Set It on Fire
Steve Albini and the manly art of making space
For a vast swath of Chicago and the gen-x punk rock diaspora worldwide, time stopped Wednesday afternoon as news spread of the shocking and premature death of Steve Albini. My phone and social media lit up. He had a … heart attack? In the studio? And was …. dead? This was not possible. He was only 61. How could STEVE ALBINI die?
Since then tributes have washed across the media, both social and legacy. They testify to Albini’s unparalleled impact on generations of bands as a musician and engineer. To his wicked smarts and his lacerating tongue, his bullshit detector honed to a razor’s edge. To his egalitarian approach to his business, to his rigorous anticapitalist ethics, to his grudging patience with anyone with a dumb question about microphones, to his generosity to neighbors who benefitted from the bounty of his garden and to the countless Chicago families who benefitted from the Letters to Santa project he ran with his wife. And, most meaningful to me, to his midlife evolution from blistering punk rock attack dog to a reflective, if still viciously funny, middle-aged Twitter personality. My old friend Peter Margasak has an excellent tribute here, that touches on a lot of this.
Like many in Chicago and beyond, I crossed paths with Albini a couple of times. I still have vivid memories of both the disastrous Oberlin show pictured above — it turns out an old gymnasium is an acoustic nightmare for noisy rock bands — and of Big Black’s epic final show ever, at an abandoned steam plant in Seattle later that same year. In 1988 he let me sleep in his Chicago basement when my boyfriend’s band was recording with him (something I wrote a little about here). The last time I saw him he had agreed to DJ a benefit for marriage equality at the Hideout I was helping to organize. He was the last DJ of the night, and most of the guests left during his set. He was very chill about it though and just kept spinning to the empty room until his time was up even after we told him he could stop. He wouldn’t know me on the street, but he seemed a good guy, despite an early aggro persona made manifest in blunt takedowns of music industry suits, bands that sucked, pretentious people, assholes, idiots, and anyone who didn’t meet his exacting standards. Albini, a journalism major, understood language and was not shy about deploying it — just go back and read “The Problem With Music.” And he had little apparent regard for whoever was collateral damage in his assault on societal norms, which could skirt and cross all sorts of racist, misogynist, and homophobic lines. He named his second band Rapeman, for fuck’s sake.
As a young woman — a young, gropingly feminist woman whose college boyfriend’s band Bitch Magnet shared its name with a note on the back cover of Atomizer — I struggled with this, a lot. I grew up on the aesthetics and ethics of the postpunk underground, in Seattle, at Oberlin, and later in New York and Chicago. This was my cohort; it was where I found meaning and pleasure and community. It was also a boys club, and band names like “Rapeman” and “Bitch Magnet” were big KEEP OUT signs on the door. Offended? Can’t take a joke? You’re not going to get raped. You’re not the bitch. Be punk not a pussy! Meaning, of course, don’t be a girl.
It was all so confusing. I loved Big Black. Truly, despite the horrible acoustics and the lighting gear that sent a buzz through the sound system, that show in the Oberlin gym was one of the most exciting things to ever happen in my young life. And look! There’s a woman in Sonic Youth, my role model of cool! And, duh, I loved my boyfriend and his band too. I didn’t quite have the language to articulate the diminishment I felt; the imperative I internalized to just Be Cool with it. I still don’t, really, and some of what I’ve been doing lately in this newsletter is in service of trying to find it.
So when Albini many years later enacted a very public reckoning with past behavior it felt personal. As he wrote on Twitter: “A lot of things I did from an ignorant position of comfort and privilege are clearly awful and I regret them. 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 space for everyone else.”
Jeremy Gordon’s revelatory 2023 Guardian feature on Albini has been all over the place these last few sad days, but here it is again. One of the bits that stuck with me was this, in discussing the Big Black single Il Duce, which was dedicated to Benito Mussolini: “We thought [the far right] was a historical anomaly, a joke for lonely losers. Even as the right wing became more openly fascist, we were still safe – and that’s where my sense of responsibility kicks in, like: ‘Oh yeah, I get it now. I was never going to be the one that they targeted.’”
I was never going to be the one that they targeted.
If every Proud Boy, every All Lives Matter apologist, every casual rape-joke misogynist could experience this epiphany, could learn to make this kind of space, we’d all be in in a different and better place. RIP.
Happy mother’s day! As I understand it house hunting is stressful under the best of circumstances, but right now it is A LOT, with low inventory, little cash, and interest rates stuck at 7.5%. If you like what you’re reading, please consider leveling up to a paid subscription — now only $40 a year — and save me from moving to the suburbs. Thank you.
XO
All of this, Martha. All the beauty all the problems all the punk. Thank you