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Blacklist: Editor’s Pick, Issue 1
Interview by Pieter Schoolwerth of Wierd Records
Blacklist is:
Josh Strawn: vocals, guitar
James Minor: guitar
Ryan Rayhill: bass
Glenn Maryansky: drums
Pieter: So How did this the band start and what was the aesthetic interest musically that you guys were initially thinking about?
Ryan: Motorhead, The Sisters of Mercy, Fields of the Nephilim.
Josh: Iron Maiden…
Ryan: Iron Maiden and the more metally stuff like that.
Pieter: And that was just the two of you guys?
Ryan: Yeah Josh and I fucked around for several months and we didn’t make much progress until we hooked up with Glenn several months later.
Pieter: In my opinion Glenn brought in the more obscure references like the touching pop movement bands on the Lively Art label in
Glenn: The first conversation I had with Josh we started talking about Comsat Angels and The Sound and Ryan and I were talking about Motorhead and The Sisters and stuff and that’s when it all made sense to me.
Josh: I think what it comes with is a sort of being bored with the way that indie rock had become so fey. We were all kind of tired of that, and the Motorhead beast is more of a spirit that we want to think we capture.
Ryan: Yeah indie rock man…Dudes in glasses and sweaters…ughh…
Pieter: So it’s not just the aesthetics of the music, it’s also the ‘whole thing’ for you guys- the aesthetics of the live performance, the aesthetics of the lyrical content. The sound is bankrupt in indie rock or ‘post wave’ music. To me it’s the live performance that always is a complete bore. And it’s that specific post-Chameleons ’single picking’ guitar sound that has become completely formulaic, convenient, and tired.
Josh: In a way it was a little bit schizophrenic, well, not schizophrenic, but dual. We enjoy sitting around listening to metal and playing metal-ish kind of stuff, but at the same time we were also listening to the post-punk bands. When I started talking to Glenn about Comsat Angels and The Sound that was stuff I was totally into at the time as well.
Pieter: The lyrical content of Comsat Angels and The Sound is absolutely antithetical to Motorhead and classic American or British metal - it’s a much more educated man’s melancholic music, there’s a sort of built in repression or restraint that I have always admired.
Glenn: That’s where we sort of wanted to fit into the middle of, which is why that French wave stuff made sense. Because it had that over the top production that the metal bands had but also the sophisticated spirit of Joy Division and early Cure stuff. It had this denseness and this druggie quality to it but also this smartness and the attention to detail.
Pieter: It had a psychedelia to it like most of the later Sisters of Mercy, The Church and bands like that had.
Glenn: I often explain it to people like the Lively Art bands were sort of in between Ride and The Cure’s Faith.
Pieter: I think its no secret now that in retrospect the touching pop movement bands were the ones that influenced the shoegaze and cold wave three or four years later. I think its really tragic that the French bands never got much credit for it because they never got to tour in Britain or in the United States, fuck man if Asylum Party could just take over the fucking world….Phillipe Planchon where are you when we need you?…Help…
Josh: I think that’s where James comes in too in terms of the chronology. As Glenn was introducing us to Lively Art bands, James came along and added this intense textural guitar sound, or what we describe as ‘the airplane hanger sound’.
Pieter: Where did that come from James?
James: All the shoegaze stuff.
Glenn: That’s where James is different than us. We all grew up listening to 80’s stuff and metal whereas he was more into industrial and shoegaze and never went through that so its almost better he’s not spoiled by a lot of the technical stuff that we kinda grew up on.
Pieter: Technical stuff?
Glenn: The kind of riffy metal stuff that we were all listening to as kids. James’s guitar adds almost a sort of keyboard affect. He adds a layer that everyone else is kind of riding on, which I think is perfect for what we’re doing, riding a cold icy wave…
Pieter: If you could make a generalization of the bands of twenty or so years ago, whether it’s the Fields of the Nephilim or The Sisters of Mercy or Xymox or whatever, all those bands’ subject matter of all their lyrics and content had to do with pure escapism. Whether it was through magic and witchcraft and the occult or whether it was through drug taking, falling in love, etc., there was an equivalence between subject matter and the lyrics. If you could say for the sake of argument that you guys take this romantic, moderately dark sound and combine it with a very ‘realist’ subject matter and content in all your ideas about Islam and the war, or the fetishization of the human achievements of science, it’s actually the same aesthetic in a way with the absolute opposite lyrical content and subject matter. It’s very strange for a band that could be called part of the history of escapism both musically and aesthetically to be talking about what’s happening in
Josh: For me people use the term Romanticism as a way to talk about whimsy and passion, and that’s fine and good, but there’s also another sort of Romanticism that puts belief in science, mathematics and the like…
Pieter: But that’s an ‘academia’ definition as opposed to a musical one…
Glenn: You could just call it aestheticism. I think a lot of the 80’s bands, especially the Nephilim, were a bit reactionary to what was going on before which was The Clash and all those bands really trying to say something and it became passé to have an opinion on things, so that kind of smoke and mirrors aesthetic became more interesting. Now we’re perhaps ‘reacting’ to the past 15 or 20 years of music where nobody’s had much to say about anything really.
Pieter: All the subject matter is so trite and formulaic in both ‘dark music’ and indie rock at this point that what you’re talking about sounds really refreshing – like why not actually say something about the world ‘outside’?. I was thinking the other day before I came to your show as I was watching the news that all that’s on TV is the bombing in Gaza and smoke and lights and all the footage is at night and thus very theatrical almost like a music video at times thanks to the lovely American media. And then you guys come on stage a few hours later and it almost looks exactly the same as these images on TV…the ominous smoke machines of Gaza at the Annex in the Lower East side…eat yr heart out Dr. Avalanche, Blacklist is talkin about the ‘real’ fucking avalanche, the one that’s killing thousands of innocet civilians!
Josh: There’s always a disconnect. On the one hand bands are ultra realistic, ultra specific about different political issues, especially punk rock, and that gets kind of trite and boring and then you have this other aesthetic of total escapism and fantasy, I’m kinda more interested in connecting the two.
Glenn: I think I’m more comfortable with it because Josh is a clever enough writer where he can make the lyrics work for people who don’t give a shit about politics.
Pieter: How important it is for people to know what you’re talking about?
Glenn: I like the duality of it. I like that there are echelons in the lyrical content.
Josh: I think if you’re interested in people knowing what you’re talking about you can’t just speak to the people who already know.
Pieter: Well you’re singing to people who aren’t as informed about what’s going on. Its almost like you’re speaking a language from one context - academia, political and religious theory, the history of aesthetics - and putting it into the realm of popular music which is certainly nothing we’ve heard in years. Nobody’s had anything to say, especially in dark music, it’s all about flying around in the clouds on a fucking unicorn and sprinkling stars and rainbows everywhere.
Josh: That’s a weird thing in art in general - There’s this balkanization like, ‘Oh I love art and passion so I don’t like science and rationality.’ And that’s why I like meshing the two. And there are plenty of people out there who create an amazing vision of the universe by using science.
Pieter: Especially within the realm of popular music and aesthetics, we don’t equate Romanticism with science. Science and Romanticism are basically antithetical historically in the West. When you start talking about Islam whose tradition has a certain respect for science, you’re leaving the western tradition to talk about another world and basically changing the language to making romanticism and science compatible and putting all this back in the western popular music.
Josh: First of all I’m really interested in rejecting the east-west dichotomies. Because the Muslim scholars are the ones who preserved the Greek philosophy while the Christians were burning it. The ‘heart’ in the Koran is really a thinking heart, and if you’ve studied Arabic, there’s always been a respect for rationality and science and connecting the two.
Pieter: There’s respect for rationality and science in the western tradition but its not generally associated with Romanticism - at least in philosophy it’s very antithetical. It seems what you’re talking about has something to do with collapsing two different tradition’s views of ‘that which might be called ‘Romantic’ into each other?
Josh: The quote-unquote western tradition is so wrapped up in discounting universality, discounting science, that it seems like its almost a loop that nobody’s gonna get out of. It seems that if you’re actually interested in that sort of thing you look for different systems of thinking to express your ideas and there’s a kernel in Islam that is interesting as far as that’s concerned.
Glenn: There’s nothing more romantic than science in a way. The whole fact that we’re here, in space with all the tall trees. There’s nothing more romantic than the fact things just ‘exist’… Making us believe that it popped up out of nowhere.
Josh: It’s interesting that those who recite the Koran are usually thought of within that tradition as opera singers. And in written form as calligraphy, you’re talking about a culture where the written word is extremely important.
Pieter: There’s a certain psychedelia in the history of the aesthetics of that culture that you can’t deny.
Josh: No doubt. The bridge is there. You have Peter Murphy living in
Pieter: Well as Glenn knows I’ve been trying to create a new genre of pop music known as the ‘Gypsy Wave’ for years, long live the Red Temple Spirits, fuck those guys were so amazing, Spaceships and time travelling back to ancient India…
Glenn: yeah man the Sisters filmed those later videos in
Josh: But at the same time I’d have to qualify all of this by saying that I kind of see Islam the way someone like Zizek sees Christianity, more like a structural interpretation, not necessarily Theism, just not the invisible man in the sky.
Josh: We’re not big fans of faith.
Pieter: Faith in what? You have faith in science it seems at least?
Josh: I don’t think I need to have faith.
Pieter: You mean faith in a monotheistic ‘God’?
Josh: I’ve always had problems with the idea that faith in the atomic weight of whatever element is similar to faith in fairies or faith in anything really…
Pieter: Faith with a capital ‘F’.
Josh: I think there’s definitely a difference between belief based on evidence and belief based on whimsy.
Pieter: Can you give a couple examples of specific songs’ lyrical content – how does it work, this sort of embracing this ‘other’ tradition hidden beneath the surface.
Josh: The song “When Worlds Collide” is what I was saying about breaking down barriers. The idea of east meets west. The east was only called the east because it was east of
Pieter: I’ve noticed you’ve been dedicating songs lately to the people being adversely affected by the war and I find it very unusual for your musical aesthetic as it seems more like something a political punk band would have done in 1977.
Josh: Well people are categorically opposed to everything that’s gone on in
Glenn: It’s also because its happening right now. It could have also fit in easily to the Bosnian conflict. It’s the same kind of ultimate tragedy of a people being persecuted by some nonsensical beliefs, a confused sort of almost fascism and religion all mixed up.
Pieter: Another unusual thing about that is that I hear you dedicate your songs to a people or cause and then you sing the song and we have no fucking clue of the lyrics because of the distortion and vocal affects burying the lyics deep inside of the mix. Its so unusual because you hear a political punk band say, ‘This is dedicated to…’ and then there’s this intense clarity and precision in the vocal content that’s about very much trying to communicate, or control meaning in the lyrics. Its very unusual saying you have these political concerns, especially before a song, saying ‘this one is for x’, and then people listen to it and they’re like, “what the fuck was that about, why bother to dedicate a song to a political cause then not tell us where you stand on it?”.
Glenn: My favorite thing about that is that ‘When Worlds Collide’ is one of our most accessible songs musically. That probably is one of the songs that could easily end up on the radio.
Pieter: But what I’m saying is that when you dedicate a song to something usually people are going like ok, lets see what he has to say about that, and then they just say, I have no clue what the guy is saying. So you think, ‘Oh I have to go read the lyrics and do my homework.’
Josh: Well if you’re too didactic then you sound like a real power-hungry pedagogue.
Glenn: That’s why I think its great because you can say that before a song and make people either do their homework or not…
Pieter: It leaves it up to them.
Glenn: There’s nothing bad in saying this is what the song’s about, take it as it is and being proud of your art afterwards. They’re two things that kind of live in the same universe. We’re a band first, and we make music. First and foremost it should sound good.
Josh: In terms of the political rock music that I would consider what I’d like to follow in the footsteps of would be like – if you listen to “The Unforgettable Fire” by U2 you don’t immediately know its about nuclear war. But you do a little bit of homework and listen a little bit closely and maybe read this or that about how they went to this museum for survivors of Nagasaki and Hiroshima and you kinda draw that stuff out. The same would be The Sisters of Mercy. I don’t think many Sisters fans know that Vision Thing is about George Bush and Iraq and Gulf War 1. That’s an intensely political record.
Glenn: People would be surprised about how political Andrew Eldritch is. He’s got quite a bit to say.
Josh: He’s literate enough that he can kind of cloak his political views in the music. I’ve always admired that in his later lyrics, it’s not like that kind of blatant Midnight Oil feel where the ‘aborigines need their home back’.
Pieter: Do you think it’s the kind of thing that people can get from reading the lyrics or do you think they really have to hear him talk about it in interviews? Certainly if you see that video where he’s in Jordan riding around on a white stallion with a fucking three piece new romantic suit on looking like some aristocrat dandy type or maybe a straight-up plantation owner, its like how are we supposed to see that he’s speaking as a leftist? To me it just as confused as when the amazing Steve Strange at the end was off his fabulous Aquanet-encrusted rocker and went to Egypt and danced on the pyramids and that album sold 700 copies. You just think ‘Dahling you look excellent but I’m afraid you’ve lost your mind a bit…’; in other words there’s no ‘critique’, he’s not a leftist, just maybe a hedonist, bless his cold wild heart…
Glenn: I think in that particular video Eldrich is playing a character, whereas in “Lucretia…” he’s in sweatshops showing what the big machine actually entails. It’s also like what we were talking about at the beginning - putting aesthetics at the forefront. Whatever he’s singing about, it looks fucking amazing. He’s walking around the sweatshops with no shirt on and a leather jacket and these people are working away and these machines are going to work behind him.
Pieter: It’s against the whole history of political leftist revolt to try to aestheticize, or glamourize the leftist workers situation. It doesn’t make any sense. Generally you expose how fucked up and inhumane it is and then you say this is wrong, you don’t say this is sexy.
Glenn: I think that’s the beauty of the beast in a way.
Pieter: Its perverse I think you could actually say.
Glenn: Well there’s nothing non-perverse about that guy. He loves to be cruel and the ultimate oxymoron. He loves to be the problem and the solution, the solution and the problem.
Pieter: Is there a provocative element in putting this political content in your songs at all?
Josh: Particularly when I was younger I was often motivated just to simply be provocative.. But the great moment that you reach is where the thing you actually believe and the thing you actually know about is provocative. But I’d never say that provocation for provocation’s sake is why I write about what I write. In a lot of cases quite frankly in terms of trying to talk about this stuff in interviews in public it could get easily misunderstood and easily shoot us in the foot.
Glenn: And it’s obviously more of Josh’s thing too. So the fact that it isn’t so much in the forefront of what we do is better because he can answer for it much better than we can. I don’t necessarily disagree with any of it, but as the mouthpiece of our band I’m comfortable enough with the end product that nobody’s going to be turned off by what’s being said aesthetically.
Pieter: Next thing – do you think the inherent melancholia in your songs is about the state of how fucked up the world is and apocalyptically ‘celebrating’ that chaotic world or is it really about a constructive proposition of something that might be a solution?
Josh: Definitely the latter.
Pieter: In the history of the music that you draw from that people might compare you to, there’s a cynicism that’s basically just about picking shit apart. It’s about like ‘I escape into amphetamines, majick and the occult, and smoke and mirrors because I just don’t know the fucking answer.’ And all the philosophy stuff we talk about like Zizek generally I see it as reactionary. He basically reacts to everything and says these are all the problems in the world, look how clever I am and all the post-modern wordplay I can create but he never seems to really propose an alternative to the ‘problems’. So is it more of a cynical position or…
Josh: In order to know what you want to propose you have to know what’s wrong with your current situation. People are afraid of the modern world and they think that science is evil – people were angry at Newton for creating the prism. They said he had ‘unwoven the rainbow’. And Richard Dawkins wrote this book kind of saying that the prism itself was amazing. I put it in our bio. It says, ‘rock ‘n ‘roll re-weaving the rainbow’, the idea that we can take it apart and put it back together again and see it as beautiful. It doesn’t have to be either totally mysterious or totally analytical and boring.
Pieter: I just like the idea of melancholic music being somehow optimistic. Its weird, like when I listen to New Model Army or something its like they take the piss out of everything, but the music has this anthemic, uplifting ‘we’re all in this together’ thing. There’s a certain optimism to it, like melancholic music actually proposing some sort of solution to the sadness. Its not just like, ‘Oh the world is so fucked lets just get wasted and shoot up.’ I mean that’s just such a formula at this point that we’re all pretty tired of it. Somehow Justin’s voice just makes you want to get out on the street and do something…
Josh: Its aggressive positivity.
Pieter: But conveyed through the opposite, conveyed through melancholy, which is totally unusual. I really appreciate that for once you guys are not romanticizing the idea of the apocalypse, thank god, another fucking band like that is the last thing we need at this point- which is basically just the state of the internet. It’s a disaster. Everything on televisual ’screen culture’ is just about everything blowing up and how spectacular that is and how everybody’s fucked - like who cares at this point lets just fart on each other and then blow up mom and dad’s sad little house and MTV will write us a nice big check as a cynical reward for our depraved nihilism…
Glenn: The world isn’t gonna end while we’re alive. We trying to bring realism to an unrealistic genre. New Model Army, even though they tread in territory that I have some disagreements with, there’s passion in their music. Its like Joe Strummer or Shane McGowan. They’re almost like motivational speakers.
Josh: Melancholy in terms of positivity is probably more true or more real.
Pieter: Not historically. The classic image of melancholy to me is like Goya’s Los Caprichos etching of the scientist at his desk with his head down. He’s given up, he has all his spilt test tubes and he’s drunk and passed out (kind of like we all are after a night of Blacklist cold guitars on the ears). Its not about like, I’ve figured everything out. You can’t have sad music and be like yeah everything’s great!
Josh: There’s a certain kind of melancholy in the idea that I might fail, and I might be wrong.
Pieter: Like its me against the world, I don’t fucking care, bring it on!
Josh: Perfect example is Kate Bush’s “Cloud Busting.” That song is majestic in its extreme melancholy.
Glenn: And its about a scientist that tries to invent a hot air balloon that flies over the English channel…Though you can’t go wrong with Donald Sutherland in a Saville Row suit…
Josh: I think that’s why the song strikes a chord.
Pieter: Basically it comes back to someone being slightly insane and taking risks, whether it’s Newton or whatever. But it’s ultimately about the same thing, the lone individual versus the world, classic Romanticism 101…
Glenn: There’s nothing more romantic than trial and error. I love when people say you can’t do something, and you reply “fuck off, whatever man, I’m going to try no matter what.” - that’s the ultimate Romanticism.
Pieter: Kinda like giving it all up for your music. Like I’m gonna quit my shitty ’secure’ day job and go on tour to California in my rusty old Honda Accord and its gonna be a huge disaster and my life’s gonna be fucked and I’m gonna become a junkie and die but at least I can feel like I fucking tried.
Glenn: And that’s why we’re all friends.
Pieter: And that gets back to the Motorhead lifestyle. We should probably say something about the fact that Glenn probably lost about five years off his life from DJing the Wierd party with me every Tuesday for 3 and a half years till 6am when he goes to work at 9. There needs to be a tribute to him for the years he’s lost.
Glenn: And we knew it would never be popular. But its always been more satisfying to be proud of something than to ride the wave of something because its cool, great thing is we were never ‘cool’ because we were so fucking cold…complicated…
Pieter: I don’t wanna be 60 years old and be like, ‘I could met that beautiful girl that night or could have done those extra lines that night that would have made me jump off a building but it still sucks that I didn’t go for it.’ Because you can’t get that back. When it comes down to things involving your physical body being 25 years old, you can’t go back.
Josh: If you catch Blacklist at 3am you’ll see that we live by that philosophy.
Pieter: It’s a real tribute to you guys. You guys live your words, I can testify to that, my hangover right now was a gift from you as usual…I only wish more bands could enjoy themselves the way you guys do, what to do about the lack of pleasure seeking in the world of music…
Glenn: Everybody’s in a band, everybody’s a DJ, everyone is and loves everything…man…
Josh: Yeah the state of the musical world really bums me out…just feels like the mystery is gone…
Pieter: Is the mystery gone just because of the internet? I often think this is the reason…I really think kids develop their identity now by picking and choosing what music they want to hear off the internet as opposed to seeking out music as a result of ‘feelings’ which come from ‘inside’ them - like ‘OK I feel depressed, I’m gay, I wear paisley and pointy boots therefore I want to listen to The Smiths’, whereas now its like ‘Let’s see what’s available - Ok I like the hip hop look, I love the ‘goth thing’ on Wednesday, and I love that ’smart indie look’ for those brunches on the weekends in Williamsburg’…
Glenn: That’s why we’re content with our longevity cause we’ve been the way we are for most of our lives. It’s not like our identity came about because of our band. I’m not gonna name names, but I think a lot of bands sort of fall into that category.
Josh: This goes back to the absence of passion and truth in music. Everybody’s got a college education nowadays. Everybody’s read their Foucault, everybody’s got their cultural relativism ingrained in them. And you don’t talk about truth, you just say something clever and literate. I think it creates a culture of narcissism. I really do feel like even as clever as a lot of the bands that are popular now are, their mystery fades because the minute somebody asks them what they care about, or get into their lives, and the sort of penetration of the celebrity begins, they’re all ready to have it.
Pieter: The problem is their narcissism is based on not even having an idea of who they are, which would seem to be a prerequisite for being narcissistic in the first place, and which is therefore basically antithetical to narcissism, like they have nothing to say if you say ‘what are you into?’. It’s like, ‘I’m into whatever you want me to be!’. The biggest symptom of the internet is people like what they’re told. And that’s a huge shift in terms of developing an identity as a kid, from the way it was before the internet, there was still a sense of subculture being possible because everything wasn’t so ‘commercially’ available and easy to find, you had to feel it, then want it, and then hunt it down in the back of fanzines or wherever, lots of letter writing…man what ever happened to those very rare white rectangles called ‘letters’? I always thought it’d be great if there were this fantastic band that just didn’t have a website and they became popular. Like how do you resist doing that? You just say no, fuck this…
Glenn: It’s impossible.
Josh: I don’t think it’s just the change in media. It’s a crisis of people actually making music the soundtrack to their experience and their formation of self as opposed to making the way that they choose their music the way that they form themselves. That’s a consumerist problem. The Sisters of Mercy’s First and Last and Always hit me because of the way I felt. It wasn’t like, ‘Oh I want to identify myself with this particular culture and this is how I’d like to come off and what kind of person I think I’d like to be so I’ll check out this record.’
Pieter: The reason why dark or ‘gothic’ music became such a campy B movie joke with Marilyn Manson and all this sad commercial bullshit in the 90’s is that we were so familiar with the image by then that we saw it as abject, vulgar, and nihilistic. What was interesting in the previous generations following the punks is that it felt new and mysterious. Is it impossible to make music like that now because they have to sort of re-believe in the possibility of mystery? How do you re-make that image of that kind of music so the band doesn’t look like an ironic, nihilist joke? It’s like basically learning to believe in a mystery of a band after ‘belief’ is gone…
Glenn: That’s what we want to do. There’s a lot of dismantling involved, wish us luck….
Pieter: I mean Eldritch told everybody he went to Oxford to study Chinese. Who knows if it’s true? I remember in the Heartland fanzine someone saying they had found this postcard he had written in Chinese to his Chinese girlfriend in Hamburg. I thought it was great at the time even though I saw right through it, but the kids ate that shit up. The point is, he courted that kind of ‘affected mystery’ which was really a great erotic thing. He’s not just saying, ‘Please put me on your itunes, I need your fucking 99 cents!’ He’s like, fuck you, I’m a freak, I’m living in Hamburg Germany speaking Chinese in the basement
of a brothel strung out on amphetamines and covered in tight leather. I’m a fucking mess and I couldn’t care less…deal with me!
Glenn: Yeah I loved the fact that Eldritch chose to capitalize on the fact that he spoke Chinese and loved German philosophy rather than the fact that he fucked Kate Moss or whoever….
Pieter: It comes down to taking the risk of being a little bit weird to realize that its fucking sexy to built a little mystery.
Glenn: And if you can do it in a freaked out way. Not like saying ‘I fucked a supermodel,
and Ryan does speak a little Chinese of course as everyone knows…’
Josh: I don’t know seems today the willingness to be eccentric is all but dead…
Pieter: That’s a very important thing. Well unlike you guys when ancient old me grew up it was radical to be straight and look like a queen so that’s what I fucking did when I was feelin the weirdness of the world. Now its like all the emo bands look like football players. How did the contemporary image of ‘Romanticism’ get cloaked in radical masculinity? It doesn’t make any fucking sense. I can have erotic feelings toward men if
I see guys like Gene Loves Jezebel, but I can’t listen to melancholic music and look or like a fucking football player.
Glenn: It gets even more mired down because its like the football player jocks from your high school with eyeliner on and sleeve tattoos.
Pieter: It’s such a confusingly uninteresting mess, maybe eyeliner should become illegal?
Glenn: Well they are confused messes because they have no idea what they’re doing aesthetically, as a result of, like you said earlier, having basically no idea who whey ‘are’ or what they really ‘feel’. They just choose and click on ‘all of the above’.
Pieter: Thing is they’re all so happy it seems, largely again because their subjectivity has slipped away through the mouse and into the hard drive, and ironically the hard drive has removed their ‘drive’ so to speak, so their whole ‘drive’ or struggle to figure out who they are is really not a part of life. Like you said, why do that when you can just choose ‘all of the above’ certainly much easier with out all the emotional exhausting struggle. For the very rare few though who still realize the struggle of daily life and retain the desire to figure out who they really are down in the very rare barren depths of their ’selves’ in this weird world it’s a real fight to figure out who they are when ‘all of the above’ is the state of identity formation. The real sort of confusion which is entirely different than your use of the word confusion as applied to the frat boy-tranny-goths is entirely different. This is a confusion that comes out of still maintaining the desire to figure your self out, and thus manifests itself as truly idiosyncratic, eccentric behavior, which unlike the ‘all of the above’ homogenized mass of ‘post-everything’ people has a very specific look to it stylistically. There’s a real dignity in this other sort of confused struggle, as well as just ‘be’ing confused for a time being. I think you can learn a lot about yourself by just ‘drifting’ when you’re confused in this way. There’s a certain respectable confidence in saying “I don’t know who the fuck I am, all I know is I’m really unconfortable in my own skin and I’m working on it but for now all I can say is I’m just really fucking weird.”
Glenn: Yeah weirdness has become just another ready-made, internet-available costume now.
Pieter: everything is awesome yo!. This is the mantra of the ‘post-internet’ look. The melting pot conflagration of every single style at once, how could you go wrong I figure they are thinking.
Glenn: ‘Yeah like ‘I get the eyeliner thing, but I don’t get the tight pants and creepers part of it, I think I’ll wear some baggy as fuck jeans and Timberlands instead, killer!’
Pieter: It’s like Insane Clown Posse, where you make rap music but you wear baggy jeans and dress up like a fucking clown. I hate that fucking garbage because they’re like
‘We’re gonna make the hip hop kids happy, we’re gonna make the metal kids happy, and we’re gonna make all the ugly fucking goth kids happy because we look like shit. It’s like the most capitalistic thing ever. These guys are the greediest little cynical fuckers. It’s not radical at all, more like Starbucks.
Josh: It’s precisely how rap rock works. Why Limp Bizkit work, they look like your next door neighbor that works at Taco Bell.
Pieter: That’s why I like Blacklist. Like, ‘We’re just gonna choose one thing, and we’re gonna look this way, and its specific. Nobody makes specific music anymore. It takes balls to indulge in a ’singular’ aesthetic with absolutely no apologies.
Josh: Well a lot of clichés are clichés because they’re fucking true.
Glenn: In a way I think it’s a total compliment to be utterly specific. We can account for everything we’re about. From the shoes that we’re wearing to our lyrics to our choice of instruments, they all have a specific meaning. Because we know exactly the sound we want, what we look like - we’re also opinionated motherfuckers. We don’t settle for anything less than want we want.
Josh: That’s key. There’s nothing I despise more than the culture of rote respect. Anybody’s opinion. There’s absolutely no way of discriminating. There’s absolutely no way of saying this is what’s good, this is what’s bad. This is wrong this is right, this is cool, this is dumb.
Pieter: I don’t think there’s an accepted place for negativity in commercial music at all. You can’t trash anything or the label kicks your passionate ass out!
Josh: Well you can trash it, as long as it has a Page 6 Killers versus Bravery kinda thing, like opportunistic negativity.
Pieter: But then it’s obviously a cynical contrivance once again…
Glenn: And then both bands just get bigger and everyone’s ‘happy’.
Josh: But that’s what people responded to about Kurt Cobain. Like, fuck all this wanky bullshit.
Pieter: He had the balls to be negative.
Glenn: He had the balls to be a total tragedy also apparently…
Josh: Compared to Warrant.
Glenn: But then again, why does Kurt Cobain get all the credit and Adrian Borland – nobody knows who he is?
Pieter: Because Adrian Borland looked good I’d say, and maybe occasionally dropped an intimidatingly polysyllabic word too, heaven forbid dahlings…
Glenn: He wasn’t reactionary. He was a chubby guy who wore great suits not like a scumbag from Seattle who dated depraved film stars for photo ops.
Pieter: The last thing, why don’t we just wrap it up. Say what’s happening with a potential record.
Josh: We have more songs than we know what to do with, and we’re gonna put ‘em down on tape, and they’re gonna be fucking crazy, fuck global warming, the long awaited cold is finally coming…
