Niklas"Since we are in Chicago now, and facing the classic American corporate-capitalism-versus-art-and-humanity situation, I’d like to digress a bit and tell you about a man named Steve Albini.
Albini, who died too soon in May 2024 at the age of sixty-one, was a famously outspoken underground Chicago musician, producer, music writer, and leader of the 1980s band Big Black. He is associated with an intense, powerful, punk/hardcore sound, and after Big Black became a sought-after recording engineer for many bands, including 1990s icons like the Pixies, the Breeders, PJ Harvey, and Nirvana as well as more underground groups like The Jesus Lizard.
Albini was known for his anticorporate attitude and outspokenness, as well as his insistence that he not be given any credit for the soul and creativity of the bands he recorded. Unlike other producers, he asked to be paid like a “plumber” rather than take a percentage of sales—even for the million-selling Nirvana when they asked him to record their next album after Nevermind, In Utero. A 2023 article in the Guardian described him:
'Albini—and I can’t say this without it sounding a little silly because of the way the music industry has conspired for decades to sand off the edges of any once-transgressive cultural movement… is a genuine punk rocker. Not because he plays music with distorted guitars or exudes contempt for pretentious establishment figures—though he has done plenty of that—but because throughout his career he, perhaps more than anyone else, has attempted to embody the righteous ideological tenets that once made punk rock feel like a true alternative to the tired mainstream.'
Regarding the “manipulative and unhealthy” corporate people around Nirvana after their huge success, Albini said at the time, “They want, somehow or another, to claim authorship of the creative output of these other people who are actually doing the heavy lifting for their career. I can’t have any respect for somebody like that, who’s not involved in the creative process but then decides that they wanna snipe at it from the outside and manipulate people into doing things to suit them. Fuck every one of those people.”
Albini was admired by Onion writers going back to Matt Cook, who reviewed a Big Black album in The Onion’s first year. One day in around 1994, back in Madison, Dan Vebber found out Albini was an Onion fan. He brought in a picture of him that he’d drawn as a UW–Madison freshman with the words “ALBINI IS WATCHING” underneath it and hung it over his desk—a role model, inspiration, and monitor for The Onion’s writers. And a warning for its owners. Past, present, and future."
— Christine Wenc: Funny Because It's True
Funny Because It's True - BookWyrm
In 1988, a band of University of Wisconsin–Madison undergrads and dropouts began publishing a free weekly newspaper with no editorial stance other than “You Are Dumb.” Just wanting to make a few bucks, they wound up becoming the bedrock of modern satire over the course of twenty years, changing the way we consume both our comedy and our news. The Onion served as a hilarious and brutally perceptive satire of the absurdity and horrors of late twentieth-century American life and grew into a global phenomenon. Now, for the first time, the full history of the publication is told by one of its original staffers, author and historian Christine Wenc. Through dozens of interviews, Wenc charts The Onion’s rise, its position as one of the first online humor sites, and the way it influenced television programs like The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. Funny Because It’s True reveals how a group of young misfits from flyover country unintentionally created a cultural phenomenon.
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