A punk of a certain kind

Steve Albini died earlier this year. He was 61. People will disagree about what his best work was. Some will say Nirvana’s In Utero. Others the Pixies’ Surfer Rosa. The Breeders’ Pod and Low’s Things We Lost In The Fire will also have their fans.

There will be audio nerds who will simply rave about the drum sound he got from the Jesus Lizard. Or the abrasive fuzz tone he could wrangle out of a Travis Bean guitar on records by his own bands, Big Black and Shellac. For students of the music industry, you could look at his 1993 essay “The Problem with Music” and (sadly) admire his prescience.

For me, Albini’s magnum opus came in February 2023. It was this Twitter thread:

Yes, it’s mean. Yes, it’s petty. But even if you’re a fan of “the Dan”, you have to appreciate the pure wordsmanship of the roasting they got. I’m not sure what inspired it. I don’t recall Steely Dan being on the news at the time, or Donald Fagen having released any new music. I don’t think Albini needed a reason, really.

The strange thing for me, however, was the way he began the thread. He says he’s “the kind of punk who shits on Steely Dan”. Was Steve Albini really a punk? And, if so, what kind of punk? 

He definitely did not fit the stereotypical image of a punk. He was a meticulous nerd who didn’t drink or take drugs. In his youth, he studied journalism at an elite university and wore a fedora over a Frank-Grimes-buzzcut. In later years, he donned a boiler suit almost every day and spent more time in online poker forums than underground live venues. He even ran a home cooking blog.

What he symbolised, though, was the attitude of punk. That oppositional, confrontational stance. The “fuck you” of it all. 

In calling himself a punk, Albini was saying that he started out his career in the punk community, that he shared its DIY values, and that those values rose largely in opposition to those of the mainstream music scene of the 1970s. A mainstream that, in Albini’s eyes, Steely Dan came to represent.

But how much are those 50-year-old distinctions worth these days? Albini may have loathed everything the band represented, but the truth is, he probably had more in common with Walter Becker and Donald Fagen—the bald-and-not-bald duo behind Steely Dan—than he’d ever admit.

All three of them were similar types: bookish geeks who tended to intellectualise art and obsess over technical minutiae. In their original music, the textures they weaved were wildly different—smooth and jazzy at one end, harsh and industrial at the other—but they were used to craft remarkably similar song types: mid-tempo rock tunes with a back beat and a straight feel, between 4 and 6 minutes of length. Lyrically sharp but not very poetic.

Transgressing cultural norms was also a common thread—”Steely Dan” was the name of a steam-powered dildo in a banned novel, after all. Albini, for his part, would name one of his bands after a Japanese manga character called “Rapeman. 

1960s Beatnik blowhard, meet 1980s edgelord douchebag. 

But let’s not overthink it. Above all, there’s one thing they had in common. They were all obsessive, unrepenting studio rats.  

As much as Albini loved to proclaim his punk credentials, there’s something inherently un-punk about spending 16 hours a day in a studio full of expensive gear. If punk is an attitude, then how much of that attitude is expressed by every millimeter that the $2000 ribbon microphones are adjusted to capture that crisp snare sound and that perfect stereo image of the cymbals?

Yes, Fagen and Becker may have wasted days trying to get the right flavour of “Egyptian” for a guitar solo that probably got scrapped from Side B of Gaucho. But Albini also wasted hours of Nirvana’s In Utero sessions making prank phone calls and asking Dave Grohl to hit a snare drum over and over again. 

I’m not going to lie, though—I identify more with Albini than with Steely Dan. But, at the same time, I feel like a bad Albini fan. 

I like Nevermind more than In Utero. I like Debaser more than Surfer Rosa. I don’t think I’ve ever listened to an entire Jesus Lizard album. 

As much as the purveyor of an undeniably kickass drum sound, I admired Albini as a great wordsmith who, for all his grouchiness and disagreeable core, was happy to share his knowledge and make music recording accessible to as many people as possible. A man of integrity and principle who cut through the bullshit of an industry floating in it.

He may have seen himself as just a regular punk, but he was a consummately professional punk, who could always be sure to show up on time, roll up his boiler suit sleeves, have the right mics set up and the tape rolling, ready to capture a piece of studio magic when it occurred. Like this one:

Okay, scratch that. It turns out The Steely Dan Twitter thread is my second-favourite Steve Albini jam.