I guess there’s a text limit on this board.
.....................

III.
Over the past decade, the independent music scene in the US has likewise moderated to reflect newfound sensitivities on the Left. Out went the deliberately outrageous band names designed to scandalise the moral majority, and in came new speech codes intended to defend public decency. Even innocuous band names became targets of scorn and rechristening campaigns. Indie rock band British Sea Power dropped the word “British” from their name because they did not want anyone to think they were glorifying British imperialism (even though the name’s intention was tongue-in-cheek). Girl Band, a male Irish noise-rock group, had to apologise for their “misgendered” name in 2021, a choice they said came “from a place of naivety and ignorance.” The white and male UK band Slaves were named in reference to job drudgery, but they had to rechristen themselves Soft Play in 2022 after years of outcry.

Canadian post-punkers Viet Cong—formed after their previous all-male band Women disbanded a few years before that name would have drawn protests—changed their name to Preoccupations after petitions, outrage, and concert cancellations. It did not matter that the Viet Cong might otherwise be considered decolonial heroes by those pushing the band’s cancellation—they were white men so their name was racist. Naturally, they professed ignorance but their careers never really recovered from the controversy. Decades earlier, Gang of Four—one of Preoccupations’ key influences along with Joy Division—could be named after China’s infamous Maoist faction without eliciting complaints (except perhaps from those who objected to their anti-consumerist lyrics).

While Albini was railing against those railing against “cancel culture,” many younger artists would privately admit that fear of being cancelled for an unintended misstep has a stifling effect on creativity. When a mainstream success story like Donald Glover links the fear of being cancelled to boring cultural products, it ought to indicate that censoriousness has become a problem. Artists are now unwilling to take risks and afraid of speaking their minds on controversial topics because they see what happens to those who do.

A case in point is Ariel Pink, a genuine musical oddball and arguably the most important and influential indie musician of the past two decades. Like Albini, Pink had a prior history of opinionated and transgressive comments that caused many music critics to categorise him as a troll or an edgelord, but he became a “music industry untouchable” in 2021 after he attended Trump’s 6 January rally. His label dropped him, many indie venues won’t host him, his fans and collaborators abandoned him, and music sites that described him as a genius a decade earlier will no longer cover him. The idea that a person can appreciate the music of someone with strange beliefs or objectionable political views is anathema to the current moment, even though the history of popular music is littered with idiosyncratic individuals. Around the time his 1976 album Station to Station was released, David Bowie extolled fascism and called Hitler “one of the first rock stars.” We live in much less forgiving times today.

Albini followed many other liberals by defecting from Musk’s Twitter for the friendlier climes of Bluesky. His final post there was a denunciation of Trump. Once the fearless iconoclast, by the time he died, his social-media posts had become indistinguishable from all the other self-righteous and angry liberal/progressive voices ranting profanely about Trump and his stupid supporters to the nodding agreement of their like-minded followers. “When you realise that the dumbest person in the argument is on your side, that means you’re on the wrong side,” he told the Guardian in 2023, a remark that neatly encapsulated his new credo.

More to the point, his positions became indistinguishable from those of the safe, corporate-media establishment that his most important work in the 1980s and 1990s aimed to offend, subvert, and contest. Unsurprisingly, his contrition was greeted with reverential awe by that same cultural elite. As the Atlantic put it in the headline of their obituary, “Steve Albini Was Proof You Can Change.” The tribute from influential music website Pitchfork went even further, proclaiming, “Steve Albini Did the Work,” a reference to the antiracist imperative as much as to his famous professional ethic. Like the Atlantic, the Pitchfork obituarist found his subject’s risk- and consequence-free repentance to be “the most astonishing and inspiring” thing he ever did, histrionically likening him to a “punk-rock Tony Robbins” of transformative change and personal development.

The story of Pitchfork’s rise and fall is itself emblematic of wider changes taking place within the independent music world. Started by a record-store clerk in suburban Minneapolis in 1996, it emerged from indie rock’s ’zine culture. By the first decade of the 21st century, Pitchfork was one of America’s most popular and influential music websites, known for unconventional reviews, unruly personal styles, and polemical opinions that earned them the disdain of established critics. They were tastemakers and a glowing Pitchfork review launched numerous careers. They franchised into festivals. However, by the time the site was waxing ecstatic about Albini’s great transformation, it had become a shadow of its former self.

Pitchfork lost its independence when it was acquired by media giant Condé Nast in 2015. In 2010, Albini was interviewed by fellow Condé Nast publication GQ magazine and concluded by telling them, “I hope GQ as a magazine fails.” As it happened, Condé Nast ended up folding Pitchfork into GQ at the beginning of 2024 and laying off most of its staff. Vice magazine followed a parallel trajectory from provocative irreverence in 1994 to corporate darlings espousing bland progressive orthodoxies in the 2020s. Vice was franchised into a media empire, and at its peak, it was valued at US$5.7 billion dollars only to slump into failure and bankruptcy in 2024.

But even before the Condé Nast takeover, Pitchfork had long stopped focusing on indie rock and began covering popular music more broadly, even publishing articles attacking the independent scene for being too white, too male, and too straight. Indie rock, it now declared, was a “comparatively conservative genre” and “the province of white, heterosexual males.” Vice went through an even more extreme makeover to atone for its past sins as it accumulated economic value. That Albini, Vice, and Pitchfork would all end up conforming to the same enlightened views about race, gender, sexuality, and politics seems to confirm that nobody preaches with quite the fervency of the new, guilty convert.

Albini had been an outspoken critic of the music industry’s crude economic realities and he held the corporate world in contempt, so the focus on his transformation speaks to the contemporary Left’s sacrifice of economics on the altar of identity politics. How else to explain Pitchfork disparaging a musical genre as “conservative” that was originally defined in economic terms against corporate cultural power. And were Vice’s and Pitchfork’s makeovers not precisely what made them appealing to corporate media? Attacks on “indie rock” in Pitchfork were symptomatic of a wider movement in music criticism known as “poptimism”—the notion that pop music (now coded as black and female and queer) deserved to be treated with the same seriousness as rock music (coded as white and male and straight).

This dichotomy was always disingenuous (as if Sleater-Kinney were not considered one of the best rock bands of the past quarter-century by music critics), but it was also part of the same movement that reclaimed Britney Spears as a feminist icon only to eventually disown her again. Within this dualism, being accused of “rockism” (as Albini, who hated electronic dance music and disliked hip hop, undeniably would be) is akin to being accused of racism. By the second decade of the 21st century, “poptimist” perspectives had taken over almost all of music criticism, from Pitchfork to NPR to the refined pages of the New Yorker.

The result of this cultural moment is best encapsulated by the unrivalled musical and economic dominance of Taylor Swift, an artist who is now critic-proof. Any critical commentary risks incurring the wrath of Swifties. One of the few times Albini discussed Swift was when he joined an online pile-on of a hapless conservative journalist who wrote a silly article dismissing Swift’s popularity as a sign of societal decline. In the song “Kool Thing” from Sonic Youth’s major-label debut Goo in 1990, bassist Kim Gordon asked the song’s eponymous figure (voiced by Public Enemy’s Chuck D but clearly based on LL Cool J): “Are you gonna liberate us girls from male white corporate oppression?” Decades later, liberation from “male white” oppression has become the focus of the identity-obsessed Left. But while demonstrable progress has been made in gender and race relations in the US, “corporate oppression” is worse than ever, especially on the cultural front, despite—or, rather, because of—the advent of Taylor Swift’s brand of girlboss feminism.

From what I know, Taylor Swift is one of the smartest people in music.

Oh, almost forgot.

Let’s hear your record, cocksocket. pic.twitter.com/dvFz4UTh0C

— regular steve albini (@electricalWSOP) September 27, 2023
IV.
Since the 1990s, just as cultural sensitivities dramatically shifted, the music industry was also radically transforming. Illegal downloading and then streaming destroyed music sales, notwithstanding a minor niche resurgence in vinyl sales. Bands used to tour to sell albums. In the new reality, releasing albums generates little income but it does help generate interest in tours, which are now the dominant source of musician income. Meanwhile, touring conditions have dramatically worsened. As a recent antitrust suit filed by the US Justice Department attested, LiveNation’s monopoly on touring has resulted in a stranglehold on venues as well as ticket distribution. Even worse, venues now routinely take up to 30 percent of t-shirt and merchandise sales at shows, thereby choking off a last important source of revenue for artists.

In short, the move to free content has been catastrophic for musicians. Surprisingly, however, Albini became a techno-optimist, cheering changes that he believed would solve the “problem with music” he identified back in the 1990s. New technologies, he believed, would allow artists to cut out the middlemen, from corporate distributors and record labels to radio stations and the entire PR machinery he despised. But while Albini remained sanguine about the ways in which the internet allowed for unmediated contact between musicians and their fans, the new digital panhandling required by sites like Patreon did not democratise music so much as devalue it. Once music became free, it was hard to convince people to spend money on it.

The effects of this change have been so bad that many musicians who have been around long enough now see the 1990s, the period Albini targeted, as one of its last golden ages. Profits from cheaply manufactured CDs (artificially inflated by music companies) were so large that the industry was awash with money, and many artists were, at least, able to make a modest living. The online revolution has only empowered big tech companies, who sweep up the profits and use algorithms to decide what music gets your attention. Payouts for even relatively established artists are pathetic, with a million streams on Spotify netting somewhere between US$3,000 and US$4,000. In the CD era, a band may have been able to survive on 30,000 album sales with a reputable independent label. But the new boss turned out to be worse than the old boss with an even greater and more pernicious stranglehold on both the culture and economics of music.

This convergence between Albini and the corporate world occurred at a time when the independent music scene that Albini represented was starting to experience its worst systemic crisis. And if independent music was in a precarious state before COVID-19, the pandemic and its aftermath may have been the death blow. COVID is yet another issue where Albini’s views conformed entirely to the prevailing liberal elite view. He unwaveringly supported lockdowns and restrictions, and he was happy to shun, shame, and moralise at anyone who disagreed. Two years into the pandemic, he was still referring to anyone who raised questions about the efficacy of masks as “assholes” who “have decided not to care.” That same year, he responded to a statement that encouraged vaccination but stopped short of mandating it for young university students by tweeting, “These fucking people, I swear. It’s a death cult.” He even appeared double-masked for a meeting with a Guardian journalist at an outdoor cafe that summer: “In the course of the many hours we spent together over the next week, I saw the lower half of his face maybe half a dozen times—only when he lowered both of his masks to sip his drink.”

Meanwhile, many music venues were destroyed by COVID-19 lockdowns. In Toronto, a city that endured one of the world’s longest lockdowns, 22 music venues were shuttered in 2020. That didn’t stop Albini from lambasting anyone “pretending the pandemic [was] over.” By the time venues were finally able to open at full capacity and without restrictions, the promised post-pandemic boom turned out to be a mirage as inflation wrought havoc on the economic sustainability of those small venues that survived. The cost of touring increased exponentially as hotels, fuel costs, and all the other incidentals of touring gutted the profits. Even established musicians were forced to cancel tours as bands reported losing their last source of income.

Many reputable musicians are now forced to tour solo to turn a profit, unable to afford the costs of a band. In 2023, 16 percent of the UK’s small independent music venues closed. In Toronto, 15 percent of venues permanently closed. Since the pandemic, ticket prices have skyrocketed, as LiveNation consolidated even more power, and limited venues meant even more intense competition, especially after two years of cancellation. Many fans are now priced out of the market or have to save if they want to pay for exorbitant Taylor Swift tickets or to see an Oasis reunion. The situation has only been exacerbated by Ticketmaster’s “dynamic” ticket pricing and other dubious price-gouging practices. Bookers will say that venues are no longer willing to risk staging smaller and more obscure or unestablished acts, preferring cover bands, dance nights, or older bands playing their classic albums from front-to-back on an endless nostalgia trip. The result is a flurry of think-pieces lamenting the demise of the middle-class musician.

It has become common to read that we now live in an age of cultural stagnation. Even the New York Times decries the sorry state of teen subcultures. The experimental and rebellious drive that involves a willingness to transgress norms, offend sensibilities, provoke controversy, and disturb the establishment is curtailed by cultural conformity and fear of offending sensitivities. Meanwhile, tech giants have turned listening to music into a “soulless algorithmic wasteland,” while the physical infrastructure for live music is increasingly imperilled by a corporate monopoly and economic conditions hostile to innovation. Any vibrant new counterculture will have to break through this current stasis and reclaim the spirit of independence and absolute freedom that, for better and worse, drove Steve Albini to produce some of the most exciting music of the 1980s and ’90s.