When I heard Steve Albini died, I thought of the future. A strange reaction, given that the Big Black/Shellac frontman and revered recording engineer was in many ways a relic from the past, a stubborn adherent to analog tech in a digital world and an independent artist in a world with no space for that sort of thing. And yet that’s what the news brought to my mind, the future. Realizing this caused a great sadness to wash over me. The emotion wasn’t for the man himself, who I never knew or met, and it wasn’t for losing a touchstone of my youth, or at least not that fact in the main. I was saddened because Steve Albini represented a notion of the future that no longer seemed possible. 

Albini was one of the last standing practitioners of the DIY ethos. If he wasn’t quite there at the start, he joined the fight a few proverbial minutes into the action (Big Black having formed in Chicago not long after the advent of DC hardcore luminaries Minor Threat) and stuck around a lot longer than most of his contemporaries. In the late 1970s, as punk rock scenes popped up in practically every town across the nation, the devotees of those scenes quickly discovered that the increasingly corporatized world of Music Distribution wouldn’t touch them with a 10 foot pole. Out of necessity, they formed their own micro-record labels, established their own performance spaces, and swapped intelligence with one another: where bands on tour could play and stay, which studios would record their 7 inches at prices they could afford, how and where to get records pressed. What began as mohawked hobo code metastasized into an alternative cultural ecosystem, where the only price of admission was finding the Top 40 world boring as shit—and best of all, you didn’t have to share it with anyone you didn’t want to.

Steve Albini was certainly not big on sharing. Big Black was all but lab designed to grate on unprepared listeners, with its sandpaper-rough guitar sound and use of a drum machine that was anathema even in his own chosen company, an indie music scene that fetishized the purity of “real” instruments. Even if you were on board with all of the above, you might not be down with lyrics that (to put it gently as possible) mocked small-town prejudices in such a way that might sound like echoing those prejudices to the untrained ear. You also might not appreciate Albini’s on- and off-stage personality, insulting everyone and everything that drew his ire, effortlessly pissing off all those who he felt deserved it, with plenty of collateral damage thrown into the bargain. He was a true Hater’s Hater. 

Even judged against contemporary punk bands and their fuck-you provocations, Big Black was notable for taking glee in repelling people, be they squares who didn’t get it or potential scene comrades who they deemed worth of dismissal. Albini copped to this in Michael Azerrad’s essential text Our Band Could Be Your Life, which contains an entire chapter dedicated to their misadventures. He insisted his abrasive stance was not teenage defiance for defiance’s sake but a matter of principle. By his reckoning, the group’s ungovernable attitude was a means to render them “invulnerable to ploys by music scene weasels to get us to make mistakes in the name of success. To us, every moment we remained unfettered and in control was a success.” True to form, at the exact moment Big Black was attracting critical raves and selling a shocking amount of albums for a small indie label like Touch & Go, the group decided to break up. “To prevent us from overstaying our welcome,” went one Albini explanation. “I prefer to cut it off rather than have it turn into another Gross Rock Spectacle,” went another. (Quotes again from Azerrad.)

Depending on your age and inclinations, all of the above may read like a punk rock spin on Groucho Marx—a determination to never belong to any club that might have you as a member—or a quaintly outdated Gen X purity test. I can only speak for someone of my own age and inclinations and tell you that learning the concepts of fully controlling your musical output free of corporate meddling and selecting your own society, then seeing those concepts successfully put into practice, was a life changing thing. It showed there was an alternative to selling out or starving, a world in which profit came second and art came first. I can think of few things more inspiring to a young person than this, and it was an idea I swore I would carry with me my whole life, and one day make a reality for myself. 

These days, Albini is less known for making his own music than recording other people’s, because in that capacity he helped make some of the most influential albums ever produced. By the early 1990s, he had already amassed a body of work that declared him to be the punk/indie equivalent of George Martin or Phil Spector. Like those giants, he was the inventor and purveyor of his own signature sound: punishing drums, glass-shattering guitar, and as few/obscured vocals as he could manage, recorded exclusively on vintage analog equipment even as the rest of the music world was rushing to digitize. 

Unlike Martin or Spector, the albums Albini produced were not intended for a mass audience, but for the freaks who populated the alternative cultural ecosystem from which he sprang. He was aiming for the record store dorks who would hear an amazing album and want to know as much about the guy who recorded it as the band that played it. 

No one could have foreseen one of those record store dorks, Kurt Cobain, becoming the biggest rock star on the planet. Adhering to Picasso’s Good Artists Steal principle, Cobain freely admitted the sources from which he’d lifted his band’s sound, and was particularly vocal in naming the Pixies as an inspiration. It would have been more accurate to say he lifted that sound from the transgressive in-the-red vibes of their first full-length album Surfer Rosa, an Albini product whose influence even then stood like a 2001 monolith in the history of rock. (In true Albini fashion, he would later shit-talk the band, though he remained a longtime friend of bassist Kim Deal.) Prior to Nirvana’s mainstream success, it was nearly impossible to imagine anything Albini-ish on the radio. After “Smells Like Teen Spirit” broke, however, suddenly everyone wanted The Albini Sound, including the corporate labels he’d done everything in his power to keep away from his doorstep.

It would have been incredibly easy for Albini to take the giant paychecks that were offered to him following the post-Nevermind major label punk rock feeding frenzy. He was not entirely immune to this temptation, taking more than a few corporate gigs while fighting off reflexive charges of Selling Out for doing so. (Aging hardcore kids like me may recall that his recording of a mid-90s album from then-huge Brit grungers Bush was a bridge too far for many.) And yet he seemed to take this work for the sole purpose of allowing him to do what he really wished to do: record more interesting bands at rock-bottom prices. 

It was well known that Albini was willing to work with any artist he thought was good or at least interesting, regardless of their cachet anywhere outside his own brain. He charged indie artists peanuts for his labor, eschewed credit whenever he could get away with doing so (which became increasingly difficult to do over the years, as many artists considered having his name on the album half the reason to hire him in the first place), and disdained the more artsy label of “producer” in favor of the workingman’s title of “recording engineer.” He expressed an almost physical revulsion to taking “points” (a slice of the royalties) on any record he engineered. This was SOP for big-name producers in the corporate music world but a windfall he declared “morally indefensible” for himself. When laying out his ground rules for working with Nirvana, he proclaimed he wished to “be paid like a plumber: I do the job and you pay me what it’s worth”. 

Granted, it’s easier to have integrity when you have a potential back-up plan, when you are a hot commodity and can name your price for a corporate gig if you must. Fashion is a fickle thing, however, and by the late 1990s the music industry had largely moved on from its love for the Albini sound. Then came the internet, and the industry collapsed completely when album sales plummeted due to the advent of first file sharing, then streaming. The major labels completely abandoned low-to-midrange artists, the remaining wealth in the corporate pot being distributed upwards to the most famous and unassailable celebrities in their respective camps. The concept of selling out as a cardinal sin was no longer applicable because selling out was no longer possible. Bands that once could have made a decent living with modest sales and basic tour support were left to starve. 

Albini could have pulled the cord on his punk rock principles at any point. Even in the decimated landscape of the post-internet music industry, it would surely have been possible for him to find steady work with one of the remaining majors, or to take the Rick Rubin route and lend his uncompromising indie cred to legacy acts. Instead, he did as he always had done, recording the left-behind bands at prices they could afford, charging rates that would have been insulting to virtually any other professional recording engineer, let alone one of his pedigree. He did this at a time when it was never financially harder to do what he did, and when the chances of reward and renown for what he did were never lower. This is nothing short of remarkable.

Even more remarkable to me is the fact that Albini atoned for the more problematic elements of his earlier work. Many other people have made this point, but it bears repeating: It is shocking for someone of his stature and temperament to exercise that level of humility and issue a mea culpa for things he said and did in the past. Sometimes his provocations were intended as satire on small-minded American bigotry, though in using all the language employed by said bigots it could be hard to tell exactly where the Satire Line fell. Sometimes (maybe a lot more than sometimes) he just wanted to be an asshole, saying the most hateful thing possible for the sake of upsetting people, such as naming his first post-Big Black group after a reprehensible manga called Rapeman (you can probably guess what his superpower was), and naming another side project after a blaxploitation film whose name I won’t repeat but which employs a word that neither I nor an extremely white dude from Missoula, Montana should be using. 

Flash forward to the 21st century, where Albini saw hordes of ghoulish internet edgelords yucking it up while using similar provocations to his of yore, punching down at people who only wanted recognition of their shared humanity, counseling anyone offended to learn to take a joke. Witnessing this gave him a sense of retroactive shame, and it compelled him to not only apologize for his past behavior, but to apologize in a way that did not let himself off the hook by making temporal excuses. “The one thing I don’t want to do,” he admitted to The Guardian, “is say: ‘The culture shifted – excuse my behavior.’ It provides a context for why I was wrong at the time, but I was wrong at the time.” It was an admission of his own complicity in perpetuating within supposedly welcoming indie scenes the same sexism, racism, and homophobia that prevailed outside them, a sweeping apology with few precedents from people as important to the history of those scenes as he was. (The closest analog I can think of is Ian Mackaye’s necessary repudiation of the Minor Threat song “Guilty of Being White”, but his tireless activism in the decades since, both inside and outside of Fugazi, have always indicated where his true heart lies.)

This could have been dismissed as a cynical attempt to buffer his image and make himself more palatable to a new world with different sensibilities. I am personally convinced that his feelings of contrition were genuine, and the reason I’m convinced of that is because Albini did not soften himself in any other respect. He remained a true Hater’s Hater, especially when it came to the music he despised—most famously Steely Dan, or anything that remotely sounded like Steely Dan. (Even as someone who grew up listening to that band and who has many warm feelings about them and their sound, I appreciate someone who stuck to his guns amid the Dan-aissance of recent years.) His razor sharp and profanity-laced takedowns of the artists he couldn’t stand offered a refreshing antidote to the current trend of Poptimism, a school of music criticism that began as a much-needed counter to rockist prejudices but which has since become a cudgel of sorts, labeling anyone who might not like commercially popular music as Elitist or Out Of Touch. (Funny how Poptimism is exclusively employed to sing the praises of the only remaining musical artists who make money for giant corporations. No one is ever scolded with “let people enjoy things” when the subject is, say, The Boredoms.)

To employ a reference I come back to often, Steve Albini was akin to the nuns in Don Delillo’s White Noise. In that novel, the nuns saw their purpose as performing the acts of their faith in order to convince the rest of the world that some people still believed. As long as Albini was dutifully ensconced at Electrical Audio in Chicago, recording a band you’d never heard before and still never might later, largely because he just fucking wanted to do that with his life, you knew there was at least one last believer walking the punk rock walk, doing all the things you told yourself you were going to do in your own life before other forces intervened. You could tell yourself that it wasn’t too late, you could quit that job tomorrow, start a band, hit the road, do what he was doing in your own small way. It was possible. He said so. He did so.

That’s why losing him feels so crushing. It’s one more believer gone, one more pillar down that I counted on to hold up my own crumbling faith, and one more sign that I live in a time without a future.

The complete algorithmitization of art does not allow for a future, only a constant rehashing and rebooting of the past. I see musicians whose only hope at success is to have recorded an influential album 20+ years ago, so they can play that album in its entirety ad nauseam to bored festival crowds. I see movie studios reheating the same franchises I watched as a kid to serve to my children, as if it’s supposed to mean anything to their lives, and calling it intellectual property, to remind you it’s nothing but real estate to them. And I see dead-eyed fascist tech bros telling me AI will soon be able ingest all of the blood and sweat and pain and love that actual living, breathing artists put into the making of all the above, shove it down their digital digestive tracts, and shit out some steaming slurry that combines all of it into an affront to god. And I’m told I should be grateful to my corporate overlords for making such a world for me and my children. 

So I will miss Steve Albini as someone who believed in and practiced the future. He continued to look for new work to do, for new challenges, in a world that has decided we should no longer do this. I am sure that humans will continue to make new art because that is a fundamental part of what makes us human, the compulsion to express ourselves and find like minded people to express ourselves to and with. I am also sure that people will continue to make their own alternative societies to skirt the boring-as-shit mainstream swill we’re told to lap up like pigs. But losing Albini feels like losing one of the ancient people who built Rome or the pyramids. A great deal of knowledge and drive and love has been taken from us, by his loss and by the technocratic monsters who appoint themselves as our cultural overlords, and I fear a long dark age awaits us when the last of his kind leave this earth.

I only saw Steve Albini in person once, playing with Shellac at the Knitting Factory in the early 2000s. They were brutal, and fun, and funny. If I inventoried such things it is likely one of the better shows I ever saw. It was certainly among the loudest. One lady in the audience screamed for most of the show, severely interfering with other people’s enjoyment of the proceedings, until finally, between songs, Albini yelled out “Good god woman, what is your day job, siren?”, a Hall of Fame-level zinger from a Hall of Fame-level asshole. He was like if Don Rickles had loved The Ramones.

Before the band came out on stage, I scoped out their equipment like the dork that I am. Albini’s amp head looked like something from a mad scientist’s lab, a matte silver box with a meter and red inlaid button lights, but if had no knobs or dials whatsoever, not a single thing that could be adjusted in any way, only a jack for the guitar cord. I assumed it was a custom job, and an extremely Albini custom job at that. He must have come up with the specs for his amp head, executed them or had them executed to his satisfaction, and then encased the thing so it could never be altered, by design or accident. He’d figured out exactly what his sound would be, and he stuck with it.