You wanna go full Liam Gallagher and be like, ‘This person sucks, that person sucks,’ whatever, do you.
See, this is how you do it. Liam's never gonna have to apologize for talking shit about other bands, the same way Steve Albini shouldn't.
So here's my question: is it truly necessary for them to be assholes when they're young and making great art? I'd say that it's not.
Plus, you have people like Nick Cave, who's not exactly going on an apology tour for his young edgelord self (as the essay on The Birthday Party's Junkyard in Pitchfork's Sunday Review this week made it clear, an edgelord is exactly what he was) but is definitely way, way past all that bullshit, who have made some of the best art of their careers after the age of 50.
Tressie McMillan-Cottom, whom I've casually followed since she was a contributor to the Root (or at least someone frequently quoted there), had a great piece in the NYT a couple weeks back about why crypto appeals to so many black folks, even though it's such an obvious scam for all but a tiny handful of uses.
(Makes me wonder if the Black pastor who lives across the street, a guy who was convicted of defrauding his old Baptist congregation in Compton and now has a church right down the street in North Long Beach, is into crypto. I'm always polite to him, but I've read about the shit he did and the old ladies he scammed for five digit figures.)
I’m not sure she was even aware of the content of the movie, so she dressed up as Rihanna, which was the right thing to do.
https://media0.giphy.com/media/3o7abnOZ8RtFi8Uzlu/giphy.gif
I've read remarks from Robert Fripp, whose career has been one of constant struggle against the major label system before external windfalls (he made some very good real estate investments in the '80s) enabled him to go fully independent, about how record labels absolutely loved it in the '70s and '80s when artists were addicted to cocaine: it made them wildly productive in the studio, willing to do promotions and tours for much longer than a healthy human being should tolerate, and created an incentive to work more because it was such an expensive habit.
The fact that cokeheads are pretty much insufferable as human beings is, of course, an unpleasant side effect that labels tried to avoid as much as possible.
I remember hearing this track the first time, not long after reading Pitchfork's rapturous review of Night Falls on Kortedala, and just cracking the fuck up at that first huge orchestral crescendo into the chorus.
He has a supervillain vibe that’s sick
I get the appeal, but do recognize that this is a symptom of a deep nihilism.
Villains seem cool until you realize that they hurt actual human beings, and a lot. It's easy to root for Pablo Escobar if you think that he was mostly selling coke to Hollywood executives and rock stars (whose drug abuse led them to be total pieces of shit to everyone around them, but I digress), but an awful lot of his money came from product that got turned into crack and smoked by poor Blacks who weren't in a position to deal with the aftereffects.
But as someone who most appreciates art above all, it seems to me that Albini's edgelord era produced far, far more interesting and good art than his "listening and thinking" era.
Have you ever considered that he also was a lot younger then? Rock music has, by and large, been a young person's game.
I think you've got the causal mechanism messed up. The underlying psychiatric/psychological issues that cause people to have an intense need for self-expression and feed their artistic muse also tend to make them assholes, but being an asshole in no way implies any sort of artistic skill or talent, and expression of those asshole tendencies don't actually contribute to artistic output. (How did Miles Davis' misogyny translate into his art? It didn't.)
I think Albini probably hates the latter even more, because they've decided to respond to the shittiness of the world by drugging themselves into a stupor.
It's the difference between knowing what does and doesn't really matter, ultimately.
And yeah, cruelty is a big part of it. Some folks grow out of it; a lot of them don't.
I had a boss who was a Deadhead. Guy grew up in Bethesda, went to Duke, and spent most of his career as a consultant to manufacturers being sued by injured plaintiffs and/or the Consumer Product Safety Commission.
Yeah, but he's gonna have to do juuuuuuuust a bit better than that. Maybe telling his faithful listeners that they're not actually very bright, and that his and their approach to manhood is pathetic, would be a start.
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