Great if long video / transcript of Steve Albini’s speech at Face The Music in Melbourne which echoes his classic ‘The Problem With Music’ from 21 years ago. Although I’d not describe Prince’s music as ‘poison’ I do think the purple dwarf’s attitude to the internet is poisonous, and all the people who try and control digital media and how music is heard today. Total control is not only unwise, it strangles any new or transformative uses of music, and actually silences music from being part of culture, like the background of a YouTube video, or orphaned 78s and dusty 45s being lost because no-one can find the original owners.
As he said: “Inside that trite sentence, ‘We need to figure out how to make this work for everyone,’ hides the skeleton of a monster” – you hear a lot of defences like this, and he’s right to tear that apart, because what it means is that those who grew fat off the bands and artists while they starved, the ones who brought guns and heavies to deal with bootleggers and contract deals, the ones who strung out the musicians on drugs to make them easier to control or get their money stream, the ones who gouged fans with CDs…the list is endless.
That system can burn for all I care – music, the listeners and those who create it will be fine, even if it goes back to live music only, that would be better than the last 90 years which have been a bit of a cul-de-sac in the thousands of years in history of music where music was always live.
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