The Gen X nature is Janus-faced. It sees no disharmony in practicing ethics of the highest possible standard while exalting morals at the lowest reachable nadir. In the mid-1990s it was not atypical to be handed an Amnesty International leaflet by someone in a Budd Dwyer t-shirt. A Jim Rose Circus performer could make a pin cushion out of his testicles while flanked by a Planned Parenthood tent and Shaolin monks. This nature was harmonious insofar as it broke decidedly with natures that preceded it. It broke with socially mandated sentimentality of American culture just as it broke with the inherited sanctimony of their parents and grandparents. The Gen X nature reflected the real conditions of the world as Gen Xers saw it, leaving them to set their own moral boundaries and to pick their own ethical battles.

If Steve Albini was not the most ideal specimen of that nature, he was the most enthusiastic. Few of his contemporaries were more jealous of their personal integrity, and few were more vociferous in living it out with greatest consistency. In the wake of his death much has been said of his advocacy for the independence of the artist while being able to accept the costs that came with it. He refused lucrative royalty opportunities as an in-demand record engineer (he disapproved of “producer” even as people still described him as such). He worked with the most famous and the most obscure and saw no difference between them. He warned in the most explicit terms of the impossible tradeoffs artists would be faced with if they crossed into the major label industry—though most preferred to learn the hard way. Touch and Go Records is one of the few labels from the indie golden age to have survived and thrived from its inception, and Albini remained loyal to it on both sides of the soundboard.

But much will also be said of personal antics that knew no ceiling of offense. His paper trail of grossly unsublimated zine rants will be pored over where found. His friendships with unsavory characters like Peter Sotos will be referenced again and again. People will retch anew at his violently unpleasant music released under the most shamelessly baiting band names. This ascetic ethicist was also an exquisite sadist. He was not above trashing bands he worked with (the Pixies most famously); and he loved a sick joke (the original cover art for Big Black’s Headache EP was a crime scene photo of a shotgun suicide). The man who took pains to protect people from economic and artistic exploitation fully exploited the rot and savagery of humanity for his own ends and amusement. He offered a taste of cultural prestige that was cheap in more ways than one.

An ethicist may adopt sadism in any condition. Both modes seek a level of purity that most people find impossible to even imagine. It may be, however, that the dual purity Albini embodied and impressed upon an entire culture was well suited to the moment of its appearance. Everyone, myself included, knew his work before they know his name. Everyone heard at least one song off of In Utero and many others will vehemently deny—or perversely valorize—their ownership of Razorblade Suitcase. But some wanted to pursue that purity a little further than the multitude. I never met Steve Albini, nor do I regret it. I mourn him within reason, as someone who served his purpose.

I bought Big Black’s Songs About Fucking around 1999 or 2000. I was 15 years old, and on the surface it seems like the very object that would magnetize the hard-earned income of any 15-year-old male. Yet this was hardly the case. At that time parents were still blaming Marilyn Manson and Fred Durst for the ills of the world. I don’t even think it had a “parental advisory” label. My classmates were no wiser. If they were aware of the band they were not especially moved by them. I discovered the band through my own pursuits; I acquired the record based on my own judgment, easily enough done as Borders carried it and my parents exerted no control over what I consumed. Moreover, I purchased it based entirely upon description of its sound. It was “industrial,” an aesthetic for which I still held out hope for some satisfaction. Interest was piqued even as expectations were middling. 

My listening experience came over me in waves. The first wave was aesthetic. Once the prurience wore off (quickly, as none of the songs were actually about fucking) I could appreciate how well-made an album it was. Albini’s songwriting prowess is little spoken of. He’s an idiosyncratic yet highly controlled and versatile guitarist. I don’t consider Big Black’s first full-length Atomizer as the masterpiece others do, but it is a kind of monument to how one can adhere to and totally undermine pop songwriting. This strength (to which disenchanted synth pop artist and fellow Chicagoan Al Jourgensen was playing very close attention) came out of the rigorous grooves of its rhythm section. The band famously used a Roland drum machine that disciplined the throbbing of Dave Riley’s bass. The result made Big Black the sociopath’s new wave band; songs like “Kerosene” and “Fists of Love” are club bangers provided that club has a lot of consensual harm happening around it.

Songs About Fucking does not lack for grooves but it is much more the guitar record. They come so loud in the mix as to slash right through it. And “slash” is an appropriate word when set against the pummeling preferred by other noise rock bands like Swans, Unsane, and Killdozer. There is a cold, calculated frenzy being conjured that resists the spiraling regimentation of a typical hardcore mosh pit. They seemed quite menacing in a live setting. Big Black’s impact could be as aggressive as their peers but the intensification of style through craft allowed for sustained absorption of that impact, making quick dispersion both difficult and not very desirable.

The second wave was cultural. Songs About Fucking abjures sentiment and resists sentimentalizing after the fact. Its malicious and ugly worldview has not dulled over time. “I’ll piss on everything you value,” among the few lyrics instantly decipherable, appeared brash and defiant upon first listen and seemed philosophically compelling; 25 years later you may find yourself modifying it for politeness. In New Jersey at the time it was almost a Satanic standpoint. It was the epicenter of pop punk and whatever wave of emo You and I and Thursday are. It was steeped in the maudlin and self-dramatizing, in provincial trivia and nostalgia for memories as yet unexperienced. There was no dissatisfaction that could not be pacified by drinking in the woods or petty vandalism. New Jersey punk was insular, conservative, and crowded; not an ideal setting for lost people. In isolation I developed a conception of punk that was purer, more singular and less amenable to joining, and where style was as much a show of self-control as self-expression. I rebelled against punk by arriving at its essence.

There is no achievement in that. Finding an essence can easily be conflated with finding an answer. Songs About Fucking escaped being a totem of controversy only to become a token of refinement. The quality of its sound and the intensity of its themes had the effect of lavishing praise upon its listeners simply for being present. That is how the punk in high school becomes the hipster in college. It’s the valorization of judgment for its own sake; rendering the work static and the audience stationary to the point of becoming decorative. The life of a hipster is the life of a pinned butterfly. Not that I think less of people for perceiving culture as a source of gratification. If I find my proximity to living death significantly narrowed I have only myself to think less of. 

A work is valuable not by the single satisfactory answer it provides but by the many new questions it multiplies, like a low-hanging black cloud that, on closer inspection, is a swarm of flies. It was necessary to disassemble Songs About Fucking down to its elements. The value of each part being evaluated with the contours of my own consciousness. At its core, the album gave certain permissions. In the particulars was the affirmative permission: to be be rude, to exalt bad behavior, to lash out in any direction. This permission was compelling so long as Gen X remained at the center of the known universe and the ethical-moral equilibrium they propounded didn’t balance itself out.

But of course they didn’t remain and it did balance out, leaving the more general negative permission: not to express or respect feelings that you don’t have, not to revere heroes that don’t exist, not to applaud accomplishments that are fraudulent, and to submit all frenzy to the elegance of form. Such a permission is more flexible to your own maturity and to the moral flux. Indeed, if the ethical-moral ration becomes the reverse of what it was, it may not simply be more attractive, but more powerful. You only need watch your manners.