The Problem with Steve Albini

Steve Albini, legendary Chicago punk rocker and audio engineer, died unexpectedly on Tuesday, May 7, 2024, of a heart attack. Albini is a legend in alternative music circles. As a recording engineer, he worked with bands like Nirvana, The Pixies, The Breeders, PJ Harvey, Bush, The Jesus Lizard, Veruca Salt, Cheap Trick, McLusky, and Superchunk, just to name a few. He was also a two time World Series of Poker Champion.

As an artist, punk rocker, and musician, he was in seminal punk rock bands Big Black and Shellac of North America, and is also known for edgier projects like Rapeman, named after a japanese manga called THE RAPEMAN.

As a teenager, I adored Albini’s tireless provocation of society, and as a late teen and 20 something, I learned more about recording from Steve Albini than any other engineer, possibly every other engineer combined. I’ve listened to every publicly available speech he has given on audio engineering, read many of his famous rants, and even his short lived food blog.

Albini has been heavily criticized for some of his more provocative projects. Anthony Pappalardo of ARTLESS INDUSTRIA® called Albini out over his performative racism in a 2012 Vice Article called But Can You Do a Kickflip, Steve Albini?

In 1985, your project band Run Nigger Run released the track “Pray I Don’t Kill You Faggot.” You’re quoted in the August 1986 issue of Spin as saying you wanted to call your band Big Black’s second EP “Hey Nigger.” (You also ranted against “beatbox disco rap” as an “aesthetically empty music buoyed by white guilt.”)

Later that year, in Forced Exposure you said, “I don’t give two splats of an old negro junkie’s vomit for your politico-philosophical treatises, kiddies.” (Apparently, in the hierarchy of junkie vomit, negro puke is the worst.)

— Anthony Pappalardo

Albini talked about many aspects of these criticisms of his performative edgelording, and seemingly took them to heart. Beginning with a series of tweets from October 2021, Albini can be seen embracing the same philosophy Pappalardo quotes him dismissing as white guilt in his essay on the aging punk rocker.

Far from the days of Rapeman, under heavy social pressure to conform, Steve went full performative Woke. Perhaps he saw some of the writing on the wall.

Which brings us to the problem with Steve Albini; something he never really addressed, or even meaningfully acknowledged. Murder Pop been working to develop this story for well over a year; in light of Albini’s death, we have chosen it to publish it in its current state.

Let’s start with this excerpt from the Big Black tour diary from the final Big Black tour in 1987, published in Forced Exposure #13, in which Albini advocates on behalf of child pornography.

Next, in this scan from Forced Exposure #7/8 he promotes a zine called PURE, put out by a man he never stopped defending or describing as a friend, Peter Sotos. He describes the cover as “a guy holding open a toddlers puny hole so his spuzz can dribble out. The girl is past crying. She is destroyed.”

Sotos was arrested in December of 1985 on two counts of manufacturing and possessing child pornography after a copy of the zine was found by Scotland Yard in Edinburgh, in the home of the suspect in a series of brutal child abductions, murders and grave robbings. Scotland Yard forwarded the material to their counterparts in the United States.

After his arrest, authorities confiscated a number of items from Sotos’ apartment, including two issues of Pure, according to State Inspector Jeremy Margolis. The magazine contains pictures “extolling and promoting child sexual murder, bestiality and sexual torture,” Margolis said, describing the magazine as “the most disgusting [thing] I have ever seen.”

A third issue of Pure found in Sotos' apartment, unfinished, featured the abduction and sex crime killing of Melissa Ackerman, a 7-year-old girl from Somonauk, IL. Authorities did not find a mailing list for Pure when they conducted their search.

Sotos defense was reportedly that owning child pornography should be legal, and that he had not manufactured any, but only photocopied the child pornography of others to reprint in his magazine. He pled guilty to possession of child pornography, and received a suspended sentence. Sotos was the first person in the United States ever charged under the Protection of Children Act.

Seven years later, Albini produced an album for Sotos called Buyers Market that was put out by the label AWB, run by Mark Solotroff, in 1992 [a previous version of this article incorrectly stated the album was put out by SubPop]. Buyers Market is a series of spoken word collages made with audio samples taken from interviews of the actual victims of child sex crimes. These excerpts were used without the consent of the victims.

At some point, Albini seems to have put together that pedophilia was becoming increasingly unpopular, reflected in the cage-y nature of public comments Albini has since made about his relationship with Sotos, as well as a change in tone regarding the material itself.

This is what Albini had to say about producing Buyers Market in a 2016 Reddit AMA:

Early in 2024, a source reached out to us on Twitter with some interesting information: In 2018, a member of the Electrical Audio forum who went by the handle Bad Comrade was sentenced to 28 years in federal prison for producing child pornography and trafficking minors. All trace of him was deleted from the forum, and the forum itself was later taken down and moved from the Electrical Audio website to a new hosting provider.

Christopher M Hall, 44, from Chicago, pled guilty to one count of inducing and enticing a minor to produce child pornography, and one count of knowingly transporting child pornography.

The crime was uncovered when one of Hall’s victims, allegedly the child of another Electrical Audio forum member, went missing from her home in Michigan and detectives were able to find emails between the girl and Hall’s email address, badcomrade@gmail.com.

Law enforcement searched Hall’s residence and discovered a collection of child pornography that included more than 7,000 images and videos of minors. Authorities identified dozens of sexually exploited children in the videos and images, some of whom were under the age of 12 at the time the images were created. 

Nearly 30 of those victims submitted statements to the Court in advance of sentencing detailing the harm caused by individuals like Hall, who would set up sexual encounters for them by taking explicit photos of the girls, posting them in sex ads on Craigslist, and then directing the girls to have intercourse with both himself and the other men who responded to the ads. He also took video and photos of the encounters. 

Albini never responded to any comments made in reference to the material in this article, which were scavenged from various places on the internet. He blocked several people who posted references to this subject in his comments on Twitter. Murder Pop tried to reach out to Steve Albini for a comment on this story but never received a response of any kind, not even a block.

We have been unable to investigate these connections any further, though we were able to confirm that Bad Comrade was a forum member at the Electrical Audio Forums. We publish this now in the hopes that this might help another investigator at some point, or elicit further tips from anyone who might be privy to such information.

For his part, Peter Sotos has reportedly “bragged about owning volumes of child porn beyond what he was arrested for and said that sales from his books goes directly towards funding child pornographers. He also claims he repeatedly raped his older sister when he was a teenager.”

In an interview with Mel magazine in 2021, Albini added this to his public comments on Sotos:

It’s hard for me to articulate, but there’s a friend of mine, Peter Sotos, who’s written extensively about abuse and murder and things of that nature. A lot of his writing is extremely difficult to read. It’s repellent. You’re brought into the mind of a sadist, pretty convincingly. And I feel like that experience, reading that stuff, is shocking to your core in the way that the horrors of the reality of those things should be. 

Whereas this sort of Nancy Grace “bombshell tonight in the child murders of” — that sort of show-business softening of the impact of it, sort of turning it into a fucking board game, and turning it into a police procedural where there are heroes and villains and you’re rooting for people… That whole thing has turned these horrible, monstrous, atrocious things into just another kind of soap opera. That stuff is embarrassing for our culture. There’s something about using that as a vehicle for commerce, as the product that you sell — these existential horrors — and using that as a trinket to get people into a commercial stream. There’s something repellent to me about that.

Selling a zine featuring child pornography is apparently somehow morally superior (or equivalent to) a commercial news show about items of public interest. He adds condescendingly:

In our circles, nothing was off limits. So, it took awhile for me to appreciate that using abusive language in a joking fashion was still using abusive language. And it was genuinely shocking when I realized that there were people in the music underground who weren’t playing when they were using language like that and who weren’t kindred spirits. They were, in fact, awful, and only masquerading as intellectuals. That was one of many wake-up moments.

Prior to his death, Steve had been heavily lamenting what he saw as fascism in his role as a sort of left-liberal faux radical gatekeeper of alternative culture, courted on X/twitter by the likes of Jason Isbell and that guy from Eve6.

Contrary to Albini’s claims here, the Cass Review (Independent Review of Gender Identity Services for Children and Young People commissioned by NHS England and led by Hilary Cass, a retired paediatrician and the former president of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health) of nearly 100 scientific studies on the use of puberty blockers found that the evidence base supporting early puberty suppression is of poor quality and unclear, that the effects on cognitive and psychosexual development are unknown based on existing research, and that there is evidence of bone health being compromised by the treatment.

There is an old proverb that you should never meet your heroes because the person that they appear to be is rarely the person that they really are. To the end, Steve Albini was Steve Albini, for better or for worse.

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