Steve Albini was a gravitational force in the American underground

I came half-steeled, having first heard Shellac a couple years earlier, eons in teen time. I had gotten my hands on “The Copper Song,” — later shortened to “Copper” — from “Ground Rule Double,” a compilation album of otherwise unknown Chicago bands, some of which had recorded their offerings at Albini’s studio. Shellac were easily the biggest name on the track list, the trio’s presence emblematic of Albini’s generosity and scene-altruism, but I didn’t know that yet. My best friend and I were too busy pondering whether the song’s harshest lyric — “Copper, you’ll never be gold” — was a metallurgic metaphor about disdaining mediocrity or a double-entendre about hating cops.

Less ambiguous than Albini’s lyricism was his righteousness, which felt heroic and incandescent once I started connecting the dots. I learned that this was the same guy who recorded Nirvana’s multiplatinum “In Utero” for cheap; the same guy who penned the legendary anti-major-label screed “The Problem with Music” for the Baffler; the same guy who had already recorded landmark albums by Jawbreaker, the Pixies, Superchunk, the Jesus Lizard, PJ Harvey, the Breeders (and who would go on to make records with Jason Molina, Joanna Newsom, Xbxrx, Screaming Females and countless more); the same guy who summarily rejected the title of producer, preferring to think of himself as an “engineer” who simply allowed bands to sound like themselves.

It was the outside world that needed changing, anyway. Perpetually infuriated by the idea of counterculture being sold to corporations, Albini stood for community, and risk-taking, and formula-trashing, and authority-dismantling, and making the drums sound as if they’re falling on you from a great height. All together and over time, his principles helped form the invisible gravitational field binding the American underground.

I had entered that gravity at an optimal moment, too, when Albini’s reputation as a spiteful, proto-edgelord was in decline. In a well-written, well-circulated profile in the Guardian last year, Albini explained why he had been atoning on social media for things he had written in his previous bands, Big Black and Rapeman — winky, smirky lyrics that played footsie with notions of racism, fascism, misogyny, homophobia and other ugliness. “I can’t defend any of it,” Albini said. “It was all coming from a privileged position of someone who would never have to suffer any of the hatred that’s embodied in any of that language. … [I] know that we’re not as safe from historical evil as I believed we were when I was playing with evil imagery.”

When Albini formed Shellac with bassist Bob Weston and drummer Todd Trainer in 1992, though, he didn’t suddenly pivot toward songs about collectivity, or ethics, or anything within a thousand miles of drum circle singalongs. Instead, his most sinister ideas became more interior, showing their awareness of right and wrong by visiting the burned edges of the human conscience. On Shellac’s most harrowing song, 2000s “Prayer to God” — which, musically, is just “Copper” slowed down from punk speed to dirge speed — Albini’s narrator seethes from the severed corner of a love triangle, asking a higher power to smite the now-happy couple that has done him so wrong. “Kill him,” Albini sneers. “I don’t care if it hurts. Yes, I do. I want it to.” Somehow, things get worse. This is a life-altering piece of music, a ballad about human vengeance as gripping as any novel or film, and probably — hopefully? — the most hateful song I will ever encounter in this hard world. The only way I can continue to cope with its existence is by knowing that the singer is a good person.

Was a good person. Steve Albini died after suffering a heart attack Tuesday. He was 61. Shocking. Excruciating. Man down. Gone. Like that. For anyone who lived in his vast gravitational field, reeling days lie ahead. Like gravity, he can’t really be sentimentalized, and his absence feels impossible to imagine.