‘Intellectual Warfare’

New York’s Show Me the Body is about empowerment, not protest music

BY SANFORD NOWLIN

With its banjo-bass-drums instrumentation and affinity for sonic exploration via samples and electronic treatments, New York-based hardcore punk trio Show Me the Body channels all the political rage expected from its genre.

Just don’t expect it to play by-thenumbers thrash.

Instead, the band has drawn critical acclaim and a sizable audience by fusing its militant political message with an amalgam of noise, metal, hip-hop and folk that somehow gets bodies both moshing and dancing.

Show Me the Body’s third and most recent album, Trouble the Water, continues its exploratory streak while adding nuanced dynamics and texture to its songwriting. The tour promoting the release — the group’s first since the pandemic — will stop at San Antonio’s Paper Tiger Tuesday, Feb. 21 with Jesus Piece, Scowl, Zulu and TRiPPJONES opening.

The Current caught up with Show Me the Body founding members Julian Cashwan Pratt (banjo and vocals) and Harlan Steed (bass and electronics) via phone to talk about their music, message and constant growth.

Protest music tends to be inclusive. You’ve got to reach out to an audience, engage them, get them singing along. On the other hand, experimentation tends to look inward.

How does Show Me the Body strike a balance between those two sides?

Julian Cashwan Pratt: I would start by saying I don’t really consider that Show Me the Body does protest music. I don’t think I would consider it protest music as much as music that is dedicated to empowerment, music that is dedicated to the young people who listen to it and music that belongs to the listener rather than music that belongs to me or Harlan. It belongs to the people who are part of our community. Maybe in that sense, it sounds different because most music is not about that. ... I’d say that most of our music is just about intellectual warfare. It’s about self-defense, and it’s about love of our community and how to build one — and how other kids can build one. I’d say that that is actually a pretty experimental thing to do in our current state of reality. Even the experimental side of what we do can be considered extroverted in that you’re not encouraged in the world to start a mutual-aid initiative. You’re not encouraged in America to have solidarity across class boundaries. In that way, I’d say the point of it is experimental to a certain extent.

Harlan Steed: I agree with Julian. If anything, our music is anti-authoritarian more so than it is protest, and it’s more about creating a space for people to feel free and feel like they can express themselves. In line with the experimental question, I think we’re in a time where people are so bored with the status quo, lowest-common-denominator, nostalgic music that comes out that I think that experimentation is something people are turning to because they need something new to experience. I don’t know if we give it to them, but that’s the goal.

There’s a sense of place in your music. It’s political, but it’s very tuned into your surroundings in New York — addressing specific kinds of gentrification, corporate ambivalence and over-policing. Do you think you’d be the same kind of band had you guys grown up somewhere other than New York?

JCP: We’d be a similar band, but I think we’d be a lot less funky. HS: I think these problems are everywhere, man. I think these systems of power and humans versus prisons and humans versus police and humans versus politics, these are things that are ever-present within the human condition. It speaks to people everywhere. Just because of where we were raised in New York, Show Me the Body has a certain sound. That’s kind of the only thing that makes us more specifically New York is just that type of sound. We consider ourselves an aggressive band, but we try not to put out anything that you can’t dance to. We maintain a heavy priority that just as fighting is important, dancing is maybe the most important.

JCP: As far as heavy bands, I think a lot of people don’t really consider the dance.

On the new record, for all the heaviness, there’s certainly a lot of dynamics at play. Several of the songs start out sounding like folk tunes almost, but by the end they’re real burners. How deliberate is that attempt to build from a whisper to a roar?

HS: I think, as a band, we have a reputation [for that], but also, I think we tend to build songs this way and have certain structures that we rely on. A lot of artists just jump right into the swimming pool, so to speak, but we like to have that slow but steady climb up the diving board tower to the point where you get to that peak and then you let go. That’s something we always enjoy incorporating into our writing. A lot of it is whenever we make records, we’re very collaborative and responsive to each other’s ideas and try to challenge each other to push those ideas as far as they can go. This album was really Julian and I finishing each other’s sentences and trying to arrive at songwriting styles we’ve used in the past, but also trying to get those to a whole new territory.

$25, 7 p.m. Tuesday, Feb. 21, Paper Tiger, 2410 N. St. Mary’s St., papertigersatx.com.