My Unpublished Interview with Steve Albini

RIP to a legend.

Here is a list of things Steve Albini is known to hate: skateboarding, Jane’s Addiction, sports, disco dancing, drugs, music festivals, Sonic Youth, fashion, New York City, Odd Future, GQ magazine, jazz, math rock.

Steve Albini, musician, audio engineer and professional poker player, passed away May 7th, 2024 of a heart attack at the age of 61. Arguably singlehandedly responsible for defining the fearsome sound of 1980s and ‘90s alternative rock, his discography includes some of the most singular albums of all time: The Pixies’ Surfer Rosa, PJ Harvey’s Rid of Me, Songs Ohia’s Magnolia Electric Co., and Cloud Nothings’ Attack on Memory all bear his signature heavy sound.

In 2017, I handed in my Master’s Thesis at Columbia Journalism School titled, “Nasty, Brutish, and Short: The aesthetics of abjection in the music of Big Black.” I spent an entire year researching Albini, tracking down copies of obscure zines he’d written for in the 1980s, interviewing his former bandmates—even his mom. I spent two full days interviewing him at Electrical Audio in January 2017 in an attempt to learn everything there was to know about the man and the music. It never saw the light of day.

The following is pulled from an unpublished book proposal I wrote for the 33 1/3 series, based on the thesis.

~

It’s noon on a Monday in January in 2017 and Steve Albini and I are sitting in Studio A, the larger of the two recording studios that comprise Electrical Audio. He looks unassuming, a middle aged man of medium height with nerdy glasses and spiky hair, and speaks in unaffected monotone. His iPhone case is a large, white, unwieldy thing, and when I ask for a closer look it turns out to be shaped like a fluffy cat. On his desk are two economy-sized bottles of acetaminophen and ibuprofen, a fitting prop for a man who once named his third EP “Headache,” which included a photo of a car accident victim whose head had been sliced in half. I ask if he gets a lot of headaches, and he explains that food makes him sluggish, so he doesn’t tend to eat in the mornings. Instead, he shows up to the studio around noon, does a full day’s work and doesn’t eat a thing until 10pm. He suspects that his routine of one Henry VIII-sized meal per day is what’s causing his headaches.

“The Power of Independent Trucking” – 1:37

One does not merely listen, one endures the albums of Big Black. The music is so relentless that to hear it at full volume has a full paralyzing effect. Imagine your body freezing up in fear. Imagine exiting a 7-Eleven into the parking lot and feeling the tiny hairs at the nape of your neck bristle, as if each keratin cell has suddenly developed extra-sensory perception and is alerting you that your are certainly being watched in the seconds before getting mugged. Imagine standing on the subway tracks, languidly scrolling through your phone out of boredom a split second before you hear breathing behind you and a person pushes you out onto the tracks. All of a sudden your mind starts to dissociate from your body, and real life becomes a movie that you’re watching but can’t do anything about.

Track one, Songs About Fucking: For less than a second, all we hear is a muffled voice. Then it’s immediately joined by a set of scraping guitars atop blasphemous drums. “The backbone of this country is the independent truck,” is muttered indistinguishably yet “bone” is enunciated so fiercely that the word sounds like an imperative or a weapon. Immediately, the drums intensify and the pulsating beat lurches into a pummeling one. The music doesn’t just grab you, it pins you down, and one hand saws your ear off while the other has you in a chokehold. The vocals swell from menacingly indiscernible to a bombastic war cry, assaulting the listener with such a blistering intensity of noise it almost dares you to turn away. At 50 seconds, the buzzing guitar retreats and we’re left with nothing but the lecherous drums and a rabies-infected snarl. The beat slows back down again from anxiety-inducing to merely frantic, but your heart is still left beating overtime, and before you have time to cool down, it’s all over. The song lasts one minute and 27 seconds.

“Nasty, brutish and short” were the most famous words published in Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan, a philosophical treatise from 1651 articulating how strong government will save humans from living out their greedy, shrewish lives in misery, but they might better be used as a description of Big Black’s 1987 album, Songs About Fucking. Critics tend to use metaphors likening Big Black’s sound to a metallic object or a weapon, usually a combination of both. The guitars scrape together creating an eerie, visceral sound that sparks with the unplaceable familiarity of Freud’s uncanny valley. In the liner notes of the album, onomatopoeic sounds replace the concept of lead and rhythm guitar; “sknnng” and “rrrr” as avatars for instruments. Underneath the diapason, Big Black employed a Roland TR-606 drum machine, which propels the beat forward with such an unrelenting fierceness that it feels like a mechanical drill or a particularly aggressive termite boring a hole in your skull. Human drumming allows for expressive variation – subtle, almost imperceptible shifts in dynamics and feel can give music its soul – while the drum machine’s unapologetic artificiality imbues the music with a sense of the cold and ceaselessly inhuman. Clocking in at a total of 31 minutes and 45 seconds, Songs About Fucking is a blistering assault of hostility, depravity and speed.

Even the most fundamental aspect of the band, its name, is meant to connote a sense of looming dread. Big Black stands for the unknown; it’s every single terrifying villain in a children’s book reduced to its most basic precepts. Sometimes a general threat can be even more ominous than a specific one, because it allows you to ascribe your own unique fears onto the thing you’re waiting for. Big Black suggests that whatever you are afraid of is coming for you, and capitalizes on your lurking fears, no matter how hidden they might be. Erik Davis, a scholar and cultural critic (and writer of the 33 1/3 on Led Zeppelin IV), characterizes the music as “more of a tactic, a challenge, a call out to the listeners, ‘Can you hang with this?’” It was art as a form of initiation rather than a source of passive enjoyment. In order to get your foot inside the door of the underground culture that Big Black inhabited in the 1980s, first you had to prove that you could handle it.

Big Black introduced the world to Steve Albini, arguably one of the most influential and fascinating characters in the history of modern rock, who formed the band in 1981 when he was still a 19-year-old Journalism student at Northwestern University. After recording one Big Black EP alone in his bedroom – Lungs resembles an excised teratoma put on full display – Albini recruited two bandmates: guitarist Santiago Durango and bassist Jeff Pezzatti, who was later replaced by Dave Riley. All three members were unabashed dorkwards – in Melody Maker, Simon Reynolds described them as “possessed with the spindly, bespectacled air of God's chosen computer operators” – yet their Pointdexter exterior belied their ability to produce ungodly noise and provoke unpleasant thoughts. While still in the band, Albini took up residence as a fanzine provocateur, writing goading columns for Forced Exposure and Matter, such as a “Guide for Social Retards” and fictional stories laced with regrettable racial epithets.

In 1993, Albini cemented his divisive persona with his infamous essay, “The Problem With Music” for Chicago alt-mag The Baffler, in which he likened the struggle for musicians to get a good record deal to swimming through a pool filled with “runny, decaying shit.” Albini’s own hard-line indie ethics created a rift between those who agree with his inflexible stance, and those who see his refusal to compromise as a sign of ignorance. Still, others just think he’s a jerk. In 2002, the cover of Chunklet magazine featured a picture of Albini underneath the headline “Is this the biggest asshole in rock?” Albini’s mother, Gina, says, “He’s always spoken his mind and that’s probably got him into trouble sometimes.”

Big Black dipped the corpse of punk rock into a tub of acid and emerged with a clean skeleton on which they took parts of each Public Image Ltd., Wire, Throbbing Gristle, SPK, Cabaret Voltaire and sewed it all up to a rogue taxidermy of influences. But perhaps the most distinctive element of the band was Roland, the anthropomorphic name given to the Roland-TR606 drum machine. Until Big Black, drum machines had been the cornerstones of cheesy synth pop acts such as the Human League and Gary Numan; never before had they been used as the anchor for a punk band. Big Black’s use of a drum machine wasn’t effete; it was merciless. Roland was the linchpin of the band, setting up the severe pace atop which the other three members could unspool their own highly disciplined version of chaos. (In his Reddit AMA, when questioned on what it was like being in a band with Roland, Albini responded, “Brutal pussy hound.”)

While Atomizer has taken up more space in the critical discourse thanks to its anthem to anhedonia “Kerosene,” Songs About Fucking is the clearest distillation of what Big Black was about: quick, apoplectic bouts of noise. Atomizer may contain the more iconic songs, but Songs About Fucking plunges the depths of ugliness, and emerges holding every squalid thought a brain could possibly hold.

For a punk album, Songs About Fucking eschews relatable lyrics about teenage boredom or political frustration, in favor of toying with depraved subject matter that was at best distasteful and at worst disturbing. “L Dopa” is a drug with the power to treat Parkinson’s disease but also has the unpleasant side effect of triggering involuntary jerks and spasms. “Colombian Necktie” is a brutal method of murder wherein the victim’s throat is slit and their tongue is threaded through the open gash. “Ergot,” one of the more esoteric obscurities addressed on the album, is a poisonous wheat fungus that was supposedly responsible for an outbreak of hysterical symptoms such as hallucinations and convulsions in Medieval England. The song Kasimir S. Pulaski Day – an intentional misspelling of the American Revolution war hero Casimir Pulaski – depicts a bystander watching severed body parts fly onto the highway after a car crash. Albini shapeshifts personas from a suicidal prom queen named Daisy to a violent alcoholic to a murderous lech. Each song drills to the core of our humanity where the filth and disgust take root.

Some of the most vivid descriptions of the album come from customer reviews on Amazon.com. A review left on September 27, 2004 says, “They sound like a New Wave band consisting of serial killers with broken instruments.” Another review, from January 22, 2000 reads, “The whole album sounds like what you would have if you could capture the moment of suicide across the length of a record,” and “This album makes Nine Inch Nails sound like Disney records,” finishing off with a recommendation and a warning: “This album is a must-buy, but it is not for the weak.”

*

“Big Black was a sledgehammer to the face. It was getting hit with a cinderblock. It was relentless, song after song after song onstage with its intensity,” recalls Jim DeRogatis, former music critic for the Chicago Sun-Times, who compares Albini’s madman charisma onstage to the borderline insane persona of Johnny Rotten. “[Albini] weighed like 90 pounds and then had this wrestler’s belt strapped around him and the guitar would balance on the wrestler’s belt. He would jump on the drum machine pedal. Santiago was amazing. Riley was amazing. It was the greatest band in the world,” he says.

Simon Reynolds, the author of Rip it Up and Start Again, suggests that Big Black was one of the most important underground bands of the 1980s, right up there alongside noise rock pioneers Sonic Youth, the agonizingly heavy Swans, and carnival freak rockers Butthole Surfers. In his zine Sub Pop, Bruce Pavitt reviewed Big Black’s final show, which took place in a decommissioned Seattle power plant, thusly: “I cut my hand. I cut my hand trying to grab a piece of broken guitar. The strings of guitar cut into my hand and my hand bled on the stage. Big Black was on the stage. Big Black is God. Big Black destroyed everything. I wanted a piece of Big Black. Now my hand hurts. Because somebody tugged and sliced a guitar string into my hand. Now they have a big piece of Big Black and I don’t. I now have a band-aid on my palm. It’s hard to write with a hole in your hand. Goodbye Big Black.” The review ran under the headline “My Favorite Show Ever.”

Though many critics laud Big Black, their brutal appeal is lost on others. In his 1987 review of Songs About Fucking, Robert Christgau referred to the band as “Hitler Youth rejects.” In a short and brusque e-mail correspondence, he relayed that his thoughts on Albini are “not for the most part positive” and suggests that while he doesn’t accuse Albini of being a right winger, “I wouldn't be shocked to learn he was.” Others with a more nuanced view of Albini’s music have understood that his provocation was aimed mainly at delicate sensibilities, and his willingness to inhabit the psyche of evil in his songs was a critique rather than an acceptance of it. Jes Skolnik, a Chicago-based critic who writes for Pitchfork and Bandcamp, recounts to me that Big Black’s depictions of horrific acts actually helped them to deal with their own history of trauma and sexual abuse.

Songs About Fucking shows up in a list of British disc jockey John Peel’s top twenty favorite albums of all time, ranking with the Velvet Underground, Captain Beefheart & The Magic Band, The Smiths, The Ramones and The Jimi Hendrix Experience. John Peel was one of the most preeminent musical tastemakers of the twentieth century, whose voraciously eclectic musical tastes could be listened to on the BBC from 1967 until his death in 2004. Peel’s enthusiasm launched the careers of Joy Division, New Order, Blur and more. While Peel’s tastes were panoptic and wide-ranging – the list might have changed completely if you’d asked him the same question on a different week – it’s not a stretch to suggest that earning a spot on a list of John Peel’s top-20 albums is a pretty big fucking deal.

*

The mid-1980s ushered in an upswelling of bands seemingly in competition to create the ugliest, most-evil sounding noises possible. Robert Christgau coined the term “pigfuck,” to refer to the crashing wall of dick-splitting noise purveyed by bands like early Sonic Youth, the Butthole Surfers, Scratch Acid and Pussy Galore. These bands’ repudiation of melodiousness was so complete that Christgau used the term to mock devotees of the sound, calling them “a smattering of convinced pigfuckers who think Hüsker Dü is Julio Iglesias in disguise.” Simon Reynolds recounts that himself and his Melody Maker colleague, David Stubbs, dubbed the sound "arsequake" for its emphasis on “the low-end rupturing sound of the distorted bass.”

In his 1977 book Noise: The Political Economy of Music, social theorist Jacques Attali writes, “Music – pleasure in the spectacle of murder, organizer of the simulacrum masked beneath festival and transgression – creates order.” Essentially, his argument is that the very purpose of music is a constant struggle to weed out the more unpleasant sounds from daily life. Essentially, music cannot exist where there is noise, and noise cannot exist where there is music. The very word itself ‘noise’ contains a value judgment – it is abrasive and unpleasant to listen to. But the sheer cacophony of listening to instruments that sound like scraping sheet metal rip atop a wonky metronome is a big part of Big Black’s appeal. The music, so intent on attack, forces you into passivity. Big Black turns masc dudes into whimpering submissives; In S&M parlance, the “subspace” is the state of euphoria a submissive achieves once they’ve ceded over full control to their dominant. By ceding your own power over to the pulverizing wall of noise, you receive something much greater in return. In a Sonic Youth Tour Diary for the Village Voice, Kim Gordon once wrote, “How many grannies once wanted to rub their faces in Elvis's crotch, and how many boys want to be whipped by Steve Albini's guitar?”

For centuries prior to pigfuck, classical composers have pushed the boundaries of established musical practice, creating challenging works that, at the time, seemed more like noise than music to both audiences and critics. Chromatic harmony, or, chords using notes that do not belong to the key the music is in, was used as early as the 1700s by Johann Sebastian Bach and was considered hostile by the audiences of the day. Arnold Schoenberg’s experiments in chromaticism led him to move on to atonality – essentially, music without harmony – where he created a series of rangy, disorienting compositions. (To his utmost credit, the Nazis labeled his work “degenerate music.”) Most famously, Igor Stravinsky’s dissonant ballet The Rite of Spring provoked one of the most belligerent audience reactions ever documented. The opening chords of the ballet score were met with derisive laughter, and by the time the dancers arrived on stage, the jeering became so loud that they could scarcely hear their orchestral cues. A fistfight broke out and the mob of angry Parisians reportedly hurled vegetables at the stage. (Why they brought groceries to the ballet is not clear.) A review of the ballet that ran in newspaper Le Temps on June 3, 1913 read, “Never was the system of the wrong note practiced with so much industry, zeal and fury.”

In the rock era, the progenitors of modern noise were, of course, the Velvet Underground. Guitarist John Cale’s experimental tendencies – he studied classical music with avant-garde composers Cornelius Cardew and La Monte Young – meshed well with Lou Reed’s inclination towards drones, and together they birthed noise masterpieces such as the sprawling fourteen-minute "Sister Ray," in which the junkyard guitar scrapes and skronks over Mo Tucker’s funky anchoring drumbeat.

In the same year that solo Lou Reed released Metal Machine Music (supposedly a bid to get out of a recording contract), Throbbing Gristle began their journey planting the seeds of industrial music. The band coined the phrase “Industrial Music for Industrial People” on their second album, which became the slogan for the record label Industrial Records, formed in 1977 by band members Cosey Fan Tutti and Peter Christopherson. Throbbing Gristle combined experimental electronic sounds (synthesizers, sequencers and white noise), spoken word and heavy percussion, blended together with an overarching attitude of nihilism. The band was not-so-secretly influenced by Friedrich Nietzsche, and live shows featured slideshows of outré pornography and photos from Nazi concentration camps. “Genesis P-Orridge, however, persistently claims that Throbbing Gristle offered a critique of our fascination with violence, how we repress that fascination, and how the media play on it,” Paul Hegarty writes in his book Noise/Music. Big Black drew from Throbbing Gristle’s aesthetic negativity and infused it with sweaty, working class abrasiveness.

In 1980, Lester Bangs wrote an essay to explain the discomfiting appeal of noisy rock ’n’ roll, titling it “A Reasonable Guide to Horrible Noise.” In it, he writes:

Look at it this way: there are many here among us for whom the life force is best represented by the livid twitching of one tortured nerve, or even a full-scale anxiety attack. I do not subscribe to this point of view 100%, but I understand it, have lived it. Thus the shriek, the caterwaul, the chainsaw gnarlgnashing, the yowl and the whizz that decapitates may be reheard by the adventurous or emotionally damaged as mellifluous bursts of unarguable affirmation.

Big Black is a challenging study in contradictions: a group of nerds who play terrifying noise, an intimidatingly cranky frontman who turns out to be a kind and generous man, combining highbrow intentions with lowbrow sensibility, producing music that’s brutal yet still catchy, a broadly influential band with no direct descendants. They sprang, like the unnamed children of the Norse god Ymir, out of the armpit of punk rock, and their approach to making music was about as formulaic as being born out of an armpit would suggest.

Rest in Peace, King.