Featured Essay: On Steve Albini: Words About Fucking Up

by Nicholas Sabin

My profile on Bandcamp has a picture of me standing in front of Electrical Audio. It’s a modest building on West Belmont Avenue in Chicago, made of concrete and brick, and it features a red door with the studio’s logo near the top. I don’t think anybody was in the studio when I stopped by. It was the summer of 2020, just as the United States began lockdown, and while I’m smiling in the picture, I don’t look happy. I was in town to help care for my father, who was about to begin hospice treatment for the cancer that’d worn him down over the last three years.

My pilgrimage to Electrical Audio, the studio that Steve Albini built and owned for 26 years, was a tribute to the man and his influence on my adult life. Knowing Albini had engineered a record made it more likely that I’d enjoy listening to it. His ubiquity on podcasts made great company on long drives. I didn’t idolize the man, but I admired him as much as I admired anybody. Possibly more than I admired anybody else. In speech and in the written word, Albini had a dry, relaxed, confident intellect and a plain-spoken, grounded perspective. I have read, and re-read, his Ask Me Anything threads on Two Plus Two and Reddit, and I’ll probably do so again before this year ends, much in the same way that devotees of J.R.R. Tolkien re-read The Lord of the Rings every year.

In Utero was my introduction to Albini’s work. Though I adored Nevermind, I could tell from the first few seconds of In Utero’s first track, “Serve the Servants”, that this was fundamentally different music. It sounded alive in a way that I’d never heard before. I could hear the sarcastic wit in the opening riff. The drums were boomy as fuck. The bass was distinct. It felt like I was in the room with the band. When I later discovered The Pixies’ Surfer Rosa, I heard a common thread. At the time, it was 1996. I was fifteen years old.

The term “edgelord” was still a few years off, but I was well on my way to becoming one. My youth was spent trolling Christians in America OnLine chatrooms and writing sympathetic articles about Marilyn Manson for my local newspaper. Once I got to college, free from my parents’ influence, I reveled in being an abrasive prick. Freshman year, I wore a toga for Halloween and told everyone I was Caligula, doing my best to be a menace to my annoyed classmates. A professor once admonished me for my excessive profanity in class. I was a philosophy major, and I thought I was hot shit.

I didn’t know that Albini had me beaten by twenty years and a few orders of magnitude.

Anybody who has lived through their mid twenties knows the air of absolute intellectual certainty that comes with that period in their lives. Me, I’m pretty sure I carried that confidence into my early thirties. For Albini, it manifested in a caustic, brutal honesty. Albini was not shy about things he didn’t like. When discussing music, the music industry, or music journalism, he was tyrannical. His diatribe “Three Pandering Sluts,” a letter-to-the-editor response to Chicago Reader music critic Bill Wyman, starts with “The opening paragraph of your Year-in-rock recap [Hitsville, January 7] is one of the most brilliant bits of ass-forward thought I’ve seen in years.” It gets worse from there. You should check it out.

The abrasion doesn’t end there. After Big Black wrapped up in 1987, Steve started a band called R*peman. Around the same time, he started another band called Run N*gger Run. They had a song titled “Pray I Don’t K*ll You, F*ggot”. The latter of these two bands, I wasn’t aware of until after Albini’s death. Kind of like finding out that your favorite uncle was in the Klan.

In 2021, Albini posted a Twitter thread about the things he did in his earlier days. “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. “For myself and many of my peers, we miscalculated. We thought the major battles over equality and inclusiveness had been won, and society would eventually express that, so we were not harming anything with contrarianism, shock, sarcasm or irony.”

The ideological needle that Albini tries to thread is narrow, and its eye is razor-sharp. In his twenties and thirties, Steve Albini attached his name and his reputation to a band with a racial slur in its name. Peter Sotos was the first person in the United States to be arrested for possession of CSAM, and Steve Albini called him a friend. It takes a heroic dose of nuance and perspective to take a stance like that, and to do so with clarity and honesty.

I’m old enough to feel the deep, rueful gratitude that comes with existing in the times before social media. I was a fuck-up, sure, but I was fortunate enough to be a fuck-up before I kept a small computer in my pocket that could create an indelible record of anything I wanted to say to anybody. I’m 43 years old, and I’m genuinely grateful for every second of distance that lies between me and the confused, angry child I was.

So it was, I imagine, for Steve Albini. As a younger man, he did some awful shit that increased the amount of suffering in the world. As an older man, he owned it, he expressed remorse for it, and he tried to do better. I don’t write this to absolve him of his sins. That’s not for me to do. I wouldn’t blame anybody for looking at those behaviors and judging him unworthy of grace. When it comes to acknowledging his flaws and making amends, Albini did some of his best work. That, at least, I can emulate.

Nicholas Sabin (he/they) lives in Greensboro, North Carolina with his brilliant wife and his six awful cats. He thinks the original recorded version of “Heart-Shaped Box” is dramatically superior to the version that ended up on In Utero. @nbsabin on BlueSky, https://nbsab.in on the Internet.