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ADIE A SE PREMIERE /// 360 FLIP NOSE SLIDE IN TOK YO
A Fat Possum/Amazon Collection
Rare recordings from iconic Delta blues artists including Skip James, Mississippi John Hurt, Bukka White, & more
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10 BREAKING: THE JUJU, OMNI, BLUE HAWAII, MIDNIGHT SISTER 20 DAVE SARDY: A PLAYLIST FOR BIG BROTHER 24 SENSE AND SENSUALITY: TORRES AND THE HEALTHY HEDONISM OF “THREE FUTURES” 34 IN CONVERSATION: KAITLYN AURELIA SMITH ON THE BEAUTY OF HAYAO MIYAZAKI 38 VINCE STAPLES IN UNNATURAL POSITIONS 48 MIGUEL AND PUSSY RIOT PARTY AT THE BRINK
PUBLISHER ALAN SARTIRANA EDITOR-IN-CHIEF MARTY SARTINI GARNER ASSOCIATE EDITOR NATE ROGERS ART DIRECTOR MELISSA SIMONIAN EDITORIAL ASSISTANT MIKE LESUER WRITERS A.D. AMOROSI, MIKE HILLEARY, JOSH HURST, JAMIE LAWLOR, ALEX MACHOCK, KYLE MACKINNEL, MISCHA PEARLMAN, LYDIA PUDZIANOWSKI, WILL SCHUBE, ERIC STOLZE, JEFF TERICH, ANDREW VAN BAAL, JASON P. WOODBURY IMAGES NABIL ELDERKIN, SHEPARD FAIREY, PIPER FERGUSON, BRIGID GALLAGHER, RAY LEGO, ANDREW VAN BAAL, SAGE VAUGHN, SINZIANA VELICESCU ANTHEMIC AGENCY MICHAEL BAUER, ANA DOS ANJOS, JACQUELINE FONSECA, CHRIS GEORGE, CHRIS MURRAY, TAYLOR NUÑEZ, RICARDO RIVAS VELIS, KYLE ROGERS
COVER AND TABLE OF CONTENTS PHOTOS SHOT BY PIPER FERGUSON
64 “WHAT MEN OR GODS ARE THESE?”: JAWBREAKER RETURNS
BREAKING
THE JUJU “YOU CAN’T WRITE MUSIC RIGHT UNLESS YOU KNOW HOW THE MAN THAT’LL PLAY IT PLAYS POKER,” Duke Ellington once said, codifying a jazz-specific ethos that places as much emphasis on personality as it does on technical acumen. It’s a worldview that goes a long way toward explaining the collaborative work done by The JuJu, whose debut album— called Exchange—is all about the possibilities of co-creation.
are “cooperative, collaborative people who value each other’s opinions.” Julian Reid adds that the “ideal jazz combo” is characterized by a lack of ego, and by its thriving on “interchange and exchange.” Thus all the songs on the album were born of improvisation, with some of the material evolving through spirited jamming, while others—including “Patients,” the ballad that closes the record—emerged fully-formed.
The group includes horn player Nico Segal, whose work should be familiar even if his name isn’t: Formerly known as Donnie Trumpet (until the reality of Trump’s presidency made the moniker too much to bear), Segal has jammed with Chance the Rapper, recorded with Paul Simon, and toured with Frank Ocean. Yet he’s neither the star soloist nor the first among equals in the JuJu quartet, which is rooted in egolessness and egalitarianism. “I didn’t want all the melodies people sing along with to be played by the trumpet,” Segal says, and although his characteristically warm, welcoming tone is key to the success of Exchange, the album’s pleasures stem just as much from the varied textures of keyboardist Julian Reid, the hip-hop breaks of drummer Everett Reid, or the understatedly pliable work of bassist Lane Beckstrom.
MEMBERS: Nico Segal (trumpet), Julian Reid (piano), Everett Reid (drums), and Lane Beckstrom (bass) FOUNDED: 2016 FROM: Chicago, Illinois YOU MIGHT KNOW THEM FROM: Segal’s previous work as Donnie Trumpet, cohort and foil to Chance the Rapper
The resulting album is built on many of jazz’s pillars—listening, individual expression, group unity— without ever sounding like a jazz record in the traditional sense. Its guiding characteristic is its sense of play, best heard on the childlike whimsy of the (almost) title tune, “The Exchange.” Julian Reid plays a fanciful piano figure that sounds like it belongs to the Vince Guaraldi lineage, brother Everett bringing a light touch to the brushed percussion—right up to the part where he kicks into a boom-bap rhythm. Segal noodles and trills through the first half of the song, countering the jaunty piano rhythm, but he lays back after that, briefly ceding the spotlight to fingerpopping percussion and bubbling electronics à la The Robert Glasper Experiment.
It was Julian who co-founded the group The goal, Segal says, was to make NOW: Releasing their written-in-the-studio debut, Exchange with Segal after the two of them— an album informed by classic jazz former high school buddies—got together to create some music for Julian’s conventions, but relevant to listeners in 2017—instrumental music people wedding; although they bonded over jazz records, they didn’t head into the would listen to on their commutes and sing along with in concerts. At a studio to cut a “jazz record” per se. Their only aim was to make music with tight twenty-seven minutes long, it is generous in spirit and stacked with each other, inspired by their personalities and their chemistry rather than by memorable tunes, excessive jamming trimmed out. It’s both the product the guiding concerns of genre or tradition. of and the soundtrack to getting lost in the possibilities of group play and idea exchange; it’s literally an album that only these four guys could What’s important about The JuJu, Segal says, is that the four musicians have made.
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BREAKING
OMNI ATLANTA POST-PUNK TRIO OMNI OPERATE BY A SIMPLE, TIMELESS APHORISM: LESS IS MORE. On the band’s debut, last year’s Deluxe, there are only a few moments where they move beyond a skeletal guitar/bass/drums arrangement. And even though new album Multi-task finds them adding the occasional piano or other instrumental accompaniment, it’s still about a couple hundred instruments shy of being Pet Sounds. Minimalism was the principle upon which they were founded, and guitarist Frankie Broyles—formerly of Deerhunter—says that he’s averse to the idea of overloading a song with tracks.
the external stimuli of their city. The band left Atlanta to hole up in a cabin in Vienna, Georgia, for a few days—a decision that lent itself to a much quicker and more efficient recording process. “When we got there, I realized how much more relaxed and not stressed out about other things I was. [We were] just out in the middle of nowhere with one objective,” Broyles says. “It helped to escape and not have anything else worrying me. I guess I wasn’t very conscious of how distracted I was… But once we went down there, it was pretty evident.”
“If there are too many tracks in a session, I’ll try to delete as many as possible,” he says. “To have the minimum tracks needed is always a goal. We used more mics on the drums [for the new record] and that was kind of scary to me, because we have all these tracks now.”
The sleek, uncluttered sound of Multitask sets it apart from a lot of other contemporary music, especially since it’s so easy now to make bedroom pop symphonies on your laptop. Yet Omni’s adherence to a zen musical philosophy isn’t fundamentalism for its own sake, or even because it’s easier. As Frobos explains, they simply don’t like the sound of music that’s overproduced.
“There’s nothing there that we don’t want to be there,” adds vocalist and bassist Philip Frobos. “Even if I’m playing a bass line that might be a little too jazz, Frank might just say, ‘Why don’t you minimalize this part?’ and I usually think, ‘Yeah, you’re right.’ We try to keep everything in its right place.” Whether it’s on the power-pop punch of “Equestrian,” the robotic interplay of “Tuxedo Blues,” or the sparse groove of “After Dinner,” Omni find a way to fill all of their sonic space without the need to invite anyone else into the room. Yet as they prepared to put these tracks on tape, they sought to remove another element entirely:
MEMBERS: Philip Frobos (bass/vocals), Frankie Broyles (guitar), and Doug Bleichner (drums) FOUNDED: 2016 FROM: Atlanta, Georgia YOU MIGHT KNOW THEM FROM: Their 2016 debut Deluxe, or from their opening slot on tour with Franz Ferdinand earlier this year NOW: Releasing their second album, Multi-task, via Trouble in Mind
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“In regard to a lot of modern music and some old music, the big problem I have is that there are just layers and layers of guitars and effects and things that aren’t really adding to the song at all,” he says. “It’s mainly more noise, just for the sake of more. There’s also something really sexy about a couple of guitar and bass lines that flow really well together. You can look at a lot of great proto-punk and rock and roll songs that don’t rely on a lot of backing. They’re just rocking.”
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BREAKING
BLUE HAWAII BLUE HAWAII’S NEW RECORD, TENDERNESS, IS A REUNION. The band’s two members, Raphaelle Standell and Alexander Kerby, spent four years apart starting before the 2013 release of their debut, Untogether. The distance was a conscious decision from both parties after their romantic relationship came to an end. Recently, as they slowly began to re-enter one another’s lives, they each realized that making music together was one of the few things that truly made them happy, and that their friendship and musical kinship was too valuable to stop altogether. With Tenderness, the duo has come back fresh and optimistic, and the album is almost the opposite of its predecessor. Standell and Kerby consciously aimed to make a more positive record and were more willing to dive into issues of selflove and technological obsession than they were on Untogether. Even when the themes are particularly heavy, a positivity reigns throughout. It’s Blue Hawaii’s strongest, most cohesive, prettiest, and, well, most tender statement to date. “We didn’t want it to be a sappy puddle,” Standell says over Skype from Montreal, before Kerby adds to the thought: “It’s still sappy.” Sappy as it may be, Tenderness is a huge step forward for the duo, building upon Untogether’s downcast dance landscape, flipping the script and concocting something more joyous from the band’s electro roots.
in a live room is evident in the album’s immaculately crafted details. “No One Like You” surrounds Standell’s voice with sampled violin stems and a beat that sounds like it was crafted underwater, while “Make Love Stay” incorporates Eastern-tinged samples and suggests a version of TLC raised on early European house music. “How do I make love stay,” Standell asks during the latter song’s chorus. A unifying theme of Tenderness is born from the realization that the path to health and stability emanates from a certain amount of self-love. “The music I enjoy the most makes me feel really good,” Standell says. “Music that I’m drawn toward is celebratory, and… that’s something I really wanted to put in our music.”
MEMBERS: Alexander “Agor” Kerby and Raphaelle “Ra” Standell FOUNDED: 2010 FROM: Montreal, Quebec YOU MIGHT KNOW THEM FROM: Experimental popsters Braids, for whom Standell is the frontwoman, or from Untogether, Blue Hawaii’s first LP
Tenderness’s cover features the pair on a couch, more interested in their phones than they are in each other. This core concept arose while Standell was in a long-distance relationship that was mostly played out online. “I just realized how different of a person I was on the phone, how different I was in communicating,” she notes. This idea propels much of Tenderness’s ideology, although Kirby is quick to point out that our relationship to technology isn’t entirely bad. “I like the idea that we can use that technology to be closer together,” he says.
The music on Tenderness, which spans NOW: Releasing their second album, Tenderness, on Arbutus Records And technology is what eventually and, presumably, sipping tropical drinks in celebration disco, beat-scene textures, and hip-hop, brought Kirby and Standell back was informed by Kerby’s time living in together, too, as they slowly began Berlin. “It’s easy to say, ‘Oh, I went to Berlin and got really into techno!’” he to revisit the idea of Blue Hawaii. Tenderness is a document of their says. “But also the musical landscape over the last four years completely relationship, and of relationships in general: the good and the bad, the changed and became a lot more oriented to dance music.” He adds, “I think ways they expose room for growth and the joys of finding someone who we’ve always been a production duo—we’ve never really been a band.” likes what you like. In that sense, their new LP praises technology and its power to connect. “There’s a way to find that warmth underneath,” Kirby The notion of Blue Hawaii being more comfortable behind the boards than says. Tenderness is that discovery.
BY WILL SCHUBE PHOTO BY LANDON SPEERS 14
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A TASTE THAT
SHINES
BRIGHTER.
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BREAKING
MIDNIGHT SISTER IF THE LADY IN THE RADIATOR FROM ERASERHEAD SOMEHOW PUT OUT A FULL ALBUM, it would sound like San Fernando Valley duo Midnight Sister. Lead singer Juliana Giraffe’s breathy, Vaudevillian tenor combined with multi-instrumentalist Ari Balouzian’s spooky analog constructions affirm that the most ordinary of American landscapes are also the most surreal.
years ago. Each line on Saturn Over Sunset is almost purely visual, and after seeing the vibrant yet isolating set design of Midnight Sister’s videos (made by Giraffe Studios, naturally), it’s apparent that, on this album, the pair are more interested in portraying the feeling of being on planet Saturn than Sunset Boulevard. But still, Midnight Sister seem deliberately ensconced in the mundane. For example, Giraffe cites a niche tote bag boutique that she managed across from LA venue The Echo as her primary songwriting environment. “I watched the community and the characters from the huge storefront window and just imagined everyone’s stories,” she says, specifically naming a homeless man called “Dominicslash-Brian” who would alternate between split personalities as her most inspiring acquaintance. “Through the stories I would imagine for these people, I wrote my part for each song.”
We meet at Donut Prince, a cult monument of Burbank known for its giant, insipid window slogan “Don’t get a divorce; get a donut” and Yelp-disparaged, twenty-three-houra-day service. Of the shop’s four cramped, hot-magenta booths, one is open, the rest occupied by seventy-somethings loudly comparing their cell phone bills. One of them, a woman with a beehive hairdo and a pair of cat-eye glasses, points out the fact that Giraffe’s dress matches the color of the bench exactly. The singer proudly announces that this was intentional. Donut in hand, she sits and leans forward: “This…is the pure inspiration for our album,” she says, gesturing at the scene. A West Coast album, aesthetically driven not by the psych-rock pageantry of gentrified East Los Angeles, but by the DayGlo diners and retirees of the Valley? Yes.
And finally, as for Saturn Over Sunset’s patently vintage sound palette, Balouzian MEMBERS: Juliana Giraffe (vocals) and Ari Balouzian (instrumentation) is confident in how to make an album FOUNDED: 2016 sound indiscernible from a ’60s acetate FROM: Los Angeles, by way of the San Fernando Valley in 2017: “You use real instruments,” YOU MIGHT KNOW THEM FROM: The creepy feeling you get pulling he says simply, detailing his use of live through a strip mall late at night drummers, analog keys from pianos to NOW: Celebrating the release of their debut, Saturn Over Sunset, via Jagjaguwar Beside her, Balouzian enumerates Judy Mellotrons, recording modules including Garland, Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard, tape machines and Akai MPC samplers, and Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon as cornerstones of Midnight string arrangements he played mostly himself, and guitar work by fellow LA Sister’s interpretation of LA as a whole. “It’s all about finding the darkness outsider Alex Izenberg. underneath the glamor,” he remarks of his city, before revealing that the title of their debut album, Saturn Over Sunset, is lifted from a chapter title in In doing so, he laid the perfect foundation for Giraffe’s vocal homages to Anger’s book. the songwriting of yesteryear: “I’m really not up to date on today’s music. I’m kind of stuck on the old records I like—Bowie, T. Rex, The Zombies, a lot Balouzian got his start scoring independent films and documentaries, of disco…” she says. This influence is clear in Giraffe’s sense of melody and and Giraffe has made music videos and short films for years with her wardrobe. Living in the suburban San Fernando Valley and being out of the sister under the auspices of their production company, Giraffe Studios. loop on new music are two qualities most LA musicians avoid admitting at all “[Midnight Sister] is my first music project, so most of my lyrics are made costs, but on Midnight Sister’s plane of surrealism, time and space are the to feel like a film,” she says, having only picked up music at all some two least of their concerns. BY JAMIE LAWLOR 16
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On November 4, bid on this Gibson guitar customized for Miley Cyrus by artist Sage Vaughn. Julien’s Auctions proudly partners with the VH1 Save The Music Foundation for the auction of this one-of-a-kind Gibson Les Paul guitar. Don’t miss your chance to bring home this exclusive instrument, while delivering an applause-worthy boost to public school music programs. The live auction takes place Saturday, November 4, 2017. For more details: Visit www.juliensauctions.com Email info@juliensauctions.com Call 310-836-1818
DAVE his upcoming collaborative EP ≠
Dave Sardy’s calendar is full, which, frankly, isn’t anything
(pronounced “Unequal”), he tells
new: Sardy’s calendar is always full. It’s become something of an occupational hazard. A veteran recording artist, film composer, and one of the music industry’s preeminent mixers and producers—having spent the past two decades working with the likes of LCD Soundsystem, Oasis, The Walkmen, Nine Inch Nails, Rage Against the Machine, Band of Horses, Johnny Cash, Tegan and Sara, Spoon, and a laundry list of other acts—the man known as D. Sardy isn’t known for his light workload. Even on the August afternoon when he squeezes me in to chat about
me how the following day he has to get on a flight to the UK to meet with the London Symphony Orchestra, who are recording his score for the upcoming Will Smith sci-fi cop thriller Bright, due out later this year on Netflix. At the same time, he’s also making preparations to oversee the upcoming writing and production of a new album by Maynard James Keenan’s supergroup A Perfect
Circle, the band’s first album of original material in almost fifteen years.
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A Playlist for Big Brother
Sitting in his personal office within Hillside Manor, a multi-studio complex located in the Hollywood Hills’ Beachwood Canyon, Sardy says there isn’t a moment where he and his team of studio elves aren’t working on different projects in different rooms or working different aspects of the same project for somebody. “My normal day? There is no normal day,” he says. On top of all of these spinning plates, somehow, someway, Sardy is attempting to finish the mixing of close to a dozen songs, some of them intended for ≠, which he is releasing under the name DSARDY. The EP is the first in a series of planned releases made with a bevy of guest vocalist collaborators, including Jim James of My Morning Jacket, Macy Gray, Son Little, Glass Animals, Black Angels, Ida Maria, and more. “The reason to make this music is really out of a creative urge to work with people who I think are incredible,” says Sardy. “It’s a bit like making a playlist. I want music that feels like it’s coming from a certain place and a certain perspective, making every track that I do with these people be a unique experiment but [still] feeling like part of a body of work.” ≠ feels like a journey through the dark web, a carefully curated soundtrack to an as-of-yet unfilmed, twenty-first century adaptation of George Orwell’s 1984. “[With] everybody I’ve worked with on this project, it’s been addressing where we’re at in this strange technological moment,” he says. “We’re all kind of under surveillance, yet we’re advertising ourselves constantly. We’re all using every tool but then losing skills because we have these tools to take care of them. We’re selling ourselves and our data but getting this ease of continuity and connection in our life. We’re closing the circle, that science-fictional moment that we’re in. It’s not uncreepy. It’s a weird moment to be in as a person.”
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Tracks such as “Error,” which Sardy wrote alongside James, regularly toe the line of this technological progress and paranoia. “[Jim] was talking about how he and a friend of his went on this long walk,” says Sardy. “They were like, ‘You know, we’re getting away from everything today.’ And they went on this hike and they put down a blanket and were completely alone just experiencing this day. And ten minutes after they sat down, they heard this weird noise and they were looking out [from] this cliff and slowly this drone just lifted up and was staring at them and filming them from twenty feet out. It hovered there filming them and then just slowly flew away. And they were like, ‘Fuck!’ You can’t do anything about it. You can’t be like, ‘Hey, stop that!’ You have no fucking control over that. You’re someone else’s video at that point. You don’t have any rights in those moments.” With plans to incorporate multi-disciplinary elements such as video, film, graffiti, and other media to build on the narrative of the music, Sardy believes that when you’re living in a dissonant world, the function of an artist is to look that world squarely in the eyes and respond to it. “I’m looking for music that’s touching and emotionally connecting,” he says. “That’s really hard to do. There isn’t a recording program that helps you do that. There isn’t a technology that connects you to that. That’s always the part I’m chasing as
Sardy on His Choicest Cuts
a producer and as an artist. That’s kind of what this project is about.”
Band of Horses, Infinite Arms That’s on the top of the list. It’s one of those records I still listen to all the time. I came in at a point when they were like, “I’m not exactly sure what we’re doing right now.” And it was very easy to be a fan of the band and walk in and go, “What if we try this, what if we try that?” I love records where you put it on and it puts you in a mood with valleys and peaks and just takes you on a ride. They’re really hard to make and really hard to find. Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds, Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds That’s like a great Oasis record minus him sharing the songwriting with other people. It’s so fucking strong. He’s one of the most awesome people to work with. He’s incredibly talented and straightforward and just down to earth and couldn’t have been [more] stoked to be making a record with no drama. The record was pure joy, and super easy. LCD Soundsystem Every time I work with James Murphy, he’ll usually send me two, three, four songs per record. He doesn’t really ever let anyone else work with his stuff, so just the fact that he’s willing to share and let one of his children [be] under my care, that’s a huge fucking vote of confidence. On American Dream I did “Call the Police” and the title track. He has a really interesting way of putting stuff together. It’s very technical,
geeky stuff. What’s interesting is that he has a mixture of an incredibly lo-fi garage approach and an incredibly hi-fi electronic approach mixed together, which is a perfect description of his music. Wolfmother, Wolfmother That was an amazing record just because I blew up so much gear making it. Making that first record with them was hysterical. All three of them were not planning on being musicians: They had other artistic lives. One was a photographer. One was a graphic designer. And they kind of got together and started playing and instantly had a sound that carried them. So we spent two months in an abandoned recording studio and just set it up as a rehearsal [space] where we could record all the time. It was kind of like inventing a rock school. Supergrass, Life on Other Planets Fucking great record. I just mixed that. I wasn’t the producer but I listen to it all the time. It was one of those records where they sent me the record—I never hung out with them in the studio—and their instructions were great. They’d be like, “Stranglers meets Elvis Presley,” and then I’d send them a mix and they’d be like, “Fucking right on, man!” I love people who have the confidence to try and work that way, to throw you some ideas and let you react to it. That’s a fun way to work.
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Touring can be bad for your health. Mackenzie Scott is only twenty-six years old, but in the past couple of years she’s found herself growing increasingly sick on the road, sapped of any youthful energy she might have had before committing to a life spent in a van. The Georgia-raised, New York–based singer/songwriter better known as Torres is more than half a decade into a career that’s found her performing over two-hundred live shows since the release of her 2013 self-titled debut. And it’s taken a toll. While touring behind her 2015 album Sprinter, Scott found herself feeling increasingly worn down by the demands of the job. Overworked, over-stressed, and sleep-deprived, she reached a breaking point. Something had to change, but in making major decisions about her health—mostly involving diet and exercise—Scott found herself more in tune with her own physiology. Much of the time she spent writing her new album, Three Futures, also involved her becoming reacquainted with her own biology, and in doing so it led to a new outlook: a celebration of the body as a vessel for joy. “I completely flipped the way that I was living,” she says on the phone from her home in Brooklyn. “I cut out most everything that I was eating and completely changed it, and made it a lifestyle. And I started getting really into walking. I wrote so much of the new album just walking and walking and walking. Then at the same time I got really into cooking. I basically had to just start cooking all my own food because I wanted to know everything that was going into it. It all came together at this intersection where I was really paying close attention to everything that my body was telling me. I paid attention to my senses— taste, smell—and I used my limbs more.” Three Futures, which is out via 4AD, is the end result of Scott’s exploration of the senses, a journey that manifests in various ways throughout its ten songs. For one, the Rob Ellis–produced album is the most physical-sounding Torres record to date, driven by dense layers of electronics, hypnotic loops, and dancefloor-friendly beats. The songs on Three Futures evoke a late-night atmosphere, whether in the dreamy surrealism of “Skim,” the darkly ominous pulse of “Helen in the Woods,” or the stunning minimalism of “Bad Baby Pie.” These are songs that are meant to be felt as much as heard.
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It’s also an album that Scott wanted to experience on other, less immediately palpable levels. She began the process of writing the album by first sketching out a blueprint of an imagined house with ten rooms, each one with its own assigned cast of characters, scents, and colors. Scott says that she’s personally had experiences of synesthesia—a condition in which stimulation of one sense triggers another, such as perceiving colors when hearing a song—and sought to extend that feeling to her own music, however difficult that might be for the listener to perceive in any obvious way. “In imparting our ideas of colors or color palettes and smells into something intangible like music, there’s no real way of actually, consciously getting that across,” she says. “However, I do think that, intuitively, that symbolism hopefully finds its way [into] the song—even on a deeply subconscious level. Those colors will make themselves present, and the scents will make themselves known. The mildest form of synesthesia being triggered is a good thing.” In addition to exploring the senses, Scott has embraced the sensual. Many of the songs on Three Futures are “sexier,” as she puts it, some in more explicit ways than others. The title track opens with the line “I got hard in your car,” while the humorously defiant “Righteous Woman” sets up an evocative punchline: “I am not a righteous woman / I’m more of an ass man.” But it’s not just a clever turn of phrase—Scott is flipping gender roles as society understands them, and turning ideas of masculine and feminine sexuality upside down: “And when I go to spread, it’s just to take up all the space I can,” she sings. In marketing the album, Scott’s also used a variety of highly erotic visual imagery. She’s straddled by a mostly-nude woman in the video for the first single, “Skim,” and she’s depicted in a promotional photo with hands caressing her torso as she reclines in bed. While she says she “doesn’t want to make a gender conversation” out of our chat, part of what inspired this exploration of eroticism were the false notions she was taught in her conservative surroundings early in life. “As a woman, and especially a woman in the South, I was raised to believe that modesty was a requirement—‘modesty’ meaning cover yourself, hide yourself, take up as little space as you can, because men are stimulated visually,” she says. “That was the mentality that I was raised with. That’s never sat right with me, because it’s not any woman’s responsibility to shrink herself or hide herself to make someone else more comfortable or to keep them from temptation, whatever that may be. The other implication there is that women are not stimulated by sight, which I think is one of the most harmful lies that I was ever taught.” BLAZER: GINO SALVAGGI PANTS: H&M 28
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But Scott never moralizes or judges the subjects of her songs. Even when tackling topics such as one-night stands—events that have the potential to lead to personal regrets—she avoids attaching a sense of shame. Part of the idea of giving in to pleasure is tied into the overarching theme of sense and sensuality, of being in touch with one’s body. And on a broader level, it reflects something else from her past that she’s had to unlearn—that right and wrong are, in large part, far from ironclad. “I’ve come to this point where I kind of had to rethink everything I grew up believing as right and wrong,” she says. “Mostly what I’ve concluded, at least at this point, is [that] the majority of things we call ‘wrong’ are social conditioning. I also don’t believe that anyone is all one thing—I think everybody is a mix of good and evil, if you want to call it that, light and darkness. Whereas previously I tended to write as young writers do, from the perspective that made me come out as having the higher ground, or having the higher moral authority… I don’t necessarily think that’s [the] writer’s job. I think it’s the writer’s job to observe and pay attention and not judge.” Mackenzie Scott has undergone a lot of personal growth in two years. She’s healthier, more upbeat, and unapologetic about the way she lives her life. Each song on Three Futures captures a specific time, place, and atmosphere in a four-minute art-pop song, providing stimulation on various levels, even if subliminally. As a songwriter, she plans everything down to the finest detail. But the inspiration, as Scott says, comes from something less intellectual and more corporeal. “I realized I had never really taken note of the body as an actual temple,” she says. “And not in the biblical sense. But the body as a true place of worship… Actually indulging the body in every way in pleasure—pleasure that ends up building the body up rather than tearing it down. “A healthy hedonism.”
BLAZER: CELINE SHIRT: KRAMMER & STOUDT PANTS: LEVIS BELT: CELINE ARCHIVE NECKLACE: LAURA LOMBARDI
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NAUSICAÄ OF THE VALLEY OF THE WIND (1984)
In Conversation:
Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith on the Beauty of Hayao Miyazaki The composer and synthesist dives into the visually rich world of the greatest anime filmmaker of all time.
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MY NEIGHBOR TOTORO (1988)
Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith sees music. Ever since she was a kid growing up on Orcas Island, Washington, the electronic composer has visualized sound. Perhaps that’s why her new album The Kid feels so cinematic, its blend of swelling new age ambiance, experimental pop, and cosmic poetry powerfully evocative of color and movement. It’s her sixth solo album, and it follows an intensely productive period for Smith that’s found her recording an album-length collaboration with synth pioneer Suzanne Ciani and performing at desert festivals like Marfa Myths, FORM Arcosanti, and Desert Daze. Add the tracklist of The Kid up, and it constitutes a poem: “I Am Learning / To Follow and Lead / Until I Remember / Who I Am and Why I Am Where I Am,” it partially reads. This sense of scope, of overarching and overlapping meaning, syncs up with the work of one of Smith’s primary inspirations: the Japanese filmmaker and animator Hayao Miyazaki. Since she first encountered his work seven years ago, he’s served as a touchstone for the composer; her 2016 album EARS was originally conceived as an alternate soundtrack to his 1984 film Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. Smith spoke to FLOOD by phone while she was walking through LA’s Atwater Village about her relationship to Miyazaki’s work. FLOOD FLOOD
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I recently listened to your great interview
You used the phrase “wiggle” in regards to your
founded with Miyazaki]. I promise I watch movies
with Suzanne Doucet for the Light in the Attic
attraction to his work. When I listen to EARS, it
that aren’t anime, too [laughs]. It’s so beautiful; I
podcast where you talked about “seeing” music.
feels like it has a lot of that. It evokes an organic
cried the hardest I have in ten years watching it.
Have you always visualized music?
feeling, like it’s mimicking natural processes of
I got this amazing feeling from it that there’s no
plant life—blooming, growing.
time to waste, so just play. That was something really strong in me creating [this record].
Yeah, [and] I actually didn’t know that other people didn’t. I thought that was just how it
That’s great! It worked. [Comic artist] Mœbius is a big one for you too,
worked. [When I] went to college, that’s when I learned it’s not everyone’s experience. I didn’t
Do you get that from Miyazaki’s work? It feels
right? Do you get a similar feeling from his work
utilize it as a tool when I was younger; I just
like there’s a special attention paid to life
that you do from Miyazaki?
accepted that that’s what it was and was like, “Oh,
processes in his films. Yeah, [and] I think it has to do with color hue
don’t you see that this is this and this is this?” It’s hard for me to say that’s what he intended,
choices; I’m drawn to when someone has a
but that’s what I get out of it. I feel like the way
consistent language with their sense of color.
Has Miyazaki’s animation influenced the way
I look at the world is similar to the way I look at
Where there’s people who have really strong
you see things?
tarot cards—you pull from it what you want to
contrasts, it’s not that it doesn’t resonate
get in that moment. Nothing’s actually telling you
with me or I don’t like it—it’s [that] I’m more
No, it was more that when I [first] saw those films,
anything; you’re reading your own experience
particular about it than when there’s gradients
it really struck a chord in me; [I felt like he] had
into it. That’s what I get out of his films. I’m
and it looks more like a transcendental art piece,
made a visual language for a lot of things I feel.
always inspired and seeing movement and flow
like something Frederic Church would paint. It’s
Every part of the animation had so much life and
and growth.
representative of what I would find in nature
People would be like, “No.” [Laughs.]
but there are little exaggerated parts. I think I’m
wiggle. That’s how I’ve always wanted to hear the world and see the world and experience it,
When you watch those films, it’s like you’re
also drawn to things that illustrate how small
just everything having so much life. I was really
reading sacred texts; it’s all in there. On “An
of a role humans have in nature, but how big of
excited when I saw them, because I was like, “Ah!
Intention” from The Kid, you sing, “I feel
one they think they have. That’s something I’m
They nailed it.” And Joe Hisaishi nailed the music,
everything at the same time.” With this record,
always trying to remind myself of.
too. Everything was perfect.
did you have it in mind to make a similarly grand statement as Miyazaki, just about the enormity
And that’s an idea that runs through many of
What was the first Miyazaki film you saw?
of existence?
Miyazaki’s films. Does that idea freak you out—
Princess Mononoke. That one’s amazing. It just
It was just kind of my experience at the time.
opened the gate and I was like, “I have to see
Someone really close to me passed away. My dad
everything. Ten times.” [Laughs.]
has been talking a lot about the four stages of life.
That’s kind of what the last song on [The Kid] is
It’s a constant theme. I’d just seen this movie that
about: this bittersweet feeling of how beautiful
provoked the whole idea of holding on to your
it can be to approach death and regeneration,
“kid” energy for dear life.
renewing energy—but also how sad it is that what
the idea of how small we are in comparison to
What’s your favorite of his works?
you knew is not going to be there anymore. So
It’s actually the one that I made EARS [as a soundtrack] for: Nausicaä of the Valley of the
Which movie?
it doesn’t freak me out; it’s my nature to move toward things I’m really bad at and afraid of.
Wind. I didn’t really say it too much publicly,
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essentially everything else?
because I’m such a big fan of Joe Hisaishi; I
It’s so sad. It’s called The Tale of Princess Kaguya.
That’s something I get joy out of and have a lot of
didn’t want it to sound like I was trying to
It’s another anime film [by director Isao Takahata,
curiosity about.
replace his work in any way.
released by Studio Ghibli, which Takahata co-
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THE TALE OF PRINCESS KAGUYA (DIRECTED BY ISAO TAKAHATA, 2013)
SPIRITED AWAY (2001)
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IN UNNATURAL POSITIONS B Y J A S O N P. W O O D B U R Y P H O T O S B Y N A B I L E L D E R K I N S H O T F O R F L O O D AT S O N O S H O M E L A
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Head over to the annotation site Genius and you’ll notice a green check mark next to the lyrics of Vince Staples’s latest LP, Big Fish Theory. Released in June to great fanfare, the Long Beach rapper’s sophomore album places his observational musings about showbiz, race, and morality in a techno-futuristic framework. The record pulses with rhythmic energy, its grim beats composed of strained soul samples and twitching electronic sounds. It’s the kind of record that begs to be studied and pored over, with references to French composer Louis Bourgeois and visual artist Richard Prince packed into complicated party anthems. But to hear Staples tell it, he only recently first logged on to Genius—to change his profile picture—and he’s not a big fan of the site’s reason for existing.
“I hate the concept of Rap Genius—good people, probably, but I hate the concept of telling people what something means,” he says gently, without any hint of malice in his voice. Speaking over the phone, he sounds relaxed and unburdened by the idea that, right now, you can read dozens of cited annotations picking apart the references in songs like “BagBak” and “Yeah Right.” His problem isn’t with Genius providing lyrics for obsessive fans—though he clarifies that his label, Def Jam, sent them over, not him personally—he’s just not into the idea of being definitively told what a piece of art means. And he’s not a fan of the pace of music consumption, the immediacy sites like Genius provide for listeners aiming to “get it” and get it quick.
“Everyone is in a fucking rush,” Staples says. “I feel bad for them. People have to look to someone else to tell them how they feel or how they think.” Staples isn’t here to explain to anyone what, or how, to feel about his work. As far as he’s concerned, his job is to create, to challenge himself and build up a body of work. But one spin through 2015’s Summertime ’06, the subsequent 2016 EP Prima Donna, and Big Fish Theory quickly dispatches the idea that he’s not paying attention to the world around him—or the world his listeners inhabit. Staples’s lyrics have elevated him to the status of one of hip-hop’s sharpest, brightest voices: part satirist, part character actor, part voice of reason.
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Unsurprisingly, the kind of folks who cherish storytelling in rap have glommed onto him, holding him up as a paragon of “real hip-hop.” But he evades categorization—he’s just as likely to be known for his absurdist Sprite ads as he is for his dark musings, like, “How am I supposed to have a good time / When death and destruction is all I see,” which he raps on the album highlight “Party People.” He’s not an entirely conceptual artist—early in Big Fish Theory’s press cycle he cited the inspiration of Afrofuturism, but now he says that he was interested more in how people would interpret his use of the term than the distinction itself. “I don’t know enough about what that is and what it means, I just like to say things,” he shrugs. But Staples is interested in the room and the freedom art provides to explore the world, and he’s not beholden to any rules set out by gatekeepers or fans.
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“I don’t see a need for a true artist to get stuck within any medium,” Staples said when FLOOD spoke to him earlier this year, shortly before the release of Big Fish Theory. While the industrial-tinged beats of Summertime ’06 were largely overseen by Chicago producer No I.D., Big Fish Theory finds Staples striking off in search of new sonic territory, working with a cast of collaborators including Los Angeles beat scene vet Zack Sekoff, Justin Vernon of Bon Iver, frequent collaborator Flume, Damon Albarn of Blur and Gorillaz, London DJ SOPHIE, Miami-based electro duo GTA, and more. Staples’s flow is alternately raging and bluesy, clearly demonstrative of his growth as a rapper and musician, pushing out of the boxes—or fish bowls— fans might seek to put him in. “People still say I make gangbanger music,” he says. “People who write about my music are still talking about [it in] reference to Summertime ’06, or even before then.”
It can be difficult to shake off first impressions of art, especially when a debut record is as expertly rendered as Summertime ’06, a vivid and evocative portrait of Long Beach youth. And Staples isn’t entirely finished addressing his youth on Big Fish Theory, either. “Another story of a young black man / Tryna make it up out that jam, god damn,” he raps on “Big Fish,” “Shoulda been dead broke, shoulda been chalked out / But it didn’t happen, now it’s time to get it cracking.” The record is about elevation, transcending the limits of an unimaginative world quick to reduce a young black man to the stereotypes that pervade discussion of rap culture— often propagated by white critics whose perspective is utterly removed from his own. But to a degree, he understands and empathizes with the impulse to latch on to what makes itself evident in the music.
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“It’s like the Kid Cudi thing,” Staples continues, referencing the constantly evolving Cleveland musician who scored a major hit on his 2009 debut with “Day ’n’ Nite.” “You’ve got the ‘Day ’n’ Nite’ Kid Cudi, and you have the second album—a lot of people loved it, [but] they still wanted more ‘Day ’n’ Nite.’ You get to [2013’s] Indicud, they still want ‘Day ’n’ Nite.’ You get to [2015’s] Speedin’ Bullet 2 Heaven, they still want ‘Day ’n’ Nite.’” Hits like Summertime ’06’s “Norf Norf” inform one perception of who “Vince Staples The Artist” is and what kind of work he creates. But an album like Big Fish Theory exists to complicate easy narratives, to challenge and expand the notion of Staples as a person and creator. It’s never easy to spot “The Actual Vince” in the song’s layered verses; the real Vince eschews drugs and alcohol but raps about debauched scenes in “Yeah Right.” He compares himself to Hitchcock on “Homage,” likening his
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approach to a master of narrative twist. It’s tempting to pin the album’s arc to the title, to ask if Staples himself is constricted by the bowl he’s placed in by fans and critics—but sitting down with Trevor Noah on the The Daily Show, Staples shifted the discussion away from a literal interpretation of the title to focus on how listening to the album made Noah feel. The answer was “good.” “People want to be right,” Staples says of those looking to assess and judge his work. “I don’t hold it against anyone or look at it any type of way—I just create what I create.” Which brings things back to Genius and interpretation. Perhaps in some ways, the site serves as a manifestation of what Staples hopes for his music: that listeners and readers will take what they hear and infer their own meaning, filter his words through their own experiences, and emerge with something entirely new. Or, like Staples says, people are simply looking to
be told what to think. Either way, it doesn’t affect his process. “I never think about people when I’m performing, as far as the production point of my music,” he says. “It’s not healthy, in my opinion. I don’t do this for other people. I’m trying to figure out how I want to create my music. If people can anticipate what your next move is going to be, they have no interest, from what I’ve seen. People want to be surprised by what you’ve made. I don’t mind being the person to do that.” And those who can’t handle his artistic expansion—his willingness to bend and shift toward the avant-garde? Well, Staples is typically blunt in his take on those kinds of listeners. “They can’t fathom me being who I am, being where I’m from, being the person I am,” Staples says. “It makes no sense to them.”
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photos by Piper Ferguson style by Van Van Alonso glam by Brandy Allen
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Fourteen years ago, in the middle of what would become his most popular song, André 3000 offhandedly delivered a line that is both prophecy and a tidy summation of the history of conscious pop music: “Y’all don’t wanna hear me,” he sings, and not without some exuberance. “You just want to dance.” André was probably right, as far as the audience for “Hey Ya!” was concerned, but even 2003—which saw the beginning of the Iraq War, the crash of the Space Shuttle Columbia, and the death of Nina Simone—sounds like a welcome respite from the brutal reality of 2017.
So what’s a pop star to do? You get the sense that this is a question that bugs Miguel. The psychedelic soul of 2015’s Wildheart was driven by a rich, lusty set of songs that veered from the carnal to the tender in the blink of a perfectly made-up eye. But, to paraphrase Erykah Badu, it wasn’t all betwixt the sheets. The dampness that seems to emanate from Wildheart’s production—most of which Miguel handled himself— comes not only from late-night lovers’ steam, but also from its creator’s humid mind as he tries to locate himself in a world that often seems hostile or alien. It was both an artistic and commercial high point, and it provided Miguel with the kind of platform his charismatic vulnerability seems to have been created specifically to occupy. In a world like ours, though, where—as he put it onstage at Pitchfork Fest in 2016—he’s “tired of human lives turned into hashtags and prayer hands,” doesn’t a musician, like anyone with any kind of influence, have a responsibility to try and make the world a more just place, instead of simply talking about it? It’s no surprise, then, that he finds himself drawn to Pussy Riot. And it’s hard to think of a better contemporary example of a group whose activism and art are so deeply intertwined. Since two of their members, Nadya Tolokonnikova and Maria Alyokhina, were sent to jail for their “Punk Prayer” in 2012, the Russian collective has splintered to pursue various projects—including journalism, activism, and music—all under the Pussy Riot banner. Last fall, shortly after the election, Tolokonnikova used the name to release a three-song EP called xxx that included the electro-pop song “Make America Great Again,” the chorus of which positions empathy as the solution for America’s woes: “Let other people in / Listen to your women / Stop killing black children / Make America
great again.” In the accompanying video, she’s branded with a hot iron, sexually assaulted, and humiliated by prison guards for her trouble. Miguel tweeted a video of himself singing the track (which he rightly called “legit a jam, feel good even!”) in a Hawaiian shirt, his body moving gracefully through the dips in the song’s melody. In his hands, “Make America Great Again” softens, and Tolokonnikova’s protest becomes his plea, and for the listener, the line between the two concepts is blurred beyond recognition. So, as he puts the finishing touches on his fourth album, War and Leisure, which is led by the legit feel-good jams “Sky Walker” and “Shockandawe,” the question lingers, and more besides. What is the role of the artist in 2017? Does anyone need to hear an R&B singer’s take on the world? How do you “celebrate every day like a birthday,” as he puts it in “Sky Walker,” when the threat of nuclear war lingers overhead? To try and answer them, FLOOD called up Tolokonnikova in Moscow, where she was preparing for a video shoot in a room decorated with a sign reading “good night white pride,” and linked her together with Miguel, who was beginning his morning in Los Angeles in a plush red robe, goblet of orange juice in hand. After expressing a frankly giddy appreciation for one another’s work and laughing about their mutual friend Dave Sitek’s habit of sending oddball picture texts, they got down to the serious business of being pop stars, beginning with the genesis of Pussy Riot’s “Make America Great Again.” — Marty Sartini Garner FLOOD
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NADYA TOLOKONNIKOVA: I hadn’t been to America for a while, and then when I was in Moscow, I heard about Trump. It was the summer of 2015, and I was scared to go, but I still jumped on the plane and went. So I decided to use art as political psychotherapy. I think that’s the best kind of psychotherapy, because you don’t need to spend money on shrinks, and you just deal with your own neuroses. That’s how that song happened. MIGUEL: People don’t understand how difficult it is to be clear and concise and to deliver a real message. And I think that’s one of the things that I love about what you do: It’s so clear, and melodic, and clever. Among punks, you’re supposed to hate pop things, right? But I believe that you need to learn from—not all pop culture, but from some parts of pop culture, how to be precise. There’s [a thing that happens] when you’re developing underground political discourse: You start to be so complicated, and sometimes you don’t even understand yourselves. You need to figure out how to question the status quo and be popular at the same time. Information isn’t always popular. And so in making information popular, you sometimes have to make it digestible for the masses, you know? For people who aren’t [naturally] critical thinkers or who aren’t going to question the status quo. You’re smart enough to go, “OK, I did all of the work to understand why I believe this, so let me condense all of that and make it something that you can really understand.” Look at Trump. He’s a douchebag, but he’s making everything super clear; he’s literally speaking in slogans. So in order to oppose him, you need to be clear, too, and you need to come up with better ideas than him. It’s crazy how appealing to people simple emotional things are, and how powerful simple emotional triggers can be. I mean, that’s what music is, really. And he’s learned how to do that—or he’s figured out how to manipulate it masterfully. How are you dealing with the news? Every time I open the news, I feel like I’m overwhelmed with despair or anger—or empathy, on the other hand. You want to be connected with reality, but at the same time you need to overcome your terrible emotions every day. Watching the news now feels like watching a soap opera. So it’s hard to take anything seriously, even though the planes that flew over North Korea—
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that really happened. And the missile that was fired over Japan—that really happened. No matter how I’m getting the information and how absurd the reason behind it is and why it’s happening, I always try and remind myself that war and conflict are—well, it can all be whittled down to greed. And it’s gonna be here until we as a culture—or as just humans—really elevate. So I think my biggest way of dealing with it is reminding myself that, at the end of the day, it’s about elevating our consciousness and our need to be connected with each other. My contribution—and the best way I can contribute—is through my music. So what in my music can I do to bring people together? And I think that’s what has been the driving force behind the music that I’ve been creating for this project. But the more fragmented we become, the less empathetic we become to each other’s positions and experiences. Definitely. I think greed and dehumanization are giant problems, because you start to treat people as merely instruments for achieving something. That’s how Trump and Putin happen. When you’re labelled by someone— “You’re Russians”—you’re not a human being anymore; you’re less than a cockroach. And you feel it, too. When I come to the American border with a Russian passport, I see their reaction. And I’m really concerned with that because it’s a deep scar, and it’s maybe for one generation, or maybe for two or three. Even after Trump’s term comes to an end, we’ll have someone else. So you will still, as a culture, be like, “Oh, the Russians.” Because he’s gone back to this Cold War paradigm. It’s taken decades [for our countries] to repair their perspectives [toward one another]. And not only with our relations with people from different places... He’s enabling Nazis inside of the United States—literal Nazis that are not in hiding anymore. Walking around with torches. The cat’s been let out of the bag. Like, there’s a population of people in the United States who clearly believe that they are better and deserve more than anyone else. And that’s something that’s going to last after Trump leaves; four years from now, that’s still gonna be there. So how do we deal with that? You said before that we need to interact with each other more. It’s terrible
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what’s going on, but it can help us to move somewhere else. There are good and bad sides to it; we’re living in a pretty shitty political situation, but it makes us act and create alternative resources and alternative institutions. How long were you in jail, by the way? A year? Two years. Two fucking years. And I know it sounds pretty bad, but it really made us stronger—and more convicted. Freedom of speech is so valuable. If you start [restricting it], that means that people can’t even dream. Do you know what I mean? You can’t even dream now. That’s another thing I wanted to talk with you about. I look back a lot on the ’60s, and it seems like it was a time when people really dreamed, and dreamed about how to combine politics and their everyday lives. Now, when you think about political engagement, most people still think of that as something boring—like a duty. But if you look back at what was going on in Paris in 1968, or with Martin Luther King, the hippies, the Civil Rights movement, they achieved a lot because they believed in politics. It was exciting for them. It was a transgressive moment. The dreaming is the catalyst for action. But overall, it always comes down to money and survival. People are like, “Yo, I don’t got time for that.” We’ve become so desensitized to so much. It’s easy, for instance, when a natural disaster happens, to post a photo and say, “Pray for this place.” And then you feel like your duty is done. That’s the kind of apathetic and lazy way we’ve come about supporting things that are good. Whereas before, especially in the ’60s, you look at here in the States we had a large middle class. You had people that had a living to fight for; they believed in that. And they had something to aspire to. Whereas now, there is no middle class. There’s only the upper 1 percent [and then the rest]. Your focus is only on money, especially in a culture [like ours] that’s built on money. It’s not about family or being together.
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Surely, but I would say that that’s true about Russia, too—this greed and [the idea that] we don’t really trust each other. And the government is a macro example. As you go down, from the government of a country to its smaller states, its cities, its communities— at the very bottom it’s family. If you break the family unit, then you lose trust, you’re losing the support system, you’re losing the community— which means the community has nothing to believe in or fight for. So then it’s just money at the forefront. It’s survival. And when you’re just playing for survival you’re not thinking about tomorrow. We need to rebuild it somehow; we need to reinforce love and trust. That’s not easy. And that’s why I love art—because art to me is a harbor where I feel connected to people in building community. I’m not a religious person in the normal sense of the word, but I feel art is something religious for me. That’s why we called our action “Punk Prayer.” I love that. It’s about the community—and inspiring each other to create. Because in a world where there are so many reasons being put in our face not to trust one another, and not to be connected, and to hate each other, I think we need as many people fighting to bring people together for all of the right reasons as we can. So this album for me is the most upbeat. You know, you go back and you study the things that you did that you like and you’re like, “OK, cool, what can I do different?” And that’s the one thing I’ve never done, to kind of just focus on making people feel good. To your point, pop music: It’s normally upbeat, up-tempo. Simple. Melodic. OK? When I can do that, everyone is in the same room. Then I can say whatever I want; you’re already here because you want to be. Speaking of hopes and inspirations, the new generation of kids are a great inspiration. If you look at who’s supporting Bernie Sanders, who’s supporting Jeremy Corbyn, who’s supporting Alexei Navalny (who’s running against Putin here in Russia)—their supporters are young people. Sometimes I speak with seventeen-year-olds and I’m like, “Hey, you’re not really a lot older than my daughter, but you understand more about politics than I do.”
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They haven’t forgotten how to dream. That’s the dope part. The youth have the energy and they’re not as washed out by their experience, you know?
It’s important for artists to control that shit inside us. Our culture encourages us to just think about ourselves, and about our representation. It’s true.
They’re not so balls-deep in stereotypes. They’re allowing themselves to believe and to challenge their own ideals. They’re challenging the ideals of what they’ve been taught growing up. As we start to see the youth grow and all of their amazing ideas take form, it’s gonna be important for us to continue watering those plants. How do we continue giving them what they need so that they, in turn, do the same thing for the younger kids that are gonna grow up with fresh ideas, pushing the boundaries and bringing people together? Music for me used to be about me. And now it’s like, “Oh, wait a second, all of my heroes are dead.” Bowie, Prince, Michael. A lot of the legendary people who shaped the shit that we listen to now and model our shit after are either old or they’re gone. So the time is now for us to do it. [We have to] be in charge of our own time. Dave [Sitek, of TV on the Radio, who collaborated with Miguel and produced xxx’s “Straight Outta Vagina” and “Organs”] always says when we write something that he wants to inspire kids, that he makes music for kids: “I don’t like those songwriters who’re writing complicated constructions just to show how smart they are.” That’s why I love Dave. That’s what he says! He’s like, “No, this isn’t for us; it’s for the kids.” You gotta just create and let it go. He’s the best. But it’s hard in a world where everyone is trying to prove why they deserve attention—and that’s the ultimate currency. It’s something we have to be mindful of. Someone like Dave could easily be like, “Hold on, do you know what I’ve done? Do you know what I’ve contributed?” He easily could. And you! But that shit doesn’t get us anywhere. It doesn’t. Maybe we would get better careers if we behaved like that, though. Nah.
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You just have to remind yourself every day, every minute, like just— [snaps]—stop right now. I can honestly say, just from the past year and a half, working at that part is so freeing. You open yourself up to way more possibility, because you’re no longer criticizing everyone and yourself simultaneously. You’re just trusting your gut to go, “Hey, this feels right, I believe in this.” And leading with love as opposed to leading with a wall. No one wants to climb a fucking wall to get to you; no one wants to do that. It’s a tough game, but it’s worth it. Yeah, it’s always worth it. And somehow everyone has their thing—we all have our way of contributing. For you and I, we love music. But there’s someone out there who loves to teach. There’s someone out there who wants to figure out what they contribute through science. Everyone has their thing, their real interest, even if it’s someone who’s like, “I just love to garden.” It’s really just about getting to like what we really want, as opposed to what we’re being told to want. Because the truth is, what we all want is similar. We want love. We want to be acknowledged. We want to feel valuable. And when we can change the order of which things are important in our collective consciousness, that’s when we change the game. We’re at a point in our human history where we have to make some big changes, or we’re right at the edge of war. We’re right at the brink of it all, you know? And we disappear as humankind. Exactly.
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RETURNS by Mischa Pearlman images courtesy of John Yates / Stealworks.com and Dan Didier
It begins with John Keats. In a two-hundred-capacity venue—the Ivy Room, in Albany, California—Blake Schwarzenbach recites the first verse of “Ode on a Grecian Urn” by the English Romantic poet, and then something he said would never happen actually does. After a bit of stage banter, Schwarzenbach, Chris Bauermeister, and Adam Pfahler play together as Jawbreaker for the first time in twenty-one years.
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They launch into “The Boat Dreams from the Hill,” the first cut from their third album, 1994’s 24 Hour Revenge Therapy, and any apprehension or anxiety about whether they’ve still got it melts into the sweaty throng of the crowd, into the room full of voices singing back at them, into the sheer disbelief that this is actually happening. The song—ostensibly about a dilapidated boat that will never see use again, but which really serves as a metaphor for the fragility of human dreams—rushes and roars, propelled by and fizzing with the raw, ragged energy that always defined the band, riding the tidal waves of expectation as if, indeed, there were none. This could be 1994. It’s as if they never went away. The fact is, however, that the trio—who started life in New York in 1986 before making San Francisco’s Mission District their home—did break up. That show at the Ivy Room was one of a few very intimate warm-up gigs before the main event that’s brought them back together: a headlining slot at Chicago’s Riot Fest. If you watch Don’t Break Down, a recent documentary about Jawbreaker that gathered its members together for an awkward reunion of sorts in 2007, it becomes painfully apparent how big a deal this is on a personal level. The breakup was, indeed, more of a breakdown, and far from amicable. But they didn’t just split up because of fraying tensions between members. The backlash of a punk community that abandoned Jawbreaker after it signed a major label deal with Geffen for fourth album Dear You also played a part. That
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record boasted a much crisper, cleaner sound than its three predecessors, which alienated the band’s core fan base even more and made them—literally—turn their backs on them. That’s something Mark Kates, who signed Jawbreaker to Geffen, remembers well. “In the documentary, I tell a story about kids buying a ticket to see them at The Roxy and sitting on the floor with their backs to the stage when they played songs from the album—and then having to explain that to my boss,” he says. “We felt we’d done the ultimate indie-to-major move with Sonic Youth,” he continues, “and there were no real political ramifications. We did it with Nirvana, we did it with Teenage Fanclub, we did it with a lot of artists. But there’s footage [from before the signing] of Blake saying into the microphone, ‘We’ll never sign to a major label.’” While attitudes about selling out have shifted since then, in the two intervening decades, something else also happened. The band’s legacy didn’t just grow, but swelled significantly. They became more popular posthumously than they ever had been while active. Not only that, but their influence could be seen and heard in the burgeoning emo and punk scenes that Jawbreaker themselves had never quite fit into. Dear You—which, after moving only 40,000 copies, Geffen allowed to go out of print—became a coveted collector’s item. More importantly, opinion on that record started to evolve as people finally gave it the attention it deserved.
“I don’t really believe it was an ‘absence makes the heart grow fonder’ scenario,” says Brandon Reilly, who plays guitar for Long Island posthardcore outfit The Movielife and fronts Nightmare of You. “I feel it was a textbook case of a band being so far ahead of their time sonically and lyrically with respect to the music scene they were a part of. Punk was traditionally straightforward and easy to grasp, and I think Jawbreaker was anything but that. Even in their moments of simplicity there was so much complexity.” As accurate as that statement is, it’s also just the tip of the iceberg as to what made—and still makes—Jawbreaker special. It’s why they matter now, both inside and outside of the punk community. It’s why, for the past decade or so, festivals have been offering them obscene amounts of money to reunite. “Over the years, I would hear rumors about the offers they were getting,” says Sergie Loobkoff, guitarist of Samiam, a Berkeley punk band who had a very close relationship with Jawbreaker back in the day. “And even if they’re exaggerated rumors, it was still quite a lot of money. Someone in the music industry told me they got an offer in the million dollar range just to do a tour of all the House of Blues venues. Who wouldn’t do that, and why wouldn’t you do that? Unless you happen to be rich—and I know from Adam that he’s definitely not rich, and I happen to know that Blake was a bartender for a time. I was like, ‘Whoa! Why wouldn’t he do that?!’ And part of me admired that, because he was really sticking to his guns
BLAKE SCHWARZENBACH ON STAGE AT RIOT FEST, SEPTEMBER 2017 PHOTO BY BRIGID GALLAGHER
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and he had such an opinion of what was right for him and for Jawbreaker. But another part of me was like, ‘You fucking idiot!’” In the end, it was an offer from Riot Fest that finally convinced Schwarzenbach. His resistance and hostility toward reviving Jawbreaker’s body had finally gone. Although they aren’t doing interviews, the singer did appear on the pilot episode of the Missing Words podcast, where he revealed what it took for the reunion to happen. “I actually had nowhere else to go,” he told host Matt Pullman. “It just happened at a moment. What it took, honestly, was a good offer from an interesting big fest. Riot Fest feels like one of the few guitar-based, kind of punk-based stage events going on. [They] appealed way more than some of the others that had been asking us.” Despite heading up two critically acclaimed bands post-Jawbreaker—Jets to Brazil and Forgetters—as well as teaching undergraduates while studying British Romanticism at New York’s Hunter College (hence the Keats recital), Schwarzenbach saw every other road close off for him. “My life was just stopped completely,” he explained to Pullman. “I don’t think I am coming to it from hunger. It was just this huge thing that was sitting right in front of me the whole time. I kind of hit a moment where I was like, I can either apply for a hundred jobs and not get them—I mean, dog walking, I couldn’t get hired. Adam wrote as he does
every year and goes, ‘I just gotta tell you what’s being offered right now.’ [From there] it was just a matter of feeling the other guys out and then seeing that everyone wanted to do it, and making a plan to meet up. We didn’t agree until we practiced and thought that this actually sounds like us enough that we can pursue it.” Hyper-personal yet fully universal, Jawbreaker’s songs tap into a world that most of us experience but are unable to describe. It’s a world of monochrome, film noir darkness, late night cigarettes, and a poetic romanticism that elevates the catalog way above what most other bands—let alone punk bands—are capable of. The unrefined brashness of earlier cuts might make them seem grating to the unfamiliar ear, but spend time listening to their music while reading along to the lyrics— “West Bay Invitational,” “Chesterfield King,” “Sea Foam Green,” “Condition Oakland,” “Kiss the Bottle,” “Ashtray Monument,” and “Ache” are all good cases in point, to name a few— and a whole new world opens up. To quote “Condition Oakland”: “Read and I felt so small / Some words keep speaking when you close the book / Drank and just about smiled / Then I remembered us in that bed.” Those four lines combine existential crisis, the insignificance of humanity, the burden of wasted potential, literature, alcohol, nostalgia, and sex, plus that deep, unspoken longing and hunger to strive for greatness—or at least to do more than just exist—that resides within us all. “Lyrically and musically, no one was doing what Blake was doing with Jawbreaker,” says
Reilly. “It was so rich, complex, melancholy, and bittersweet. The lyrics were more like prose. They told a three-dimensional story, and he wasn’t afraid to feel and be vulnerable in a rugged scene. His chords were barely ever straightforward; there was always an extra note thrown in that took the chord and feeling to a way more emotional, grander, and regal place.” It’s not just about Schwarzenbach, however, but the effect of what happened when all three of them played together. “A lot of people will talk about Blake,” says Dave Hawkins, who played in Engine 88— another of Jawbreaker’s contemporaries—and who co-runs the Lost Weekend video store in San Francisco with Pfahler, “because he’s an absolutely amazing songwriter, but I want to give love to the [rhythm section], too, because what grabbed my attention first was Adam and Chris’s playing on 24 Hour Revenge Therapy, and the driving nature of the music. And it still really stands out to me.” All of which is to say that Jawbreaker isn’t just another band, and their songs are so much more than just songs. Rather, the trio somehow manage to reveal, through the combination of their music and their words, a rare truth about the human condition that few—if any—songwriters come close to matching. To do that in one song is something most artists only ever dream of doing. Jawbreaker do it in most. Hopefully, now, the rest of the world can discover that, too—albeit twenty-five years late.
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STOP BREAKING DOWN HOW THE JAWBREAKER DOCUMENTARY DEFIED THE ODDS There are many documentaries about bands, and many good ones at that. But not many have their own story in addition to the one they’re telling. It seems appropriate, then, given the convoluted and intricate history of Jawbreaker, their demise, and their recent reunion, that Don’t Break Down can boast its own narrative, too.
“The reunion of the band totally blindsided us,” says Irwin. “We didn’t know about it at all. The reason this took so long is that Keith and I were funding it out of our own pockets and life just kind of got in the way. But from our perspective, it never felt like it wasn’t going to get made.”
A decade in the making, the project was started by Tim Irwin and Keith Schieron—the pair behind We Jam Econo, the acclaimed 2005 documentary about Californian punk icons the Minutemen. The pair began work in 2007, eleven years after Jawbreaker broke up, but rumors about the documentary’s existence—and its unfinished state—were rife for years. The only thing that seemed less likely than the documentary being finished was the band reforming, even though the filmmakers had managed to get the three members together in a room back when they first started making it. There was, of course, no hint whatsoever that it would happen for real a decade later.
Tragically, Schieron was diagnosed with brain cancer in 2015 and passed away last December. It meant that the film was no longer just about Jawbreaker—it was also about one of its own creators. For Irwin, finishing it (with help from The Promise Ring’s Dan Didier) became a way to honor Schieron.
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“Finding Dan was really miraculous,” Irwin says. “He was able to get some momentum behind it, and when Keith fell ill, Dan really stepped up in a way that helped push that thing to completion.”
“I’d heard about this documentary trying to be made for the last however-long,” adds Didier, “so to get the opportunity to finish [it] after all that time, I took as a pretty big challenge. When I started, I was just going to be the editorial supervisor and manage the post-production, but then Keith got sicker and sicker, so I stepped in as more of a producer. At the [first] screening, Keith’s wife, Sarah, was there, and she had the opportunity to watch the finished film. It was a really nice moment.” That premiere took place on August 11, 2017 in San Francisco, and there was a Q&A with the band afterwards. As it turned out—and unbeknownst to either Irwin or Didier—that would be Jawbreaker singer/guitarist Blake Schwarzenbach’s first time watching the documentary, too. “When we got into town,” laughs Didier, “I happened to see Blake and Adam [Pfahler, Jawbreaker’s drummer]. We were catching up and talking
and I came to realize that Blake had never seen it. So I was like, ‘Oh shit. You’ve never seen this?!’ And he was like, ‘No—I never wanted to watch it alone.’ So afterwards I asked him what he thought, and he really liked it, so I was super stoked on that because it could have all gone horribly wrong!” Thankfully, it didn’t. Whether you know everything or nothing about Jawbreaker, the film is a fascinating glimpse into both the magic and dysfunction of a band that Green Day’s Billie Joe Armstrong thought, as he says in the documentary, “was going to bridge the gap between Green Day and Nirvana.” That didn’t happen, but Don’t Break Down— thanks to the raw footage shot by the band at the time, interviews with key players in the scene, and the clumsy interviews from the studio “reunion”—provides a revealing and rewarding look at a brilliant group. It also serves as a beautiful tribute to Keith Schieron—without whom the film wouldn’t exist.
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