The song Steve Albini thought destroyed the world: “The supernova moment”
Many column inches have been amassed waxing lyrical about the healing power of great music. Less attention has been afforded to the fact that it can also be a form of spiritual kryptonite.
The wrong song at the wrong time can eke its way into your psyche like poison, an aural dose of cyanide leaving you jamming cotton buds ever further into your ears just to silence the sound of UB-fucking-40 or some other sonically shoddy ailment. As an esteemed producer, Steve Albini was less tolerant of this torture than most.
Whether it was with his own bands like Big Black or working alongside Nirvana, the Breeders or The Wedding Present, one core tenet you could claim that all Albini’s work shared is a sense of honesty. On every level, Albini relished a sense of raw authority. This even prompted a few clashes with Robert Plant, labelling him a “complete prat” after their disastrous stint in the studio.
Alas, his obsession with getting right to the soul of something new gave his projects a timelessness; it cut through bullshit and overproduction with an earnest aura of energy. This might sound paradoxical to say of a producer, but the pinnacle of his work is epitomised by the fact that the records he engineers always sound just as good live.
So, when it comes to the music he hates, it’s perhaps no surprise that its anything overly manufactured that gets it in the neck. “As a recording engineer – someone who is deeply embroiled in the process of making records every day – you see trends and fads run through the social organisation of the population of musicians in the same way that they would run through a high school,” he told AV Club.
And just like leg warmers and heat-sensitive t-shirts, these trends are subjected to dating transitions. This is true even when they arrive as part of a progressive ideology. “One of them that happened in the late ’80s and early ’90s was the appropriation of African pop as a motif in conventional Western pop music,” he continues. “Peter Gabriel and David Byrne were quite responsible for that.”
While they might have been effective, as is often the case, a fair few got the wrong end of the stick in their bid to follow suit. As Albini adds, “But you saw it working its way through that stratum of rock stars. Like, ‘Hmm, maybe we should have an African part?’”
Then, as a result, you suddenly have bands like U2, ostensibly a bonafide classic rock band, literally travelling to Ethiopia for fresh inspiration, a move akin to a cheesemonger travelling to China in Albini’s book. “There were certain other production gimmicks, which are especially annoying to me because I know that they could not come from a band in rehearsal,” he says.
He saw that the honest soul of music was on the slide. But even more grating than this errant approprition of Africa, was the sense that commercial bandwagons were piling up in a sorry tailback, and an endless stream of artists were all too happy to climb aboard. Track after track was simply trying to be different with no foresight of what message they were conveying in the process. That blind search for (anti)progress was a dalliance with death.
In his view, the worst offender in history was the first song to ever use autotune. “’Believe’ is this horrible dance-pop song that Cher did in one of her many vampire-rising-from-its-own-ashes moments that she’s had so frequently in her career,” he viciously claimed.
Adding, “It had one of these synthetic moments that I could tell instantly, that was going to be the go-to gimmick for everyone who was stuck for an idea.” With its very first utterance, the age of auto-tune was upon us, and it has never truly left us since. Sucks.
Regarding its greatest sin, he concluded, “That was the synthesised, pitch-modulated vocals that she used in the song ‘Believe’. As soon as I was aware of that, I realised, ‘Oh yeah, you know that thing with Auto-Tune that people thought they were getting away with for the last few years? Here’s their excuse to use it baldly and brazenly and not care if anyone notices’.”
He continued, “All those people who had been sneaking the odd note into Auto-Tune to try to hide the fact that they were bad singers, now they could embrace the fact that they were bad singers. That seemed inevitable, but when it finally happened, it seemed really depressing to me.” Albini didn’t mind bad singers, but what he did mind was dishonesty. As Mark E Smith said, “If you’re going to play it out of tune, then play it out of tune properly.”
That art was now gone, and a phoney artifice had taken its place. That dose of despair is one Albini never recovered from. Every time he heard the wail of ‘Believe’, admittedly a catchy song, he was left with the sickening weight of a dystopia descending unchecked – often celebrated, even – in a world gone awry, blinded by melodicism, surface-effect, and ludicrous headwear.
His horrified visions now seem all the more prescient in the age of AI, where, in an extension of Auto-Tune, it seems easier to imagine pop music without real singers being the next bandwagon than it is to imagine pop music outside of market logic. To coin an eerie term, it is almost as though Albini saw it as post-authentic, and as a critic, that is an age we seem to be creeping towards, though I also can’t help thinking ‘Believe’ is more guilty of what it inadvertently begot rather than a bad song.
But it is a symbol of how capitalism adapts, adopts, and commodifies. As Albini put it, “You see something happen to a population whereby everyone adopts something that’s just preposterous in a way that makes it normal instantly.” For him, ‘Believe’ was a dark “supernova moment” within modern music.
