It used to be that whenever someone on TV or in a movie fell off the roof or had a skiing mishap or got into any sort of auto accident, the odds were pretty good that they’d end up in a neck brace. You know what I mean: a circlet of beige foam, or else a rigid ring of plastic, spanning from an actor’s chin down to their sternum. Jack Lemmon wore a neck brace for a part. So did Jerry Seinfeld, Julia Roberts, and Bill Murray. For many decades, this was pop culture’s universal symbol for I’ve hurt myself.

Now it’s not. People on TV and in the movies no longer seem to suffer like they used to, which is to say they no longer suffer cervically. Plastic braces do still crop up from time to time on-screen, but their use in sight gags is as good as dead. In the meantime, the soft-foam collar—which has always been the brace’s most recognizable form—has been retired. I don’t just mean that it’s been evicted from the props department; the collar has been set aside in clinics too. At some point in the past few decades, a device that once stood in for trauma and recovery was added to a list of bygone treatments, alongside leeches and the iron lung. Simply put, the collar vanished. Where’d it go?

The story naturally begins in doctors’ offices, where a new form of injury—“whiplash”—started to emerge amid the growing car culture of the 1940s and the early ’50s. “It is not difficult for anyone who travels on a highway to realize why the ‘painful neck’ is being produced daily in large numbers,” two Pennsylvania doctors wrote in 1955. Following a rear-end collision, a driver’s body will be thrown forward and upward, they explained. The driver’s neck will flex in both directions, “like a car radio aerial.”

The damage from this jerking to and fro could not necessarily be seen in any medical scan. It was understood to be more of a sprain than a fracture, causing pain and stiffness in the neck that might spread into the shoulder. Many patients found these problems faded quickly, but for some of them—maybe even half—the discomfort lingered. Whiplash in its graver forms led to dizzy spells, sensory disturbances, and cognitive decline (all of which are also signs of mild traumatic brain injuries). And it could leave its victims in a lasting state of disability—chronic whiplash, doctors called it—characterized by fatigue, memory problems, and headache.

[Read: Chronic whiplash is a mystery]

From the start, standard whiplash treatment would include the wearing of a soft appliance: a foam collar to support the patient’s head and stifle excess movement. But the underlying problem had a squishiness about it too. If the damage to the neck was invisible to imaging, how was it causing so much misery? Some doctors guessed that the deeper, more persistent wounds of whiplash might be psychic. A paper on the problem published in 1953, in the Journal of the American Medical Association, suggested that the chronic form of whiplash might best be understood as neurosis—a “disturbing emotional reaction” to an accident that produces lasting ailments. These early whiplash doctors didn’t claim that their patients were malingering; rather, they argued that the underlying source of anguish was diverse. It might comprise, in various proportions, damage to the ligaments and muscles, brain concussion, and psychology. Doctors worried that these different etiologies were hard to tease apart, especially in a legal context, when “the complicating factor of monetary compensation,” as one study put it, was in play. (These uncertainties persist, in one form or another, to this day.)

A clinical unease colored how the neck brace would be seen and understood by members of the public. For about as long as it was used for treating whiplash, the collar held opposing meanings: Someone had an injury, and also that injury was fake. In The Fortune Cookie, the Billy Wilder comedy from 1966, a cameraman (played by Lemmon) gets knocked over at a football game and then persuaded by his sleazy lawyer—a guy called “Whiplash Willie”—to pretend he’s gravely hurt. They’re planning to defraud the big insurance companies, and Lemmon’s plastic neck brace will be central to the act.

Indeed, the stock setting for the collar, soft and hard alike, has always been the courtroom. When Carol Brady finds herself before a judge in an episode of The Brady Bunch from 1972, the “victim” of her fender bender, Mr. Duggan, hobbles into court with an ostentatious you-know-what. “A neck brace—do you believe that?” she asks. Of course you don’t; that’s the point. Mr. Duggan tells the judge that he’s just come from the doctor’s office, and that he has whiplash. (He puts the stress on the word’s second syllable: whipLASH. The condition was still new enough, back then, that its pronunciation hadn’t fully settled.)

[Read: No one in movies knows how to swallow a pill]

Concerns about unfounded civil suits multiplied in the ’70s and ’80s, thanks in part to what the law professor Marc Galanter would later term the “elite folklore” of seemingly outrageous legal claims, stripped of context and diffused throughout the culture by mass media. There was the woman who said she’d lost her psychic powers after getting a CT scan, the worker at a convenience store who complained that she’d hurt her back while opening a pickle jar, the senior citizen who sued McDonald’s after spilling coffee in her lap. And then of course there was the granddaddy of them all: the whiplash faker in a neck brace—the Mr. Duggan type, familiar from the screen.

Car-insurance premiums were going up and companies were pointing to exaggerated whiplash claims from drivers whose “soft injuries” could not be verified objectively. Financial motives did appear to be in play for certain plaintiffs: In Saskatchewan, where a no-fault system of insurance had been introduced and most lawsuits for pain and suffering were eliminated, the number of whiplash-based insurance claims appeared to drop. (Similar correlations have been observed in other countries too.) In the early 1990s, the New Jersey Insurance Department even staged a series of minor accidents involving buses wired up with hidden cameras—they’d be rear-ended by a slowly moving car—to test the prevalence of fraud. The department’s investigators found that Whiplash Willie–style lawyers quickly swooped on passengers to cajole them into making claims of damage to their neck and back.

By this time, the neck brace’s mere appearance in a movie or TV show would be enough to generate a laugh. It just seemed so silly and so fake! In the courtroom, insurance companies and other businesses grew less inclined to settle whiplash cases, Valerie Hans, a psychologist and law professor at Cornell, told me. Instead they’d try their luck, and mostly find success, in jury trials. To find out why, Cornell and a colleague did a formal survey of potential jurors’ attitudes about such injuries in 1999, and found that the presence of a neck brace on a plaintiff might only make them more suspicious. Fewer than one-third believed that whiplash injuries were “usually” or “always” legitimate.

[Read: Whatever happened to carpal tunnel syndrome?]

If the soft neck brace was already well established as a joke on television and a liability in court, the medical establishment soon turned against it too. A series of randomized controlled trials of whiplash treatments, conducted in the 1990s and 2000s, all arrived at the same conclusion: Usage of the soft foam collar was “ineffective at best,” as one evidence review from 2010 described it. At worst, it could be doing harm by preventing patients from engaging in the mobility and exercise programs that seemed more beneficial.

A broader shift away from telling patients to keep still, and toward assigning active interventions, was under way in medicine. Bed rest and other forms of immobilization were falling out of favor in the treatment of back injuries, for example. Concussion doctors, too, began to wonder whether the standard guidance for patients to do nothing was really such a good idea. (The evidence suggested otherwise.) And uncertainty was even spreading to the other kinds of cervical orthoses, such as the stiff devices made of foam and plastic called trauma collars, which remain in widespread use by EMTs. These are meant to immobilize a patient’s neck, to help ensure that any damage to their upper spine will not be worsened. But their rationale was being questioned too.

In 2014, a team of doctors based in Norway, led by the neurosurgeon Terje Sundstrøm, published a “critical review” of trauma-collar use. “For many years, the cervical collar was the symbol of good health care, or good pre-hospital care,” Sundstrøm told me. “If the patient wasn’t fitted with one, then you didn’t know what you were doing.” But he described the evidence of their benefits as “very poor.” His paper notes that at least 50 patients have their necks immobilized for every one that has a major spinal injury. Trauma collars can interfere with patients’ breathing, according to some research, and their use has been associated with patients’ potential overtreatment. They’re also quite uncomfortable, which may agitate some patients, who could then make just the sorts of movements that the EMTs are, in theory, trying to prevent.

In short, despite trauma collars’ near-universal use since the 1960s, no one really knows how much they help, or whether they might even hurt. Sundstrøm said that his own health-care system gave up on using trauma collars a dozen years ago, and has yet to see a single injury as a result. Official guidelines for the emergency use of cervical braces have lately been revisited in a small handful of countries, but Sundstrøm does not expect major changes to take hold. “I don’t think there will ever be really good studies for or against collars like this,” he said, in part because cervical spinal injuries are very, very rare. For the same reason, we may never even know for sure whether collars are appropriate for patients whose cervical fractures have been confirmed in the hospital. “There hasn’t really been any interest in this research topic either,” he told me. Instead, doctors just rely on common sense about which interventions are likely to be helpful.

So the use of rigid trauma collars is likely to persist regardless of uncertainty. In health care, that’s more the norm than the exception. Research is difficult, the human body is complex, and tradition rules the day. Lots of standard interventions, maybe even most of them, aren’t fully known to do much good. Viewed against this backdrop, the soft foam collar—rarely useful, always doubted, often mocked—may finally have flipped its meaning. For years it stood for fakery and false impressions and also, ironically, for a lack of proper evidence in medicine—for a failure of support. Now it may signify the opposite. By disappearing from the movies, the courtroom, and the clinic, this form of neck brace has become a rare example of a lesson duly learned. It shows that science can correct itself, every now and then. It shows that progress may be slow, but it is real.

Nearly 20 years ago, my high-school calculus teacher introduced me to a book that would, although I didn’t realize it at the time, permanently reframe the way I thought about music. Written by the journalist Michael Azerrad, Our Band Could Be Your Life was a study of the 1980s independent-music landscape—of bands who had unconsciously responded to the commercialism found on MTV and mainstream rock radio by going underground, and by getting very weird. The book introduced me to groups such as Black Flag, Dinosaur Jr., and the Replacements, the last of which had beer-drunk songwriting and electric punk-rock hooks that soon made it my favorite band. These groups had never become traditionally successful, Azzerad explained, but their careers represented a romantic and uncompromising approach to making music, which could too easily become cheapened by external forces.

And in fact, many of the bands in the book had attempted to move up a level by signing to major labels, only to hit an artificial ceiling once it became clear that they couldn’t look or sound a certain way. But some of them had not even attempted this—they had recognized, as their careers were taking shape, that their personal beliefs were permanently at odds with the idea of participating in a notoriously predatory and corporate music industry. Among them—and the band that left the strongest impression on me—was a band called Big Black. Big Black was, even by the standards of its contemporaries, particularly abrasive; its serrated riffs and pummeling drumbeats sounded like they’d been recorded on the floor of an automobile factory. And the band’s philosophical stances were just as belligerent as its sound: It was led by a guitarist and singer named Steve Albini who seemed to take particular joy in broadcasting how he thought artists should behave, and denigrating everyone who did not live up to his standards. As Azerrad put it, “This was a band with policies.” Proving its ideological commitment, Big Black broke up in 1987 right after its best record came out—partly because one of the members wanted to attend law school, and also because the band was becoming a little too popular, which meant it was attracting the wrong kind of fans.

But Albini, who died yesterday at the age of 61 from a heart attack, did not stop making music. Over the next few decades, he continued to perform in his own bands and struck up a second career as a recording engineer (his preferred term, over producer), where he worked with hundreds of artists—among them Nirvana, the Pixies, PJ Harvey, Slint, Joanna Newsom, Robert Plant and Jimmy Page, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, the Jesus Lizard, and many, many, many more. It’s no exaggeration to say that Albini changed the trajectory of rock music for the better. He was especially good at capturing an artist as though they were playing right in front of you, a product of chemistry and ability rather than studio-driven artifice, and hiring Albini became a way for bands to signal their interest in being “realer,” both in sound and in attitude. His own outlook was perhaps best crystallized in his 1993 essay for The Baffler, “The Problem With Music,” where he meticulously sketched out all the reasons why making music on a major label was a sucker’s game. This idea, and its attendant aesthetic principles, felt just as important as the records themselves; to a certain kind of listener, it sometimes seemed like Albini was the last honest musician in the industry, though he would’ve shaken his head at such mythologizing.

I feel confident saying this because, in the summer of 2022, I had the opportunity to profile Albini for The Guardian, and I interviewed him on multiple occasions in Chicago, where he spent most of his life. I did not approach this task lightly. Foremost was the fact that I’d been listening to his music for the past 20 years and didn’t want to seem like some fawning kid. But Albini had also incurred a reputation for being personally combative—which is saying something, given that inveterate punk rockers are not always known for their social graces. Over the years, he’d become infamous for saying a tremendous number of insulting things about other people, including bands he’d worked with. (“Never have I seen four cows more anxious to be led around by their nose rings,” he once wrote about the Pixies.) He seemed terribly smart, and suspicious of any nonsense. This is a bit of a broad statement, but allow me to say it: Anyone who has spent time around people who are really into music has met the type of person who seems totally obstinate, and borderline caustic, about why the bands they like are better than the bands you like. These people can be pretty irritating—I don’t want to be yelled at just because I like some Taylor Swift songs—but they inspire a shard of dread that perhaps their obstinacy is justified, that they have latched onto some way of thinking about art that the rest of us are too dull to perceive.

From afar, Albini seemed like the final boss of this mindset. Yet the Guardian profile had been assigned because Albini, in recent years, had begun to soften some of his adversarial instincts, at least in public. He still got worked up about bands he hated (especially Steely Dan) and about right-wing politicians—but he had explicitly apologized for the numerous offensive things he’d said throughout his life, which included using racial slurs and denigrating women. “A lot of things I said and did from an ignorant position of comfort and privilege are clearly awful and I regret them,” he wrote in a 2021 Twitter thread that went viral. This felt notable because it’s become popular, in recent years, for people to complain about the rise of cancel culture and the shifting standards for public speech. In the past, Albini had always claimed that his offensiveness was attached to some underlying principle, no matter how arbitrary it seemed to others, but he’d since become suspicious of the people who reveled in offensiveness for its own sake. “When you realize that the dumbest person in the argument is on your side, that means you’re on the wrong side,” he had told me about recalibrating his feelings.

So this was one dimension of the Albini I met: A man who, while still razor-sharp and hilarious, was clear-eyed about why he felt he should shed some of these more reactive traits of his former self. “It’s me owning up to my role in a shift in culture that directly caused harm to people I’m sympathetic with, and people I want to be a comrade to,” he said of why he had decided to be open about his evolved thinking. When I published the story, quite a few readers, and particularly men of his generation, said they were personally inspired by Albini’s perspective and growth—that if someone with his cutting reputation could be this reflective, then perhaps nobody else had an excuse for staying rude.

Just as striking, to me, was the way he talked about his job. Earlier in his career, he had been more insistent about how a record should sound, and had freely offered his opinions in the studio. Over time, he sloughed off this tendency and became more comfortable with recording musicians as they were, and as they wanted to be. His rates remained affordable, and he was always personally available to record a band; for a reasonable fee, a local artist could get the guy who’d laid down Kurt Cobain’s guitar on “All Apologies.” He relished working with musicians “beneath the professional level,” as he put it to me—people for whom making music was part of a necessary impulse rather than any means of getting rich or famous. He was decidedly not sentimental about the famous artists he’d worked with (though he got a little giddy when we talked about Iggy Pop and the Stooges, whose reunion record he’d recorded). Instead, it was the everyday work of going to his studio and producing physical evidence of a band’s existence—no matter how big or small—that mattered the most. His greatest contribution to music, Kim Deal of the Pixies told me while I was reporting for the profile, was “every single person who has walked through that door and been treated with respect about their ideas.”

Albini did too much to be neatly summarized in any profile; I didn’t have the space in mine to dive too deeply into his most recent band, Shellac, who in a terrible coincidence is releasing a new record next week. But as I drafted, two things kept coming back to me: The first was that he had been unafraid to own up to his past rather than wave it off or double down on his positions. The second was that he talked about music not as some expression of ego but as a creative practice worth maintaining because it enriched your life. To hear this—and in such an unpretentious way—was no small thing. This was not mere plate-spinning from a guy who liked to hear himself talk; these were tightly reasoned, directly stated beliefs that he’d stress-tested in his own life and were reflected in how he carried himself.

Unlike many of its peers, Big Black never really reunited, other than for a single performance at an anniversary show for its former record label. “I’m not a nostalgic person by nature,” Albini had told me. “I don’t think about the past very much.” I believed him, but one of my final questions was how he hoped his work would be regarded, should he have to retire tomorrow. I’ll reproduce his answer in full, because I was struck by it at the moment, and I feel heartened thinking about it now:

“I don’t give a shit. I’m doing it, and that’s what matters to me—the fact that I get to keep doing it, that’s the whole basis of it. I was doing it yesterday, I’m gonna do it tomorrow, and I’m gonna carry on doing it. Other people can figure out if they were happy about that, or not. I don’t care what they say; I’m doing it because I find value in it. I find value in being part of this culture, and preserving my peers’ artistic output. I find value in that, as my role: being the person responsible for making the record that someone will hear in 50 years to find out what some band sounded like. How will people know what our culture was like now, in 50 or 100 years? Well, they can read what survives the great digital void, and they can listen to what music survives. And I just want to make sure that I do a good job on the music that survives, you know?”

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Steve Albini, a monumental figure in the music industry known for his unyielding integrity and influential work as a producer and musician, has passed away at the age of 61 due to a heart attack.

Born on July 22, 1962, in Pasadena, California, Albini was revered for his commitment to an ethos of artist empowerment, often refusing to take traditional production credits or royalties for his work, preferring instead to be paid as an engineer. His extensive body of work included collaborations with a plethora of seminal bands, including Nirvana, Pixies, Jimmy Page, Robert Plant, Pigface, Killing Joke, and PJ Harvey. His own musical endeavours were marked by a fiercely independent spirit and a unique sound.

While hammering out the finer points of his journalism degree, Steve Albini kickstarted Big Black and plunged headlong into the throbbing heart of Chicago’s music scene, embodying the raw, unfiltered ethos of punk with Big Black’s blunt, aggressive tracks and staunch DIY approach. To keep the lights on, Albini took up music production gigs—or “engineering,” as he preferred to call it. This sideline swiftly became integral to his artistic identity, most famously demonstrated on Nirvana’s seismic 1993 release, In Utero. Albini’s commitment to artist autonomy led him to establish his own haven, Electrical Audio, where he continued to take on production work for a flat fee, staunchly eschewing royalties in a bold stand of solidarity with his artists.

Post-Big Black, Albini didn’t skip a beat. He stirred up controversy and conversation with Rapeman, a band named after a Japanese comic book character, from 1987 to 1989. He then launched Shellac in 1992 alongside drummer Todd Trainer and bassist Bob Weston. Known for their stripped-back, rhythmically intense, and utterly unique take on alt-rock, Shellac was poised to return this week with To All Trains—the long-awaited successor to 2014’s Dude Incredible –painstakingly crafted over a series of long weekends stretching from 2017 to 2022.

Shellac were preparing to tour their first album in a decade, To All Trains, which is scheduled for release next week. Steve Albini was 61 years old. He is survived by his wife, film director Heather Whinna.

Godspeed, Steve, thank you for the music.

The post Producer Steve Albini, Singer and Founding Member of Big Black, Passes Away At 61 appeared first on Post-Punk.com.

A reader comments on generational views of Israel:

I see three generational views. My parents, who see Israel as it was in the 1960s and 1970s: constantly at risk of annihilation. Then there's my generation, that sees Israel as a strong democratic island in a sea of totalitarian neighbors. And the younger generation, that sees Israel as an oppressor.

This is probably more accurate than my young-old division.

What makes the Israel-Palestinian conflict so intractable is that both sides view themselves as besieged minorities fighting for their lives against implacable foes. And they're both right. Israel has fought since its beginning against the entire Arab world, which surrounds them and is massively larger. But in the specific fight of Palestinians against Israel, it's the Palestinians who are overwhelmed by a larger and far more powerful enemy.

Even in theory, I'm no longer able to conceive of a plausible resolution. The West Bank is now too carved up to support a Palestinian state, which means a two-state solution is effectively impossible. And a one-state solution is intolerable to both sides. The status quo is abhorrent—one of the few things everyone agrees on—but it's all we have.

On May 4, 1970, 54 years ago today, members of the Ohio National Guard opened fire on a crowd of student protesters gathered on the campus of Ohio’s Kent State University, killing four students and injuring another nine. Several hundred students had been protesting against the Nixon administration’s expansion of the Vietnam War into Cambodia, and the mayor of the city of Kent asked the governor of Ohio to bring in members of the National Guard. News coverage of the shooting of unarmed protesters dominated headlines around the world and spurred hundreds of protests across the country. Gathered below are images from that pivotal day in American history.