Didn't We Deserve a Look at You the Way You Really Are?

Thoughts on the life and death of Steve Albini

It no longer comes as too much of a surprise to hear of a sudden celebrity death, what with all the climate change that's been happening since 2021, but the recent news that Steve Albini died of a heart attack at the age of 61 has the feeling of a watershed moment for those who grew up listening to alternative music. Albini is best known as a studio engineer, having worked with big names like Nirvana, Page & Plant, PJ Harvey, and Jarvis Cocker, as well as indie, noise, and metal artists like Slint, the Jesus Lizard, and Neurosis. Albini's dedicated support of the underground music scene was one of the factors that earned him his respected status, combined with his acerbic sense of humour, and his own musical endeavours. He was impressively humble and professional in his studio work, working with anyone who earnestly requested his services, giving musicians total creative control, and often working for free if an act ran out of budget.

Despite this, Albini generated his own share of controversy as frontman for the bands Big Black, Rapeman (seriously), and Shellac.¹ His provocative sensibility, given a blind eye during the permissive 1980s and 90s, came back to haunt him after the Great Awokening of 2020, and he engaged in the standard grovelling to retain his standing among his overwhelmingly progressive audience:

“A lot of things I said and did from an ignorant position of comfort and privilege are clearly awful and I regret them. It’s nobody’s obligation to overlook that, and I do feel an obligation to redeem myself. f anything, we were trying to underscore the banality, the everyday nonchalance toward our common history with the atrocious, all while laboring under the tacit *mistaken* notion that things were getting better. I’m overdue for a conversation about my role in inspiring ‘edgelord’ shit.”

It should come as no surprise, then, that during this period he was also pushing the mRNA injections and calling the unvaccinated a “fucking cancer.” Like so many other 'rebellious' rockers, when 2020 came knocking, Albini took the knee, rolled up his sleeves, and did his bit for the Two Minutes of Hate.

In retrospect, the puerile antinomianism that Albini represented can be seen as an essential step towards the quasi-satanic wokery of today. It's as if they were the advance guard, tearing down the structures the held society in place, only to be discarded when it was time for the new structures to be put in place. Think of industrial pioneers Throbbing Gristle, who combined sexual deviance and androgyny with fascist imagery, or the even more extreme Whitehouse, whose dedication to perversity led them to a long-standing collaboration with Albini's friend, the writer Peter Sotos.

1985 post-arrest mugshot of Peter Sotos

Sotos himself is an interesting case study in how late 20^th century ‘transgressive’ culture provided a context for deviants to flaunt their degeneracy in public and even attain a modicum of recognition for it. Simply put, Sotos is a child pornographer; his writings depict the rape and murder of children, illustrated by images of actual child abuse and photos taken from media reports of such crimes. Sotos was arrested for possession of child pornography in 1985, having used such an image as the cover for one of his self-published zines; he received a suspended sentence. The zine in question described child abuse as a “sublime pleasure.”

Despite this, Sotos has had some (un)surprisingly mainstream defenders. The gossamer-thin veneer of “art” provides some incredibly convoluted justifications for enjoying the work of a degenerate child pornographer. Brandon Stosuy, in the Prague Literary Review, wrote that “Sotos continually proves himself a rigorous thinker (sentences shot through with Nietzschean quivers) whose brutally spare prose and complex inquiries into desire make him one of a handful of contemporary authors justifiably worth their "transgressive" salt.” The New York Press described him as “the world's foremost literary brutalist” in a glowing review, while Vice has published several articles complimentary to his work, including one in which Andy Capper describes Sotos's “audio collages of tear-stained TV interviews with murder victims’ families, crack whores and abused children. The results of his efforts have appeared on their last two albums and are deeply stomach-churning, if at times hilarious. Sotos claims to masturbate over them” (emphasis added).

Albini also admired Sotos, and produced an album for him entitled Buyer's Market, consisting of such collages. Albini defended his friendship with Sotos in 2012, stating: “Peter’s an old friend. I’ve known him for 30 years or so. I’ll help him do whatever he wants to do, from wash his car to edit his album” (emphasis added). Albini drew criticism for this double-down, and scans of 1980s punk 'zines were retrieved in which Albini admitted to his taste for child pornography. One of these scans was from a particularly nauseating review of Sotos's Pure #2, the publication which brought Sotos his conviction.²

Albini's post-2020 repentance, however, was primarily focused on his use of politically-incorrect language during the no-holds-barred 1980s, and not on his self-confessed appreciation for sadistic child pornography; in the woke 2020s, sexual deviance is a virtue, while 'hate speech' is one of the Deadly Sins (alongside refusing pharmaceutical interventions into one's genome). While I have no doubt that he was more or less sincere in his vitriolic and hateful condemnations of the unvaxxed, the existence of some form of kompromat relevant to Albini is not implausible, and may even go some way to explain the ferocity of his rhetoric.

In any case, his libations at the Temple of Woke were embarrassing to witness, a watermark of how far culture had moved on from the snarky proto-edgelordism that he represented. His own scrambling to keep abreast of the ever-shifting goalposts set for leftists in the modern age was mirrored by most of his audience, bearded Gen-X'ers and Millennials who largely managed to bury all their misgivings about transgendered athletes and suchlike to retain their standing amongst a load of liberal arthouse wankers.

I had my phase of listening to a lot of Shellac and Big Black, but I haven't revisited them in years. I always preferred the immediacy and punchiness of Big Black to Shellac, who too frequently became plodding, repetitive, and frankly boring. 1996's Terraform begins with a 12 minute song consisting of a two-note bassline and Albini's mumbling; I wonder how many super-fans would reflexively skip this turgid, self-indulgent drivel and start with the more dynamic “This Is A Picture” instead (I certainly did).³ Albini's distinctive guitar tone is harsh and metallic, but it sounds strangely underwhelming to me now; much like arch-nerd Albini himself, its jaggedness hides its lack of strength, as if passive-aggression could be expressed through the medium of the guitar. Compare his tortured efforts at angularity with the ease and dexterity of Killing Joke's Geordie White (also recently deceased), described by Chris Knowles as “slamming out riffs so non-Euclidean yet so god-damned catchy that you could have seals barking over them and it would still come out totally metal.” White's guitar evokes “molten-iron”; Albini's signature Travis Bean, merely a crumpled piece of aluminium.

Albini's passing is another milestone on the road away from 20^th century rock culture. The age of cheap, abundant energy, which enabled bands like Shellac to tour much of the world with relative ease, is coming to an end; the pedestals on which people like Albini stood are being toppled. The future of music, like so much else, is local.

In the meantime, I think I’ll crank out some Killing Joke.

1. Albini took the name Rapeman from a Japanese comic of the same name, which depicted a serial rapist. Albini was “sort of obsessed” with the comic, apparently.

2. Link; a content warning applies.

3. The title of the boring first track did, however, provide the name for this piece, as it’s so starkly relevant.