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May 12“Pretty sure I could fuck up any dinosaur the size of a chicken or smaller.”
Steve Albini did an AMA last week. As you’d expect, it’s tremendous and enlightening.
On the record industry:
There won’t ever be a mass-market record industry again, and that’s fine with me because that industry didn’t operate for the benefit of the musicians or the audience, the only classes of people I care about.
Free distribution of music has created a huge growth in the audience for live music performance, where most bands spend most of their time and energy anyway. Ticket prices have risen to the point that even club-level touring bands can earn a middle-class income if they keep their shit together, and every band now has access to a world-wide audience at no cost of acquisition. That’s fantastic.
On voicemail:
I detest voice mail. Answer your goddamn phone or don’t have a phone. We have an answering machine at the studio for when everybody’s gone, but otherwise I answer the phone and I expect other people to. I detest the whole system of using the phone to manage/frustrate callers with menus and voice mail and all that. It’s a cop-out and it sucks and if you do that to people you’re an asshole. Answer your phone.
His political views:
As a realist, I tend to vote against the most destructive candidate, which generally means the Republican, in any election. I refuse to vote for a candidate with no chance of winning unless the election is a cinch. For judicial retention elections my wife compiles a cheat sheet of recommendations from various groups with whom we sympathize on womens’ issues, prison reform, GLBT issues and corruption.
My political perspective is progressive. I believe a society with a conscience should actively try to incorporate, liberate and support as many of its people as possible, and the story of our country is a lurching, faltering progress toward that ideal. Gradually, eventually, our side always wins. Slavery ended, women are no longer property and can vote, children no longer work in mines (although we still send them to prison), institutionalized racism is dying, we got out of Vietnam, being Queer is no longer criminal… It can take decades, and there are obviously still fish to fry, but the moral, generous and forgiving nature of mankind expresses itself piecemeal as the stones in the right-wing reactionary wall, sexism, racism, class identity, greed, exclusivity, violence and revenge all erode over time.
The progressive positions are all eventually adopted not because we’ve overpowered our opposition, but because the positions themselves resonate with the American identity; we want everybody to have a fighting chance at happiness and to live a fulfilling life of his own choosing. Whenever the right wing scores a victory on an issue, it is (in the words of the poet John Houlihan) a small, temporary victory won by small, temporary men. The right wing seizes territory during its season of power, which is ceded back to civilization and then some when its season ends.
Basically I think selfishness and revenge are the ugliest human impulses and I root for anyone who helps quiet them.
Anarchism is interesting intellectually and engenders some interesting discussion but that’s about it. Libertarianism, pfft. Me-me-me bullshit for selfish little pricks who have a child’s conception of property and liberty. Communism has a humane underpinning but basically can’t be implemented in groups larger than maybe a hundred.
Whenever I hear somebody bitching about taxes I want to punch him in the mouth. “It’s MY money!” Shut up, no it isn’t. It’s money, and it’s a fluid resource (or should be) just like air. It isn’t YOUR air just because you’re breathing it some of the time. Fucking children.
I find the notion and reality of a for-profit corporate prison system absolutely horrifying.
Other tidbits:
- “France has a ridiculous 95dB sound limit in performance spaces.”
- Asked for five words on the Pixies: “Five words? That’s going to”
- “Shellac will play in Chicago in August.”
- The inspirations for Songs About Fucking were “Songs and fucking.”
- “[O]nce you get into baseball other team sports just look like variations on a theme. Dogs fighting over a rag doll.”
The AVC rounded up some more gems, including the title quote, his PT Cruiser and his “Normal John Travolta sized” dick. HT: Ed.
