Big Black’s 1987 album Songs About Fucking does not fuck around. There are lots of bands that play loud songs, that have distorted guitars and pounding drums and brutal bass, whose lyrics are depraved stories of sex and violence and sexual violence sung with a vicious voice, but the energy here goes beyond standard signifiers. I put it on while driving once, headed up I-95 and in the mood for some rock, and I’ve banned it from the car ever since. Because after a while I realized I was driving not just faster but tenser. I was responding to the push and pull in the songs, the way they tightened around pings and sheets of noise and snapped-off shouts into a mainline of aggression, getting wound up at the idiots around me. I wasn’t driving angry, I was driving mean.

Steve Albini had a reputation for being mean. For being an asshole, a provocateur, someone who enjoyed pushing buttons and — here’s the part that stings — being really good at it. The hundreds (thousands?) of other people on the receiving end of his caustic ire at the time probably found it less amusing than I did years later, but the guy knew how to cut deep. Albini recorded the Pixies’ Surfer Rosa, a great and essential and canonical album, he later referred to it as “a patchwork pinch-loaf,” and even if you love the album as I do that is a hilarious burn. He was a sharp and funny guy in general — an old AV Club interview with him uses the conceit of asking him horny questions from a Maxim feature, leading to the priceless exchange “Are you into sex toys?” “No. The other way around.” Last year, Albini spent some time on Twitter trashing Steely Dan (“Music made for the sole purpose of letting the wedding band stretch out a little”) and it was amusing to see people trying to change his mind. Like the person who wrote “Pigeon Kill” was not defined by hating on stuff like Steely Dan in the first place, as if you could divorce the meanness from the music that so much of us love.

In the past several years, though, Albini has become most well-known not for his music with bassist Bob Weston and drummer Todd Trainer in Shellac (their band of the past 30 years) or his continual recording of bands at his studio Electrical Audio, but for reflecting on and repenting for his past meanness. This was not a plea for forgiveness or a complete renunciation of the many, many times he used racist or sexist language, especially in the context of his art. But it was an ongoing recognition of what he was allowed to say and who it might have hurt. “I am ashamed of some of the things I said and did in that ignorance, the flippant pretense of being above it all, expecting other people to indulge my divine right to shit anew on people who had been shit on their whole lives. I was still acting like a child,” he wrote last year. In the liner notes to Big Black’s 1988’s live album Pigpile, he pissily directs the reader to “look it up numbskull” regarding the song “Jordan, Minnesota,” about an alleged child sex trafficking ring — during performances, Albini would imitate a raped child. “It fit my personal pretension that all of us, all of humanity, is capable of both the most elevated and most depraved acts imaginable,” Albini wrote last year, discussing how the allegations were prosecutorial fraud and he bought into it. “I am deeply sorry I was duped, and if this song perpetuates the impression that these people were actually doing these things, then it’s caused harm, and I’m sorry for that as well. There is literally no way I can make up for that.”

This is part of a lengthy back and forth with musician Evelyn Morris, a huge Shellac fan who had toured with the band and enjoyed their support as fellow musicians, yet felt some of their songs made light of sexual trauma, like what she herself had experienced. She questions Albini about feminism and artistic expression and specific songs, like “Prayer To God,” one of Shellac’s best-known tunes and one parodying while fully embodying impotent rage. Sometimes he’s incisive, sometimes evasive or maybe not willing to look fully past what his preconceptions are. But he’s wrestling with this, talking with someone who asked him to talk about hurt he caused, and he’s considerate about what he’s done while standing firm on his right to be vile — if not flippantly so — in his art: “It is imperative for an artist to be honest, to respect the creative impulse, wherever that may go. Anything less is just decoration or inconsequential humming. Sometimes the resulting art is repugnant, but I believe the world is better for it, that it is made richer by having those thoughts explored.”

I think this was the deeper drive under the meanness, a desire to say things honestly. And if meanness is part of that, so be it. In his 33 1/3 book on Fugazi’s In On The Kill Taker, Joe Gross describes how the band initially recorded tracks with Albini in Chicago, with the sessions going great by all accounts. But the recordings themselves didn’t come out right, the band could hear it and so could Albini, who faxed the band “Upon further listening, I blew it.” Not in the sense of turning a knob the wrong way, but in failing to capture the sound that he heard the band making. It was an intangible thing, but he could hear its absence and blamed himself; the band wound up re-recording the album elsewhere. Around this time, Albini wrote to Nirvana about producing what would become “In Utero,” and laid out his philosophy of art and of commerce: “I’m only interested in working on records that legitimately reflect the band’s own perception of their music and existence… I would like to be paid like a plumber: I do the job and you pay me what it’s worth.” Albini’s words here recall those of another Chicagoan, the heister Frank in Michael Mann’s Thief. And they’re part of an explicit rejection of music industry practice where the record producer is paid in “points” off the album, which is to say they get a percentage of someone else’s work. Albini despised this, and laid out how the record industry used it and other practices in one of the most essential pieces of music journalism ever written. The Baffler version has the headline “The Problem With Music,” the title I first saw it under is more straightforward: “Some Of Your Friends May Already Be This Fucked.”

Because while Albini may have shat on people who had been shit on their own lives, he also threw shit at the people selling shit of their own — the music industry, bands he saw as working within its contours to the detriment of their own sound and of the greater world of music. Especially in the Chicago scene, where he famously trashed Smashing Pumpkins and Liz Phair and Urge Overkill. “Artists who survive on hype are often critic’s pets. They don’t, however, make timeless, classic music that survives trends and inspires generations of fans and other artists,” Albini wrote the Chicago Reader in 1994. “There are artists in Chicago doing just that, but you don’t write about them. You save your zeal instead for this year’s promo fixtures. Shame on your lazy head. Clip your year-end column and put it away for ten years. See if you don’t feel like an idiot when you reread it. Fuck you.”

And for all his shit talk, Albini walked the walk. Big Black and Shellac did their own booking, their own negotiating, their own music. “We …made our own mistakes and never had anybody shield us from either the truth or the consequences. The results of that methodology speak for themselves: Nobody ever told us what to do, and nobody took any of our money,” Albini wrote in the Pigpile liner notes. “We had a fucking blast, and we blasted a few ourselves.” Maybe you have to be mean to make that kind of life happen, but not taking shit is its own reward and inspiration. And crucially, Albini built up while tearing down. He estimated he recorded several thousand albums, some famous and many, many more not. He did his job, whoever the client, and got paid, and if you look at chatter from bands now and then he cared about making them sound not just good but like themselves, no matter what the budget. The critic Mark Richardson noted how Albini also worked very well with quiet bands as well as loud ones – “nothing to hide behind in his recordings.” He recorded the greatest band of the 90s making its greatest album, and also Vomitface. He remixed Cheap Trick, removing the shine from already great songs by one of his favorite bands and letting them stomp out in full rock glory (“Southern Girls” in particular is revelatory).

Everyone knows how Dave Grohl’s drums kick in on “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” everyone FEELS Grohl’s drums in the Albini-produced “Scentless Apprentice.” And then there’s his trebly, jabbing guitar, the sound of a cock’s spur frantically scratching bone (although Albini agreed with an accurately mocking assessment of his style), and his hateful sneer of a voice, contemptuous and savage, barking out “she’s wearing his boot print on her FORE HEAD” in “Fish Fry.” “This is the brutal guitar machine thousands of lonely adolescent cowards have heard in their heads,” Robert Christgau wrote of Big Black’s “Atomizer.” Writing about Shellac, Evelyn Morris pegs it better: “They hold a special place in my heart, the place where all the rage lives.”

I was too young to see Big Black or Rapeman, Albini’s short-lived (and with cause!) second band, but I did see Shellac once, about 15 years ago. In their first album, the band is wryly credited as Albini on Velocity, Weston on Mass and Trainer on Time, and that sense of music as a physical thing to be shaped drove their work. They had launched into “The End Of Radio,” an apocalyptic rant from Albini over a remorseless bass chord beat from Weston and Trainer’s skittering, degenerating drums — a song that makes the expanding space of the narrating DJ’s final broadcast a tangible thing. Which was filled by chatter, the ignorant gas of some loud-talking numbfuck straight out of Hipster Central Casting. Trendy shirt, skinny jeans, fancy sneaks, and a messenger bag. “MESSENGER BAG!” Albini snarled a few minutes into the song. “MESSENGER BAG! SHUT THE FUCK UP! SHUT THE FUCK UP, MESSENGER BAG! SHUT THE FUCK UP! WRITE IT DOWN AND PUT IT IN YOUR BAG!”

This fully in rhythm with the narrator’s rant and the rest of the band’s noise, refusing to stop for this shithead but bringing the hammer down on him with scornful precision. The dude shut the fuck up as the crowd turned on him, very much looking for blood, and the song continued in its despair, a dark impulse carried through to the end. Afterwards, Albini apologized to the guy, I think realizing that he had created a near mob scene. I remember that apology and the grace in it, but I cherish the meanness more.