Then one of them lit a joint (or a pipe, I didn’t look) and told the driver to shut the fuck up nigger and smoked it anyway. They piled in, niggering everything in sight, motherfucking the driver, boasting into the air unbidden about getting their dicks sucked and calling everyone in the area a faggot.
They piled onto the shuttle late, after finally getting corralled by their minder, who was nursing a head wound with an ice bag wrapped in a towel. He also did a fantastic job of conjuring the noise from Cheap Trick’s second album by remixing it.Ī decade ago, he faced criticism after posting on a public forum about his experience sharing a shuttle van between his band and members of the hip-hop collective Odd Future in Barcelona: He made a much bigger name for himself as the producer of acts such as Nirvana (famously referring to Kurt Cobain’s wife Courtney Love as a “psycho hosebeast”), The Pixies, and PJ Harvey. (The name “ Rapeman” was inspired by a Japanese manga comic book.) He also did a one-off project as “ Run Nigger Run” with a song called “Pray I Don’t Kill You Faggot.” He was visiting Peter in his Chicago apartment and remarked about the bookcases stuffed with VHS tapes devoted to things such as prostitute-killers and the JonBenet Ramsey case.Īs the story was related to me, Albini told Sotos, “It’s not the subject matter that I find disturbing - it’s the fact that you’ve alphabetized it.”Īlbini first made a name for himself as a musician with bands such as Big Black, Rapeman, and Shellac. My favorite Albini story involved writer Peter Sotos, whose thematic content focuses on sexual abuse, murder, and the way the media luridly exploits such topics while making a grand display of holding their nose. The record’s cover listed all the recipients, each of whom had their name hand-circled in their copy the one I received had a circle around “Jim and Debbie Goad.” (Apparently Debbie later sold our copy, because someone informed me they’d found it for sale.) He had recently issued a limited-edition 12-inch record that numbered in the hundreds and gave it exclusively to people he considered friends. We talked via phone while I sat in a rustic South Dakota motel room and Steve was in Chicago. I was taking a cross-country road trip from Portland to the East Coast and back in late 1996 to decompress after finishing the first draft of The Redneck Manifesto. I only spoke with music producer Steve Albini once. You can buy Jim Goad’s The Redneck Manifesto here. In its initial incarnation, it was a reaction against hippie sanctimony, but in the 45 or so years since it hatched, punk rock and every iteration of white “indie” music has become far more unbearably Leftist than the hippies ever managed to be.Īnyone who hasn’t been in a coma for the past decade has likely lost friends because everything - even the shits you take in the privacy of your own bathroom - has become political, and one of the innumerable drawbacks of fanatical political partisanship is its tendency to reframe simple disagreements as egregious moral transgressions, which leads to the utter dehumanization of those with whom you merely have a difference of opinion. What I initially liked about punk rock - and my fondness lasted roughly a year back in the late 1970s - was its sociopathic level of irreverence. The same applies to playing guitars about politics. The most articulate musician was probably Frank Zappa, who once slammed rock critics with the zinger, “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” Music appeals to a preliterate part of the brain, which is why I strain to recall an interview with a musician where they didn’t come off sounding dumb, juvenile, and uninformed. However, I don’t think I’ve ever encountered a musician, many of whom seem to have trouble wiping themselves and tying their own shoelaces, who didn’t act as if they were qualified to endlessly opine about politics and the way the world should be run. Steve Albini, back when he was interesting.īack in the late 1980s, when Republican strategist Lee Atwater made a grand public display of posturing as a blues musician, musicians rightly recoiled and said that he was way out of his element.
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