I have a thing about sticking up for the over/underdogs–the highly successful musicians that people just can’t wait to hate on.

Whether it’s journalists in the 70s turning their noses up at the Archies while praising Toto and Chicago, or oddly spiteful faux-journalists who hate Kreayshawn to the point where they’re taking solitary, reasonable quotes out of context and then linking them to Wikipedia entries about black youth being shot in Oakland two years prior to somehow make it seem that Kreayshawn is a whiny entitled race exploiter, too often my fellow music journalists take the easy way out: they find a target to hate that they know a lot of “hip” people would be eager to take issue with, and they hate on ‘em good. “Ooooh, look at me, with the balls to call pop music ‘vapid!’” How clever. How brave. And for anyone who likes the rawness of rock, country, and hip hop, how hypocritically selective. Compared to the dexterity of jazz or the sober precision of classical, we’re all retarded perverts flinging blocky chunks of musical clay into a three minute sludge. We’re cavemen, and I thought we were proud of that!

But there’s one musician whose works I am slowly coming to love who indisputably is kind of lame: Hank Williams Jr. In fact, he’s kind of a monster. Yesterday’s quote about Obama being like Hitler that got him kicked off ESPN was actually relatively rational compared to some of the things he’s done, if you’ve been paying attention to his PR ouevre. His advocacy for Sarah Palin a couple years ago was outright weird, as was his ridiculous version of “Family Tradition” that he made for the McCain/Palin ticket, which blamed the Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac bailout on Clinton and said that Obama had friends linked with terrorism (as though Sarah Palin’s husband wasn’t an anti-American separatist). And of course, his creepy fantasy song from 1988 about how good things would be if the South had won the Civil War gave a boner to thousands of rednecks while sidestepping the fact that millions of black people wouldn’t find that scenario quite so wonderful.

And yet, and yet… if you, dear reader, are building up your country music fandom, can I just strongly recommend that you please don’t pass up this man’s stuff?  Despite the annoyance of his Monday Night Football anthem, ol’ Bocephus was once a solid country musician. Even Little Richard thinks so.

Look, love is an emotion that infects both the smart and the dumb, and it’s not necessarily the politically savvy who can sing with the most conviction about the joy of living or the pain of longing. Hank Williams, Jr. has had a lot to long for–a dead famous father, an accident that left him scarred and forced to wear his trademark beard, hat, and sunglasses at all times, and he must be upset that all his “rowdy friends” in country music are actually liberal pinkos who love prisoners, government programs, and true American freedoms, i.e. Merle Haggard, Willie Nelson, the late Johnny Cash, you name it. While I agree with folks like Amanda Marcotte at Pandagon that rich millionaires who pretend to be down-home are scum, I disagree that Hank Jr’s wealth alone makes him inauthentic. Whatever his crimes against human decency, it hasn’t prevented the man from occasionally making BLISTERING country that can pull at your fucking heartstrings:

Even a song like “Dinosaur,” which has a mean anti-gay streak, also paints a picture of a time that to me is fascinating–blue collar workers being shoved out of their own clubs by corporate disco. Despite how I might feel about disco (Giorgio Moroder is my boy, and I love muted hi-hats), this character sure hates it, and you can feel the pain of this dude who just wants to go drink whiskey and listen to some old “country and rhythm and blues” but is being force-fed this alienating music that has no place at his saloon. Do I have to agree with his politics or even his mores to feel this character’s pathos?

I guess what I’m saying is, I acknowledge that Hank is far from perfect, but sometimes I’d rather cry with the sinners than laugh with the saints. When I listen to Hank Williams, Jr., I’m going to focus on the young man he once was, the poor little boy whose mother made him dress like his dead father, the figure he had to struggle to overcome. And when I listen to the modern Hank Williams, Jr. (and remember, he’s like a senile senior now) opine about politics, I’m going to pretend I’m watching C.S. Lewis, Jr:

-Dan Collins

Download: Busdriver “Me-Time (With The Pulmonary Palimpsets)”

(from Jhelli Beam out now on Anti-)

We met up with Busdriver at a coffee shop in Silverlake to discuss the future, the present, and the bits of past that stick around like gum on the bottom of your shoes. His newest Jhelli Beam is out now on Anti-. This interview by Daiana Feuer.

I can’t really kick it in this neighborhood anymore.
In this airport?
In this airport. In this neighborhood. I don’t know. I can’t.
Why can’t you? You get so sensitive.
I’m sensitive?
A little bit.
Probably am. Strike that up as my primary weakness.
What’s new?
I’m weathering the storm. The electrical storm. Meaning, the live form in which music happens. Trying to reform my little show for a tour in the Fall around the U.S.A. Wisconsin. Seattle. Omaha. All the hot spots.
How are you changing the live show?
Just a couple of things. Nothing dramatic.
You’re the dramatic one?
I’m not the dramatic one. What’s dramatic are the songs and the…actually there’s nothing dra-matic about it. It’s all quite tame at the end of the day. Hopefully the live presentation makes it seem other than that. When you’re removed from the receiving end of the music and you add the place where the genesis of the music comes from, it’s a bunch of very practical elements. This has to go here because this means there, and then, ok! When we’re building the show and sound banks and cutting things, we’re pretty conservative.
We is you and Anti MC?
Me and Anti MC and God knows who else. Aside from that, I’m executive producing a rap record for my friends Thirsty Fish. They’re from my open mic—Project Blowed. Three guys, three rapping machines. They will be on Mush. I’m the spewer of cosmic advice. I’m with them every step of the way. I really want to do more stuff like this. To corral and harness other people’s output is strangely satisfying.
How do you feel about Jhelli Beam?
Here’s my purpose of the record. I wanted to reinforce the interest of a base of people who enjoyed my earlier records. That’s probably the last record I am going to make like that. I believe that maybe a lot of my records are anachronistic in that they reference techniques and a time and set of values that are long gone. They had their place in the ‘90s. I don’t think it’s bad, but sometimes I’m really indulgent. There’s a different emphasis that the next records are going to have. The way that I rap and write, it can be interpreted as clusterfuck of wacky ideas and maddening technique and pseudo song writing and that’s fine. But I want to pare it down.
Less syllables?
Rapping less? A variety of things may play into it. I have a whole collection of songs I record that don’t play into the Busdriver records that come out. I want to meet some middle ground. It’s really stressful to make records like Jhelli Beam. I don’t want something easier. I want something genuine in other facets of myself. I don’t want these beat to death ideas I had when I was 14. That’s what Jhelli Beam is. It’s me being 14 and saying, ‘What if I could rap this way?’ And then rapping this way. I need to press the refresh button.
Are you going to make a pop song?
No, that’s the default mode for rap and indie acts. ‘Fuck this shit, I’m making pop records!’ And people are blowing up and making money. I’m already knee deep in the next shit and I haven’t really made pop songs, but I’ve made some kind of songs. I’m having fun. I’m fortunate enough that no one ever pressures me to go a certain way. Not my label. Not my grandmother. I don’t regard my posse’s input as much as I used to. I’ve gotten to the point where I can trust my instincts. I want to indulge that. That’s all that I have. I’m trying to come to terms with being a professional, an auteur, a man of the arts. I have to do things that I think make sense. Too much advice gets factored into rap music. When I read a lot of interviews with rappers, there’s so much emphasis on their careerist aspirations. ‘Hey, man, you feel like you being shorted by the industry?’—‘Yeah! I’m not blowing up! Yada, yada…’ Is that all people think about? Is that all people who ascribe to black culture think about? I don’t think so. This will land where it may, but we’ll keep going. L.A. has changed. There’s other kinds of things to do. The next Michael Jackson could be an architect or a neurosurgeon. The king of pop popularizing neurosurgery. I think I read somewhere that our president is the king of pop. Which he is.
Is that a positive?
Is it? It has sway over millions of people. I’m sure it is positive.
Is there a parallel between the sway of politics and the sway of music over people’s existence?
You can’t deny a cult of personality. You can’t deny a populist slant on good ideas or revisited ideas and I think if you’re a rapper or a politician, there are similar regions you have to thrive in and personal traits you have to exaggerate. Everyone in politics has to have some kind of—aside from good ideas on policy—some personal investment in things. It’s kind of the same with rap music. There aren’t too many rappers out there devoid of personality. Which makes it seem a bit like a minstrel show.
Menstrual?
Minstrel. I actually did say menstrual because of my lisp. But people kind of dance around…
Bleeding all over themselves? Babies coming out of a woman! A sea of red and a killer dance beat.
[He flips through newspaper on the table]
You like that Cirque De Soleil stuff?
Actually I just performed with a circus dance company. They booked me and were dancing all freaky behind us. Contortionists and stripper clowns gyrating. I saw a stripper construct a portable stripper pole right there during sound check.
What do you make of the cross between strippers and clowns and burlesque? It seems somewhat popular.
Burlesque is one thing, but stripper clowns—that’s strippers as clowns, wearing things with the boobies out—that’s kind of different from burlesque. It’s a seedy underbelly of depraved yet very entertaining individuals.
What kind of entertainment do you like?
I like puppies and gumdrops.
How can you have a new puppy and go on tour?
That’s why I have gumdrops.
The puppy eats the gumdrop while you’re away?
The gumdrop eats the puppy. Then when I want the puppy again, the gumdrop regurgitates the puppy.
You like games?
I played Scrabble the other day for the first time. It was fun. I recommend. I don’t like cards.
You ever gamble?
With my life, but that’s about all.
What’s the most daring thing you’ve ever done?
Driving through Montana at 3 in the morning on a snowy night. That was daring. Daedelus was there. I was driving and it was getting slippery. He was playing a game—he’s got various ways of entertaining himself while the down time is being lived through—and he was looking at me and I was looking at him like really intense. He was like [concerned], ‘Are you ok?’ And I said [tense], ‘It’s fine! Just…a little slippery!’ That’s how I get down. That’s a good fun evening to me.
How about the guys you work with—Daedelus, Deerhoof. How does that fit into the Busdriver schema? Is this part of your evolution?
I don’t know if I am evolving. I think I should devolve a bit and set a different trajectory. I like these people. I’m always hungry to spend time and work with Deerhoof. I thought we were plotting a course at some point but we got sidetracked. I want to incorporate more people. I don’t want to get bored or complacent. I want to do things in real time rather than rehashing my old ideas.
There’s not too many other people doing your idea.
I think there’s a reason for that!
What age would you like to go back to?
There’s so many problems at every step. Which set of problems would I prefer over my current bevy of problems? When I was 21, I liked my problems. I didn’t like being 21 but I liked my problems. Hustling, that was problem. Hustling CDs on the street and writing rap songs and raising a newborn baby. Ooh, boy. It was a tough period. My daughter’s about to be 11 next week. She’s a big Jonas Brothers fan and I make fun of her at every twist and turn. I like now, though. I don’t think back, like, ‘I’m old, I need things!’
What is necessary? How do you deal with that?
I perpetuate disorganization. I throw it out into the world and it comes back 10-fold. I haven’t filed my taxes properly. I don’t know what I’m doing. I’ve got parking tickets from god knows when and where. I have no plan. By the seat of my pants. It works out somehow. I mainly do things out of fear. I make records out of fear.
Fear of what?
Exactly. Fear of what? What the fuck am I afraid of? Myself? Expectations? Lack of expectations? The ability to tour. What people think. Anything. I’m afraid of everything. Try to keep things on an even keel.
Is there fear in performing?
Riddled with fear. Not stage fright but I’m like, ‘I got to blow up! It’s not going well! Do something! Hit a button!’
Have you ever tripped over a mic cord?
Once I fell through a hole in a stage. It was years ago in San Jose. I’m walking off like, yeah, I’m badass, and then hoooo! But no one even saw it or acknowledged and I crawled out and I wasn’t even sure that it really happened. It was a complete hole. I disappeared.
What’s something to laugh at that’s humiliating when it happens to others? Like when they walk into a sliding glass door?
That’s a good one. I like when really confident or attractive looking people fall or trip or get knocked down. That never gets old. That’s what you get! But, what do I do for fun? That’s a good question. I used to go to museums. My daughter doesn’t like museums anymore. I took her to a David Hockney exhibit and she was like, ‘Why is that guy naked? What’s that man’s butt doing?’ I was like, ‘It’s expression. It’s something good? There’s something important in this painting…’
She’s not an L.A. kid that likes art galleries?
Some of her friends are. She’s definitely a child of now. She makes web pages and edits film and writes scripts. So she is kind of an L.A. kid but she’s more goofy. She does impressions and accents. We’ll be talking and she does this Indian accent. I don’t know where she gets it from. But she’s got a prolific mind on top of her for a child.
What’s she think of your albums?
She makes fun of me. ‘Sun showers, beebadeedee, bee ba dee dee…’ I’m like [weak], ‘Shut up?’ It’s all good. She my homie. I’ve been acting very fatherly the last year. Like, ‘Don’t do that thing!’ A lot of finger wagging. I need to ease up on that. More tail wagging. Like, ‘Good job!’ She loves clowning me. That’s her thing.
Has being a dad made you better? Is it a playground in which you can learn about yourself?
Having a child has almost nothing to do with self. It’s not self-fulfilling. It’s fulfilling but it’s not a place where you reassess yourself so much. It’s not like, ‘Oh man, this is so good for my insides! My soul is re-energized via this little exchange.’
Where do you get your clothes? I appreciate your colors.
The Salvation Army. Really? My daughter gets the new clothes. I get the recycled shit. I do like bright colors. I don’t like dark colors. That’s from the ‘90s when Grand Puba came out and he dressed a certain way. We all used to wear Eddie Bauer stuff. All colored shirts and stripes. I don’t necessarily dress like that now but it’s similar to that. But the child. The immediate reward of having a kid is that you become more compassionate, more patient, more sensitive to people’s needs, more cognizant of the underpinnings of people’s personalities, and what kind of upbringing gives way to how people become. How a country’s regional culture melds into people, how it becomes people or how people reject it. Children in France and Norway have different priorities and different levels of xenophobia, different footwear. It’s good to know what that is. Then you understand people more. Or you can act like you understand people more. Kids are fascinating. Kids in the U.S. have so many advantages. It’s bizarre. On one side the educational system in L.A. is kinda bad. My daughter’s about to go into a magnet middle school. It’s good but what’s happening there? I’m wary of teachers when they make too many sweeping hand gestures. ‘Kids have to le-e-e-e-ea-rn to be freeee!’ And I’m like, what are the requirements for mathematics? How are you introducing algebra? ‘Freeeeee!’
My math teacher blew bubbles out of her eyes.
See, I don’t want bubbles—out of her eyes?! That’s exactly what I’m talking about, Daiana. I want regimented education. Not bubble-blowing math teachers. Actually that’s fantastic. That’s crazy.
What subject were you bad at?
Everything.
But you’re good at memorization.
Not really. I don’t memorize lyrics at the time. But if you spend hours with them.
How many times do you do a song before you perform it?
I don’t rehearse.
Then you’re good at memorization.
Ok, fine. But all those details get obscured. You become a creature of habit. I do something a couple of times, I guess I can pull it off live.
Do you think the apocalypse will happen in your lifetime?
If I lived in Iran then I would understand that the apocalypse is happening right now. If some kind of cataclysmic doomsday scenario comes out, the blow will be softened for the USA. No one will know it happened. The rest of the world will be in fucking ashes or a smoldering pile. We’ll be here drinking lattes with HD-TV channels beaming straight to our heads. I don’t know. That’s some conscious rapper disillusionment. Like, ‘Man, they’re going to control our MINDS! We’re never going to be free!’ With Britney Spears break-the-chains hand gestures. I don’t think the world is going to blow up yet. But there are worse things than the world blowing up. Such as not being able to go to school. Did you know they’re going to cut that out? So poor people can’t go to school. This is Schwarzeneger attempting to save a few bucks. If you’re poor and you’re exceptionally talented, you are staying home.
Not that I agree with that, but there are some ideas about civilization not being sustainable, which will require the dying off of a large part of the population.
‘Poor people are going to have to die for the world to keep going.’ Are you predicting a mass-scale holocaust?
Maybe little ones spread about the world.
There aren’t too many people. There’s mismanagement in how these people live. No one has gotten the clue that the paradigm shift doesn’t have to be in 10 years, it has to be now. That takes a lot to do. That’s why Obama can’t do it in his term, or two terms. He’ll probably set it in motion, kind of…there are too many groups he has to appease. He’s not going to do that shit. I don’t know if people are going to die. In the ‘60s they said it—the world’s going to end! But it didn’t. The quality of life is going to become different. Who knows? Americans spend a lot of money they don’t have.
If only the world were different. You can’t make life the way you want it to be entirely. You have to have insurance.
You don’t have to have those things.
They send you letters that say so.
I don’t have healthcare.
What do you do when you’re sick?
I hope that I don’t get sick—that’s what I do.

BUSDRIVER WITH DEERHOOF AND AVOCET ON FRI., JULY 31, AT THE ECHOPLEX, 1154 GLENDALE BLVD., ECHO PARK. 8 PM / $14 / ALL AGES. ATTHEECHO.COM. BUSDRIVER’S JHELLI BEAM IS OUT NOW ON ANTI-. VISIT BUSDRIVER AT BUSDRIVERSITE.COM OR MYSPACE.COM/BUSDRIVER.

Download: The Mekons “Dickie, Chalkie And Nobby”

(from Natural out now on Touch And Go)

The Mekons lived Leeds but dreamed Texas and Tennessee and after finding their feet in first-wave punk songs like “Where Were You,” they left the world of Rough Trade for the open range. They are working on a new album tentatively called 100 Years and singer-guitarist-activist Jon Langford speaks as he takes his dog to the vet. This interview by Chris Ziegler.

Is it true that the son of Donald Rumsfeld is a really big Mekons fan?
Jon Langford (guitar/vocals): That’s a good question. It might be true, but he has not revealed himself to us. I never got to the bottom of that but I heard he was wandering around the clubs of Chicago with a Mekons t-shirt on. Donald Rumsfeld sort of wandered around Chicago as well. He was a congressman from here so he was occasionally spotted in sushi restaurants. And I know people who actually know him and I always wonder what I would do if I actually ran into him.
Do you think you could beat him up? Mekon vs. Rumsfeld?
He’s kind of like some sort of crazy cockroach. You’d probably keep treading on him and he’d just get up and run around.
Do you think that might be an effective way for art and music to provoke social change? By specifically targeting the hearts and minds of the children of the rich and powerful?
I’d like to think something of what we’ve been singing about for the last twenty years may have rubbed off on him—he’d probably want to wrestle his dad to the ground as well, you know? But you know what? I think I know about as much about that as you do. I don’t know. Our songs were never particularly aimed at the sons of the rich and famous.
Where were they aimed?
They weren’t really aimed at anyone. They were aimed at ourselves, I think. Most of the songs we made to sort of please ourselves or to exorcise things that are in ourselves. I think a lot of the Mekons songs are quite sad, which is interesting because we’re not necessarily sad people. I think what’s good about the Mekons is that there’s always been a kind of cushion—the fact that there are a lot of people and we all kind of share the duties. There’s never been one person with the whole burden. A lot of the people in the Mekons have been through quite a lot together. I wouldn’t even say our politics are necessarily the same or our life stories are the same but there’s definitely a shared instinctive feeling about the world. Obviously, or we wouldn’t be doing this project together so long.
What is the essential sadness in the Mekons discography?
Well, we don’t come together and act sad. We come together and have a good time. But the music that comes out is often very—I don’t know, maybe gallows humor? We always try to describe the world we live in and anyone with half a brain would find it pretty difficult to write happy songs all the time.
I’ve heard that they did a neurolinguistic study of various genres of music and that country music is overwhelmingly objectively the saddest type of music they found. Do you think there’s anything to that?
Have you ever heard the music from the Bahamas? There’s some traditional vocal and solo vocal stuff that’s mostly unaccompanied that I think is the saddest thing I’ve ever heard. People who are poor and have crap lives will probably make sad music. I guess rich people who have lots of money and an easy life, they might be sad as well—but they probably don’t bother to write songs about their lives. Probably too busy spending their money.
In ‘Big Zombie,’ is the line ‘I’m just not human tonight’ a Chandler reference?
Absolutely. Yeah. It’s an L.A. song and we’ll be playing it. When we kind of started up again in the mid-’80s, we were very interested in Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. We were touring the States a lot and that was our reference for what we thought the States should be like. Dashiell Hammett was our version of San Francisco and Raymond Chandler was our version of L.A. Every time I walked into a room, I’d expect to find a body. Most of the time we didn’t.
What drew you to honky-tonks like Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge when you came to America?
When we first came to the States we got obsessed about music and it was kind of like… most of the cowboy shops we went to seemed to be full of black people, Hispanic people, Asian people and English rock bands. So it was funny—just how you can literally claim a piece of this fantasy mythical America by buying a Stetson or a pair of cowboy boots and then going back home to Leeds and strutting around in your cowboy boots. They’d ask, ‘Where did you get those?’ and I’d say, ‘Aw, I got these in Chicago,’ you know? People would come ’round my house after the pub and I’d be playing Ernest Tubb and Merle Haggard, and these were all people who thought they wanted to go listen to acid-house or something. They thought we’d lost our minds.
There’s a quote from Ernest Tubb I wanted to ask you about. People would say, ‘Aw, Ernest, you’re so flat, anyone could sing the way you can. You just got lucky.’ And he would say, ‘Well, I sing that way on purpose. I want everyone who hears this to think that they could do it. I want them to feel that I’m no different from them.’
Is that from that Peter Guralnick book? Lost Highway? There’s another great quote in there where he says he’s singing for the boys back on the farm but he says by the end of his life the farm wasn’t even there anymore. But he wanted those farm boys to be able to sing his songs. Yeah, that’s a very Mekons-type thing. When I read that, I thought, ‘There is a connection between that and punk.’ It’s been said before that there was a connection between the Mekons and country music and I thought that was ludicrous, but as I listened to that stuff and really began to love it, it became more and more interesting to me. And then to have someone articulate it like that… We always meant the Mekons to be like ‘Anyone can do it.’ Anyone can pick up the guitar. There’s a quote from Mary Harron about the Mekons that kind of sums it up: ‘Rock ‘n’ roll is probably better played by people who can’t play it very well.’ She said the Mekons were the only people to base a band solely on that fact. It was kind of a jab as well as a compliment, but I think that’s true. That really struck a chord with me—I’ve always being drawn to music that was functional rather than virtuoso. Music that kind of has to be made because there was a need to make it.
Who are you thinking of?
Well, actually I was talking to Peter Hammill of Van der Graaf Generator who came to town the other night. I got to hang out with them and I was talking to them about what they were listening to on the bus and they were telling me about Olivier Messiaen who is an avant-garde composer who wrote something called The Quartet for the End of Time while he was in a P.O.W. camp or a concentration camp. As Hammill said, that was music that had to be made. It was a quartet because that’s what he had at the camp and they thought they were going to die, so they wrote this music. I’ve been listening to it and it’s like—you’ve got something as primitive as the Mekons when we first started and then you’ve got Ernest Tubb and reggae music that was there because it was on the street with a message that people could dance to. And then you’ve got Olivier Messiaen which is like music that couldn’t be kept in. It had to come out. It wasn’t anything to do with any commercial desires or all that. It’s just music that had to exist. There’s a lot of music like that and I find that I’m just drawn to it. It was actually great talking to those guys because they’re much older than me. To be sitting on a tour bus with a bunch of old guys drinking wine and talking about things you’ve never heard of—it was really, really cool. Peter Hammill said, ‘Yeah, that’s the secret, as long as you don’t pander.’ ‘No pandering allowed!’ he was shouting. ‘That’s the trouble with all this bloody music nowadays. It’s all just fucking pandering!’ And I thought that was pretty good. That’s what the Mekons do.
Steve Wynn said that it’s better to make a record that is just one person’s favorite in the entire world than to make a record that everyone thinks is just pretty good.
I totally, totally agree with that. I think that something happened to music when the idea was that everyone would like it. I think that’s completely unnatural. When we were on A&M, they told us that 25,000 records sales wasn’t very good and we were like, ‘That’s good enough for us!’ We’d feel very uncomfortable if more than 25,000 people bought our record. That’s more people than ever go to see any of the football teams I supported! But that was a failure. There’s a hierarchy in the music industry where you have all these people floundering around not making a living who are—to me— doing what they should do and doing a good job of it. And then you have these people who managed to hit on the magic formula—finding what it is that everybody wants and it’s all backwards. They should be punished for learning that secret. Paul McCartney should be taken out and punished.
What particular punishment would be appropriate for that?
A good lashing. No, I’m only joking, I’m only joking. Again, the structure of the industry is the problem. That’s what it’s geared to—it’s just not geared to having lots of different types of music for lots of different types of people to enjoy. It doesn’t recognize the fact that people are different—that not everybody wants to listen to the sort of crap that’s on the radio everyday. It’s very hard anywhere in this country when you listen to the radio to find stuff that’s worth listening to. I don’t think that makes me weird.
You said once that ‘society dehumanizes from the top down.’ I’m wondering if that reproduces within pop culture.
Yeah—most of the stuff that I’ve written and the paintings that I’ve made about country and western music, it was kind of about using that as a microcosm for the whole society. The trend is there and you can see it so obviously in what happened to country music. I think that goes through everything. And actually that quote, that’s not me—I didn’t say that. John Peel said that. I might have been quoting him because he said that about ‘God Save the Queen’ when that record came out and everyone was up in arms and he made that quote defending the record. He said it was a pretty simple record and that the message was society dehumanizes from the top down.
I have to commend your memory for quotes.
I know where I pinch all my best stuff from. You know, Peel was a Radio One DJ and to come out with something that profound was pretty powerful. To have somebody in the BBC defending the Sex Pistols when it looked like—when that record came out, you know… they could have been hung from lampposts and the majority of people in the country would have been really pleased. It was a very scary time for a little while.
Have you seen that kind of response to anything else in music?
Ice-T’s ‘Cop Killer’ was kind of interesting as well. It brought up an interesting debate about whether he really wanted to kill a cop or talk about someone else. It brought up the debate about what you can write about. Why is a song always in the first person? People always think when you write a song that it’s you talking. I had that problem singing ‘Cocaine Blues’ which, you know, is a Johnny Cash song. Obviously I’m not someone who takes cocaine and kills people, but it’s still a great song. The history of those songs is old and ancient.
Someone once asked you if there was a light at the end of the tunnel and you said that now that you have kids, you’re going to hijack the train, turn it around and drive it back.
I just felt like a lot of people tell me to shut my mouth because I’m not from here. I’ve got that a number of times. Mostly in hate mail, especially when we were doing the anti-death penalty stuff. I really got some quite extraordinarily vicious and unpleasant stuff. But I just felt like having kids was definitely a galvanizing moment for me. It made me feel like this is when you have to get involved. I can’t just be like non-American anymore and just shrug my shoulders and go, ‘Oh yeah, they’re just all fucking crazy.’ Because I’m one of you now.
What kind of world do you want to build for your children?
We need to dismantle what was created over the last fifty years, really. The food industry for a start. It’s a fucking hideous Frankenstein that’s killing us all, you know? I really believe that. I don’t think I’m some kind of freak. I’m not some kind of hippie vegetarian. Not that there’s anything wrong with hippie vegetarians, to be honest. I was always prejudiced against people who had, like, strong views about things like that. Now it’s kind of like, ‘Fuck, things are really, seriously wrong.’
How do you avoid becoming discouraged?
I see a lot of people feel the same way. I see the election of Obama, which I thought was impossible, you know? I’m encouraged because it wasn’t just me sitting in my bedroom. Wow, that’s change. That’s real serious change. A lot of sort of naysaying cynics that I know were like, ‘Aw, it’s never going to happen in America. The only reason this happened is because he’s just the same as the other people.’ I don’t think he is, you know? I don’t think he can be. It’s got to change, you know?

THE MEKONS ON SUN., JULY 26, AT McCABE’S GUITAR SHOP, 3101 PICO BLVD., SANTA MONICA. 9:30 PM / $16 / ALL AGES. MCCABES.COM. AND ON MON., JULY 27, AT THE ECHO, 1822 SUNSET BLVD., ECHO PARK. 8:30 PM / $12-$14 / 18+. ATTHEECHO.COM. VISIT THE MEKONS AT MEKONS.DE OR MYSPACE.COM/THEMEKONS.

L.A. RECORD photographer Paul Rodriguez sends this behind-the-scenes video documenting the Bruce LaBruce photo shoot for our July 2009 issue. Read the interview here.

Bruce LaBruce is ready to leave the blood behind but not without one final splatter. A self-described “reluctant pornographer,” Bruce’s films feature as many heart-wrenchingly romantic moments as they do scenes of explicit and extreme sex. For every gut- or stump-fuck, there is a glance or a line so scathingly heartfelt I can’t help but think Bruce LaBruce’s sincerity is his most dangerous weapon. This interview by Drew Denny and video of the shoot by Paul Rodriguez here.

I just read an interview with you in Butt magazine!
Oh yeah—I’ve worked with them a lot. I photographed Ryan McGinley for the cover, and then I wrote the intro to the Butt Book, which is a big thick compilation of the first 15 issues.
I’d love to read that! But we should talk about your show—
It’s completely out of control at this point—
You still have a whole day!
It’s called Untitled Hardcore Zombie Project. It was time for me to have a solo show, and I’d been doing a lot of stuff with zombies and blood over the past—well, since 2002, I guess. I think I’m going to leave behind all the blood and gore after this, but I thought I’d go out in a big explosion. The idea was to make—as an art project—a hardcore zombie splatter porn film. Because splatter and porn—it’s been done, though I’m not sure if there’s been a gay splatter porn. This idea of intersecting the gore and splatter genre—and horror—with porn really intrigues me because of these new ‘torture porn’ movies as they call them, which aren’t really porn but they operate similarly to porn in many ways. And they’re constructed the same way in terms of these narratives which build to orgasmic moments in which people either have sex or get murdered or end up emitting large quantities of fluid. The original idea was to make an actual gay splatter porn for the opening, but we realized we wouldn’t have time to pull it off, so I decided to make it more like a work in progress, and I’m actually shooting it here in August. The star of the show is Francois Sagat, the famous porn star and model. He’s in town, and I’ve been meeting with him and he’s going to be doing a live performance tomorrow with the guy who’s doing the special effects—Joe Castro. We’re experimenting with Francois’ look so we made a prototype for canine teeth and Joe’s going to airbrush him live. I also have five or six photographs that are examples of the bloody work I’ve done over the past few years with models and in movies.
A few of your photos remind me of the Abu Ghraib images.
That was a big inspiration for a lot of people. They were such strong, horrible images. Abu Ghraib was like a horror movie come to life, and that’s what a lot of my work has been lately in terms of the horror stuff—I do these Polaroid performances in which I do an installation then make it look like it’s some sort of abduction scenario or terrorist scenario where someone’s being tortured. Especially when Al Qaeda was at it’s height in terms of visibility, you’d see these videos where they were about to decapitate someone. It was all over the news, and we got accustomed to these scenarios. So I re-enact them but in a kind of gay way. There’s always an undercurrent of homosexuality in these things—like ‘mujahadeen’ has become slang for ‘gay’ or ‘faggot’ in Iraq, and they actually had this TV show where they would find terrorists—it was like a terrorist of the week show—they’d find a terrorist and put him on TV and humiliate him. They’d call him a faggot and say he was homosexual. It’s the idea that people are so used to passively accepting these violent images, so I like to give the public a chance to participate in these kinds of set ups—like one of those violent videos. It’s very cathartic. There’s always a vibe—it surprises me—the vibe is always more therapeutic then negative.
I was definitely surprised by that—Otto is the most recent work of yours that I’ve seen, but Hustler White is still my favorite.
I just saw Tony Ward last night at Diamond Dogs—Brian Rabin’s club—and I hadn’t seen him since we toured with the film in ‘96. He looked exactly the same—he’s so beautiful.
One of the most wonderful things about Hustler White, for me, was how it blurred the line between narrative filmmaking and documentary—you used non-actors and the sex was real. Now you’re re-creating in the public world situations from the media and the war. What’s the idea behind your combination of fiction and documentary?
My films have always—even from my short experimental films that I made in the late ‘80s when I was in the punk scene—they’ve always had a documentary element to them, and I did fanzines and stuff. It was all just taking pictures of friends or Super 8 movies of friends and incorporating them into a narrative or inventing stuff that’s fictionalized. But there’s always a core concept of documenting the scene that I was in. I think I’ve kept that process. Although with Otto, it’s obviously the biggest budget that I’ve had and the most ambitious film I’ve made. I think it’s almost completely fictionalized, although I still found the actor who played Otto on Myspace, and I used Katharina who played Medea—Katharina was a friend I met in Berlin who happened to be a woman filmmaker who made a documentary about horror film. So I still base characters on people I know.
As I watched Otto, I was surprised by how different it was from your other work—until the love scene. When Otto’s remembering his lover, he says he smelled of chlorine then you cut to that shot of them falling into the pool. You do love really well! That moment recalled the sincerity and realism I appreciated in your earlier work.
I always throw in the romance, especially when dealing with a lot of extreme subject matter. Like in Hustler White there’s a lot of sexual torture—or sexual fetish and amputee sex and that kind of stuff. First of all, I think that stuff is really corny if you’re too serious about it. Secondly, I think it’s important for people to know that there are real people with normal emotions participating in a lot of these extreme sexual fetishes all the time—so they’re just really average people. Thirdly, it’s just an unexpected representation. You don’t expect to see these kinds of people in a romantic way or with romantic impulses. In Otto, part of the whole point was a reaction to this new wave of torture porn which is so brutal and non-romantic and really cynical.
I appreciate that you take what is considered ‘subversive’ or ‘extreme’—people and behaviors that are either not represented at all or are exploited to create spectacle—and depict it casually, with a certain amount of respect and even grace. Hustler White exemplifies that sort of representation for me, which is impressive because at that time in the ‘90s, there were all those filmmakers—like Tarantino and his ‘gimp’—exploiting such people and behaviors, using them as a gimmick—
Unfortunately at that time, Tarantino represented the zeitgeist—it happened some time in the ‘90s—where it became a politically incorrect posture… this kind of irony through which you could be misogynistic or you could be homophobic but you were laughing—like it’s an inside joke—but you still do it. You get away with it. It’s still nasty. Those things became acceptable again in a weird way. That’s why I think being sincere almost became politically incorrect. My films—despite the extreme subject matter—there’s always a sincerity behind them.
That’s what shocks people.
A lot of people don’t get it. They think, ‘Oh, he made a movie where one guy fucks the other guy in a hole in his stomach, so he can’t possibly have any kind of romantic ideas.’ Actually, the gut-fucking scene is in a film within the film—which is very romantic. It’s about these two rebel zombies who are on a crusade together, and they’re boyfriends. It’s very romantic.
You mentioned your involvement with the punk scene in the late ‘80s—I’ve always really enjoyed your soundtracks, and I was wondering what your relationship is with these musicians. How do you curate your soundtracks?
For the early ones, I either used music by people I knew, or I would use obscure soundtrack music from the ‘60s and ‘70s and mix it up with really obscure punk music. For my first couple of films, I don’t have a lot of music clearances which is why they’re so hard to get a hold of—people are really reluctant to release them. I’ve done that with all my films. My last two—Raspberry Reich and Otto—I got a lot of music through people I know or friends of friends. With Otto in particular—that was sort of at the height of the popularity of Myspace—I sent out word that I was looking for music for a melancholy gay zombie movie, and I got flooded with so many people saying they’d donate the music for free just in exchange for credit. I ended up with 23 hours of material, and I tried to use as much as I could. We ended up using 55 tracks by 27 different artists. Most of it was for free. I got Antony and the Johnsons and Cocorosie because of my friend Kembra Pfahler who has a cameo in the film—
Who does she play?
She’s in the dance scene. In the DVD extras, there’s a short film of Medea’s that got cut out of the film—it’s called Messy in the Afternoon… it’s a take off Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon, and Kembra features very prominently in that.
You mentioned Raspberry Reich, and I’d like to talk about that—it seems to be your most overtly political film. I’ve read a few interviews in which you discuss how subversive political movements become co-opted by capitalist society then turned into empty signifiers which can be filled by whatever content the market provides—Che Guevara t-shirts and the like.
That certainly came back to bite us in the ass because we got sued by the estate of Korda, the photographer who shot the famous image of Che Guevara—
Everybody else uses that image!
I know! Korda was Che’s personal photographer for ten years. He sued us for a million dollars Canadian for using the image without permission. It was a long protracted thing—we had to go to court, and the suit was launched in France. We had a lawyer in France to deal with it. We ended up having the damages reduced to eight or ten thousand but we had to pay court costs. Technically, we’re not even supposed to show the film anymore. We basically lost. But my American distributor wasn’t named in the suit so I think we’re still distributing it here. The European version had the image right on the box. But they definitely watched the whole thing. The subpoena was fifty pages long—they thought the film defiled the image. There’s so much irony involved because the film is anti-capitalist. It’s about the way capitalism exploits not only Che Guevara but radicalism and terrorism and the Baader-Meinhof Gang. You can read about it—I just posted an article I wrote about it for Black Book. That’s what the film is about—the commodification of radical imagery and the way it’s made fashionable. It’s also about left-wing idealism—how it can turn into dogmatism, and it can also quickly switch into becoming the very thing to which it stands opposed. These left-wing radical groups like the Baader-Meinhof gang start out with lofty ideals about improving the world and equality and class and fighting corporate control, but then they become completely ethically and morally bankrupt when they start killing people. Of course it’s more complicated than that because they consider themselves at war, and the rules of war are different from normal law. But one of the themes that runs through my films is the idea of the oppressed becoming the oppressor and about not practicing what you preach. When I went to university and graduate school, I had a lot of professors who spouted a lot of extreme anti-patriarchal and anti-capitalist rhetoric yet they were in monogamous marriages—
Working in institutions—
And living in nice houses!
What did you study?
I was a film undergrad and then I got an MFA in basically film theory and social and political theory.
I wanted to ask you who you’re reading—in terms of philosophy—because your dialogue and those t-shirts from Raspberry Reich—
Put your Marxism where your mouth is! For Raspberry Reich, I went through all my old notes from university. I steal a lot from Marcuse, and I was always into the Frankfurt School. In Raspberry Reich I also steal from Raoul Vaneigem’s The Revolution of Everyday Life and the Situationists. I’m much more into that practical enterprise of dealing with realpolitik rather than the French Post-Structuralists—
I’m reading Deleuze now—
I should’ve read more of that actually. I took a course called Psychoanalysis in Feminism, and I had to read all of Lacan translated into English—that was what almost killed me.
Let’s get back to your show—if I’m picturing the image right, there’s a flag in the background of one of the photos. Since 9-11, there’s been a void in art that uses that kind of imagery for critical purposes—
Raspberry Reich was a response to what happened to the left in America after 9-11 because the left was silenced. Castrated really. It was amazing—even now people are so quick to call someone a socialist or a communist —like Obama—that’s why in Raspberry Reich people are constantly spouting leftist rhetoric, and the text is flashing across the screen. I wanted to bombard the audience with that imagery and ideology. In terms of the flag, that was from a performance piece that I did in London a few weeks ago—Ron Athey and Lee Adams curated a performance spectacle called ‘Visions of Excess.’ They curated a bunch of international performance artists and it was in the Shunt Vaults under the London Bridge—it’s like a dungeon. It’s a huge space. My piece was an IRA zombie concept—it’s the Irish flag and the British flag. An IRA zombie being tortured by British zombies—you know, the IRA coming back from the dead. It was also this idea of the war going on in Northern Ireland. It seems to have gone away but there were a couple incidents when it was coming back. The idea that war and violence become fetishized not only by the media but by the participants and the whole military aspect becoming very aesthetic and sexy—even for the participants—so there is a certain romance to it as well. There were a couple people who were shocked because it was so directly political. He’s standing in front of the Irish flag. A zombie. Covered in blood. Licking his gun. Also, he’s got a hard-on. So it’s basically terrorist porn!
When you discuss the politics of your films, how much do you concern yourself with gender politics and the politics of sexuality—the decision to work almost exclusively with male homosexuals, for example?
After my first feature—I had been politically correct in terms of my representation of sexuality. It’s partly because of my academic training. I had a couple friends who de-programmed me. They said, ‘You’re policing your imagery. It’s politically correct.’ So I started trying to deal with gender in a much looser way—in Super 8 1/2, Richard Kern, the famous photographer, was in a wig with a strap-on dildo fucking a woman—which was kind of an inside joke because people consider him misogynist. So it was kind of a mind fuck. With Hustler White, we decided to have not a single woman in the movie—partly as an expressionistic thing wherein this fantasy world of johns and hustlers, they are living in this utopian world where they don’t have to deal with women. Then I often have lesbian characters like in Super 8 1/2 and in Otto. I haven’t done as much with the transgendered as I would like. I did a photo series with a pre-op transsexual in Toronto named Nina Arsenault. I don’t know if you’ve seen the photos, but they’re quite extreme because she actually allowed me to photograph her penis which had never been photographed before. She just had one of her breast implants taken out because there was a problem, so there was a scar and just one big breast—and she was covered in blood and carrying a gun. So it was a take on gender terrorism. I’m totally into that. In terms of politics and the gay thing, I always try to carry on that tradition of the gay avant-garde which is going back to Warhol and Morrissey, Kenneth Anger, Jack Smith, Curt McDowell, and John Waters—because I think it’s necessary and I think it’s what sets homosexuals apart—that kind of experimentation and celebration of difference. In terms of more straightforward politics, my husband is Cuban. He grew up in Cuba and didn’t leave until he was in his early 30s—so he makes fun of me for my political posturing. I’m kind of a Marxist sympathizer, and I’m anti-capitalist and anti-corporate which came from my punk training… I did grow up below the poverty line on a small farm, but compared to what was going on in Cuba or in a third world country, I was living an incredibly privileged life. He’s lived the revolution and seen how the revolution went sour, so he’s a good reality check for me.
How long have you two been together?
We’ve been together for four years, married for two years.
Considering the work that you do, isn’t it difficult to be married?
It’s not a monogamous relationship—it’s an open relationship.
Oh, much better—I was shocked!
I’m not into the institution of marriage but he’s Cuban, and I’ve sponsored him for citizenship—so it was done for those reasons. Strangely, it actually made our relationship stronger. But I never would have done it without the immigration angle.
A friend of mine shot porn for a while and says it ruined her sex life—does it affect your sex life?
I make it so rarely. I’m more like an artist who works in porn. I’ve really only made two movies for actual porn companies. Most of my films do have sexually explicit content but I certainly don’t work in the industry so it’s not-—like I know people, friends who are porn stars and directors, who make forty to fifty films a year so they’re constantly saturated with it. It’s like a fatigue—sexual fatigue. Also, it’s not glamorous shooting porn. That’s what I gathered when I made my first industry porn which is Skin Gang. It’s not glamorous—it’s very contrived. The guys are certainly hot and sexy, but they are professionals and they’re doing their job. They take their Viagra, and they have to insert the cock when they’re told to and have to hold it there and keep it hard and turn cheek towards the camera and hold in an awkward position for a long period of time. And then they’ll have anal leakage and someone has to come wipe it up. So it’s not that sexy to shoot—to make. The whole idea is to present this illusion of this seamless fantasy of sexual perfection that climaxes in a fountain of ejaculation. We all know that real sex doesn’t often happen that way.
Does that label bother you—’pornographer’? Hustler White, for me, is an art film in which the sex is real rather than simulated.
Right, but then I did actually make films for porn companies. Skin Gang was nominated for nine Gay Adult Video Awards. Also I wrote a memoir in the late ‘90s called The Reluctant Pornographer. But, yeah, I was just talking to somebody about that the other day. There is a glass ceiling for pornographers. There’s a lot of hypocrisy where people kind of look down—even if they are an avid consumer of porn—when they meet someone who works in porn. I was out with a porn star last night, and he was saying how tired he is of people coming up to him and asking him how big his cock is and taking these kinds of liberties. I experienced that after I made my first two films, and I was having sex in the film. There’s a certain line that you cross which I call the ‘corn-hole line’—once you’ve been penetrated, people look at you differently. They assume you’re immoral, amoral or unethical. I always say—you actually need a very strong moral compass to navigate the porn world because there’s a lot of exploitation that does go on, and there are a lot of damaged people and sexually abused people. So you have to be careful not to be exploitative and to be really responsible for what you’re doing.
Considering the amount of exploitation involved in mainstream filmmaking, this all seems very hypocritical.
The hypocrisy of it is really sad. That’s why I’m making this hardcore splatter zombie movie. The hypocrisy that you can show the most disgusting, over-the-top, gory torture—women being tortured and mutilated—and yet you can’t show two people having sex? If an alien came down from another planet and saw that phenomenon, they would be so disgusted.
Violence—OK. Naked people—not OK?
Right.
I’ve heard you say you incorporate all types of sex in order to depict all types of fantasies that real people have—is there a limit to what you’ll represent?
For one thing, I think porn in general is—it’s the collective unconscious. It allows people to work out their most extreme and most politically incorrect fantasies, which is what I really explored in Skin Flick—which was racially based fantasies of domination and submission and rape. It was kind of a heavy movie. I had a lot of gay black guys contact me on the internet—even though there’s a black man raped by white power skin heads—who were totally turned on by that scene. Then in Hustler White, the white character is gang banged by the black gang. I think anything is fair game. That’s what the function of art should be—to explore those kinds of things. In terms of where else there is to go? Well, I’m not really talking about my next film. I’m working on the script for a larger movie—the title is Gerontophilia—so you can draw your own conclusions.

BRUCE LA BRUCE’S UNTITLED HARDCORE ZOMBIE PROJECT THROUGH SAT., JUNE 27 AT PERES PROJECTS, 2766 S. LA CIENEGA BLVD., CULVER CITY. PERESPROJECTS.COM. VISIT BRUCE LA BRUCE AT BRUCELABRUCE.COM.

Stream: The Crystal Method “Drown In The Now” (Single Edit)

(from Divided By Night out now on INGROOVES)

Durable (and durably dynamic) mainstays of the L.A. party underground, the Crystal Method shot to international stardom in 1997 with Vegas. Dance music and electronica produce a great many ephemeral acts, but Crystal Method’s debut (now platinum and suitably special-editioned last year) placed Ken Jordan and Scott Kirkland at a seemingly permanent place at the pinnacle of both genres. Divided by Night is the duo’s first studio album in five years, with scads of guest stars doing cameo appearances within CM’s characteristic dancefloor action adventure sound as it wanders down various dark sonic alleys. The Crystal Method is set to appear at the Electric Daisy Carnival the seriously-tweeky weekend of June 26th and 27th. Meanwhile, Ken Jordan here speaks to Ron Garmon about the real enemy of party people everywhere.

Crystal Method albums tend to have themes, so what’s the premise for Divided by Night?
Ken Jordan: This album is a lot more song oriented—also there’s a lot more singers on it. We’re not generally a lyric-driven band, so the themes are generally carried by the sound.
Which this time out is quite gritty, which is certainly the state of the L.A. underground. Is the dance-dance utopia over?
There’s like an ebb-and-flow going in America and L.A. I think even back in the late 1990s we always knew the scene would return underground after a while and so it has. All over the rest of the world, DJ culture is thriving and we’ve got the Electric Daisy Carnival coming up in L.A., which is gonna be huge. Last year we were there, it was like 70,000 people. There’s little or no crossover action with the mainstream, but DJ culture is still huge, so it’s kinda hard to figure. We don’t consciously try to take the temperature.
I get a lot of warehouse party vibe off this one, like a giant sound compressed into a small space until it detonates.
This one is a little more of a four-on-the-floor—much more than we usually do. It’s more varied and wide-ranging as well.
Any thoughts on the startling survival and mutative capacity of the L.A. underground?
There are a lot of good things still being staged at the Avalon and the Vanguard and elsewhere, but here and other big cities with the pop mash-up sound and the scene—that’s all bottle service and how much you pay. It grew up in nightclubs that had had cool DJs and cool music and the guy who could afford the bottle service couldn’t get in.
Tracks like ‘Dirty Thirty’ and ‘Smile’ are like long trawls through the L.A. nigh— big action-adventure soundtrack grooves with lots of dramatic proggy touches Peter Hook‘s bass gives those tracks a nice horror-movie feel that’s very much sums things up right now.
Oh, yes. His playing is so identifiable it really takes off. All of a sudden, you hear Joy Division and New Order. We didn’t actually work in our studio with all of our collaborators, but with Peter we did. He came by and spent all day working on those two tracks, with all his stories. He’s quite funny.
‘Drown in the Now’ does the big noise/small room trick I mentioned. How did Matisyahu get involved?
Last year we met him at the Pemberton Festival in Canada. We were closing out one of the dance tent on the last night. Earlier in the day, his road manager came around and asked if he could appear with us. He did this kind of singing-rapping thing over ‘High Roller’ off our first album and it was really really something, so we stayed in touch. We do always collaborate on our albums and sometimes the collaborations don’t always work out and never see the light of day, this time they all did.
Tell us about the Method’s new studio digs in NoHo. For years you recorded in the Bomb Shelter in Glendale.
For thirteen years. It was really getting nasty toward the end. We built it by ourselves in a two-car garage. It was just a disaster toward the end. I dreaded going to work every day. Maybe that’s why we have collaborators now!
I last saw you guys at the Obama Art of Change Inauguration party at the Mayan with the Mutaytor.
That came about at the last minute. We put up that free download of ‘Now’s the Time’ where we used Obama samples. It was kind of a nonpartisan incentive to get out the vote, even though we were very much pro-Obama. We got Shepard Fairey to make another version of his famous Obama image, only with the word ‘Now’ instead of ‘Hope.’ My girlfriend, who has this nonprofit, had some other friends who were throwing the event and asked us to play.
You guys sit at the pinnacle of the clubland scene here in Los Angeles. Is there any message you wanna drop from the balcony the dance-dance proletariat?
Yes. Music is not the enemy.
The L.A. County Fire Marshal might beg to differ on that. Who is the enemy?
Bottle service is the enemy.

THE CRYSTAL METHOD WITH PAUL VAN DYK, THIEVERY CORPORATION, PAUL OAKENFOLD, DAEDELUS, MARK FARINA AND MANY MORE ON FRI., JUNE 26, AND SAT., JUNE 27, AT THE ELECTRIC DAISY CARNIVAL AT THE L.A. MEMORIAL COLISEUM AND EXPOSITION PARK, 3939 S. FIGUEROA ST., LOS ANGELES. FRI. 4 PM – 2 AM / SAT. 4 PM – 4 AM / $55-$200 / ALL AGES. THE CRYSTAL METHOD PLAYS SAT., JUNE 27. MORE INFORMATION AND COMPLETE LINE-UP AT ELECTRICDAISYCARNIVAL.COM.

Download: Ya Ho Wha 13 “Treat You So Right”

(from Magnificence in the Memory out June 23 on Drag City)

Ya Ho Wha 13 were the band formed out of the pre-dawn practice sessions that served also as morning meditation for the Source Family, the L.A.-area religious sect that ran their own health food restaurant during the ‘70s. They released nine albums but recorded hours of material. Drag City has collected nine unreleased songs for this month’s Magnificence in the Memory. This interview by Dan Collins.

How did you get your name, Isis?
Isis Aquarian (Source Family historian): It was the family name given to me. Father said that the names we were given were for several reasons—either because that’s the name that we needed to learn from, or that’s the name of who we were, or that’s the name we needed to get qualities from. In other words, whatever name we had, nobody could go on an ego trip about because you never knew why you had that name.
You never had an ego trip about being named after an Egyptian goddess?
No, not really! I always related to her, though. Manly P. Hall from the Philosophical Research Society—who did Secret Teachings of All Ages—was a mentor to Father when he was Jim Baker, before he became Father and started the Source. And we had gone over to see Manly P. Hall in the early days, and he handed Father a list of names, and he said ‘These names are the names to give the people in the Family.’ And we went back and people either picked what name they liked, or Father gave them a name. And somebody gave me the name Isis, and I didn’t relate to it. I said, ‘No, I’m not going to take that name!’ And Father was standing there and he said, ‘No, that’s your name.’
What was your original role in the Family and in the Source?
I had known Father as Jim Baker, when he had his other restaurant called the Old World. He had three restaurants—the Aware Inn, the Old World, and he opened up the Source. And they were all within, I would say, four or five blocks of each other on Sunset Boulevard. And they were all very famous. And he had his first two as Jim Baker. I met him, he had the Old World, and he was living with his wife of the time, Dora, a French girl. And I became friends with Dora, and I hung out at the Old World. And I knew Jim, but we never seemed to really connect, which was very strange, because he was very good looking, and he was the kind that would flirt with everybody. But there just seemed to be a hold on us at the time. But then I went my way, and he went his way, and I ended up living with Ron Raffaelli. He was a famous rock photographer—he was known as Jimi Hendrix’s photographer. That’s how I met him. I was asked to go on a shoot with Jimi Hendrix, and we became engaged. And I had my life at the studio with him for a couple years. And I had heard that Jim had opened up the Source, and was being known as Father, and was starting a spiritual family. We were looking for a group of people with long hair that looked like Jesus, because we were doing a poster for Jesus Christ Superstar. And I said to Ron, ‘I know where there’s a bunch of people running around looking like Jesus. They’re at this place called the Source! I’m going to go down there—I’ll get us some models.’ So I drove down to the Source, and oh my god, the place was incredible. As soon as you stepped near it, you knew something was happening. And I stepped onto the patio, and I asked for Jim Baker and somebody said ‘Oh, you mean Father.’ And he came walking out, and he was like 6’3’, and he looked like Moses. He had long hair and a beard, and he was no longer the Jim Baker I knew. And I was immediately smitten, as they say, and he just embraced me and said ‘I was wondering how long it was going to take you to come home—to come back.’ And I basically forgot what I was even doing there. And he invited me to come to morning meditation the next day, and then I basically never left. So I just walked out of my home life and became a full time part of the Source family.
How old were you?
I was in my late twenties. A lot of the kids were sixteen, seventeen, and in their early twenties. I’m not saying I was the oldest one there, but I had also known Jim Baker so I wasn’t intimidated by him. Most people were finding their guru and their masters, and I found him as my earthly spiritual father, for sure. But I knew that I had a destiny with him. I basically became his right hand—that’s what he called me. The Family had other names for me. ‘Bulldog’—you know there’s a bulldog in every family. And ‘hatchet lady,’ ‘dragon lady’…
Did you like those nicknames?
It didn’t bother me, no. In fact, ‘Dragon Lady’ was kind of endearing! You had your role, and you played it out, and Father always had my back.
When did the band Ya Ho Wa 13 start?
We had musicians in the Family that would always gather and play. We weren’t doing anything ‘musically,’ but we did realize we had some very talented musicians. Music seemed to be playing all around the house. And that was the thing to do back then. Everybody carried a guitar. It was like music was the new language. And one day I think Octavius came in and was talking about being a drummer, and a lot of people had been musicians, and just gave it up when they came in—whatever any of us were, we gave up when we came in. It was of no necessity at that point. And I just remember Father one day saying, ‘Wait a minute. I have a drummer. I have a guitar player. I have a bass player. We have singers. We have a band. Let’s do some music!’ So, bands started being formed to see what we wanted to do with them. And at this point, Father wasn’t really in them—he was just having fun seeing what we could do. And because we were very famous, and everybody came to the Source, all the movie producers, directors, musicians—John Lennon was there all the time—they all came there. So we figured, ‘Well jeez, we can just start letting people hear it and see if we can do something with it.’
I heard you would play every day from 3 to 6 in the morning! When did you sleep?
Right! That was when we gathered for morning meditation. Father would be so full of energy and so excited, and he would say, ‘Let’s go to the band room!’ And the band room was just a converted garage off the meditation room, and speakers had been hooked up, so no matter what was happening, we could all hear it. Because we all couldn’t fit in the band room.
A lot of your movement’s spiritual beginnings and influences have been chronicled. But what seem less well known are the specifics of the musical side of things.
He formed Ya Ho Wa 13 and started playing with it, and that was like his signature when he started playing with the Family. It’s not like he could play or sing. It was another way of morning meditation. It was another way of his talking about the wisdom teachings. He often said, ‘Long after I’m gone, my teachings will continue because of the music we’re doing now. Music has no barriers. Everyone understands music because it’s a soul thing.’
One of the interesting things about your band is that, given your spiritual and cosmological underpinnings and your emphasis on improvisation and spontaneity, I was expecting you to sound like Sun Ra or something jazzy. But you guys are a rock ‘n’ roll combo.
Very much so. When the band first now started getting back together, I was wondering how it was going to work. Because when you have the head guy no longer there, how does that work? And I know the public’s been going on the albums that had Father in it, like Penetration. So when the three Brothers got together and decided to continue playing as Ya Ho Wa 13, it was interesting to see how that was going to play out: Octavius, drummer, Djin, guitar, and Sunflower, bass.
Was there ever fighting about the music?
There were disagreements, but we never got into bickering or arguing. The short time we lived together was so incredible because we lived in a space and time out of this reality. Certain things didn’t exist that exist for us now that we’re back. We lived in a kind of free zone where certain rules and regulations didn’t exist. We related to people’s souls, not their personalities. When the Family dispersed—and now we’re trying to deal with each other again thirty years later—we’re just starting to relearn those techniques. In 2001, we had our first big reunion, and the last ten years we’ve just been dealing on a social level with each other and trying to be nice. A lot of stuff has come up that we never got to work on, because we all just left. It was like The Day the Earth Stood Still. We looked around and nobody was there.
I remember reading that the Beatles were a big influence on the band.
I think definitely because that’s what the band grew up with. The Beatles were very cosmic. They had stepped over into spirituality, and they were given incredible messages.
Were there specific Beatles songs that you wanted to emulate?
No, once the Family was formed we didn’t listen to other people’s music.
You never stepped into a discotheque or club and heard another band?
The only time that happened was in the early days when we did try stuff like that. We got booked at the Whisky a Go Go, and we walked into the Whisky a Go Go in our robes and our long hair—and we did get laughed at! But when they got up on the stage, everybody was quiet because they could sing. They had some good music happening.
But you must have noticed that at the same time you were making this music, bands such as Pink Floyd, they were doing the same…
Oh, yes, absolutely! I do know that we opened the Crater Festival in 1976, sunrise, here in Hawaii for the 200th anniversary of America, and we opened for Sly and the Family Stone. We asked for that slot, and we led the thousands of people in Diamondhead Crater in star exercise, and we got them chanting.
Do you think if any band forms, even if it’s just four or five people, that something spiritual forms?
Music seems to touch the largest amount of people at one time than anything I know about all over the world. It has no barriers, it has no race, it doesn’t distinguish between color, religion, and nationality. You can put a song on and put it out over the airwaves, and thousands of people, their soul can get out of it whatever it gets out of it.
Contemporaries of yours in the avant-garde, such as La Monte Young and Angus Maclise, have kind of said that there is a spiritual plane you can achieve with pure musical tones. Was there a certain way of playing for you that was more in tune with your spiritual quest?
We were into frequencies. Like—the F note is the sound of nature. And the fact that vibration, if you tune into like a F note and another F note comes before, then you vibrate. Like a tuning fork. He tried that with the gong and the kettle drum. We had the gong from Dr. Zhivago—the movie! He bought it and we still have it, and it’s huge! Often in morning meditation, when we weren’t even doing anything with the music, he would have us all go into meditation, and he would do the gong throughout chakras because the gong had the frequencies—all the frequencies of the chakras.
There was kind of a no-drug policy, wasn’t there? Despite your band being considered psychedelic?
I think marijuana, since we don’t consider it a drug—that is probably being used.
But psychedelics like mushrooms or LSD?
No, no, we didn’t do it in the Family, and as far as I know, it’s not being done now. The family dispersed and we all went our ways and created a new life with new members, and so some thirty years later, we all are not on the same page and we are not responsible for what anyone does or does not. As human beings now out here on our own, it has made it somewhat harder to ‘ante up’ as they say.
Sky Saxon, who joined the band later, has been known to have some drug issues. Did he have those when he was in the band?
Sky Saxon was an entity unto himself. He does his thing. I’m talking about Ya Ho Wa 13.
Whoa! Are you saying the album he recorded with Ya Ho Wa 13 was outside the realm of what you consider their music?
Um… well, during the Family days, after Father left and said he was no longer going to be in the band, he invited Sky—‘Arelick’ was his family name—into the band. And they renamed the band Fire Water Air. And it either didn’t do anything, or we moved. We didn’t accomplish or finish a lot of what we did because we would move and go on to something else, and it was disruptive of what we were doing.
Was Sky part of the Source?
He was. He would kind of come and go, though. Father loved him, but he was always just Sky! The way he is now is the way he was back then. And I think Sky does a lot of things that the rest of us don’t do.
Was there a conscious decision about which instruments to use in the band?
No, that’s just the instrumentation that the band played. And I think it’s the basic formation of a band that you have drum, guitar, and bass, right?
Definitely in rock ‘n’ roll. But did you ever introduce any other instruments?
I think they brought in Pythias for a while on guitar, and Lovely with a violin. Lovely was Andre Previn’s daughter. That was one of the forms of Ya Ho Wa 13 that Father was trying to put together. And they brought in a couple other brothers—Home, who sang and played guitar, and Rhythm, who played piano. After we left L.A., we tried different forms of the band, when we moved to San Francisco and moved to Hawaii.
Brian Wilson considered himself a very spiritual songwriter, and made many songs about Hawaii. You still live there now! Is there a spiritual purity there?
There was to us. Hawaii is very clean. The air is clean. We don’t have pollution. We have nice weather all year. It’s called paradise for a reason!
Were you happy with the Obama presidency being that he was a resident of Hawaii?
I don’t really ‘do’ politics, but as far as being a local Hawaii boy, he’s right here where I live—Kahlua. When he stayed here, he was just like three blocks down the street. We saw him on the beach all the time.
Did he go surfing?
He tried to, but the Secret Service wouldn’t let him surf anymore!

YA HO WHA 13’S MAGNIFICENCE IN THE MEMORY RELEASES TUE., JUNE 23, ON DRAG CITY. VISIT YA HO WHA 13 AT YAHOWHA13.COM. FOR MORE INFORMATION ON YA HO WHA 13 AND THE SOURCE FAMILY, SEE THE SOURCE: THE UNTOLD STORY OF FATHER YOD, YA HO WHA 13 AND THE SOURCE FAMILY BY ISIS AND ELECTRICITY AQUARIAN AVAILABLE NOW FROM PROCESS MEDIA. PROCESSMEDIAINC.COM.

Download: Femi Kuti “Eh Oh”

(from Day By Day out now on Mercer Street)

Femi Kuti is the son of Fela and the righteous leader of his own Positive Force. He speaks now just days after the Nigerian government shut down the Shrine, the historic venue that was the birthplace of Afrobeat. This interview by Chris Ziegler.

What’s the current status of the Shrine right now? The Nigerian government shut it down?
It was shut down for a week. They finally opened it today, about two or three hours ago. A lot of pressure has been coming on the state government to reopen it. We are going to start a very big international campaign. The excuses why they closed the place—that’s not our business. They said it was these people who are sitting on the streets in front of the Shrine. It is not our duty to clear the streets.
Did they wait until you left for tour to shut it down?
It looks like that. They say no, but I mean, I’m leaving for tour and then they close the place. And I can’t do anything—I can’t cancel the tour. So I have to go on tour. I think we’re going to direct people to sign a petition to make sure they never close the Shrine again. It has been going for so many years—it was my father’s thing.
Is it true that in addition to trying to suppress the music that you are making, the Nigerian government is actually funding musicians who make poor quality pro-government pop music?
Yeah. There is a lot of money pumped into that kind of music. These boys can’t afford it so somebody must be funding them.
Do you think any of that is ultimately coming from the American government?
I don’t think the American government would be involved. I don’t think your government is that kind of government. The Nigerian government is wise enough to know how to do this kind of campaign on their own.
What makes you so optimistic about the Obama administration?
I think he’s genuine. I mean, he’s definitely going to face a lot of difficulties, but I think he’s genuine about world peace, about rectifying America’s image and all those things. So I believe if he really has the opportunity to change many things, he will.
Does America seem different now as opposed to when you were here during the Bush administration?
A lot of people I’ve spoken to have complained about the recession, no jobs, things are slow. But this is not Obama’s fault. This started long before Obama became president. He’s already coming into pain. America, if you had given Bush four more years, you all would be dead probably! Obama can rectify the bad positions of a bad government, probably. Not probably—definitely. Toppling Saddam was not the issue, but the Bush administration could not see that. Even when the world kept saying he didn’t have chemical weapons. But America went into Iraq. The world could not understand that. A war like that… just pumping money, money, money into that war and it might be never ending. So Obama just took over in bad times. If he had come in in the Clinton era, things would probably be much easier for him. So I understand the times of which I am in America. Which is not just America, but the world probably. Even in Lagos, for somebody like me, in Lagos where we have had a difficult life… we have always had a hard life all our life. So when we come here and Americans complain that it is difficult, it is kind of funny. At least you still have electricity and hot water—running water. We don’t have electricity or running water. We have bad roads. It’s not too bad here—it’s not as bad as anywhere in Africa.
How do you feel when you meet musicians here that have never had to face the kinds of threats or struggles you’ve had to deal with? What are the conversations like when you’re talking about music?
It depends on the artist, really. Most of them just want to know what’s going on in Nigeria and I just let them know what is going on and that’s all, really. When I met people during my album Fight to Win, I was meeting with a lot of people and even if they didn’t start the conversation, I would let them know what was going on in Africa. They had to want to know what is going on in Africa because it is part of their heritage. And they were very interested. They wanted to know more and they were happy it was coming from me because knew a lot about my father and had heard about me, so we got along very well.
You’ve said a few times that music is the voice of truth. Is that connected to what we’re talking about here?
Yes—I think because music has a major role to play in anything. It moves you. Like if the Shrine was not opened immediately, I’m sure the outburst coming from the music world would put so much pressure on the Nigerian government to open the Shrine. Those people, those big artists… I wouldn’t be surprised if someone like Stevie Wonder campaigned. He knew my father very much. If he got wind that my father’s shrine was closed, he would sign the petition as well. I mean, big artists like that would be signing the petition against the government. All my friends in the hip-hop world—Mos Def, Common, Alicia Keys—everybody would be signing this, and these are people who are very very well known in the Nigerian scene.
You said once that we have to take beauty seriously, and that’s how the human race will get better. What did you mean by that?
Because the artist sings from within. If someone like Bessie Smith or Billie Holiday are taken seriously and people really followed the words of the songs, people would live those words. And if people lived those words, the world would become a better place. Even a lot of artists sing these words, but they don’t practice the words they sing. We sing but we don’t practice what we sing. If people did follow the words, the world would become a better place.
If a musician is a hypocrite, does that ruin their music?
Yes.
What’s an example of that?
Oh, I can’t give you an example. That would be wrong of me. When you want to capitalize… a lot of artists find that this is the fashion and they go into it because they want to make money or even a lot of people are going to sing politics because they believe it is the in thing now, but they don’t really believe what they’re saying. It’s just to cash in on it. Because one day you will be found out. The audience will find you out one day and then you will pay a very high price for it.
Do you think still want artists to be honest?
Definitely, yes. The world is always ready to bring the artist that is not sincere down quickly.
Would you say a song like “Tell Me” is a hopeful song?
Yes, because it’s really inspired people to understand where I’m coming from and it’s made people want to know more about issues. Like, why are they criticizing me? Don’t they see what I’m talking about? They are complaining about me. I’m not the problem. ‘Femi, what you mean?’ You don’t understand me. How can you not understand what I am talking about?
What do you most hope to do with your music?
I hope I can inspire a very energetic generation that will change things in the future.
Do you think you will see that in your lifetime? Is it coming?
Well, that is a very difficult question, but I know that I have influenced a lot of artists today and that is already a very major point. If people are not listening, then that would be sad. If I am even touring America today, it means people want to listen, people still love the music, so that is already a very major point. But it might take years. I believe sincerely if I live to my seventies or eighties, I will see that kind of change.
What exactly is a shoki shoki master?
It’s like a sex master. Is that a hard thing to become? It is, it is. It’s a subject of its own. If you are not educated properly about sex, you will not have a good sex life. You will never satisfy your partner. I think sex education has to be given, in a way. People need to understand what to do when they get married, when they meet their partner, what to do in bed. This was a discussion that the African culture had… it was always discussed. It’s only in this era that it has become taboo, that people are ashamed to discuss openly. America talks about a lot of other things, like HIV… Americans talk about that easily. I think it’s just the stage where we are. The world has passed through so many stages to get to where we are right now. Nobody believed that Obama could become president in America because everyone believed that America was full of a lot of racism. Now America seems to have overcome that. The majority of Americans, of young people, are not thinking along those lines. So that shows that America does have a bright future in that sense.
Do you think educating the young is the key to getting everything moving in the right direction?
Yes, because if I didn’t know about people like Malcolm X or my father, I would have a very stupid, uneducated life. We need to know history. We need to know about contributions, about how Columbus discovered America. And people need the truth. We need the truth to forge ahead.
I know you stopped school, but where do you think your best education came from?
From my father because he made me read a lot of books which opened my mind. I had to read books like Black Man of the Nile, Stolen Legacy, Malcolm X… I was reading books about the history of Africa and all these things. So that enlightened me. And then listening to his songs, listening to his lectures when he gave lectures, or his press conferences, I always wanted to hear what he had to say.
If someone just listened to his music and your music, would they be getting an accurate picture of what life is like?
Yes, definitely, definitely.
Do you think of yourself as a documentarian or journalist with the kind of music you’re making?
I know that definitely my father’s music is. I don’t want to sound too arrogant about myself. But if you listen to my father from his beginning to his end, you have a very very good picture of aspects of Nigerian politics, our way of life and Africa in general. And then the world too. You can picture your environments in the ’80s, what was going on in Nigeria at the time, with this music. And you can travel with this music in your mind.
Are there any American musicians who you think are doing the same thing?
I think all the great American jazz musicians did it. Stevie Wonder. I want to put so many names right now, but I can’t think of many names. A lot of them even listened to my father… James Brown, he was listening to my father as well. Miles Davis, definitely. It’s people like this who are doing it.
Out of all the books you read growing up, what is one you think everyone should read?
Wow, that is very difficult. I would probably choose two books. Stolen Legacy and Black Man of the Nile.
What’s one record everyone should listen to?
One record? My new album. It has everything for you. It has the ’70s, it has so much in it, it has a great future and gives you room to think about what it is going to do next.

FEMI KUTI AND THE POSITIVE FORCE WITH SANTIGOLD AND RAPHAEL SAADIQ ON SUN., JUNE 21, AT THE HOLLYWOOD BOWL, 2301 NORTH HIGHLAND AVE., HOLLYWOOD. 7PM / $10-$98 / ALL AGES. LAPHIL.COM. FEMI KUTI’S DAY BY DAY IS OUT NOW ON DOWNTOWN. VISIT FEMI KUTI AT SHRINETV.COM OR MYSPACE.COM/FEMIKUTI.

(from Communion out now on Yep Roc)

The premiere psych-rockers of Scandinavia, Ebbot Lundberg (vocals), Mattias Bärjed (guitar), Kalle Gustafsson (bass), Martin Hederos (keys), Ian Person (guitar) and Fredrik Sandsten (drums) have redefined what it means to be influenced by ’70s psychedelia, prog pop and classic rock. Though Sweden’s economy is in as much trouble as ours, TSOOL wasn’t bashful about releasing their latest effort Communion—a discussion of the corporate mass psychosis that has slowly taken over the world—as an epic 90-minute double-CD. The band stopped by L.A. for the first time since opening for Robert Plant four years ago, having just enough time to do Leno, play a one-off at the Troubadour, and perform an acoustic set at a private party thrown by the Swedish Embassy in their honor. Just before sound check, Ebbot, Ian and Mattias strolled over to a nearby park to soak in some California sunshine, get trampled by frolicking dogs, and chat with Linda Rapka about their album.

Explain the cover art of your album Communion—a wealthy, middle-aged Caucasian couple drinking an ungodly concoction of fluorescent green alien juice.
Ian Person (guitar): We hired this guy to come up with some ideas about mass communication. So he came up with a few suggestions and this came up, and we kind of collaborated from there.
So what exactly is in that drink?
Ebbot Lundberg (vocals): Tomorrow we will find out, because they’re gonna have this party, and they’re gonna do these drinks. So I’m curious!
Ian: We’re going to a party at the Swedish Embassy.
Ebbot: There will be lots of them there…
The new album was based on a theme of modern mass psychosis—which I see happening here in the U.S. Was America a major source of inspiration?
Ebbot: It was a global thing. I don’t know if you’ve seen the whole [CD] package, but it’s not only Caucasians, but all people.
Ian: It’s like Noah’s Ark.
Ebbot: Yeah, it’s like an ark. It’s just pictures you see every day without even thinking about it. It can be plastic surgery, it can be like a life coach, or whatever. I’m curious about the people on the cover—they don’t really know they’re on the cover. So we’ll see what’s going to happen. We might get sued!
Releasing a double CD in today’s economy is pretty ballsy.
Ian: We didn’t go out and say, ‘Let’s do a double CD.’ It sort of evolved itself, really.
Mattias Bärjed (guitar): I guess we always wanted to do a double album as well and now it just felt natural to do that.
You recently got out of your contractual obligations from Warner. The last album you worked on—Origins: Vol. 1—they were pestering you about what was going to be the radio hit. That can be difficult when trying to create a work of art.
Ian: Especially when you’re in the studio and trying just to get everything going.
Ebbot: Well, I dunno. There’s a lot of singles on the new one, so we’re just gonna put out singles from the album and see what happens. Milk it as long as we can.
Ian: Basically Warner didn’t really have the money, ’cause we wanted a certain amount of money to do this album and they said no.
This album sounds a lot more energized than Origins.
Ian: We kind of had a lot more fun!
Mattias: We had some time off, actually like two years, before we started working on this album, so I guess that’s—you can hear that.
Ian: We had a lot of energy going in.
It sounds like it—which is probably why you ended up with so many songs.
Ian: For once it was quite easy to do the album. For once it was quite fun!
It always sounds like you guys are having fun.
Ian: But this time we actually had fun! We always had fun afterwards when the album is done. But now it was a nice process all the way.
I read that each of 24 tracks is supposed to symbolize each hour of the day.
Ebbot: It could be. It could be anything.
Were you trying to bring back the lost art of the concept album?
Ebbot: Yeah, why not? We grew up with it and we love it, so why not?
In today’s mp3 culture, is a concept album is a way to bring back listening to an entire album?
Ian: Absolutely. Take some time off and listen. That’s one thing to do. The vinyl is coming back. All the record stores back home now they carry as much CDs as vinyl these days. The kids are learning.
Ebbot: It’s more like you do something that you wish existed and then you do it. You kind of miss it, you miss idea of what this became.
Ian: Carry on with the old legacy.
You cover a Nick Drake song, which is an interesting choice—not many people are brave enough to take on Drake.
Ebbot: That was the reason. Nobody ever did it. Maybe it was the wrong idea, I don’t know! We kind of did it around the demo version, which is on ‘The Time of No Reply.’ The other one John Cale produced, and it doesn’t really sound that good.
Another track, ‘The Fan Who Wasn’t There,’ was based on a conversation that Ebbot had with Arthur Lee.
Ebbot: Yeah, some of it. He played in Gothenburg—his manager was there, who passed away like six months later, and then he passed away, sadly. It’s inspired by that conversation, having drinks for three hours. That was pretty fun. But it was sad…
It sounds like there were a lot of ’60s and ’70s influences going on.
Ebbot: Yes. And we DJed. It’s like all time is one time.
Ian: Squeeze them all in together. The best picks of raisins in the cookies.
I don’t like raisins.
Ian: Chocolate chips then.
Do you enjoy listening to your own records?
Ebbot: Yes. We’re warming up to it sometimes. Our own records. There’s nothing wrong with that. That’s The Soundtrack of our Lives. We try to be what the name is. Sometimes it sucks. And sometimes it’s OK.
I stumbled upon a food blog where your bandmate Martin had posted his recipe for lamb tagine. Do any of you have any hidden surprises?
Ian: Martin and I are the chefs in the band. I’m into the Italian kitchen at the moment. A friend of mine had his wedding recently and I cooked for like 200 people.
Ebbot: Did you get paid?
Ian: No, I didn’t get paid. But the food was great. And I got to eat the food.
Mattias: When we come over here we try to eat as much Mexican food as possible because it’s really hard to find good Mexican food in Scandinavia—Sweden, Norway or Finland—it’s impossible.
Ebbot: There are no Mexicans. Just Finnish people.
You haven’t been to the U.S. since 2005.
Ebbot: We were actually here in 2007 in New York for a while.
Ian: And Austin last year, SXSW. We did a couple of hit and runs. Guerilla warfare.
But what about L.A.? We missed you.
Ian: We love L.A., so we’ve been sad.
Ebbot: We went to China last year.
Ian: But that’s not America.
Was that your first time in China? What was it like?
Ebbot: It was exactly like here. But it’s even more futuristic. It’s like beyond ‘Bladerunner.’
Ian: The director’s cut.
Ebbot: It’s happened. It’s really growing fast and scary.
Billions of people.
Ebbot: And they’re working all night. It’s like, ‘You’d better stop.’ They’re just like ants.
Mattias: We might go to Taiwan in a month.
Ian: And then South America in the fall.
Do you get time to actually enjoy the countries you visit?
Ian: We try and plan a couple of days. When we did those long tours we didn’t have much time, but now in China we had a few days off, Australia we had like five, six days to hang out.
Ebbot: We spent a lot of time in L.A. and had a lot of time off here.
If Obama’s stimulus package fails and I move to Sweden, whose couch can I stay on?
Ian: Kalle’s got a grand studio. It’s gigantic.
Mattias: My guitar tech is single.

THE SOUNDTRACK OF OUR LIVES’ COMMUNION IS OUT NOW ON YEP ROC. VISIT THE SOUNDTRACK OF OUR LIVES AT TSOOL.NET OR MYSPACE.COM/OFFICIALTSOOL.

Download: Extra Golden “Thank You Very Quickly”

(from Thank You Very Quickly out now on Thrill Jockey)

Extra Golden started when a graduate-studies project grew into a part-American-part-African benga band in Kenya and recently won notice for their particularly timely song “Obama,” which is about the president and not the beer. Their Thank You Very Quickly is out now on Thrill Jockey. This interview by Kevin Ferguson.

Was [drummer] Onyango Omari the first person to name their child after our president?
Ian Eagleson (Guitar, Vocals): Actually, I think that was a friend of his who did that. It’s very common over there to name a child after somebody meaningful. I know people who have named their kids after me!
I don’t know if so much they’re trying to give me respect, or I just happen to be a significant person in their lives. I’ve met people in Kenya who are named after some terrible people—they just happened to making a lot of news at the time. There are a lot of people in Kenya whose name means ‘damn it’ in English! I felt honored—especially since it’s our singer who named his son after me. It’s nice knowing there are a couple of people named Ian running around Kenya now.
Did you ever get to try the Obama beer?
Yeah! It was funny because it’s like a really cheap beer. It’s actually called ‘Senator Beer’ and the name is a coincidence. In 2004 when he was elected senator they started calling that beer Obama. I tried it—pretty good!
How much benga knowledge did you have when starting the band?
I went to Nairobi specifically to do research on benga music. One of the projects I got involved with was recording benga bands over there. I was pretty inexperienced at first. I was using a little laptop and recording them in nightclubs. I got interested in Kenya a long time ago, when I visited as a college student. As I got into graduate studies and followed through on it, it was the most prominent contemporary music there. I thought it was interesting because some of the things that were happening there were like the U.S. music. The guitar is very important there, just like it is to us over here. Also there’s just a lot going on with benga! I was coming up with a research project, and me being a guitarist, it was just fun to study it. That’s how I got interested in it. And the way our band got formed was just staking it a step further beyond just observing it and studying it. We’re trying to make ourselves a part of it.
Does that mean Extra Golden influenced other bands?
Our exposure to Kenya was kind of limited to begin with. I think it’s becoming more noticeable now, but I don’t know—I don’t think so. That style has a life of its own. It’s so much greater than us! Benga has its own trends. I think a lot of people have heard about us over there, and we have made an impact, I guess. It shows some people that there is interest in benga outside of Kenya. Some people think that it’s getting outmoded—there are newer genres based more on hip-hop and so on. But I think there’s still so much potential for people to get interested!
You and Alex own a label called Kanyo—what does that mean?
Kanyo in Luo means ‘there’ or ‘it’s there’—you hear people say it a lot in songs. It’s like if someone is playing a nice solo you say, ‘Kanyo! Kanyo! Kanyo!’ It’s just a cool word, too!
Isn’t it true that many African artists never financially benefit from many of the releases? Are you guys trying to combat that?
Yeah—I always wonder about that myself, especially when I see some new record come out. We were in touch with one musician whose record just got put out recently without any licensing or notice to him. It’s just that musicians are just always complaining about that stuff, and we’re trying to make sure that what we do is legitimate. It can be hard but if you work, you can figure a just and fair way to release albums. On our website we also do download for a couple of other labels, and I think those labels have done a good job in getting money to artists. So hopefully we’re not furthering parasite behavior! Some people argue that they’re not making money anyway, so why should they worry about it so much? But it’s just wrong to assume you can diffuse somebody’s record and not even consider that they’d want to have some say in it. Sometimes musicians in Africa don’t even have the rights to music they produce themselves—they sometimes get shafted by a producer who has rights to their music. I helped somebody in the U.S. get some licensing for some Kenyan musicians once and the musician and producer ended up arguing and nobody could establish who had the rights. The producer just decided to not do it.
What happened when half of Extra Golden was detained in Paris?
We were going to play in Austria and the Kenyan [band members] flew through France. They had to pass some kind of immigration check point, and the police started asking them what they were doing, what they were doing and how come they had no money? This was even though even though they had all the paper work and everything was legit. It was a nightmare! They were stuck there for like 14 hours or something. Eventually the police tried to get them deported, but in order for them to do that they had to get them to sign something. Because it was in French, they refused to sign it. At that point they became temporary refugees and ended up at a Red Cross office—there were people there that could help them. They were able to contact us in Austria, but it was tough! We thought they were doomed!
Have Omari, Bilongo and Jagwasi ended up in the states finally?
They’re not permanent residents—they have like year-long multiple-entry visas so they can come and go as long as they have a reason. They came out earlier this year and they’re here now. We have more things planned for later on this year—looks like they’ll be around for a while! Kenya—like everywhere else—is getting squeezed by the economy and everything. It’s a lot easier for them to make ends meets here rather than there.
Is Omari self-conscious about saying ‘thank you very quickly’?
Not at all! It’s funny—there are a lot of weird English phrases in Kenya that you would never hear here in the United States. We all say that all the time now!

EXTRA GOLDEN WITH THE MEDITATIONS, FOOL’S GOLD AND YOUSSOUPHA SIDIBE ON WED., MAY 13, AT THE ECHOPLEX, 1154 GLENDALE BLVD., ECHO PARK. 9 PM / $10 BEFORE 10PM / $15 AFTER / 21+. ATTHEECHO.COM. EXTRA GOLDEN’S THANK YOU VERY QUICKLY IS OUT NOW ON THRILL JOCKEY. VISIT EXTRA GOLDEN AT EXTRAGOLDEN.COM OR MYSPACE.COM/EXTRAGOLDEN.