Steve Albini Analyzes His Career From a Feminist Perspective
LISTEN is an organization that “exists to spark and cultivate a conversation from a feminist perspective around the experiences of marginalised people in Australian music.” In a new post, site founder Evelyn Morris (who also performs as Pikelet) interviewed Steve Albini, whose band Shellac invited Pikelet to open an Australian tour a few years ago. The conversation focused on discussing Albini’s work through a feminist lens. Morris writes that she initiated the talk after analyzing her own relationship with Albini’s music, particularly how the Shellac/Pikelet tour helped her process her experience with sexual assault.
During that tour, she said she felt “utterly respected” by the band, and that “feeling accepted by Shellac went a long way in helping me to give less of a fuck about what dudes thought.” In the conversation, Morris probed Albini about his experience of feminism in the music community, and got him to analyze songs by Big Black, Rapeman, and Shellac from a feminist point of view.
“I consider women’s perspectives to be critically important to our scene, and I am pleased to be asked to comment rather than being used as an unexamined data point,” he said. Read the full interview here, and find some excerpts below.
When Morris asked Albini if he saw his own music as “masculine,” he replied:
Having been raised male in our culture I have an ingrained a male perspective through experience, the same way I have a white perspective, a middle-class one, an educated American one. I have tried to cultivate an enlightened perspective, and I try to be an ally to women both in my life and in music. I feel like the female perspective, when adopted by men for song or story, is inevitably a caricature. At worst it’s minstrelsy or projection based on cultural norms and exploitative depiction in art. For that reason, I’ve rarely used a female perspective in songs. I guess that’s another facet of letting women speak for themselves. There have been exceptions, noted below. As for men, boys and other dudes, I feel like I can voice many of those perspectives without invention, and while I’m not about to speak for women, men are fair game, including the way they deal with women.
During the conversation, they discussed the concept of being an “ally,” as well how to discourage the culture of victim-blaming within the music community. Albini replied:
As a man, I’m circumspect about active efforts on my part. I feel pretty strongly that women should take the lead and the initiative, and in efforts that have actually changed culture it has been women defining and driving the conversation: suffrage, reproductive sovereignty, legal, structural and pay inequity, rape and exploitation consciousness.
My lack of perspective and ingrained privilege could lead to clumsy and counterproductive affairs, so I do my best to support women in their efforts, don’t tolerate sexism in person and work on expanding my enlightenment concerning women’s issues.
Albini also dissected the “sexual/power content” of several of his own songs, such as Big Black’s “Fists of Love” and “Jordan, Minnesota,” Rapeman’s “Trouser Minnow,” and Shellac’s “Billiard Player Song,” “Song of the Minerals,” “Prayer to God,” “Canaveral,” and “Genuine Lulabelle.” He prefaced that section with:
It is imperative for an artist to be honest, to respect the creative impulse, wherever that may go. Anything less is just decoration or inconsequential humming. Sometimes the resulting art is repugnant, but I believe the world is better for it, that it is made richer by having those thoughts explored. Essentially any theme or subject could trigger memory of trauma depending on the context.
The reason we value art is its ability to move people, its ability to be larger than itself and engender a greater experience, an experience that can inform an entire lifetime. In some cases that greater experience is unpleasant or insulting, but it is there. In our conversation (you and me) we’d be talking about you being brought back to a traumatic sexual incident. In conversation with others, they were reminded of the death of a parent, a traumatic incident from a tour in the military, a drug experience that put a friend in institutional care, incest, gang attack, suicide attempts and other trauma. These things leave the deepest scars in a person, they are the defining events in a life. It stands to reason that anything reminiscent of them will be unsettling. None of that is an argument not to address those topics and issues.
Toward the end, he wrote:
In closing, let me own up to a few things and make a disclaimer. I do not pretend to fully understand the experience women have, either as part of the music scene or society in general. I accept that I cannot ever fully understand it. I consider it my obligation then to listen to women when they want to speak about it and to do what I can to be an ally in feminism. I believe in feminism as a critical component of a worldview that values the individual and accommodates independence and freedom of thought and expression. A feminist perspective is essentially always welcome in comment, even (perhaps especially) when it is disruptive. As part of that perspective, it is important to hear perspectives on inappropriate behaviour, abuse and harassment, though those things bear discussion under any circumstances. I know that I cannot completely understand women’s experiences, so I try my best to be enlightened by them as related.
Read the full piece here.
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