Angry Email About Hating Dance Music Gets Turned Into Giant Billboard

Steve Albini really doesn't like dance music. And understandably so, as quite a bit of modern dance music is, in a word, terrible. Albini is much better at describing how it irritates him than I am, and he didn't mince words in an email to producer Powell, who was writing to the former Big Black frontman to see if he could use a Big Black tune as a sample in one of his songs, "Insomniac."

Albini's response was pretty legendary; he digitally condemned all dance music has to offer, and said he didn't care what Powell did with his music, but he wouldn't be listening to it. Albini, noting the response was generating a bit of buzz, asked if he could use it as a billboard. Albini's reply? "Still don't care." Excellent. Here's the full text of the email below:

I am absolutely the wrong audience for this kind of music. I've always detested mechanized dance music, its stupid simplicity, the clubs where it was played, the people who went to those clubs, the drugs they took, the shit 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, shit 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