Albini Wasn't Entirely Wrong About Dance Music

a.k.a. For decades, the late icon's words were dismissed as the musings of a punk curmudgeon, but looking at the genre as it stands today, his observations had some real merit.

Resident Advisor did something interesting last week. When news broke about the death of Steve Albini, the site ran its own story by managing editor Carlos Hawthorn, which it framed in terms of how the electronic music scene was responding to his passing. And while that story featured a photo of the famed artist / recording engineer in the studio (i.e. his preferred environment), the image used on their associated Instagram post wasn’t of Albini at all. Instead, RA chose to adorn their social media tribute with a photo of a billboard, one that the XL label commissioned back in 2015 to promote a single by Powell. [Editorial note: This essay originally stated that the header image of RA’s news story was of the billboard in question, but it’s been corrected to reflect that the image only appeared in the publication’s Instagram post about Albini’s death. My apologies for the mix-up.]

The contents of that billboard? A sharp-worded email from Albini, in which the notoriously irascible figure stated:

I've always detested mechanized dance music, its stupid simplicity, the clubs where it was played, the people who went to those clubs, the drugs they took, the shit they liked to talk about, the clothes they wore, the battles they fought amongst each other...

Basically all of it: 100 percent hated every scrap.

For those who don’t remember all the details, that entire kerfuffle began when Powell used an old live recording of Albini’s voice in his song “Insomniac.” Wanting to do things properly, he wrote the former Big Black frontman, both to profess his appreciation and to ask permission to use the sample. Albini, who admittedly didn’t even bother to listen to the track, granted that permission, but couldn’t resist the opportunity to piece together a little diatribe and send it Powell’s way. The UK artist, who actually agreed with many of Albini’s observations, was so delighted by the email that he eventually decided (with the help of XL) to put it on a billboard—and, yes, he asked Albini’s permission to do so.

At the time, the incident was framed in some quarters as some sort of intergenerational, inter-genre battle royale, with Spin claiming that Powell put up the billboard to “spite” Albini, and Thump (which, for those who don’t remember, was Vice’s short-lived electronic music vertical) running the obnoxious headline, “Crusty Old Punk Producer Steve Albini Hates on Dance Music, Gets Trolled by Powell.” (The site’s follow-up story was somewhat less sensationalist, though its casual arrogance and self-righteous dismissal of Albini as a “professional crotchety old man” was just as annoying—and still makes my skin crawl, all these years later. Thump is not a publication that I miss.)

Resident Advisor, on the other hand, provided far more measured coverage of the billboard drama. Oddly enough, the site’s brief 2015 news post was also written by Carlos Hawthorn, and while he only devoted a few lines to the incident, it clearly loomed large in his memory. When Albini died, Hawthorn chose to center the story around the man’s feelings about dance music, stating that “Albini also famously hated club culture, earning himself a generation of electronic music fans in the process.” (A slightly tweaked version appeared on Instagram, where RA wrote, “Steve Albini hated modern electronic music—and a generation of electronic fans loved him even more for it.”)

Considering the massive influence Albini had not just on rock music, but the whole of independent music culture, it is a bit strange that Resident Advisor chose to respond to his death in this fashion. While other outlets offered praise or simply detailed his life, RA largely glossed over Albini’s many achievements, focusing instead on what the electronic sphere—a sphere that the guy never inhabited and generally avoided—had to say about his passing. As the former editor of a daily publication myself, I get it. Albini’s death was a big piece of music news, not to mention an opportunity to reel in some major web traffic. Plenty of other publications that would have otherwise never covered Albini’s work also chose to run stories about his death, and RA’s approach, while unusual, could be seen as a genuine attempt to do something that made sense for both their audience and the site’s editorial mission. It’s not necessarily what I would have done—granted, I’m someone who’s followed and loved Albini’s work for several decades—but, in this case, I’m willing to give Resident Advisor the benefit of the doubt.

Even so, it’s noteworthy that RA, which is arguably the most influential, or at least the most widely recognized, publication in all of electronic music, would so proudly run a story celebrating a man who openly despised the genre. This wasn’t a repeat of 2015, when Thump snottily thumbed their nose at a “notoriously vitriolic ’90s underground rock purist known for hating on almost anything and everything,” implying that Albini was an out-of-touch curmudgeon who just didn’t understand dance music. If anything, Resident Advisor was co-signing Albini’s views, literally leading with his spiky critiques of the genre and wrapping up their Instagram tribute with “RIP to a Real One.”

Reading between the lines, their headline could have been, “Steve Albini, Legendary Artist and Recording Engineer Who Loathed Everything We Stand For, Dies at 61. We’ll Miss Him, and So Will All of These Artists Who We Cover on a Regular Basis.” I’m exaggerating, of course, but the underlying self-loathing in what RA published is nonetheless hard to ignore, particularly when the site has such a vested economic interest in maintaining narratives which say that contemporary electronic music is healthy, exciting and better than ever.

Moreover, that self-loathing doesn’t seem to be limited to the Resident Advisor offices. Enthusiasm for Albini’s legacy, including his harsh critiques, has been widespread across the electronic music spectrum during last week, especially among its older participants (i.e. those over 35 or so). And while that sort of excitement often swirls around anyone who makes (or made) a habit of speaking truth to power, there’s a reason why so many of Albini’s words are resonating so loudly right now: A lot of the dominant narratives around dance music, and contemporary dance music in particular, are bullshit, and those who’ve devoted significant chunks of their lives to the genre know that better than anyone.