INANIMATE CARBON GOD

As much as he could be a complete shit of a person with harsh words for some of the bands he recorded, Albini was obviously a major player in his particular niche of the music industry, for which, of course, he tended to have even harsher words… a look at his list of credits shows just how many records he was involved with in the last 40 years, of which I suppose the dudes from Led Zeppelin represent one extreme and Whitehouse the other.

This latter is the bit some people are focusing on…

If you are reading this, then you probably have heard that the esteemed rock musician and producer Steve Albini — who produced bands like Nirvana and the Pixies along with fronting bands like Big Black and Rapeman — died today at the age of 61. The usual lugubrious outpourings of phony grief have been rampant on social media, with countless people who had never even heard of him until now professing to have been his biggest fan. In other words, the usual thing that happens when someone even remotely famous dies.
In reality, however, Steve Albini was certainly no hero. In fact, Albini was an admitted lover of child pornography who openly promoted said child pornography in language so sickening that you may feel like a criminal just for reading it.

This is an awfully large accusation, with unfortunate proof also provided, in the form of a tour diary he wrote about Big Black when they toured Europe and, well, found certain magazines while in Hamburg where certain magazines and films were still legal then (there’s a really interesting video here about how Color Climax in Denmark got away with bestiality and CP simply because there were no laws against that sort of thing after censorship was abolished there in 1969). It’s yikes-inducing to read, although from what I can see online there seems to have been some debate about the extent to which he may or may not have been “edgelording” it for effect like Peter Sotos… for whose ‘zine Pure he also gave an approving review, reproduced in the Medium piece. It’s equally yikes-inducing. There’s a fairly long video here about Sotos and Pure, which is about as close to the fucking thing as I want to get.

Sotos was notable as a member of noise/power electronics mob Whitehouse for much of its existence, and for his… literary work, and for being the first person charged under then-new child pornography laws in the US. This has somehow never got in the way of him having a career as a writer and musician, or being taken seriously in that capacity; it never stopped William Bennett inviting him to rejoin Whitehouse when he reactivated the latter in the ’90s (I have long suspected Bennett was a bit of a cunt as well); and it never stopped Steve Albini from being his avowed friend, or from making records with him for Whitehouse and under Sotos’ own name, including… this. Ugh.

For what little it may be worth, the author of that Medium piece is an avowed piece of shit himself, and there’s a commenter on it who’s pretty snippy at him and basically accuses him of writing the piece in bad faith. I don’t know if Sotos is an actual nonce or not—I mean, I suppose it’s possible he just had that CP magazine in order to use it in Pure rather than as, you know, spank bank material—but fuck him anyway. And I similarly don’t know about Albini, who may well have regretted that tour diary bit and his positive review of Pure like he regretted his other “youthful indiscretions”, but… you know. I don’t think I have anything else to say on this one.