So there was the music, much of which was exceptionally good. But Albini also stood out for acting like the biggest jerk in a milieu that was not exactly inhospitable to jerks. In his public capacity as “Steve Albini”, he often came off like the resident wiseass who thinks he’s smarter than everyone else and thus spends his time getting a rise out of anyone who isn’t clever enough to get the joke.
[...]
So when Albini expressed public contrition in late 2021, it surprised a lot of people who mostly remembered him as an incendiary jerkoff and assumed that he – like many public 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. 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 space 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 Deal told me: “I could just break into tears, the human he’s become.” These are not sentiments typically associated with an individual who once called Courtney Love a “psycho hose-beast” in print and told an interviewer from GQ: “I hope GQ as a magazine fails.” How did this happen?
[...]
As the years wore on, his perspective started to shift. “I can’t defend any of it,” he told me. “It was all coming from a privileged position of someone who would never have to suffer any of the hatred that’s embodied in any of that language.” For years, Albini had always believed himself to have airtight artistic and political motivations behind his offensive music and public statements. But as he observed others in the scene who seemed to luxuriate in being crass and offensive, who seemed to really believe the stuff they were saying, he began to reconsider. “That was the beginning of a sort of awakening in me,” he said. “When you realise that the dumbest person in the argument is on your side, that means you’re on the wrong side.”
Kim Deal told me that Albini’s wife, the filmmaker Heather Whinna, whom he met in the 1990s, was a crucial influence. “She told him specifically: ‘I don’t think you know the power that you have when you just dismiss people. They really respect you, Steve, and why would you do that to them?’ I don’t think he understood that people were actually listening to him.”
Now whenever any public figure is made to answer for their former bad self, they go on an apology tour where they say all the right things about being a work in progress, and learning and listening, and so on. Rarely do they break down the actual specifics of what they said, why it was wrong and why they regret it. But Albini, when I asked him about his public reassessment of his past sins, was pretty no nonsense. “I thought it was important to explain how some of the uglier and more confrontational aspects of my speech and behaviour came about,” he said.
It would be naive to claim that someone like Albini might serve as a “model” for how others might revisit their past failures. He didn’t have a tidy series of epiphanies fit for a TED talk; instead he slowly changed his mind over a long period of time. Still, it was instructive to hear him connect the dots about why he had felt entitled to talk the way he once did. “It’s exhilarating to feel like there’s this forbidden area that you’re not allowed to participate in, and when you go in it, you feel like you’ve discovered a tropical island: ‘They told me there was nothing here, and look, there’s something here,’” he said. “I understand that exhilaration.” But, he added, “I also know that we’re not as safe from historical evil as I believed we were when I was playing with evil imagery.”
In 1985, for instance, Big Black released a single called “Il Duce”, whose cover featured a stylised rendition of Benito Mussolini, and which was dedicated, in tongue-in-cheek fashion, to the Italian dictator. “We gave ourselves licence to play with this language because we felt no threat from it,” he told me. “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.’”
[...] “It’s not about being liked,” he said, as we sat at Electrical Audio. “It’s me owning up to my role in a shift in culture that directly caused harm to people I’m sympathetic with, and people I want to be a comrade to."
“The one thing I don’t want to do is say: ‘The culture shifted – excuse my behaviour.’ It provides a context for why I was wrong at the time, but I was wrong at the time.”
It was a clear and honest apology, and it was the truth. And with that, we both fell silent for what felt like the first time since we’d met.
