Steve’s comments in the twitter thread and a few other places are why I thought this was worth talking about it in the first place, because attention should be paid to what he’s actually saying. In his lifetime he apologized precisely for instances like using racial and homophobic invective, but as far I’m aware he never directly acknowledged past comments on his stated attraction to children.
In those tweets he broadly paints everything he ever said or did that could have been taken as outré as a cynical posture, and reps his progressive bona fides by claiming it was all done out of a naive belief that “major battles over equality and inclusiveness had been won” and thus nobody was really being hurt. There’s no specific denial of, “When I said I consume child pornography and it turns me on, this was not true.”
The published diary entry isn’t throwing out concepts like personal excitement at child sexuality and adult participation & commodification of it in vacuo, it’s putting forth a reasoned, political argument for why this is fine. Similarly, Steve’s promotion of Peter Sotos’ zine in which Sotos reprinted images of real child abuse and was convicted for doing so is an endorsement of the distribution of actual child pornography. Regardless of how ‘ironic’ either of these things were intended to be, the net result is, respectively, an apologia for child abuse and an advertisement for its dissemination out in the world. It goes beyond saying bad words to make people upset.
How sincerely remorseful Steve was about any of this isn’t for me to say, and whether he should be forgiven for it is up to each individual person.
if someone said this i would absolutely think they were attracted to children. thats kind of a lady doth protest too much situation with that one
There’s a documentary about James Ellroy where he says something like, “I will not justify myself and say, ‘I am not a racist,’ because anyone who would say something like that sounds like Richard Nixon saying, ‘I am not a crook.’”
But Steve could have been cool about it, I was just trying to make a point. He could have typed in all lower case and been self-deprecating and added a “lol” at the end. “haha can you believe that time i said kids are hot”
yeah the thing is it’s easy to apologize when everyone loves you and considers you the world’s foremost expert on everything you open your mouth on. it ain’t hard. you just float on through. now I wasn’t a punk in the 80s, but I am on the very edge of the edgelord generation – it’s right there in the name – and despite my certain level of fondness for telling people to fuck off in creative ways, I don’t think wondering about fucking kids and calling everyone a faggot is very punk, unless you explicitly define punk as ‘being johnny rotten.’
no, actually, even though i’m a very punk ethos kind of person myself, i think historically it’s quite fair to view punk as exactly this sort of outrageous reactionary moment
‘nazi punks fuck off’ was made because nazi punks were everywhere
i have listened to part of one of these albums. but i have enjoyed some of shellac
rip albini, it’s always sad when a lefty artist type guy passes away. even if he had dogshit opinions on jazz lol
albini always seemed like the most gen x a dude could get
I cannot hear that It’s been one week without instantly playing this masterpiece in my head
I have to come clean, when I first heard the news I got him mixed up with Joe Satriani
Better rip of Pigpile tape
