hi im moose/erasmus


chelmnik
@chelmnik

author's note: this is a piece i originally wrote back in 2022 when i had first promised myself to 'get serious' about my own writing, with the vague intention of pitching it somewhere. i never did due to what is i suppose an albini-esque aversion to selling my wares. remarkably given i am constantly at war with the person i was two days ago, i basically still agree with everything i said back then, so now that he is dead, i figured i may as well post it here. judging from the one other piece i have in a mental pipeline to post on cohost if i ever finish it, this is now where i share writing about death and the writers i respect the most.
vale albini, long live jamie!


I used to have a job that involved a lot of talking to prisoners and people under probation supervision. We didn’t speak about what they’d done to end up there, unless it was relevant (say, a driving ban making it harder to find a job), but I spoke to a pretty comprehensive microcosm of people who might have been through the courts: non-violent drug or theft convictions, assualts, sexual offences, and yes, also murder. There was nothing remarkable about these conversations, and no way that you could tell from how someone looks or speaks that, say, one person committed rape or murder and another fraud. On some level this doesn’t really bear mentioning at all - I already knew that the main difference between people convicted of a crime and me, or every other adult who has broken the law at some point, is being unlucky enough to get caught - but it was this job that reconfigured how I thought about ‘true crime’.

I started working in the justice system in 2018, when I figured we were experiencing peak ‘millennial true crime’ and now realise we had simply reached peak ‘millennial true crime podcast’, and had previously been a staunch defender of the stuff. Humans killing other humans is a story older than the written word, true crime stories are important because of what they tell us about the world a given crime was committed in, and it’s denigrated as a genre because it’s associated with women and therefore seen as fundamentally unserious, or so my reasoning went. Sure, some of it is tasteless or reactionary, but isn’t the majority of all art or writing in existence mediocre? What changed for me was a visceral awareness of the lie that underpins the whole genre: that true stories of crime will, generally speaking, be entertaining and/or enlightening to hear.

This isn’t to say that they are never worth telling, obviously. The stories of the twenty women assaulted or murdered by Peter Sutcliffe and of Sarah Everard’s murder by the police officer Wayne Couzens, help to tell us why calls for more cops on the streets, or to criminalise catcalling, will do nothing to protect women from harm. The fiction of true crime is that these stories are the rule, rather than the exception: that a day sat in the gallery for an average murder trial will offer similar lessons rather than an account of the quotidian misery, carelessness or desperation that has caused one person to kill another, misery that sticks to you without belonging to you.

At this point it feels like true-crime-as-social-phenomenon has died down; not by becoming any less ubiquitous but by fading into the patina on the endless sea of middlebrow content we are adrift in. I see more critiques now than endorsements of the idea that endlessly consuming stories of other people’s misery is somehow empowering and equips you with the knowledge required to “stay sexy and don’t get murdered” rather than turning you into the sort of person who refuses to answer the door and finds it ‘threatening’ if the Uber driver you hired 1 tries to start a conversation. But a lot of these arguments have a stance of moral superiority that sits poorly with me. They suggest that the upstanding citizen simply does not pollute their mind with thoughts of rape and dismemberment, and the reader is directly accountable to a victim somehow slain again by each retelling.

I find myself more and more drawn towards the polemic of Peter Sotos, whose writing positions true crime, and particularly the appetite for stories of monstrous killers and innocent victims, as essentially voyeuristic and pornographic. Despite the deliberately sickening quality of Sotos’ writing, there’s also a fundamental humanism - an acknowledgement that morbid curiosity is as natural an impulse as sexual desire, and the uselessness and dishonesty of attempting to deny that. But Sotos works in the medium of shock and extremity, leaving him unable to address my biggest question: how to satisfy our desire to witness and understand violence whilst acknowledging how ubiquitous and banal it all is. I’ve found the voices best able to answer this for me don’t work in prose, either narrative or theoretical, and certainly not in podcast, but songwriters: Steve Albini and Jamie Stewart. The two are similar enough to characterise as a kind of two-faced body musically chronicling human misery: both figures with cult followings, boasting prolific careers but keeping to the margins of fame and remaining directly approachable to fans. Both are also admirers of Sotos’ work - Albini also worked directly with him as producer on a number of records - and deal in similarly transgressive and discomforting subject matter, but their shared genius is in their situation of violence and abuse as part of the everyday fabric of human life.

Fascination with power and its potential for abuse ran through Albini’s musical career, but it’s in the first phase with Big Black where it manifests most viscerally, for better or worse. Big Black’s lyrics have the quality of an ethnography of human cruelty; Albini speaks as an array of perpetrators drawn from his own life, from newspapers, and his imagination, all rendered without sympathy but fully believable. Big Black’s clearest foray into the realm of ‘true crime’ as subject matter is Atomizer’s bracing opener ’Jordan, Minnesota’, where Albini takes on the voice of one of the 24 adults charged with child sexual abuse in the titular town, home to less than 3000 residents at the time. This track could have aged exceptionally poorly, given that most of the charges were dropped, with the investigation derailed by unsubstantiated claims given weight by the satanic panic of the 1980s. Albini’s pared-back retelling hinges around two chilling lines: “This is Jordan, we do what we like/And this will stay with you until you die.” These lines cut past hysteria and land much closer to the official finding that several children were undoubtedly abused in Jordan, but that the way the investigation had been carried out made all but one prosecution unviable. The worst abuses aren’t caused by demons or grand conspiracies, but by people who hold power choosing not to, or failing to intervene.

We do what we like” is perhaps the mantra for all the characters inhabited by Big Black-era Albini: the teenager in ‘Cables’ who goes to the slaughterhouse for fun; the corrupt cop of ‘Big Money’; the slumlord who trains his dog ‘Seth’ to attack Black people. The kind of people you’d meet anywhere, drawn to violence maybe by boredom, bigotry, for profit, but ultimately because they know they can. Little is subtle about Big Black but there’s also a subtle awareness of a colonial entitlement to dominate the Other: the narrator of ‘Pigeon Kill’ asserts “This is our land, we got a right;” clearly echoed in ‘Jordan, Minnesota’.

The ethnographer’s quandary is always to what extent, if at all, the observer can separate themselves from their subjects. The unflinching nastiness of the portraits Albini painted in Big Black was enabled by the youthful self-assurance that he was smarter and better than the bad people he depicted, with the potential to misfire into a callousness towards victims (most notoriously in the decision, which he repeatedly expressed regret towards, to name Big Black’s successor Rapeman). His work with Shellac had a greater sense of self-awareness and exploration of Albini’s own power as a straight white man. In contrast to the almost clinical portraits of Big Black there’s more exploration of his own potential to abuse and harm, and the listener invited to join - it is nigh impossible to listen to ‘Prayer to God’ without visualising the person that you, at that moment, would most revel in seeing struck down. The greater reflexivity of Albini’s later work strengthens the power of the earlier portraits, pulling them out of two dimensions and into an uncomfortable dialogue with ourselves: when did you last succumb to cruelty, and were you more of a ‘Bad Penny’ or a ‘Deep Six’ about it?

If Albini chronicled the myriad ways in which humans are driven to harm one another from the perpetrator’s end, at the other end of all of this is Jamie Stewart. Xiu Xiu, the project they have led for the past two decades, can be understood as an effort to find solidarity in suffering, as exemplified on ‘Hi’, the rallying cry which opens 2012’s Always: “if you are alone tonight, if there’s a hole in your head, if you wish he should die -” these are the people welcome in the kingdom of Stewart. Like Albini, they collage together stories and characters from their own life with those in the news (‘Pink City’ draws from the Balkan civil war, ‘Factory Girl’ sweatshop workers) or observed from a distance. Stewart’s portraits are always drawn from a place of empathy yet face up to the impossibility and voyeuristic quality of trying to inhabit another’s pain. This is maybe best epitomised by the cover art for Xiu Xiu’s sophomore record A Promise: a nude photo of a homeless sex worker who had approached Stewart in Hanoi, photographed in Stewart’s hotel room with a baby doll. Whether the image is intimate and humanistic or distanced and humiliating, whether paying a vulnerable man to use his image in perpetuity is more exploitative than paying him for sex, are obvious questions that Stewart is not interested in pushing you to answer. The man exists, and he has been made visible to us when he was not before.

Pain and suffering can never be far from harm and abuse, meaning Xiu Xiu’s project is also inherently one about victimhood. Many critiques of true crime suggest that crime-as-entertainment forgets victims, but as Sotos highlights the victim is in fact maybe even more powerful a fetish object than the perpetrator: the object which must be destroyed to grant the murderer their perverse magnetism and transgressive force. We crave stories of the most ‘innocent’ and ‘perfect’ victims imaginable: the blonde-haired child or the equally blonde-haired sorority girl, and forget ones who sold sex or got into fights or drank. They remind us too much of ourselves.

Stewart’s songwriting frees victims from the pinned-butterfly status of innocence. They desire their abusers, or are mutually abusive. They have lives and power outside of victimhood: they crave and exact vengeance, they escape their abusers but find that suffering continues. Pain and discomfort is everywhere, and to be lived with (until it isn’t - suicidality is one of the most frequently recurring themes of Xiu Xiu’s twenty-odd years). Maybe the most striking and discomforting exploration of victim-as-subject in their career is 'Faith, Torn Apart', the spoken-word closer to 2017’s Forget: a collage of Stewart’s one-sentence reflections on exploited children's Backpage listings. The observations range from empathetic (“my goofy jokes hide my goofy damnation”) to banal (“my braces are real”); some hint at the subject matter obliquely (“my pose is for you”) or unbearably (“my dead-end childhood is just beginning”). It’s at once tender and voyeuristic, cataloguing the girls but identifying them only by familiar, human qualities.

Perpetrator-as-monster and victim-as-innocent both offer the same comforting lie: that they’re not like us. Stewart’s songwriting works to restore the human qualities of victims - desire, memories, agency - as much as Albini’s stripped away the monstrous, Othering qualities we project onto perpetrators. Taken in conversation they cut through the mythology of ‘true’ crime narratives and offer something that acknowledges our morbid cravings without satisfying them, situated in the everyday life-world in which we are all trying to survive, trying and failing not to hurt each other as we do it.


  1. the night bus, of course, is too dangerous.


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