‘Night, Music
I.
The day Steve Albini posted on Twitter/X that he “will always be the kind of punk that shits on Steely Dan” and then followed up with “Christ the amount of human effort wasted to sound like an SNL band warm up” was a good day. Not because of the merits of any of his arguments (life-long Dan fan here), rather because it was comforting to know that there were people who seemed to still refuse to be part of a perceived monoculture (i.e. that Steely Dan is a very cool band). I think the best response to this thread came from the brilliant Steven Hyden who pointed out that, as a sixty year old world champion poker player, Steve Albini is a character in a Steely Dan song.
Steve Albini passed away suddenly last week at the age of sixty one. Since his passing, there has been extensive, deserved praise of Albini: from his various bands, to his legendary production, his ability to reassess the younger person he was and apologize for the wrongs he committed, even his gastronomical opinions. And, since I’ve just finished the second season of the Bear, Albini represented the best of what Chicago has given the world. Even his hatred of Steely Dan was accepted, if not defended, as part of Albini’s principles as well as his authenticity. The guys who run the “bad Dan takes” twitter handle, and host the Gaucho Amigos podcast, vowed to not listen to Steely Dan the day after Albini passed in his honor.
Not quite a week after Albini’s death, jazz saxophonist David Sanborn passed. Among his many other credits, Sanborn both played with Steely Dan and was a member of the SNL band for many years. You couldn’t imagine two different musicians, and it almost seems perverse to bring them together. Almost. If there’s one thing that Sanborn and Albini have in common it’s the Pixies. Sanborn was host of Hal Wilner’s miracle TV show “Sunday Night” (later retitled “Michelob presents Night Music”) It played late on Sunday nights. I watched a number of them but the episode that will forever be stuck in my brain is episode 207 featuring the Pixies (in their US television debut) and the Sun Ra Archestra. In my memory, the two bands played together on a cover of “Space is the Place,” but this, based on everything I’ve read and seen, did not take place. They were on the same episode and clearly both Black Francis and El Sonny Ra have a life-long passion for the outer spaceways. But it doesn’t matter: these two influential musical institutions shared the same stage within this episode and it seemed that David Sanborn was the orchestrator of this musical adventure.
Now, obviously, Sanborn wasn’t the mastermind behind Night Music, nor was he its musical director. He was a very charismatic host who, because of his well-liked reputation within the jazz community, could get Sun Ra and Miles Davis to play on his Sunday night music program. The mastermind behind the show was Hal Wilner, the musical polymath who created two seasons out of what he had done on SNL in 1980. Though often considered the worst season in terms of comedy, most consider it the best season for music: Prince, Captain Beefheart, Bob Dylan, The Funky 4+1 (first hip hop group to play on national TV) were some of the artists Wilner chose for that season. Yet, for a kid in high school discovering music when “Night Music” was on the air, Sanborn, the guy who played the sexy sax and had the hair and suit to match, was my guide through the outer limits of music.
Albini famously produced the Pixies first full-length album Surfer Rosa, one of the greatest records to have been released during my lifetime. As much as Nirvana is rightly considered the vehicle by which “punk” broke big and shifted units in 1991—their third record, In Utero was initially engineered by Albini before DGC made them “soften up” the sound a brought R.E.M.’s producer Scott Litt into the mix—the Pixies really are the pre-history of 1991’s sound. Their “Night Music” appearance would be the beginning of a big media blitz that would see the Pixies eventually host “Post-Modern MTV” for a week and the videos from their second full-length, Dolittle go into heavy rotation. The Pixies made popular something that would be a hallmark of both the music Albini produced and created, as well as Nirvana’s own musical aesthetic: a startling jump from quiet to loud that, with some exceptions, hadn’t really been the hallmark of punk or underground music before then. Also, a certain dryness to the drums that has become a hallmark of rock production ever since: there’s a reason why “Where Is My Mind?” continues to be a classic from generation to generation: the “stop”/slow strum/ dry drums loudly pounding in the background as they come in is thrilling no matter how many times I’ve heard it.
II.
Earlier this year Spotify introduced their AI DJ in the app. It’s a strange experience. It obviously fills a gap left by most people’s movement away from terrestrial radio. People miss the sound of a voice and a choice directing their listening experience. You can easily still experience that every day at, as the Replacements sang, the left of the dial, where college students and old people who DJ for community radio will play you what they like. Someone the other day played all of “Ife” by Miles Davis in the middle of the afternoon on the OSU radio station. God bless them. But most people don’t tune into that any longer, yet miss the pilot of the airwaves steering their listening experience one way or another. And yet, that isn’t what the Spotify AI DJ is actually doing: during the many times I’ve listened to DJ Flex? X?, he/it/the thing that doesn’t think had played me a mix of songs I’ve been listening to recently, songs I listened to in 2022 or various “vibes” that…are just songs I’ve recently played that the algorithmic DJ seems to “think” fit into an acceptable stream of music. The oddest part of the experience is the cadence of the “DJ’s” voice: he’s hip, he’s just hanging with you, you know, playin’ some tunes you’re gonna like. As if I weren’t constantly aware that this DJ doesn’t exist and has no idea what I, or any human, might be like when the just want to hang out and listen to, you know, some tunes, catch some vibes, etc.
But I realized that what the Spotify DJ gives us is the illusion of a driver, a taste maker, behind what we listen to. And Spotify had to create this, not just to assuage the isolated and lonely streaming culture consumer, but to give the listener the illusion that there is someone behind the selection and not just some algorithm aggregating our listening habits and spiting out what it/the thing that doesn’t think assumes we want to hear. And this is what Steve Albini and David Sanborn have in common: a flesh and blood human who has taste, ideas and values that are reflected in both the art they made and the art they presented. Albini and Sanborn might have had diametrically opposed musical tastes and general outlooks on life and the creative process, but they were trusted individuals who seemed both curious and gracious in their championing of what they liked.
People always worry about the current state of as well as the future of music. Other people, more often than not, misinterpret this to mean that they are worried that people don’t make good or interesting music any longer. This, of course, is the wrong way to think about this anxiety. Of course humans will always make good, interesting music that has never been heard before. As a species, we haven’t lost our ability to create or imagine art forms otherwise. Recently I’ve been listening a lot to the late, great artist/producer Sophie, whose music doesn’t really sound like anything else but clearly emerges from a long history of queer dance and electronic music. There are any number of other artists out there, those known and unknown, who are changes genres right now as we speak. When people express anxiety about the current state and future of music it has to do with value and distribution. Who values music and, as if one could put an actual value on such things, how is music evaluated in whatever hell-stage of capitalism we find ourselves in?
According to a survey conducted by the World Economic Forum in 2023, streaming services dominate the way most people consume music. How these companies present music as a commodity is as important (if possibly not more so for their particular medium) as what that music actually consists of. Spotify, the most ubiquitous of these streamers, is constantly looking for venture capital to finance it’s money losing operations. This is why it’s gone all in on podcasts and things outside of music. The corporation has to consistently resign contracts with major labels in order to keep the music catalogues on its service. If, someday, the venture capitalists that fund Spotify were to determine that contracts with music labels are too costly compared to audiobooks and podcasts, what would happen then? Music could still be streaming on other platforms—Apple and Amazon make enough money on other products and services that music is mostly secondary—but given the market share of Spotify that would be a huge loss.
Besides, the humans who actually make music can’t really afford to do so because these streaming services pay out so little in royalties. This doesn’t really matter to a company like Spotify, which would be happy to populate their various playlists with music made by AI and have already started doing so. There’s a current thread on the Spotify community board of people complaining that most of their “Discover Weekly” tracks are AI generated. If the point of Spotify streams is to simply fill up playlists that people will stream regardless of what the content is then isn’t it more cost effective to just simply fill those playlists up with AI generated garbage. If you need “beats to study to” or “happy songs” or “songs that make you cry,” well, if you already know what that might mean, you can manufacture what you need without human involvement. Which means you don’t have to pay humans.
Thus music, independent of the creative process that will always make it essential and exciting, sucks as a medium right now. And the deaths of both Albini and Sanborn, though sworn enemies in the trenches of the rough and the smooth, come together to remind everyone that music you love is passion, sounds are weird and exciting, a performance can split your skull open, and, because we stake so much on the differences in our tastes, this stuff is as serious as your life.
