PicoBlog

TWENTY YEARS AGO THIS month, I and my band spent a week at Steve Albini’s recording studio in Chicago. After some neighborhood children taunted me on the first morning’s walk to the nearest grocery store, I stayed indoors for the duration. There was no reason to leave the compound anyway. The building included cushy living quarters, a kitchen, rec room, and lots of nooks and crannies where I could stay out of everyone’s way. This last bit was important. Not being a musician, I had nothing to contribute to discussions of high end and eighth notes and ‘brittle’ guitar tones. The two-story Studio B reminded me of the reactor pool in a nuclear power plant, and the control room’s banks of blinking equipment resembled props from a classic science fiction film. Clearly, my task was to avoid breaking anything. When recording vocals, I twice came close to fainting—in hindsight, one of many clues that I was aging out of professional screaming—and each time made sure to bend my knees so that I’d reel backwards, into a shelf of battered guitar heads, and not forwards, into an $8,000 microphone.

The studio’s most impressive piece of equipment was Albini himself. Several times, we noticed he could grasp the math of recording in a way that a normal engineer could not. It was unclear if he was a savant, or just someone who’d honed his skills with an inhuman work ethic. He bragged that he never took a day off. At one point, he told us he’d recently realized he hadn’t left the building for nine weeks straight. At the time, this dedication seemed inspiring, a pure distillation of the work ethic animating the 1980s bands that had inspired us (his smoking cigarettes in the control room was a different kind of throwback). In light of Albini’s death last week—in this studio, of a heart attack, at only 61—this work ethic demands a reassessment.

ALBINI’S CAREER ITSELF DEMANDED several jarring reassessments. Throughout the 1980s, his public persona was that of a flaming degenerate, gleefully flouting as many taboos as he could. I never needed to separate artist from art because I always found his music as boring as his schtick (proto-edgelords were a staple of 20th century punk scenes). But a funny thing happened in the 1990s. His widely-shared essay “The Problem with Music,” coming between the grunge and Green Day explosions, offered an eloquent defense of indie culture with the neat trick of bypassing dogmatism. For years, these two personas—icky troll and elder statesman—coexisted side by side.

Yet another reinvention came in this decade, and it was this switch that interested me. In a 2021 Twitter thread, Albini offered a movingly nuanced apology for his 1980s self (you can read his mea culpa here, or, reprinted in full in any one of dozens of online obituaries; I myself quoted the thread in a piece written for Creem last year). More than atonement, he offered context. In Reagan-era America, offensive felt subversive; it would have seemed impossible to imagine that all of us were building a tributary leading to the fascism of the next century. His self-awareness felt important to the work of deciphering what has happened to this country in the last eight years.

I was looking forward to seeing where he was going next.

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