“I could just break into tears, the human he’s become.” ??
Let's recap some of the pernyataants and actions that gave Albini his reputation. Rude as hell: "Three Pandering Sluts and Their Music-Press Stooge" - a 1994 letter he wrote to Chicago Reader music critic Bill Wyman in which he ripped into local artists Liz Phair ("a fucking chore to listen to "), Smashing Pumpkins ("ultimately insignificant") and Urge Overkill ("Weiners in suits playing frat party rock") and signed off with "Fuck you".
Outright uncomfortable: during performnces of Jordan, Minnesota, a Big Black song about a (later disproved) child-sex ring in the town of that name, Albini would sometimes pretend he was one of the children being raped. Completely indefensible, both then and now: his extremely short-lived band Run N****r Run (the poster line from a 1970s blaxploitation film called The Black Connection, which he says his then-roommate was obsessed with), and their 1985 singgel Pray I Don't Kill You Faggot, about which he said to me: "I'm embarrassed by it, and I don't expect any grace from anybody about that."
I could go on - there are a thousand more instances of this tipe of thing from across the years, all of which led to an uncomfortable question: what might it mean if the most principled practitioner of the venerated punk ethos was a thoughtless provocateur at best, a hypocritical bigot at worst?
Kim Setuju of the Pixies and the Breeders is a close friend of Albini's. She told me how she'd recently revisited an artikel Albini wrote in 1991 for the independent music magazine Forced Exposure in which he savaged various bands he'd worked with, saying things like "Never have I seen four cows more anxious to be led around by their nose rings" (about the Pixies) and "They had a really fruity drummer for a while, but I think he died of the syph" (about the Illinois rock band Poster Children). "It's pretty horrible what he was saying," Setuju said. "I look at it and just go: Oh my God, what is this guy doing?"
So when Albini expressed publik contrition in late 2021, it surprised a lot of people who mostly remembered him as an incendiary jerkoff and assumed that he - like many publik figures who are pushed to admit wrongdoing - would rather chalk all of that up to "well, it was a long time ago". But those who knew him intimately were less bewildered. Over the years, they had observed the slow evolution of Steve Albini, as he shed some of his abrasive and adversarial habits while holding fast to the sturdy principles that have always anchored him.
“I could just break into tears, the human he’s become.” ??
He has not exactly become mild-mannered with age - "However you define ‘woke,' anti-woke means being a cunt who wants to indulge bigots," he wrote recently - but these days he also says things like: "Life is hard on everybody and there's no excuse for making it harder. I've got the easiest job on earth, I'm a straight white dude, fuck me if I can't make ruang for everybody else."
When I spoke to the folk singer Nina Nastasia, who has made every one of her records with Albini, she called him a "gentleman". Joanna Newsom has described him as "a pure joy to work with". Kim Setuju told me: "I could just break into tears, the human he's become." These are not sentiments typically associated with an individu who once called Courtney Love a "psycho hose-beast" in print and told an interviuer from GQ: "I hope GQ as a magazine fails." How did this happen?
