Friday, June 1, 2007
Music / Crickets Albini's all "whatever" about downloading
Posted by Miles Raymer on 06.01.07 at 05:47 PM
Shellac's next record, Excellent Italian Greyhound, doesn't come out until Tuesday, but it being an eagerly awaited album by a much-loved indie rock institution, and this being 2007, it's already been leaked on a few blogs. The music news aggregator site The Daily Swarm—a great addition to your RSS feed, in my opinion—asked Steve Albini his feelings about his first unapproved premiere. Unsurprisingly, he's a little grumpy about it. He calls downloaders "harmless," but only after harshing on them: "Downloads reach those people who don’t really like music enough to be participants in it as a culture, they just want to consume at their leisure, casually, the way my mother would have the kitchen radio playing while she did housework."
For the record, the track in question, "Steady as She Goes," would only be a good accompaniment to housework if you do yours with a sledgehammer and a heart full of rage.
Albini's dismissal of worthless downloaders marks a record-breaking 10,000 disses in his underground-music career, the highest by any one individual and second only to the combined staff of Maximumrocknroll. In an imaginary press conference after receiving an entirely fictional award for his accomplishment, Albini said of the honor, "Bah."
Comments (3)
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Well, what do you expect from somebody so legendarily hostile to digital media? Until you can download 180-gram virgin vinyl, I think Albini is gonna stay pretty "whatever" about the whole thing. His generalization about downloaders not caring to participate in music as a culture just makes him sound out of it, but I totally sympathize with his implied criticism of the sound quality you get with most digital music. I can't listen to a 128 kpbs AAC file at much more than conversational volume without the compression artifacts irritating the hell out of me.
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