The Beat

Welcome to The Beat, Decential’s weekly breakdown of the music-web3 byway.

Like most things in web3, the music space moves at breakneck speeds, issuing regular bouts of hope, cringe and FOMO. That combination of qualities blur the essence of the movement – the enduring solutions to legacy industry problems and the people building them. Let’s focus on the essence; the rest, as Alex Ross wrote, is noise.

Steve Albini

During the pandemic, I interviewed Scott Lucas, the frontman of Local H – a band best known for their 1996 radio hit, “Bound for the Floor.” Local H had just released their record Lifers, which was partially engineered by the icon Steve Albini, and recorded at his Chicago studio, Electrical Audio.

Lucas admitted he was “kind of afraid” to record with Albini. “I guess I just didn’t want to get in there and embarrass myself in front of him,” Lucas told Billboard at the time. “But…it was great. Everything we did with him was analog; there was no digital with him, so we’re recording to tape again, and that was fun. It really got us in a different mindset.”

Last week, Albini died of a heart attack at the too-young age of 61. As an engineer, his name – and aliases – graced more than 650 albums, including triumphs like Nirvana’s In Utero and PJ Harvey’s Rid of Me. “Meeting Steve Albini and working with him changed the course of my life,” Harvey said when he passed. “He taught me so much about music, and life.”

These past few days, there’s been an outflow of elegy from the music pantheon. Dave Grohl dedicated the Foo Fighters’ song “My Hero” to him during a recent gig. Joanna Newsom, too, took time to honor him during a show, saying “On the list of all the reasons that he’s my hero, music and music-related stuff doesn’t even crack the top 10.”

Indeed, Albini’s collective eulogy hasn’t been contained to his music contributions – far from it. Albini’s was a clarion voice, capable of – as Lucas said – shifting mindsets. His conviction was laden with an acerbic wit, steeped in a spicy stew of journalistic prescripts (he studied journalism at Northwestern) and punk ideology: sometimes principled, sometimes nihilistic, usually a bit of both. 

As Stereogum wrote, “he was a geyser of both wisdom and controversy across zines, alt-weeklies, message boards, and social media.” Not long ago he made headlines for his unabashed castigation of Steely Dan – “I will always be the kind of punk that shits on Steely Dan,” Albini said last year, likening the studio-only yacht rockers to an “SNL band warm up.”

”Steve had answers and he had pronouncements. He was always right, even when he was wrong,” wrote Thurston Moore (Sonic Youth) in his own must-read tribute. And though his takedown of ‘The Dan’ might be a bit contentious in this newsletter, he won’t hear any complaints about the “pronouncements” he regularly lobbed at the music industry.

“He seemed to have a bemused realization of his own staunch judgment towards factionalism, us versus them, the capitalist colonization agenda of the recording industry coexisting with the socialist minded independent music world,” Moore continued. “He could articulate, from a surprisingly young age, with intelligent and intellectual passion, reasons not to set foot in the manipulative cogs of ‘major’ label indignity.”

More than once, I’ve quoted Albini’s formative 1993 treatise, “The Problem with Music,” which outlines the flow of money through music’s value chain. The guy eviscerates the music industry, comparing it to a shit-filled trench whose wonky contract math – which he breaks down in detail – demonstrates “just how fucked [artists] are.” 

It was the basis of my 2022 essay on music NFTs, and a grounding exercise in the unfortunate reality that, 30 years on, artists are still fucked. Even worse than back then? Probably. And while we should regard the streaming paradigm as yet another “manipulative cog of major label indignity,” we should also acknowledge it wasn’t the first.

Albini seemed to recognize that artists have been fucked no matter which way we’ve turned, and he voiced that recognition in both ‘fuck this’ apostasy and tempered nuance. And truly, we need both. As I read through the heaps of homage, finding both sides of this man’s voice, I was reminded again of my conversation with Scott Lucas in 2020.

“I dunno how many times I bought Dark Side of the Moon,” he told me. “And that's the point. It's like, ‘Hey, there's this new format, you should get it.’ It's my favorite record. I want to hear it. They go, ‘Hey, that format we told you about, it's not that good – here's a better format.’

“It costs more money and finally gets to the breaking point where they're charging you 20 bucks for a piece of shit record that's got one good song on it,” he continued. “So, of course Napster is gonna happen, right? And that guy just wants to burn it all down, so fuck him too. It just gets to this point where no one gives a shit.

“And it's either somebody who's trying to rip you off or somebody who's like, ‘fuck everything.’ And you know, they end up getting millions of dollars for fucking everything. So, I don't know, man.”

A Tale of Two Steves

The other day, I interviewed Lubomyr Melnyk, a singular composer and pianist – and that’s not hyperbole, he’s the fastest player in the world, clocking in at 19 and a half notes per second. The Ukrainian is also the only person in the world – he says, and to his great sadness – who can play what he calls “continuous music” (it’s beautiful).

Melnyk’s connection to music is profound, especially to the piano. When he speaks, he regards the instrument as part of him. And like Albini, he’s not afraid of risking dissent in the name of music’s preservation:

“Now you have access to everything, but you can't get to it,” he said. “It's there somewhere on your telephone. You'll find a little bit here, a little bit there or something, but you won't be able to listen to it because there are no recordings that you can own. 

“This is thanks to that shithead, Steve Jobs, who eliminated CD players from computers and went so far as to pay car companies to remove them from cars because he was so driven by greed,” he continued. “I mean, he got sick and died because he could not live anymore without having complete control of everything that people heard – like not being able to listen to a minute of music without paying him money.”

Although I often vilify the tech archons, Jobs had thus far evaded the ax – but Melnyk’s got a great point. (And as I write this, trying to search my – fka – iTunes library for my “owned” music while repeatedly getting dragged into Apple Music, I’m especially inclined to agree). 

But this is the world we live in (for now), where music is part of the broader dualities of commerce and art, access and curation, digital and analog – ‘the capitalist colonization agenda of the recording industry‘ and ‘the socialist minded independent music world.’

So even as we live with these perpetual “I don’t know, man” frustrations, voices like Melnyk’s and Albini’s remind us that we can find success and live our principled “fuck off” moments. It’s cliché as hell, but ‘do it for the music, not the money’ rings true. Melnyk’s been at it for 60+ years and always let the piano lead, even when nobody was paying any attention (it wasn’t until very recently that people starting to – long overdue).

And Albini was much the same. His success was more immediate, but it didn’t come with ethical concessions. The engineer was egalitarian, working with anyone who called – as long as they were serious about making a record. He refused to accept royalties, calling it an insult to the artist. Compared to other engineers of similar renown, he kept low rates, and sometimes even worked unpaid when an act ran out of cash.

There’s a great clip from the BBC doc Sound of Song, where Albini is interviewed. The interviewer asks him to listen to his longtime band Shellac – for whom he sang and played guitar – on an iPod. Albini indulges him and listens. Upon taking off the headphones, he simply says: “That wasn’t enjoyable.”

Coda

To add to the sadness, Albini died just ten days before the release of Shellac's sixth album, To All Trains. It’s the band’s first record in a decade. Don’t miss it when it arrives tomorrow.

Now go outside and listen to music — it’s a beautiful day.

My name is MacEagon Voyce. For more music and less noise, consider subscribing to The Beat. And if you already do, consider sharing with a friend. Thanks for being here.