a music industry “lackey” with a fountain pen and contract. Whoever swims the trench first will get the deal.

Yet, at the peak of his influence, he also said: “If you wanted to take punk seriously on a more significant level, you could. If you pretend to take dance music seriously on a more significant level, that is a delusional pretension. There really is no substance to it.” Indeed, of all the legendary tales of Steve Albini, one of the best is the long letter that he wrote to Nirvana before recording “In Utero,” to lay out his philosophy and expectations:

Source: Entertainment Trends (entertainmenttrends.net)

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