Steve Albini Quotes

I think fashion is repulsive. The whole idea that someone else can make clothing that is supposed to be in style and make other people look good is ridiculous. It sickens me to think that there is an industry that plays to the low self-esteem of the general public. I would like the fashion industry to collapse.

I wouldn't mind being taller, because when I'm in the company of people who are absurdly tall, there's something about them that I can't help admiring.

I think good-looking naked ladies turn on the majority of men.

I learned to cook from my mom. Most of what I ate growing up was Italian cooking.

Almost any decent cook will make food by eye and taste. Virtually all of my family cooked that way.

New York has magnificent eating available, both in restaurants and in the materials available to home cooks in the many specialty markets.

Of the people who cook on television, I have admired people like Jacques Pepin, Julia Child, Mario Batali, Jamie Oliver and a few others because they are free of drama, display good taste and masterful technique, and use clear exposition to bring you up to speed.

Know what you're trying to do before you do it. Turning knobs at random isn't enlightening any more than throwing paint at a wall blindfolded will let you paint a nice picture.

The only kind of restaurant I could imagine doing would be the extraordinarily snooty restaurant with three or four tables, and I would cook what I felt like cooking. And you could eat it or not.

If I were a gambling man I would put all my money on there not being anything other than this universe.

There's a stupid trend in American politics right now with people who have no experience with politics and no grasp of public service as a profession just deciding that they're going to jump into it. The obvious figurehead of this whole "I am an idiot, therefore I can be a politician" is Donald Trump. People think that ignorance of a profession is somehow qualifying for that profession. It's utterly baffling.

I hate 'foodie' because it's cute, like pretty much all diminutives associated with eating. 'Veggies,' 'sammies,' 'parm.' I eat food, and I cook it: it's for eating, preferably with friends, and I don't make a fetish out of it.

When people are absurdly tall, they command everyone's attention when they walk into a room. Nobody's ever dismissive of somebody for being too tall.

I don't feel like embarrassing Kurt by talking about what a psycho hosebeast his wife is, especially when he knows it already.

You can't help noticing an amazing ass. Pretty naked ladies will always get my attention. Revealingly dressed good-looking women will always get my attention, at least for a moment.

Whenever there's active promotion on the part of somebody else, whenever I see somebody all dolled up for a fancy photograph and someone's handing out flyers or whenever there's active promotion for something like that, as an imposition on my day, I hate all those people and I want them to fail. I have a visceral reaction to advertising and promotion. There's just something about salesmanship that grates on me on a very base level and I react very negatively towards it. I want those people to suffer and I want their enterprises to fail.

I'm not a particularly good cook. Part of it is that it is the kind of cooking anybody could do if they bothered. It's improvisational. I cook with whatever I have laying around.

The woman I am currently crazy about was a vegetarian for a year until I started dating her. As is the case with most vegetarians, she had never eaten properly prepared meat, only commercially packaged or otherwise abused flesh.

My dad, Frank Addison Albini, was a terrific shot with a rifle and had generally excellent hunting skills. While my dad loved hunting and fishing, he didnt romanticize them. He was filling the freezer, not intellectualizing some caveman impulse or proving his worth as a real man.

Harmonics are vibrations a fraction of the length of the vibrating string, which add higher-pitched and more complex content to the notes. With a dull instrument, the harmonics die out, but with a sustaining instrument, the harmonics continue to sound along with the fundamental note.

When I'm in a restaurant, I don't eat red meat. It doesn't taste like anything. But if a friend of mine is grilling stuff at his house, its almost always great.

The band cannot sign to another label or even put out its own material unless they are released from their agreement, which never happens.

Find people who think like you and stick with them. Make only music you are passionate about. Work only with people you like and trust. Don't sign anything.

I'm not really interested in participating in mainstream culture. Participating in the mainstream music business is, to me, like getting involved in a racket. There's no way you can get involved in a racket and not someway be filthied by it.

What's the most outrageous thing I've ever done? Let's just say I don't think I've done it yet. The most outrageous thing is yet to come.

In terms of other people's perception of me, that's their business. There are people who I have never met but, for whatever reason, I am certain that these people are jack-offs. I've never met Billy Joel, but I'm absolutely convinced he's an asshole. I can't justify that opinion, that's just what I think. But my opinion about Billy Joel isn't going to affect him in the slightest. In the same way, I am sure there are people out there who are completely convinced that I am an asshole, for whatever reason. They might even feel more justified than I feel about my presumptive opinion of Billy Joel.

Suicide was such a formative band for me, so influential in the development of my taste. They're one of those bands that operated in absolute isolation for so long that they developed a completely unique world view.

In 1980, I moved to Chicago, and I recorded demo tapes for my friends' bands, and in 1981, the first Big Black record - the first thing I did that was an actual record.

A lot of musicians are good cooks, and a lot of cooks are musicians, but I think that may just be a result of the creative impulse finding several means of expression. Probably an equivalent number are visual artists, woodworkers or compulsive liars.

I have no problem with bands using participant financing schemes like Kickstarter and such. I've said many times that I think they're part of the new way bands and their audience interact and they can be a fantastic resource, enabling bands to do things essentially in cooperation with their audience. It's pretty amazing, actually.

I stopped drinking almost immediately after I had ready access to liquor, when I got to college. It almost immediately lost its appeal for me.

Over the last thirty years or so, I have definitely become more enlightened about corners of the social spectrum that I had less exposure to as a young man. I've interacted with more poor people, more minorities and more sexual minorities. As you get more people from different backgrounds involved in your life, you get a broader perspective and you're less cavalier about your opinions.

I want to be in cahoots with bands who want to make the record of their dreams.

My father was an expert hunter, so we ate a lot of wild game when I was growing up in Montana. That helped broaden my palate generally, but I know it informed my distaste for factory farms and unspectacular commercial meat.

Cooking is about presenting flavors and other aspects of food in a way that makes best use of them and makes an engaging, satisfying meal. Taste necessarily comes into it along with technique. Some ingredients require cooking, cleaning or otherwise denaturing them, some are fine as they are.

In heaven, after antipasti, the first course will be pasta.

For less than the cost of a Big Mac, fries and a Coke, you can buy a loaf of fresh bread and some good cheese or roast beef, which you will enjoy much more.

It always offended me when I was in the studio and the engineer or the assumed producer for the session would start bossing the band around. That always seemed like a horrible insult to me.

The bands that have been the most important to me, and the records that have been the most important to me as a fan, have been records that surprised me for one reason or another.