From ash@mailbox.neosoft.com Tue Sep 17 23:38:58 1996

Date: Wed, 18 Sep 1996 01:29:41 -0500 (CDT)

From: "Evan R. Jones" 

To: pasha90@gonzo.wolfenet.com

Subject: Big Black



ok....

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Guitar World April 1996

This was a sub-article included with an article on Bad Religion entitled

Dead Or Alive? Taking The Pulse Of The Nineties Punk Revival. The article is

basically a debate by a few of the old school big wigs (Tesco Vee, Brian

Baker, Dr. Frank, Dave Smiley, Gerard Cosloy, and of course, Steve Albini)

about today's punk rock (or so-called "punk rock"). I have cut out the other

parts and left only the relevant Albini tidbits, as Pasha would have cut

them out anyway. Enjoy!

____________________________________________________________________________

Vee speaks from the standpoint of someone who lives a life of self-enforced

obscurity. He has seen former friends like Glenn Danzig and Henry Rollins go

on to fame and fortune while he still holds a day job.

Steve Albini is a different story. In the eighties he and his band, Big

Black, set the standard for guitar-based sonic aggression; in the nineties

his brilliant work as a sound engineer defined a studio approach that was

raw yet nuanced, and captured the essence of a band playing live. His

talents have attracted clients like Nirvana and the Jesus Lizard, and earned

him the reputation as the world's leading "punk producer."

He hates the title.

Asked to assess the state of punk, the sharp-tongued Albini replies, "In

the seventies, 'punk' was used to describe a diverse group of bands that

included the Ramones, Devo and Wire. They didn't have anything to do with

each other stylistically, but shared a perverse internal aesthetic. Today,

'punk' means the stylistically unified sound of bands that play frat music."

Albini view the "evolution" of punk as a natural process of cultural

co-optation. It's occured before, and will likely occur again.

"When an underground movement can be reduced to style and a few basic

elements that can be imitated," he explains, "it has a much better potential

for mass cultural penetration. It doesn't broaden anyone's tastes, however,

because the mainstream encourages herd behavior, and once something is

assimilated into mass culture it makes trivial anything which anyone does

in that style in the future."



Perhaps the most on-target assessment of the true implications of punk's

rise and fall is offered by Steve Albini:

"What was inspirational about punk was that it proverd you didn't need a

hall pass into the world of serious culture. You could do anything you

wanted in your basement or garage and it was as valid as anything that

anybody else was doing. This 'Do It Yourself' ideology is so intuitively

right that you have to be amazed that it took so long to take hold in broad

cultural terms. Today we are seeing a dissolution of that ideology and an

abdication of power into the hands of the mainstream, and that is the pity

of the whole thing - not that some band is now popular that isn't

stylistically worth it."



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                            Evan Jones: Ash@neosoft.com                      

             Walking naked in the lions den/I know I'm gonna bleed again

                           "I suck, go home." -Bob Mould