Rapeman - The Cannibals of Nothingness

Steve Albini was born in 1962 in Pasadena, California, to immigrants from Turin. Having moved to virtually the opposite side of America, to Chicago, between the ages of 18 and 20 he worked as a music critic and immersed himself in the city's hardcore and noise underground. The fact is symbolic: hardcore was born and died in Los Angeles. Post-hardcore, with its noise, indie and experimental variants, would from the mid-80s onward catch fire in various hotspots scattered across America. Albini in Chicago is like saying hardcore in Chicago, which is like saying post-hardcore. With the young Albini's move to Chicago, post-hardcore was formally born — a genre that, alongside metal, would prove one of the most fruitful of the 80s. But why Albini in Chicago? Couldn't he, a hardcore kid, have stayed in hardcore's Los Angeles? Or did he already have in mind, or feel the pull of, the post- to come?

In fact, in Chicago, Albini, though still "unseasoned" and "untested", began acting as the guru of the city's underground and, in proportion to his growing means and abilities, as the protector or the tormentor of the various local hardcore scenes: Jeff Pezzati's Naked Raygun (1981-1991) were one such band: Albini attached himself to them as an external member, as a spiritual guide, and immediately showed his true colours: tyrannical, exploitative, generous, narcissistic in his productions; humble, defenceless, insecure, sincere, exposed, in his own work. Like those professors who are also true artists.

At 20, Albini (who played a sour, out-of-tune guitar and had a thin, tragic, dejected voice, perfectly embodying how post-hardcore loses in hardcore power what it gains in noise-driven nihilism and inhumanity) formed Big Black (1982-88) with Santiago Durango of Naked Raygun on guitar, Dave Riley, later of Fudge Tunnel, on bass, and a drum machine in place of a conventional drummer (a move that could almost be credited with inventing techno-hardcore before techno music itself even existed).

Steve Albini's music is noise, distortion, acidity, a synthetic state of being. Beyond depression and death, beyond the anti-Rolling Stones blues of the Cramps and the Gun Club. It is inhumanity, reification. Shellac (formed in 1992 with Bob Weston, ex-Volcano Suns, on bass, and Todd Trainer, ex-Breaking Circus and Brick Layer Cake, on drums) would be the name of Albini's third band, carrying his granite-hard vision forward into post-rock. To the wider public, however, Albini is better known for the other half of his work: that of producer or sound engineer (a practical consequence of the theoretical standpoint of rock critic, which is where Albini began, partly for lack of other objective abilities). This activity brought him fame and money and has accompanied him for nearly his entire four-decade career.

Albini belongs to the same generation as Jack Endino and Butch Vig, and alongside them is the most famous and important producer of post-hardcore as a whole: except that, while the other two specialised in and grew rich from grunge (which can also be understood as falling under the post-hardcore umbrella), devoting only the occasional fleeting detour to post-hardcore's more experimental strains (just enough to keep their artistic conscience clear), Albini poured himself into dozens of unknown and extreme underground bands, only occasionally allowing himself productions aimed at (relatively) larger audiences to pad out his wallet a little.

It's perhaps impossible to keep track of Albini's sometimes excessive output; below, in any case, are his most significant productions or sound-engineering credits, spanning almost two decades of alternative popular music (Albini being the "alternative" producer par excellence). Unlike the most famous, classic rock producers, Albini doesn't follow a band from start to finish, nor, in most cases, does he tie himself to it: given his difficult, anarchic and authoritarian spirit, he accompanies a band for an album or two, sometimes at one stage of its career, sometimes at another, sometimes consecutively.

Albini has worked with the following famous names in garage/grunge rock: Pixies (produced Surfer Rosa, 1988: curiously, the band's softest, least "core" album!), Nirvana (In Utero, 1993; at the peak of their fame), PJ Harvey (Rid Of Me, 1993), Bush (Razorblade Suitcase, 1996). For the more metal-leaning end of post-hardcore, Albini worked with TAD (Salt Lick/God's Balls, 1990) and Helmet (produced Meantime, 1992). Among old acquaintances, close to him ideologically too (though one takes a hard approach, the other a blues-inflected core one), there's Jon Spencer Blues Explosion (Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, 1992). For the countless more or less unknown alternative-noise-indie bands, there's: Silkworm (producer of every album since 1994), Whitehouse (producer of every album since 1990), Breeders (produced Pod, 1990, Title TK, 2002), Wedding Present (Seamonsters, 1991), Zeni Geva (Japanese, every album since 1993), Neurosis (Times of Grace, 1999, Sun That Never Sets, 2001).

Among his boldest productions, being furthest removed from the hard and violent end of the spectrum, are: the folk of Robbie Fulks (Country Love Songs, 1996, Couples in Trouble and 13 Hillbilly Giants, 2001), the Auteurs (After Murder Park, 1996), Low (Secret Name, 1998, Things We Lost in the Fire, 2001), and songwriter Nina Nastasia (every album since 2000).

This list hasn't been put together at random, but with a clear purpose: it's essential in order to properly place Steve Albini alongside his second band in chronological order: Rapeman (1988-1990, with David Wm. Sims, ex-Scratch Acid, later of the Jesus Lizard, on bass; Rey Washam, ex-Scratch Acid, later of the Didjits and Lard, on drums). After the Big Black experience, Albini ditched the drum machine and formed this trio of outstanding performers: three instruments to return to the roots of rock and, from there, leap straight to its end, reaching its most extreme, inhuman essence, at times bestial, at times object-like: it's the same logic that, in a different form, Jon Spencer would follow with his Blues Explosion. Spencer and Albini are the most terrifying flayers of guitars and violators of dance and blues rhythms, though one (Spencer) works from the inside (he makes blues) and the other from the outside (he makes industrial hardcore).

More a high-level project than a band, Rapeman lasted barely a year, straddling 1988 and '89; just enough time to record an EP (4 tracks recorded live, though given the musicians' skill and the unreal silence of the audience, it hardly sounds like it) and one album.

Budd Ep (1988). "Budd" (7.00) does to Sonic Youth what their noise had done to hardcore: re-simplifying the unintelligibility that Sonic Youth had infused into the hardcore lexicon with their sonic lashings, "Budd" returns to a primordial state, and this pre-Sonic Youth sound leads directly to the post-Sonic Youth of Slint. "Budd", poised between Sonic Youth (noise) and Slint (expressionless chords, the te deum of noise), opens up space for one last hiss, one last hardcore scream; like the final existence (and experience) before alienation (and petrification) sets in. It begins by stumbling, in an exasperating search to take flight; it hesitates, mulls things over, struggles, contemplates itself and leads the listener astray: before finally detonating. Its length and structure recall a late-60s psychedelic track, yet gutted of its foundations and its ethics. Despair, nihilism, abandoned screams, off-key voices, weak to the point of breaking. After 4 minutes of stifling litany, everything stops dead and a desperate scream erupts, one that deserves a place among rock's greatest expressive and expressionistic peaks; and the scream cries "Motherfuckers!", but does so with a self-pity that reeks of self-reference. It's a slow suicide. One that drags on through a very long coda (3.00) where you have no idea where it's heading, or whether it's heading anywhere at all. A refounding of the psychedelic song and the hardcore song at once. As well as of the jam session: in this live recording, with just Albini's guitar and tragic voice and Rey Washam's desperate drums, alone before a struck-dumb audience, we reach the furthest shores of the rock song, of its content and its forms. It's not an anthem, because in hardcore's generation zero, and in post-hardcore's even more Nothing-like one, there's no room, nor strength, left for punk rebellion. The acid-rock jam session of the Grateful Dead (see "Death don't have no mercy") is swallowed up, or rather ignored entirely: because we're on another planet here, a planet of extreme solitude even live on stage, of aphasia, of apathy. Nobody speaks, nobody listens, nobody looks: even to lament and self-pity, all that's left is the space — inevitable for any organic body — of ordinary, inexpressive breathing.

"Superpussy" (2.00), which doesn't even try to approach the previous track's totalizing scope, settles into the surrender of a ferociously clattering state that's more "operational" than emotional, robotic, machine-like; a machine running because it must, because the energy forces it to. The opening minute and a half, caught in these conditions, is ultimately abandoned in favour of the shouted repetition of the title, pre-empting by two years Jon Spencer's lycanthropic, self-destructive blues. The "super" of the title serves as a gesture of disapproval in the face of a reality ("pussy") which, in order to be rejected, must first be accepted and affirmed to the point of paroxysm.

“Log Bass” (2.00) contemplates the end, taking it head-on. It basks in the end. On one side, a rhythm section as tribal as it is futuristic; on the other, the guitar, choral in its disintegrated articulations, broken into a thousand pieces of cartilage; in between, lost, forgotten, an inhuman and dehumanizing voice. The drum roll, dizzying and whirling, Albini's guitar relentless, never playing a single note but instead roaring as if drowning or gasping in a dust of metal, add to the speed of every hardcore tempo the power of industrial metal. All of it executed with the utmost refinement: in front of such compositions there is always a sense of ungraspability, of pushing past limits, of a snobbery born from something that endures as unbreakable fragility or repressed violence. It has the length of a hardcore track, but offers up enough ideas and solutions to have sustained a 10-minute progressive suite. And that's why every Rapeman track is a gem. At the end, the extreme sense of estrangement comes from the mockery of Elvis, whom Albini impersonates for a moment, a cappella, in the line “Love me tender.” If it's a joke, it's a bitter one.

“Dutch courage” (2.30) sways, industrial and acidic, between Chrome and Swans. The formal atony is a symbol of dystonia in life. Once again, a slurred harmony, sacrificed to nothingness, to the abyss that never stops unstoppably swallowing. And the music along with it. Music aware that it is therefore no longer music (song) but only noise (scream). Another extreme track, uncompromising, terribly varied. Another masterpiece. A robotic, alienating, eternal ballad. The blues for the post-Apocalypse, a notch above Jon Spencer.

Budd Ep isn't an album, but it holds 4 of the greatest masterpieces of all time. Essential for anyone wanting to understand something of rock's final outgrowths. Formally, post-hardcore is achieved by slowing down, halving hardcore's speed, but doubling its power and heaviness. As if in a mirage, the hardcore song is split in two, frayed, and finally annihilated. The carcass, exposed to the uncontrolled gusts of wind blowing through it. Because Rapeman's tracks lend themselves to, or to some extent demand, improvisation as well; improvisation that was supposed to be the antithesis of rock, being a trait proper to jazz; which was brought into rock by many protagonists of long and often tedious performances between the '60s and '70s, and above all almost always non-rock artists. Here, improvisation is packed into two minutes: and that's practically blasphemy; it is to the riff what menopause is to orgasm; this isn't non-rock but, consciously, post-rock.

To get an idea of Rapeman's stature, consider that in Italy (granted, it has nothing to do with rock itself, but consumes foreign rock and therefore, slowly and respectively at least one stage behind, absorbs its changes) in 1988, among the general public, the new wave of Litfiba was still going strong, and that they would only bring hard rock to Italy at the start of the '90s.

Two Nuns And a Pack Mule (1989). “Steak and black onions” shows how Albini's music is equally far removed from metal epic, from punk sermonizing and from indie lyricism, as well as from a certain kind of noise that exists for its own sake. Joy Division's dirge is elevated into a granite wall of sound, condensed into two minutes of dizzying, nagging polyphony; a polyphony knotted together through the acrobatic torture, or self-flagellation, of just three instruments.

“Monobrown”, despondently, with electric-folk pauses amid sublime guitar flourishes that are tragic in their screeching, tries to digest the constipation of a land made desert by nuclear fallout. All of it to be read as a metaphor for a psyche that wants to rise up as an exemplary specimen both of the average man of the late millennium and (above all) of man as “human nature” itself. Albini's screeches are not the roar of the dying, but the conscious, more than mournful, bark of someone who coldly wants to throw an absurd state of affairs (life) back in the faces of those who uphold that very state of affairs (the living). A state of affairs as absurd as it is necessary and inevitable. The suicidal mindset of early hardcore fades away, with suicide itself becoming a gratuitous act, indifferent to the state of things that, prison though it is, will carry on regardless. It's not that life doesn't matter because death comes anyway and so one must draw close to it to throw life's transience back in its face; life doesn't matter because it's indistinguishable from non-life. Albini's music is inhuman; and the inhuman is the obligatory passage for the human before reaching reification: that is, ultimate truth. Prong and Marilyn Manson, more naively, will attempt to say similar things. After two minutes “Monobrown” breaks into an almost disco rhythm, while a certain harmony (a blues legacy) keeps peeking through, making its steady and inevitable annihilation all the more piercing. Albini's voice is an admirable synthesis of 10 years of hardcore, his surgical guitar of 20 years of noise (see “White Light/White Heat” by Velvet Underground).

“Up beat”, far from being boring, kicks off with a charging rhythm that, however fast and logical, limps along in a wildly uneven way (Pop Group). Rapeman are the cannibals of nothingness. This is what sets them apart from Jon Spencer (a cannibal of the blue-evil), Nick Cave (of an equally great but white evil), and from punk (cannibal of all presumed goods). This is the legacy of Rapeman's generation (a name whose best translation might be “inhuman”); and perhaps even more so of the generations to come. Albini grafts onto a barely recognizable hardcore skeleton (recognizable only by the volume, speed and length of the tracks) the unstoppable pounding of techno music (of which, without fear of contradiction, we can say Albini is among the greatest forerunners: from his use of drum machines, right through to his collaboration with that wonderfully original and intelligent drummer, Rey Washam). All of it without ever touching electronics.

Albini is among the very last rock artists; and, partly following, partly making history, he helps bring about this final, post- state. So Albini is among the greatest rock interpreters; since the greatest are always those who stand at the end and at the beginning: always the ones who take on the responsibility, even if the fun, perhaps, is left to the mediocrities in the middle.

“Coition ignition mission”, drawing on every conceivable guitar trick in the book while still staying within the essentiality of the absolute — the only thing that makes things great — offers another chapter in a perversion to which one is forced rather than consenting. The scream, Albini's music, are as spontaneous and unproduced, with all the humility of despair, as his productions for other musicians are tyrannical. As if Albini vents onto others that same pusillanimity and arrogance that alone allow him to live, yet which he nonetheless sets aside in his own compositions, where, seeking the ultimate meaning of life, he must detach himself from it for the sake of the truth of non-life. “Coition ignition mission”, in a minute and a half, condenses and drives to the furthest edges of depression the maniacal guitar noise of Red Crayola and Chrome, programmatically distorting that of garage (Stooges).

“Kim Gordon's Panties” means two things: 1) self-destruction (if the equation Sonic Youth = Albini holds, and Sonic Youth are being desecrated, mocked); 2) and consequently, a break from Sonic Youth, given that they have turned nihilism into an art form: starting from a shared base (noise), Albini repudiates those whom the general public considers the alternative ones: and taking down Kim Gordon's panties means humiliating her and knocking her off every pedestal, soiling every bit of her artistic aura: it's like taking the guitar away from her husband Thurston Moore. Albini considers himself among the few truly alternative musicians: and given the uncompromising nature of his work, it's hard to prove him wrong.

In “Hated Chinese”, Cobain's distortions and screams come across as a stripped-down simplification of these, which are quantitatively greater and therefore more obsessive, as well as more intricately arranged.

“Radar love lizard”. Without giving an inch, head down throughout, utterly despondent; disillusioned with everything and everyone, Albini still pushes the accelerator on the flipping of rhythms and tempos; and always under the banner of the extreme, on every front, in power as much as in distortion and compositional variety.

“Marmoset” is yet another relentless string of originality piled on originality; no dip in quality; no dip in sincerity. These tracks are all the more precious the shorter they are (because the shorter they are, the higher the concentration of great ideas).

“Just got paid” changes forms once again while keeping the same substance: it anticipates Jon Spencer's hard-blues-noise by a few years. As if the Rolling Stones, instead of being epicureans, were nihilists; another track split in two, with the second half a startling example of dance-noise. The praises of drummer Rey Washam and of Albini's guitar (as well as his voice) can never be sung enough. For innovation, intensity, lack of letdowns, and absence of compromise, this work can only be compared to the Melvins' Gluey Porch Treatments from two years earlier.

“Trouser minnow” is more elegiac, though no less raw and exasperating: at least that's how it starts. It goes on to build into a crescendo of a real, steady, powerful lament, utterly devoid of rhetoric.

Albini is incapable of having bands the same way he's incapable of having faiths; he captains projects, pairing himself each time with two co-stars, outstanding both technically and existentially. Big Black were the first of these projects, Rapeman the second and perhaps the most perfect, Shellac the third and, for now, the last. Who knows, maybe in the future we'll see works credited simply to Albini, the man himself cast as a folk singer of the techno era.

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