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The Evolution of Steve Albini.

If the dumbest person is on your side, you're on the wrong side, by Jeremy Gordon.

The musician Steve Albini and I had been chatting for about a half hour,

going over the particulars of his daily routine, the financial viability of his business,

and various other prosaic and uncontroversial subjects.

When it suddenly seemed appropriate to ask about the decades-long stretch of time,

where he'd sort of seemed like a giant asshole.

Several months before on Twitter, he'd felt moved to explain some of the terrible things he'd

said in public over the years. This might not seem so remarkable. Many people, the famous,

the semi-famous, the completely insignificant, have spent a lot of time apologizing on Twitter for

their former selves. But when Albini decided to acknowledge his past in direct terms,

with no qualification or defensiveness, a lot of things I said and did from an ignorant

position of comfort and privilege are clearly awful, and I regret them.

Went one line in what became a viral thread. It engendered somewhat astonished reaction

along the lines of, damn, if Steve Albini is saying this, then nobody else has an excuse.

Possibly you're wondering why it matters that Albini, from afar merely a middle-aged American

musician who tweets a lot about poker in US politics, was re-evaluating his past. He's never

...