We talked via phone while I sat in a rustic South Dakota motel room and Steve was in Chicago. I was taking a cross-country road trip from Portland to the East Coast and back in late 1996 to decompress after finishing the first draft of The Redneck Manifesto. I only spoke with music producer Steve Albini once. You can buy Jim Goad’s The Redneck Manifesto here. In its initial incarnation, it was a reaction against hippie sanctimony, but in the 45 or so years since it hatched, punk rock and every iteration of white “indie” music has become far more unbearably Leftist than the hippies ever managed to be.Īnyone who hasn’t been in a coma for the past decade has likely lost friends because everything - even the shits you take in the privacy of your own bathroom - has become political, and one of the innumerable drawbacks of fanatical political partisanship is its tendency to reframe simple disagreements as egregious moral transgressions, which leads to the utter dehumanization of those with whom you merely have a difference of opinion. What I initially liked about punk rock - and my fondness lasted roughly a year back in the late 1970s - was its sociopathic level of irreverence. The same applies to playing guitars about politics. The most articulate musician was probably Frank Zappa, who once slammed rock critics with the zinger, “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.”

Music appeals to a preliterate part of the brain, which is why I strain to recall an interview with a musician where they didn’t come off sounding dumb, juvenile, and uninformed. However, I don’t think I’ve ever encountered a musician, many of whom seem to have trouble wiping themselves and tying their own shoelaces, who didn’t act as if they were qualified to endlessly opine about politics and the way the world should be run. Steve Albini, back when he was interesting.īack in the late 1980s, when Republican strategist Lee Atwater made a grand public display of posturing as a blues musician, musicians rightly recoiled and said that he was way out of his element.

Struggle session s