Steve Albini email about his hatred for dance music turned into a billboard
'Basically all of it: 100 percent hated every scrap'
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Your support makes all the difference.Legendary punk rocker Steve Albini really, really doesn’t like modern dance music. Not one bit.
Electronic producer Powell was unaware of this. He sent Albini an email stating his love for Big Black as well as asking if he could sample one of their tracks for his upcoming single ‘Insomniac’.
I detest club culture as deeply as I detest anything on earth
While Albini may have given his approval to use the sample, he also took the time to produce a lengthy rant about his hatred for "mechanised dance music". In response, Powell asked if he could use the email to promote the single, to which Albini responded by saying "still don’t care".
Keeping to his word, the rant has been turned into a massive billboard, currently up in Shoreditch, East London.
It reads:
Hey Oscar,
Sounds like you’ve got a cool thing set up for yourself. I am absolutely the wrong audience for this kind of music. I've always detested mechanised dance music, its stupid simplicity, the clubs where it was played, the people who went to those clubs, the drugs they took, the s**t they liked to talk about, the clothes
they wore, the battles they fought amongst each other…
Basically all of it: 100 percent hated every scrap.
The electronic music I liked was radical and different, s**t like the White Noise, Xenakis, Suicide, Kraftwerk, and the earliest stuff form Cabaret Voltaire, SPK and DAF. When that scene and those people got co-opted by dance/club music I felt like we'd lost a war. I detest club culture as deeply as I detest anything on earth. So I am against what you're into, and an enemy of where you come from but I have no problem with what you're doing…
In other words, you're welcome to do whatever you like with whatever of mine you've gotten your hands on. Don't care. Enjoy yourself.
Steve
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