Image of the Week #6: Steve Albini on the Cover of the Wire, by Adam Lehrer

The late musician and record engineer is on the cover of the last standing underground music magazine on the week of his subsequent death

When it came up in one of my group chats that legendary musician and record producer Steve Albini had passed, it humored me when one of my friends briefly confused him with well-known online music critic and noted hack Anthony Fantano. Yes, it’s obviously true that Albini was a man with considerable more talent than just espousing opinions on YouTube, and had a far more decorated career. Nevertheless, the two men represent the same problem. Though both of them had well-documented youthful antics of provocation and subversion — for Fantano, it was reviewing Peste Noire, and for Albini, it’s essays that seem to endorse pedophilia and associations/friendships with artists like Jim Goad and plenty more  — they have spent the last 10 years over-compensating in their quests to rehabilitate their images for post-2015 liberal (AKA THE POLITICS OF THE DIGITAL PLATFORM) politics. Albini’s political statements were not just trite, they were almost uncomfortably robotic. They were clearly ideas that were being programmed into his head. He seemed every bit as confused as he did spiteful. In both Albini’s and Fantano’s cases, the depths these men sank to is damning. For Albini, however, it’s a mightily ugly last impression on an otherwise impressive career. Albini’s wife’s tribute to her husband on her Facebook page perhaps tells the entire story of his social deterioration:

“If I prayed, I would pray for you that someone loves you the way that Steve Albini loves the people with whom he loves, all of the animals, the work, the words, the purpose, the dream. All of it is meant to be loved. And if there is a power imbalance, then it is worth fighting for. But don’t go into a fight unprepared because Steve will wipe the floor with you. A master wordsmith, an impressive orator, only ever trying to impress himself with the dance, he was more like the GOAT than he was the curmudgeon he was often mistaken for by those who refused to admit that their underlying behavior was steadied by greed. You see, you are not excused. No matter who you are. Power and privilege (which he had a much greater understanding of in the last 10 years - thanks to @danaandjulia and @rashidasheedz and @newman.ariana) is insidious and thrives unless you take it upon yourself to recognize your own misdeeds and apologize for them as publicly as you did make them. But for the rest of us he is a fucking champion and worked harder than anyone else with soft hands, to make sure that the greedy were never allowed to believe their own bullshit as long as he was in earshot. Don’t let anyone try to fool you now. If he called you greedy in conversation it never ended with the two of you laughing about it. And if he told you he loved you in a conversation, it never ended up with you questioning it. Next to Muhammad Ali, he was the Greatest Of All Time. #stevealbini”

What in the fuck? While I don’t mean to take a stab at someone in grief, the sentiment shared drips with delusion so dense one can hardly parse through its maze of unrealities. It’s like she’s talking about Dr. King or Malcolm X or fucking Vladimir Lenin! Not one mention of his bands Big Black, RAPEMAN, or Shellac. Not one nod to his acclaimed career as a record engineer working on huge hits, including fucking Nirvana’s final album! Indeed, it sounds very much like the widow wants her late husband to be remembered better for his X feed and obnoxious political posturing than for the very thing that built his wealth, legacy and reputation: music. I guess the cliché is true: when a man in his middle age becomes an absolute terminal libtard, you best believe that a shrill woman is insisting he do so in the background.

Can’t help but notice a freaky serendipity to the fact that Shellac, Albini’s now longest-lived rock band, is on the cover of the last underground music magazine that still exists, The Wire, the same week he’s been announced as dead, even if it is in a cartoon form. The Wire, a Gen X media product if there ever was one, also started to politically mutate in the 2010s in the same way that Albini did; even in a far more understated manner, we sure as hell know which political tilt the publication will offer in its coverage. It’s freaky. Just at the moment that Albini was about to get press for some actual music, he dies and is only remembered for the last 10 years of his politics. It’s a bit tragic, but he brought it on himself.

As a 15-year-old with a broken leg in Missoula, Montana, Albini discovered the Ramones, and then spent years absorbing the only music he at that point believed in, punk rock: The Stooges, The Pistols, Pere Ubu, Devo, and Skrewdriver (yes, THAT Skrewdriver.) While studying journalism (yes, Albini was deeply JOURNO-BRAINED) at Northwestern, he wrote for local punk zines and major punk publications like Forced Exposure. Then, in 1981, he founded Big Black.

I’ve never been a big fan of Albini’s music, but one has to admit that Big Black was the absolute first band to wed the American punk underground with the Industrial music of Europe. He used a Roland T3-606 as a drummer, and developed a hard, sickly, and propulsive sound that borrowed equally from punk rock like Rudimentary Peni and the 4-Skins (another skinhead reference for Albini) and Industrial bands like Throbbing Gristle and Whitehouse (who he’d even work with later.) From day one, however, naughty themes and lyrics had been intrinsic to Albini’s identity as an artist. Like many of the edgelords of Generation X, a particularly sewer-drained, toilet humor ran through Albini’s lyrics and song titles, often to potent effect. Though he’d later state that he was making “commentary” about the racial divisions in his city of Chicago, it’s clear that race baiting was a jokey under-pinning of the band. I mean, they’re named BIG BLACK for fuckssakes:

“I’ve never hung a darkie, but I’ve fed one,” he shrieks on “Steelworker” from The Lungs EP.

Big Black didn’t limit its controversial topic matter to race either. The group’s lyrics are full of woman hate, fag bashing, rape, murder and even child abuse. Albini’s follow-up band, Rapeman, perpetuated these antics even further, taking the band-name from a shockingly popular Japanese manga in which the titular “Rapeman” is actually a superhero who uses forcible penetration as a means of vigilante justice (Japan is truly amazing.) Albini devoted much of his chapters in Michael Azzerad’s This Band Could Change Your Life to defending his lyrical choices as postmodern humor and artistic gestures. Provocations.

“Given how intermingled the gay and punk subcultures were, it was assumed by anyone involved that open-mindedness, if not free-form experimentation, was the norm,” he said. “With that assumption under your belt, joke all you like. The word 'fag' isn't just a gay term, it's funny on its own.”

Both these bands, and his current post-hardcore power trio Shellac, made Albini a massive cult figure, beloved equally by the underground for his work as well as his cantankerous, opinionated, and asshole-ish persona. So, when he started work as a professional record engineer, bands flocked to work with him to have that waft of subversiveness dripping off of them. Albini lent his studio gifts to bands as popular as pretty boy Gavin Rossdale’s British Nirvana knock-offs Bush to bands as obscure as power electronics pioneers Whitehouse. He became wealthy without ever losing his heir of “coolness” and, despite the occasional protest by an angry feminist, he never got much push-back for any of this. It was the ‘90s, after all, Marilyn Manson and Wu Tang Clan were making millions of dollars scaring the ever living shit out of everyone in sight.

At some point in the 2010s, Steve Albini’s political views hardened and shifted, and he expressed deep regret over his youthful controversies. To some extent, this is perfectly normal. Lord knows the amount of shit I pulled when I was young, drunk and on drugs that I wish I could take back. But Steve’s politics took on a militancy that were not only extreme — basically adopting every position of the millennial left with 100 percent, unflinching support — but so pronounced and furtive that, to anyone who remembered him from back in the day or has half a brain, seemed totally ridiculous and abjectly hypocritical. Who in the fuck was Steve Albini, of all people, who just over a decade ago was telling Tyler the Creator to stop being such a misbehaved “nigger” (his words, not mine,) to tell me that I shouldn’t make jokes about racism? That I shouldn’t use misogyny as content? Why in the hell should the lead singer of RAPEMAN be allowed to tell me a fucking thing about what is “morally correct” thinking? I’ll leave it to Jim Goad to explain just how rank Albini’s dissent into libtard do-gooderism was:

“Over the past year, Albini has considerably accelerated his public-good-guy declarations,” wrote Goad.” “This has led to naysayers pointing out some of his past shenanigans, which he’s never tried to hide . . . in fact, he makes a point of airing these alleged misdeeds in the service of repeatedly publicly announcing that he’s ‘evolved’ and ‘matured’ and seen the deeply ignorant error of his ways and how it was rooted in privileged white-male ignorance. This, in turn, has led to accusations that he’s ‘trying to stay relevant’ in a music business that has grown increasingly intolerant of dissenting opinions.”

That brings us to what I call the “Gen-X problem.” If you haven’t noticed the trend, let me remind you of several other provocateurs of that generation who have aged into shriveled castratos raging against some alleged white christian machine that does not exist, claiming to be rebels while have functionally indistinguishable viewpoints from corny homosexual news anchors like Don Lemon or Anderson Cooper: Eminem staged concerts to shame Trump voters, Joe Roemer of Macronympha claimed that he would “murder Donald Trump” as if it was the hardest thing he could have said – not the corniest, Adam Parfrey’s Feral House imprint has transformed into a gender ideology manual, and so forth. All of these figures who developed infamy for their ability to challenge the prevailing orthodoxies of the media, society, and culture, ended up adopting and absorbing those viewpoints once the 21st Century took hold. Why?

In a now viral X thread, Albini explained the dilemma for me amidst a rant of sneering hypocrisy, name-calling and virtue signaling:

“For myself and many of my peers, we miscalculated,” said Albini. “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.”

There you have it. Like Francis Fukuyama himself, Albini and other Gen-Xers falsely believed that they were at the end of history. They thought that all the political and ideological battles had been resolved, and that their words had no meaning. Who could possibly be offended if everybody was OK?

As you can see, this kind of thinking is delusional in several ways. First, Obama brought race back to politics to use as a branding device. And then, the election of Donald Trump changed everything. It was a direct affront to every misconception about the world that Gen-X held. The punk rock “fuck the system” Gen-X artists were forced to confront the fact that they had become the system. People like Albini then were useful carnival barkers in that they harbored the illusion that there was still something like an edgy, anti-establishment left still existent. Indeed, Albini’s viewpoint is a harbinger of what would eventually become the dirtbag left; their brand of toilet humor is substitute for the fact that they know in their fucking bones that they are conformists.

Furthermore, the Gen-X disposition neuters all its artists’ provocations. A subversive gesture, you see, needs to have stakes. It needs consequences. If you are putting out offensive content with the hope that no one will be offended by it, then you are weak. You’re playing it safe. Albini was an “edgelord” until the exact moment that it became politically unfeasible to do so. I risk my financial stability every single time I communicate a thought to the world, and yet I’m supposed to respect this position?

Jim Goad has told me he believes it’s unintelligent to ascribe generational traits, but I don’t agree. Generation forms us as much as ethnicity or family does. It is the environment we traversed through. And Albini’s journey led him to cowardice. None of this would be that big a deal but for one fact: Albini made it a point to deny artists younger than him to use the same subversive tactics that brought him to game. Was he being politically committed, or simply killing the competition?

A respected musician and producer reduced to a man so broken with apologies that he even found time to apologize for his “fascist hairstyle.”

Can you imagine? Me being interviewed and asked about my mullet and being like: “Oh, yeah, I’m so sorry about my mullet, I’m not actually a white trash chud I’m just a hipster.” (reality is, I’m actually both.)

Nevertheless, for all of Albini’s apologies, he is still being roasted by all the vile libtards he tried to appease over the years. He is being dragged for all those offensive song titles and statements. Radical feminists have even insisted that he must have been a pedophile because of a fucking satirical essay he wrote in 1985. The hilarity in all of this is that the people he spat at, people like me, would have defended him on all these fronts. Why? Because the First Amendment of our motherfucking Constitution guarantees his right to say whatever the fuck he wanted to! He sided with the people who would erode our principles! That is what he should be condemned for. Not pedophilia! He wasn’t a fucking pedophile, or even a racist. He was, however, a coward who stood for NOTHING.

I’m not going to even point out the probability that the multi-vaxxed Albini likely died of Myocarditis after having called for the social ostracization and political imprisonment of the unvaxxed, because the point is already made. This new cover of the Wire isn’t solely an image of the return of an old rock band, or even the shocking death of a revered artist. It is a symbol of the failure and cowardice of an entire generation.

IMAGES:
1. The Wire Shellac cover
2. Albini contribution to PURE
3. Big Black tour diary
4. Rapeman manga