Did he actually addressed directly the fact that he said he enjoyed, and defended child abuse and pornography? It's one of the most disgusting things I have ever read. Be warned if you decide to look those comments up. Absolutely vile.
Somewhat.
First of all, I see a mod did already tell you not to post this. So if the mods don't want this addressed, lmk and I'll delete.
The comments being shared that you're referencing are related to Albini's friendship with Peter Sotos. Sotos was in the confrontational power electronics band Whitehouse (who Albini worked with). Like other industrial and power electronics bands of the time e.g. Throbbing Gristle, Whitehouse used fascist imagery and violent and misogynistic lyrics—they would argue for the purpose of communicating the vileness of those things. Sotos is also a writer, and he anonymously published Pure, which was billed as a fanzine dedicated to serial killers. In this magazine he wrote from the first person perspective as serial killers and child predators. Ostensibly this was a reaction to the satanic panic and day care abuse hysteria of the time in America—Sotos saw something being commodified and turned into daytime media fodder, so he wanted to make something so horrible feel confrontational and ugly again.
Sotos also republished photocopies of cp in Pure. He was rightfully convicted for this.
Albini defended the writing in the magazine at the time, and mimicked Sotos' first-person writing style in stuff like the Big Black tour diary you're referencing. Albini was not the only defender of Sotos, and Sotos was not the only writer working like this. Defenders of this mode would call it transgressive fiction, in the tradition of de Sade or Bataille or Nabokov. Sotos' work has been compared to Andrea Dworkin or Dennis Cooper, who write detailed accounts of abuse and violence. Sotos continues to write today, publishing accounts of real abuse and murder cases, which I imagine he would argue are literary depictions of the depths of human immorality and not endorsements of the events—the same way
Lolita is not a grooming instruction manual. I'm not sure any of this is a satisfying defense of the merits of the literary work. It's not satisfying to me, and I have no interest in reading it. The transgressive fiction I have read, like William S. Burroughs or Kathy Acker, I find very stupid.
As for what Albini has said. Years later, when he was speaking up about his role in "edgelord" shit, he touched on his reasoning behind his transgressive impulses at the time and mentioned Sotos.
In a recent Twitter thread, the famed audio engineer owned the ugly parts of his past — years of offensive music, statements and posts — and said his generation needs to talk about how culture has changed
melmagazine.com
Stuff like [your college performance art] seemed to inform who you became later as a punk musician and music producer. With your band Big Black, you came out and played music at the audience. You've said of your approach, "I wanted to push myself, the music, the audience and everything involved as close to the precipice as possible." What was the value, for you, to push both yourself and the audience to the edge?
The main thing that I was reacting against was an impulse that I saw in my peers to soften their art and their music so that it would be acceptable within the existing conventions of art and music. What I wanted to do was make music and art that was for its own sake, entirely, and irrespective of what other people had to say about it. It was a reactionary impulse on my part. The music and art that had meant the most to me had always been music and art that had existed for its own sake. The art that seems to inhabit its own universe where other people's expectations and perceptions had no influence. That's what I was trying to do. I was striving for an ideal that this music and this art would be a realm of pure ideas, and that it would be unconcerned with convention or acceptance.
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.
So: he did not bring up the specific comments you are referring to. He did bring up the impulses and cultural events that led him to make art that way and with those people, and brought those up as examples of thoughtless, unjustified "edgelord" shit he did that he believed he should be held accountable for. I don't imagine you or most people would find that sufficiently satisfying, but there's the full story.
