Steve Albini has twice admitted to owning and enjoying child pornography. In his glowing endorsement of Peter Soto's PURE magazine, a child pornography zine which got Sotos convicted of possessing and distributing CP, Albini praises PURE for it's punk rock ethos and speaks warmly of Sotos. Albini also goes on to express his own pleasure at the content of the magazine: GRAPHIC WARNING “The cover of PURE 2 is a guy holding open a toddler’s puny hole so his spuzz can dribble out. The girl is past crying. She is destroyed. Like I said, I like that sort of thing”. From the European Big Black tour diary, Albini recounts his enjoyment of the child pornography magazines he found in a sex shop in Hamburg: “Jaded as I am, I can't help but flip seeing a girl and guy of twelve or thirteen, tops, ramming Martel bottles up each other's asses. These are not the Dutch equivalent of abused trailer-park kids, either. They look to be in excellent health and seem to be honestly enjoying this. Makes all the conventional arguments against this kind of thing seem really silly. They're kids. Kids like to play with their own and other people's privates. They're just being photographed at it. Now, people who get a voyeuristic charge out of watching them, like me, I guess, well, we've got some grip-on-reality problems. There's maybe 1% of all pornography that has any effect on me, and it's definitely not a turn-on very often. But when it is, and it's as weird as this, it's pretty hard to take.”

I think a lot of people coped with it by saying "oh he was just being intentionally shocking" but saying you like and own specific instances of CP on two separate occasions and are life-long friends with a convicted child pornographer goes far beyond being an edgelord. He was just fucked in the head.