WAVE by francuneo

HEAR it THROUGH THE PAGES $3 Nยบ 137-JANUARY 2016

sky ferreira mac demarco lena dunham TARANTINO ariel pink bukowski GRIMES

COBAIN: THE LAST INTERVIEW 1

CONTENTS CONTENTS

COVER STORY

kurt cobain: the final interview

playlist: this month

grimes killed her own album

mac demarco invites fans over for coffee

sky ferreira on industry pressure

top albums of 2015 listed (not ranked)

lena dunham talks self image (yet again)

charles bukowski interview

tarantino: racial tension & new film

the "27 club" not a thing?

picture the album of the year gone

forget hipsters yuccies are here

CULTURAL AGENDA or the ultimate guide to not miss anything this 2016 and dissappoint any of your hip friends JAN

mar

apr

EAGLES OF

hozier

the kvb

DEATH METAL

RAZZMATAZZ CLUB

JAN

mar

apr

FOALS

RAZZMATAZZ CLUB

JACCO

SALA apolo

half

FLORENCE

moon run

+ THE MACHINE

palau sant jordi

SALA apolo

feb

mar

apr

HALSEY

GARDNER

Macula cafe

RAZZMATAZZ CLUB

CHRIS CORNELL liceu de la musica

may

24 adele

palau sant jordi may

26 COLDPLAY by David Renshaw

olimpic lluis companys

Grimes says she scrapped whole album worth of new music because it was ‘depressing’

Grimes has denied reports sugjun gesting she scrapped a whole album based on the fan reaction to 2014 single ‘Go’.

The musician admitted in 2014 that she had binned an album worth of music as she records the follow up to 2012 album ‘Visions’.

PRIMAVERA sound

have almost 1000 gigs of unreleased music on my hard drive. I just want the next album to be as good as possible. ‘Go’ was never on the album anyway, it is a collaboration with a close friend that was released for fans as a ‘Thank you’ for waiting since my album was being delayed. There are only about 4 people on earth who have heard my new music. People’s opinions do not factor into my process. That is all, and hopefully this helps... I’m really not that sad or insecure of a person.”

This led to speculation that negative feedback to ‘Go’, a collaboration parc del forum with Blood Diamonds which was originally written for Rihanna, was the reason for the decision. The blog post follows the release of nov new Grimes song ‘REALiTi’, a demo However, in a new blog post on her dating back to 2013, earlier this Tumblr, Grimes clarifies the situa- week. Another new Grimes song, tion and says she ditched the mu- one she has worked on with Bleachsic she was making as she could not ers, will appear on the US TV series face touring the “depressing” songs Girls on March, 2015. the cure around the world. Last year Grimes confirmed that she “The album was scrapped cuz it was has worked with US MC Lizzo on her depressing and I didn’t want to tour new album and hinted that the reit,” she wrote. “I may release it one cord could be a double album. W palau sant jordi day. I throw out music all the time, i

ompared to hipsters, it’s a kinder term; it has a meaning, and it’s much broader, encompassing many different types so that stereotypes don’t yet apply. Yuccies (Young Urban Creatives) are 25 to 35-ish in age, found in cities and work in a creative profession. ‘Creative’ covers such a multitude these days, from artists to marketeers and fashionistas to digital entrepreneurs; as long as you’re inventive and original, you tick the box. Instead of a devotion to rock music and free love, yuccies are committed to connectivity and worship at the altar of social media. Like yuppies, they want to prosper and have all the things they desire, but like hipsters, they know that they can create such a world for themselves. Instead of affected insouciance, they’re engaged and eager, concerned with getting where they want to be. Self-aware, they have the desire to forge a path not just for their own creative satisfaction, but in the name of success.

Researchers say 27 Club of dead rock stars is a myth

ver since Amy Winehouse died, she became the latest member of the ‘27 Club’, a list of musicians who have all passed away at the same age including Kurt Cobain, Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin. However, by examining the deaths of 1,046 musicians who had a Number One in the Official UK Album Charts between 1956 and 2007, Barnett disproved the theory that 27 was a cursed age, although he did conclude that musicians in their 20s and 30s were two to three times more likely to die young than the rest of the UK’s general population. Writing in the British Medical Journal, he said: The myth of the 27 club supposes that musicians are more likely to die aged 27, whereas our results show that they have a generally increased risk throughout their 20s and 30s.

This finding should be of international concern, as musicians contribute greatly to the populations’ quality of life, so there is immense value in keeping them alive (and working) as long as possible. Explaining his findings, he said: “The study indicates that

the 27 club has been created by a combination of chance and cherry picking.

“We found some evidence of a cluster of deaths in those aged 20 to 40 in the 1970s and early 1980s. This pattern was particularly striking because there were no deaths in this age group in the late 1980s, despite the great number of musicians at risk.” He went on to add: “This differ-

ence may be due to better treatments for heroin overdose, or the change in the music scene from the hard rock 1970s to the pop dominated 1980s.” W

“I account manage in an agency called notoriousPSG by day, run a club night called Church and write and edit a home and interior website called HomeDelve. com on the side. “I have a short attention span, so having all of these things going on suits me. I also like ‘doing’ things in my downtime; my friend Edel and I love nothing more than chatting at length about things like politics, how we can become rich and how social media is changing us, so we made a Soundcloud podcast called Waffle On where we upload our conversations.” For 27-year-old Emma Fraser, yuccie culture has sprung from a willingness to embrace change. “If you look around the capital now, it’s the ‘hipsters’ of five years ago who are running the best restaurants and changing the face of the shopping scene. The term used to frustrate me as I felt that it was used in such a general way to describe anything that was new to people, or something they didn’t understand.” Emma has been running website and store Nine Crows since 2010, and is launching NotAnother Agency with her business partner Dean Ryan McDaid. She thinks the recession made young people bolder.

Now that wanting to do well as opposed to simply surviving is the new normal, yuccies are in a better position to achieve their dreams. Hipsters came to prominence during the global reces- “Job options were so thin on the sion and were characterised by a ground it made people go for it pared-back self-sufficiency (less with their own businesses. The emphasis creative on groomsector has ing and"yuccie culture has flourished; spending,always been there, but we learned an affinity how to with timesnow it has a name." achieve gone by), things in a yuccies grassroots are capiway, and talising on their predecessors’ to work hard - something we advances yet moving along with lost sight of during the Celtic the times, and with their rising Tiger. There is nothing like the bank balances. strain of not knowing where next month’s rent is going come We yuccies (yes, me included) from to make you work your ass are characterised by the fact that off!” we like to have our fingers in as many pies as possible. I was re- Dave Byrne (30) is a PR direccently referred to as “just a jour- tor/DJ, and isn’t offended by nalist” by a young blogger, and either term. considered setting up a Tumblr “Do I think I’m a yuccie? No, for a minute before I caught my- but I did Mashable’s quiz and self. the outcome was ‘You are such That’s because yuccies are often a Yuccie, it’s insane’ so I suppreoccupied by the amount of pose whatever one is, I’m tickslashes after their name - in my ing some of the boxes! I don’t case, journalist/writer/talking think yuccie culture has come head. For others it’s PR execu- from anywhere, it’s always been tive/club promoter/interior-de- here and has evolved - now it has sign maven; such is the case with a name. 26-year-old James Kavanagh, “It’s impossible to deny a shift another D7 resident. though; it’s obvious that where hipsters hid behind irony, yuc-

Goodbye hipsters hello yuccies It's official - the hipster is no more. After years of pop-culture dominance characterised by full beards, tight jeans and a fondness for craft beer, it seems that everything associated with being a hipster has now become de rigueur. meet the yuccies, a new pop culture tribe that drifts away from the hipster principles. vicky notaro, our very own yuccie correspondent sits down with some of the specimens to chat about the recent tag they've been attributed. cies dare to dream. They’re hopeful, more engaged with the here and now, and less preoccupied with what’s cool or what they “should” be doing according to societal norms.” Perhaps that’s down to a strange confidence having survived the past few years, or a worldliness thanks to the vast expanses of the internet. “I think most people have seen how the older generation struggled through the recession with hefty mortgages and debt and just thought ‘no thank you’,” says 26-year-old fashion illustrator/visual merchandiser Holly Shortall. “That’s my way of thinking. The people who are constantly asking if I’ve started saving for a mortgage are the same people moaning about the one they’ve been paying off for years. I would rather make a small living doing what I love, than be rich doing something I despise. “I think social media has been a huge player in allowing [yuccies] to happen. You can share whatever you want to with the whole world at the touch of a button, and this has influenced creativity. It’s a good time to be creative.” The common thread amongst the yuccies appears to be optimism, self-motivation and a quest for joy. Surely that’s better than the doom and gloom of years gone by? “Money had taken over creativity for so many years; but then the recession hit, and that reversed. Right now, we’re at that sweet spot where we have both - big ideas, and the available capital to go turn them into a reality.” So if we can avoid losing the run of ourselves, it appears yuccie culture can only be a good thing. w

HIPSTER VS YUCCIE ironic

eager

like vintage

like a high street/high end hybrid

love obscure love mainstream Hipsters want self sufficiency delight in being secular

want to get involved delight in straddling slashes

insouciant enthusiastic hate electronic dance and pop music

yuccies think it’s all good craic

stick to their own bars, clubs and restaurants

yuccies like to branch out

pretended to eschew technology

yuccies embrace it wholeheartedly

PLAYLIST THIS MONTH" GRIMES " OBLIVION

Pooneh

photo: Pooneh Ghana

QUENTIN TARANTINO DEATH PROOF

TAME IMPALA THE LESS I KNOW THE BETTER

Mac DeMarco says "30 kids have come over so far" since giving out his address on new song

he song in question, ‘My House by the Water’, features on the Canadian singer-songwriter’s new mini-album ‘Another One’. The instrumental track ends with an invitation to DeMarco’s home in Arverne, a neighbourhood of Queens in New York. He says on the song: “Stop on by, I’ll make you a cup of coffee. See you later”.

plained: “The way I rationalize it… to have the address you’ll have to listen to the album to the very end.” “Second, to even consider coming to my house you have to be a kind of a superfan. And thirdly, it’s in such a weird part of New York that if they actually get there, they deserve a cup of coffee.” Now, he’s told Billboard: “I’ve had about 30 kids come over so far. I don’t know what I was thinking.” “Everybody has been nice, but I

Speaking previously to the Wall asked a kid the other day, ‘Did you Street Journal, DeMarco ex- check if I was on tour, or did you just Andy warhol polaroid portaits 1958 to 1987 collection of andy warhol's polaroid pictures, featuring artists like debbie harry, mick jagger or basquiat

come over blindly?’ And they were like, ‘We just came over.’ These kids came from Long Island and Staten Island. They took the train for two hours. You didn’t even think to check if I’m on tour?” The singer-songwriter released ‘Another One’ on August 7. It follows on from 2014 LP ‘Salad Days’, widely aclaimed by the critics. W

ky Ferreira is having problems with her voice. Literal problems, this time: Her vocal cords have hemorrhaged. So instead of spending the month on tour with Vampire Weekend, she’s home in New York, resting and visiting doctors and, this afternoon, having her picture taken. When she meets me in a restaurant off Union Square, she’s wrapped around herself a ratty blue coat that’s either thrifted or eager to look it, plus a dose of the whole ambient Sky Ferreira mood that’s seen her adopted as an “It” girl, a style-magazine cover subject, and a rock-and-roll muse for designer Hedi Slimane. She’s pale and chic, with choppy dyed-blonde hair and sullen glowering eyes, and just overall seems like she should be smoking a cigarette behind the gym of a high school circa 1994. It feels almost incongruous that she doesn’t actually smoke, maybe because she grew up in Los Angeles and has, as she puts it, had quinoa in her life since age 2. A little later she’s debating whether to order a second Arnold Palmer—she doesn’t drink much caffeine, either— and telling me about her album, which will be released on October 29. It’s called Night Time, My Time, after a bit of Laura Palmer’s dialogue in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, and it’s a wonderful, unlikely product: a shiny, major-label pop record bashed together by an artist audibly interested in noisy music-geek favorites from the seventies. Like, say, the grinding old synth-punk band Suicide. And psychedelic “Krautrock” bands. And Brian Eno. The unlikely part isn’t that a pop musician would have those tastes—they’re common enough. What’s peculiar is the way Ferreira got to indulge them. She’s 21 years old. She

twelve-hour flight to Europe and do press, then fly back the same day. They worked me to death, but when I wanted to input anything, it was like, ‘You’re a child, you don’t know what you’re talking about.’ ”

SKY FERREIRA will be a pop star on her own terms; or not at all. text:Nitsuh Abebe·photo: cass bird signed a recording contract at 15, after building a following and networking with producers on MySpace—home to the untapped demand for bouncy teen-market pop that would soon enough drive singers like Katy Perry up the charts. (Justin Bieber was brought into the industry around the same time, on the strength of his YouTube performances.) This album is her debut. In other words, she’s spent the better part of a decade lost in a teenage-pop-star incubator: jetting around, p osing for photos, and dutifully promising an album on the way “next year.” Capitol, her label, dispatched her to record countless songs in countless styles with just about every big-name writer-

producer in L.A. They tested the market with singles and EPs and sent Ferreira forth on buzz-building errands. They couldn’t put together an album they liked, threw up their hands, and even, she says, shelved her for a while, which is when she moved to New York, alone, and turned to modeling: “It was like, Well, she’s a dud. I’ve been told I was a failure since I was 17.” People have butted heads with Ferreira over what kind of pop product she was meant to become, and she does not seem to have enjoyed the process one bit. “I signed a million-dollar record deal,” she says, “and never saw any money. It all got spent on planes and writing. I’d have to leave school and go on a

It’s hard to pinpoint what ended the stalemate. Maybe it was the success, last year, of a song called “Everything Is Embarrassing,” recorded with Dev Hynes, a musician whose tracks tend to sound, gloriously, like the Instagram-filtered ghosts of Janet Jackson hits from the eighties. Ferreira threw that one online when the label declined to release a single and watched it soak up love from the indie-music crowd. Or maybe it was the management changes attending Capitol’s absorption into Universal Music Group. Either way, you get the impression that at some point this year, the label finally said to her: Fine, if you’re so damn smart, you go make an album. “They were sort of out of money and out of ideas,” says her manager, Mike Tierney, “and basically said: This record has to come out. You have a limited amount of time, and you’re welcome to use your own money to finish it.” So she did. It took Ferreira and her collaborators roughly half of August to stick together Night Time, My Time, which shows in fascinating ways: The LP mixes grungy eccentricity and radio hooks as casually as a Cyndi Lauper video. It has the same blend of pop decadence and grit Sofia Coppola was aiming for with the Marie Antoinette soundtrack, possibly because it’s chasing similar themes: Glamorous, depressive teenager, bought and sold by adults and beleaguered by gossip, seeks private space to assert herself, or at least experience her own joy. “She doesn’t need a room full of 50-year-old guys,” says Tierney, “to tell her what other 21-year-old women want to hear.” W

think that I may be the voice of my generation—or, at least, a voice of a generation,” declares Hannah, the aspiring writer protagonist of Lena Dunham’s new HBO series, Girls, which revolves around a group of four young women living in New York as they fumble their way through twenty-something life in the greater post-recessionary Manhattan area. Hannah, played by Dunham (who also writes, executive produces, and directs Girls), is the talky, self-obsessed one, and makes her announcement in her parents’ hotel suite after a whirlwind 24-hour period during which she has been summarily cut off by them financially, fired from her unpaid internship, and downed a cup of opium tea. To longtime cable subscribers, the show’s other archetypes will seem vaguely familiar: there’s Marnie (Allison Williams), the uptight, ambitious one; Jessa (Jemima Kirke), the flighty, adventurous one; and Shoshanna (Zosia Mamet), the naive, optimistic one; there’s even a Sex and the City poster in one of the Girls girls’ apartments. But while Sex and the City was a celebration of all of the cosmos, Manolos, and punny innuendos of a certain kind of single-girl life in Manhattan, Girls reflects the resignation-and, in some cases, the entitlement-of another demographic, forced by sky-high rents and a bad economy to watch it all from the existential cheap seats as they come to grips with the fact that the malaise they’ve been experiencing as a deferment of life might very well be life itself. Claire Danes recently spoke with the 25-year-old Dunham in New York.

CLAIRE: I watched the first season of Girls, twice: once by myself, because I couldn’t stop, and once withmy husband. Your depiction of women is unnervingly relatable. It’s so funny how you’ve worked in things like the way that we’re always asking everyone if they’re mad at us, and the fact that women cuddle with each other and we pee with each other. I also like the way you address the possible, if not inevitable, comparisons to Sex and the City. LENA: Did you watch Sex and the City when it was on? C. I did. I really liked Sex and the City. I love all those actresses, and I think the writing was really clever. But it was aspirational, and it was escapist. L. Totally. And not just in terms of lifestyle—I kind of also felt like it was aspirational about friendship. Like, I love the friendships that you see in Nancy Meyers’ movies, but for me, that kind of friendship is elusive. I feel like a lot of the female relationships I see on TV or in movies are in some way free of the kind of jealousy and anxiety and posturing that has been such a huge part of my female friendships, which I hope lessens a little bit with age. C. Your character, Hannah, is fumbling

10 10

LENA DUNHAM interviewed by Claire Danes photo by Gregory Harris

and struggling and terrified to really commit to her work, even though she is obviously very gifted. It’s like she has a confidence that she’s not even aware of. L. It’s sort of like the naivety of youth. It’s interesting how we often can’t see the ways in which we are being strong—like, you can’t be aware of what you’re doing that’s tough and brave at the time that you’re doing it because if you knew that it was brave, then you’d be scared. C. It is interesting that the male characters on Girls are as defined as the women. There is not as much emphasis placed on them, but they’re all really interesting, rich, specific characters. What’s it like for you writing from a male perspective? L. That was always a concern for me. I didn’t want to write in guys who felt like girl fantasies of a good boyfriend or like a voodoo doll of ex-boyfriends whose lives I was trying to ruin. I wanted it to feel like guys that you would know who are a little weird. I do think girls in their twenties accept certain kinds of lesser treatment than they would at other times in their lives. They’re willing to experiment with what it means to be treated well. You know, what’s it like to have a guy who totally demeans one aspect of your life? For Hannah, at least, it’s an intellectual exercise. C: Do you identify yourself first as a writer-director or as an actor? Or are they interchangeable? L: I think I’ve sort of made it all into one giant job where all of the parts feed one another. I remember going to see Les Misérables on Broadway as a kid. I was so jealous of the girl that got to play young Cosette, but I never had a moment where I was like, Oh, that’s something I could do. I just felt like, Oh, that’s what certain people can do. I also never got good parts in school plays, and it would incense me to no end, but I was like, “I’m not cut out for

this.” I started writing plays, and I would be all of the characters in my head, but I never auditioned or anything. It was only when I started making short films in college and I was looking for girls to play the me-ish parts that I thought, Well, maybe I’m just going to try doing this myself before somebody else comes in and handles it. For a long time my acting was just a marriage of convenience between me and these characters that I was writing. C: So you’ve never taken an acting class or been in a play? L: Well, I went to schools that were small enough that basically everyone was in a play. I played a bouncing ball in a production of Alice in Wonderland and a fat man

‘People called me fat and hideous, and I lived’

in an Italian commedia dell’arte play. I was given some small chances. But we had this amazing playwriting festival at Saint Ann’s [school, in Brooklyn] where there was a teacher who helped us write, direct, and do stage readings of what, looking back, were these incredibly graphic, morbid high-school plays. There’s nothing funnier to me than 14-year-olds writing plays about abortion and incest. I remember a kid writing a big play about purgatory. There was an apocalypse and all that was left was one McDonald’s where everyone had to stay together. There were these ambitious ideas that people were pushing. It wasn’t about becoming great dramatists. It was just about getting your important ideas out into Brooklyn Heights. C. So you were writing in high school? L. Yes, and then I went to college with this idea that I wanted to be a poet. I had a really romantic idea about what that would mean. My parents knew some poets, and I liked how they dressed and acted, but I didn’t really acknowledge that I only liked reading some bits of poetry while I was peeing or something. I was a creative writing major, and I would organize a lot of really intense poetry readings and slams. There was a lot of embarrassing audio footage of me, like, reading my poems in a slam voice. Then I started writing plays, but the fact that plays don’t last forever was too much for me to bear. At Oberlin, you’d put on a play, and it would have a threeday run, and I was like, “This is bullshit!” I’d always loved movies, but it wasn’t some sort of desperate love of celluloid. It was literally like, “I want to write things, and I want people to see them more.”

has ever existed is now finally resolved and we should all just be cool. But it’s so important that we become engaged in that conversation again. it comes to rendering sex the way that most people have it, which is unclothed. L: Yeah, it’s true. We have a little sex-ina-bra on the show, but we try to keep it to a character who is a sex-in-a-bra-type character. I do have one real-life friend who’s an I-don’t-show-my-boobs girl. That’s the most fascinating kind of person. C: Girls is kind of a pejorative word now, and I think even with the fact that it’s called Girls and the title is in all caps and gobbles up the entire screen, you kind of reclaim it. I feel like the topic of feminism has gone out of vogue because there’s this idea that any inequality that

L: I feel exactly like that—where people are kind of like, “Our moms handled this, and we really have nothing to complain about anymore.” It’s amazing how not true that is, and yet I feel like every time I make a claim of misogyny, I always sort of apologize for it first, which is itself not very feminist. I’m always like, “I’m sorry to be the girl who wants to talk about feminism, but that person is sexist.” So the idea that the feminism conversation could be cool again and not just feel like some granola BS is so exciting to me. It is really funny how even cool chicks are sort of like, “Our moms covered the feminism thing and now we’re living in a post-that world,” when that just isn’t true. W

C: So you’re playing someone in Girls who’s reminiscent of who you are, but she’s still fictionalized. What’s that like? L: I play these girls who are close to me, but they’re the parts of me that I find the most shameful, or the parts of me that I kind of want to excise. So I sort of distance myself from it. I have the comfort to feel free and un-self-conscious. I sort of go, “These are all the awful parts of me that I don’t get to talk about all day. Here she is.” C: You’re talking a lot about women’s relationships to their bodies, which are so complex and so difficult. Sex is just a fraction of it. L: You might think with the show that I was really casual about the nudity thing, but it’s actually something that I’m really not casual about and I started out doing it in my own work. I feel like I’ve been given this really safe way to do it. For some reason in my first movie I was like, “I’m just gonna show my boobs.” I don’t know why. Have you had “get naked” pressure, where you really had to think about it? C: I try to avoid it whenever I can, but at the same time, I don’t want to be coy. It’s so important for me to be as genuine as possible, so I don’t want to stop when

uentin Tarantino lives up in the Hollywood Hills, in the same house he’s had since 1996, with a movie theater built into one wing of the house and a terrace with a swimming pool and a Planet of the Apes statue out back. That’s where he’s sitting, glass of red wine in hand, watching the sun go down. His newest film, The Hateful Eight, is pretty much done. He shot it on 65-millimeter film, and then he had his studio buy up pretty much every existing 70-millimeter projector in the country so he could personally equip 100 theaters with them and show the movie the way he thinks it should be shown. He describes The Hateful Eight as “a claustrophobic snow Western”—a chamber piece, like Reservoir Dogs or The Iceman Cometh, but set in the wintry post–Civil War 1800s. It’s about a bounty hunter escorting a prisoner to justice, only to be diverted into a tavern of sorts, where six other men are waiting out a snowstorm, and nobody’s who they say they are. “I think it could be my best movie,” Tarantino says. “If not, at least in my top four.” Which is a hilarious qualifier, since he’s only made eight. People count Tarantino movies because he’s maintained for a while now that he’s only making ten. Maybe not even ten. “If film projection goes the way of the dodo bird, well, then, maybe I might not even get to ten,” he says.

ZACH: The legend is that you wrote Pulp Fiction in Amsterdam with no phone. Are those the conditions you need to write? QUENTIN TARANTINO: No, I don’t need to go anywhere to write. It can be fun. I have a cell phone, and the only person who has the number is my girlfriend. I don’t need anyone to call me as I’m walking down the street. You know, my landline is my phone. And so I unplug it, or I don’t listen to it for a while. I’m good. I’ll play some of the messages. I’ll hear them when they come in. Okay, fine. Z: And that doesn’t cause you anxiety? T: No, no. My problem is the opposite. It causes me no anxiety whatsoever. A lot of people figure that’s my problem: I have no anxiety about shutting the world out at all.

essarily political. It’s a little bit more wish fulfillment; Django is still a bit of wish fulfillment, but I was trying to show America itself, you know? Django was definitely the beginning of my political side, and I think Hateful Eight is the extension and conclusion of that. I mean, when I say conclusion, I’m not saying I’ll never be political again, but, I mean, Django was the question and Hateful Eight is the answer. Z: What do you mean by that? T: Well, talking about America’s culpability in their past is what Django’s about: the white supremacy that has existed since and that is rearing its ugly head again, to such a degree that it’s being dealt with by the Black Lives Matter movement and all that stuff, is where we are now. And that’s what The Hateful Eight deals with. The thing that was really wild is, I wasn’t trying to bend over backwards in any way to make it socially relevant; but once I finished the

Z: How does something like The Hateful Eight emerge from that process? I liked the idea of creating ainterview

by zach baron

Z: What did you think of his movie? T: I never saw it. Z: Is that because it was too close to what you were working on? T: No, I just spent a year and a half in the antebellum South. The last thing in the world I wanted to do was go back to it, visit it in any way. There’s no shade going toward his movie when it comes to that. I just didn’t want to subject myself. Z: Django made $425 million—what do you chalk that success up to? T: People liked the movie. I mean, [laughs] I take a little bit of pride about the fact that Westerns aren’t supposed to work, black-lead movies aren’t supposed to work, and if they’re not supposed to work, slavery movies are really, really, really not supposed to work, and I made almost a half a billion dollars around the world and was actually even more of a success and greeted with more open arms in other countries. But ultimately, I think it was the movie. People just responded to the movie.

QUENTIN TARANTINO

Z: Do you have high expectations for the new one? T: No. If anything, I have the opposite. It’s like, I’m hoping that my movie will do well, but it’s not the third in line to Inglourious Basterds and Django. It’s a different beast. And I love the fact that people are so excited about it.

Explains the Link Between His Hateful Eight and BlackLivesMatter

He sounds weirdly at peace anticipating the end of the work he’s given his life to. He seems weirdly at peace in general; he’s still the antic, emphatic, maniacally gesticulating guy of ’90s popular imagination, but he also turned 52 recently. “I tend to always think of myself as perpetually 35; so, you know, it’s a bit of a drag, in certain regards. And in other regards, I’ve really enjoyed it. I mean…a lot of shit that used to really be on my mind is kind of gone now.” He places his finger at the precise center of the table we’re sitting at. “If the universe was this table, I’m right here where I wanted to be at this point in time, at this point in my life, at this point in my filmography. I’m right where I wanted to be.”

new pop-culture, folkloric hero character; my hope is it can be a rite of passage for black fathers and their sons. When are they old enough to watch Django Unchained, maybe it’s something that they do with their fathers, and it’s a cool thing. And then Django becomes their cowboy hero. And so I like the idea of maybe like a series of paperbacks coming out, Further Adventures of Django, and so I was really into that idea. And then I started writing it as a book, as prose. And that’s what ended up turning into The Hateful Eight. The number one thing I had to do was get rid of Django. [laughs] Z: Django felt like a political turn for you. T: You know, it was very political, as opposed to, say, Inglourious Basterds, which was not nec-

script, that’s when all the social relevancy started. Z: Django came out at an interesting moment, when you also had Spielberg’s Lincoln, and then, a year later, Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave, in theaters, dealing with the same material. T: There literally was a moment where Lincoln was playing in one theater in the multiplex and Django was playing in another one. Which was actually kind of fucking groovy. Z: I interviewed McQueen around the time his movie came out and asked him about Django, and he said, “I’m just happy to see black actors onscreen who actually get work.” That sounded like a shot to me. T: Yeah, I’m sure it was.

Z: And presumably the Oscar conversation. T: Well, that is understandable. I think we are a contender. We’ll see. But it is one of those weird things that makes me wonder: have I gotten so popular that I can do weird-ass shit like this, and it actually is a commercial entity? Well, that remains to be seen. But if that’s the case, that would be fucking awesome. Z: Are you competitive as a director? T: I’m not competitive as a director. But the thing about it is, if I win a third screenwriting Oscar, I will tie with Woody [Al-

len]. I can’t beat Woody until I tie with him. Z: But you want to beat him? T: I want to have more original-screenplay Oscars than anybody who’s ever lived! So much, I want to have so many that—four is enough. And do it within ten films, all right, so that when I die, they rename the original-screenplay Oscar “the Quentin.” And everybody’s down with that. Tarantino’s girlfriend emerges from the house: “You are insane. I just heard that. That’s the most ridiculous thing you’ve ever said.”

or after they posted about the girl who went on a date with you? T: No, that post was before. I had no idea. If Gawker was involved—I don’t think Gawker was involved with that. I think they hired her after the fact. So I don’t think they were involved with her. But if they were, I wouldn’t even have known about it. Z: So it wasn’t about— T: No, no. They’re putting my fucking script—there’s a copyright issue going on here, you

know, and if the judge had saw it our way, maybe things would be different now. But they didn’t. Z: Ennio Morricone did the sound track for The Hateful Eight, but he also was in the news in 2013 for saying that you place music in your films “without coherence.” T: I think he was talking to a class, and he was just saying that he didn’t care for my all-

over-the-map approach in the case of Django and some of the other things that I’ve done and whatever. But it wasn’t necessarily a criticism of me, per se. It’s just not his cup of tea. I think it’s kind of a generational thing, and that I completely understand. He apologized. And he said nothing he needed to apologize about. He later clarified it, because it was blown out of proportion. Some asshole nimrod who wants some sort of

Z:I just find it hard to believe that you’re down to see other people go up there and get Best Director. You’re such a scholar of the medium. You know the history. No offense to Danny Boyle, but aren’t you like, “How the fuck is Danny Boyle winning Oscars when I’ve directed eight films?” T: It’s whatever. You know, I don’t make Oscar kind of movies. So the fact that I’m invited to the party when I don’t—and I’m not saying he’s pandering, I mean, it was hardly pandering doing Slumdog Millionaire—but, you know, there’s no pandering to mine. I mean, actually, the idea of winning three screenplay Oscars, maybe four, all right, with only ten films, and never doing it for that purpose, only following my own muse—that’s about as great a testament to an artistic career as I can imagine. Z: It surprised me that you reacted so angrily to the leak of the Hateful Eight script—you know you’re a good writer. So why sue Gawker over posting a link to it? T: Well, it was a mistake to sue Gawker, and the mistake was—I was just pissed off at the time, and, like, “They can’t do that! Okay, let me sue them!” And it got kind of exciting for a second, because it looked like, you know, even though there was no precedent for it, it looked like it might be one of those things that could create a precedent. And that became very exciting. Well, it didn’t happen. So I dropped it. But I regret it now, because it actually took the spotlight off where I thought it deserved to be, which was on Hollywood practices of passing out stuff by artists’ representatives. Z: Did you sue Gawker before

power thing leaked it to whatever thingy so he can just have the fun of watching it in three hundred outlets. I felt [Morricone] was betrayed by that person. I knew that was where he was coming from! I knew that’s how he felt about my shit! It was nothing new to me. And almost in a generational way, he was left out to dry. He is such a great artist, he can say any fucking thing he wants. Z: You’re on film number eight. How could you plan to make only two more after this? T: Hopefully I’m getting better and better. And that means I still have two more to go. All right? And two more to go is gonna be six years, at least. But we’ll see what happens. And, you know, if that tenth film is a stinker, well, maybe the plan goes into the house fan. You know, in shreds. But so far so good. And I love the idea of taking my vitality to its furthest point, and then stopping, leaving you wanting a little bit more. Not staying too long at the party. Not working with dulled senses. Not working with dulled intentions. Not working with compromised intentions—i.e., age, vitality, wealth, wife, kids, you know, all those kind of things that get in the way. Z: That seems like a bleak thing to say, that last part. T: My filmography comes first. My artistic journey comes first. I’m not saying I can’t have kids. But the last two movies, can’t have kids, can’t have a wife, you know. If I have a kid two years from now or three years from now, then they’re age three or age four. Now I’m, boom, that guy. And that’s okay. But there is an excitement when you’re hanging on the next film of a director as they’re doing their climb to immortality. I felt that way about De Palma in the ’70s and the ’80s. I felt that way about Scorsese in the ’70s and the ’80s, and I felt that way about Spielberg in the ’70s and ’80s. Z: Who do you think is currently working at your level? T: I think my real filmmaking peer is probably David O. Russell right now—i.e., his ability to write, the movies he does, and his relationship that he has with the actors that he likes to work with. And I think along with myself, I think he is the best actor’s director out there. And I feel he’s pushing it. Z: Can you still access the per-

son that you were at the beginning of your career—the guy who went to jail for parking tickets and who’d never left Los Angeles? T: Oh, very much so. I mean… [pause] I still touch base with that person all the time, and I still have their thoughts. I still have their perspectives. I mean, you know, the way the police are killing black males out there, unarmed black males, shooting them down… it’s a different story for me now. The police protect this house. And I need them to do that. And I want them to do that. If I have a problem here, if I think somebody jumped my fence and is fucking around on my property, I’m gonna call the cops. But I’m rich now. I’m rich and white now. All right? When I was in my twenties, I wasn’t rich. They looked at me, and they saw a criminal.They saw someone to be fucked with. I went through a county-jail system four different times. I saw how the county sheriffs talk to you when you’re down there. I saw what it’s like when you have absolutely no power and you’re on the wrong side of the social strata, and what they think of you, and the judgments they make of you. I see that, and I see that now. So when I watch this stuff, I say, “God, shit, that, you know, that could have been me in 1984. That could have been me in 1986.” Now, I have white skin and they have black skin, and that’s a huge difference.

of this. But I was never afraid of the burnout scenario that you described. I was more afraid of like—I didn’t want to open up a shingle and a shop and now I’m a factory. You know, I do my movie that I do every two or three years, but then I produce a bunch of stuff, and my name’s always out there, Quentin Tarantino Presents this movie, that movie, and I’m rewriting this, because they’re paying me a lot of money, I do a two-week dialogue polish on Transformers 3, this and that and the other, and I keep making money and money and money, and I’m, like, you know, giving my special magic well water away to these people—and now all of a sudden my name doesn’t mean jack fucking shit.

Z: Back in the ’90s, you used to approach the press cycle like an actor would, and you became famous in your own right. Did you later regret that decision? T: I joke I’m not really that famous, I’m just that recognizable. If you know what I look like, you’re gonna know me when you see me. But no—I wanted me to be enough when I’m making a movie. I didn’t want to have to go and get a star who respected my movies. I wanted to be enough to get it made, and if I get a star, well, that’s all great.

Z: There’s still a lot of random Tarantino floating around in the culture in 2015—whether it be in film dialogue or nonlinear storytelling or the basic eternal persistence of the Reservoir Dogs suits. Where do you most encounter your work or your influence in the wild? T: In the ’90s, from ’97 through ’99 or 2000, it would be going in young people’s apartments and seeing the Pulp Fiction poster up, or seeing the head shot from Pulp Fiction, which is Jules and Vincent pointing their guns. Or seeing their cinder-block used-video library— you know, that they bought for $9.99 from the local video store—and they have Godfather 1, they have Godfather 2, they have Scarface. And then they have Reservoir Dogs and they have Pulp Fiction. W

Z: So many people in your industry have early success and then burn out. How did that not happen to you? T: I worked too long to be here. I mean, I had such incredible good luck and fortune to make Pulp Fiction and just, in this weird pocket of time, that it could be appreciated for what it was. If I’m gonna fuck that up, I don’t really deserve to have any

Z: Have you seen The Wolfpack, the documentary about the kids who love and reenact your films? T: Yes, I have. Those kids are fucking awesome, man. I think they’re fantastic. And, like, you know, and literally, watching acting out the scenes, that was so entertaining and lovely and glorious. But watching them writing the script, i.e. just jotting it down, but the way they talk about it, it’s as if they wrote it. “I’m working on the script. I’m writing the script.” And I know exactly what they mean! I got it. Watching the kid writing the dialogue down word for word on a yellow legal pad was fucking fantastic.

tarantino

"With 'Django' I was trying to show America itself".

B 16

”Some people never go crazy; What truly horrible lives they must lead”|

CHARLESBUKOWSKI interviewed by Elisa Leonelli Charles Bukowski is often considered the “damned” writer of American literature. Also called misogynist, anarchist, violence addict, junkie and many other endless negative adjectives which make of him the significative figure he is today for underground literature, or at least one of the most controversial; maybe the only consideration about him absolutely true to everyone. Elisa: You asked us to call you Hank, isn’t your name Charles? Bukowski: Hank is short for Henry which is really my first name. Charles is my middle name. My mother and father would always call me: “Hennryy! Dinner is ready!” so I go out to get dinner and they beat the shit out of me, after I ate or before I ate. They were bad news. So when I first decided to write I said: I’ve got to get rid of Henry, it’s bad luck. So I got Charles, Charles Bukowski sounds better. As Henry Bukowski I’d never make it, I’d still be starving. There

are too many loops, Henry goes up and write-off. See, after many years of povdown. Charles is straight, and Bukowski erty the royalties from Europe pounced loops, so it makes for a good name. on me all at once. In America you either spend your money or the government E: Bukowski is a Polish name, you takes it away from you. And nobody were born in Germany, but you are an likes to just get money and burn it, esAmerican writer. How did it happen? pecially if they’ve never had it before. So B: Bukowski is a Polish name, evident- I bought a home, and a BMW, I make the ly some Polack came over to Germany payments and I get a tax write-off. I had around 1780. As far back as I can trace to change my style. I was used to living my whole family is German. My father in one room apartments in East Hollywas born in Pasadena, California from wood. So these surroundings are very German parents. He was an American new to me. At first I thought they would soldier with the army of occupation in destroy me, because I’m not used to Germany during World War I; there he space. So I thought, well if it gets to me met my mother and I was born. I came I’m not a very good writer. But it didn’t over to the United States in 1923 when and I’m still writing every night. I was 3 years old and I’ve been here ever since. So I’m American, I live here, but E: How did you become a writer? I have German blood. When I went back B: I first started writing when I was to Europe I felt it, maybe it was only my 13 years old. I was in a hospital at the imagination. time getting drilled with these drills, because I had an extreme case of acne E: Why do you live in this house in San vulgaris, huge boils that come out and Pedro? nothing can be done about it. I guess B: Well it’s a quiet place and nobody that made me do some thinking that bothers you. I had to buy a house as a tax a person at that age doesn’t think too

much about, about the pain and brutality of reality. I got a good education early. I never had a college education. I’ve had hundreds of jobs, the worst jobs. When I was 35 and I had been drinking heavily for many many years, finally I had hemorrhages, the blood came out of my mouth and my ass and I was just about dead. They took me to the charity ward and they waited for me to die. But I didn’t die. I got out of the hospital, I got a job driving a truck and I started writing poems. I had never written before, in fact I hadn’t written for 10 years. So I wrote all these poems and I didn’t know where to send them. So I picked out blindly a magazine in Texas and I sent them the poems. I thought: I’ll make some old woman angry and she’ll send them back. Instead I get this huge letter back from this woman calling me a genius. One thing led to another. She came out to visit me, we got to know each other, we got married. Then it turned out that she was a millionairess, and that was bad. After two years she divorced me and I was glad of it. Later I met another woman somewhere, Francis, we got together and we had a child. My

”

daughter is now 16, she is a genius, just graduated from high school. E: You have the reputation of a woman chaser and a male chauvinist, because of your best seller, Women. What do you think? B: I’m not a great fucker. I don’t go around fucking women by the dozens. B u t

it deliberately, I knocked on doors, I hopped into beds and I fucked when I didn’t feel like fucking. I’m not really a great fucker. I’m not too interested in that kind of thing. It’s kind of drab. It’s hard work. The people that call me male chauvinist don’t know all my works, they’ve just heard rumors. If they had read the total body of my work they would know that I love women almost as much as I love myself. They are nice to have around. E: The Italian director Marco Ferreri has just finished a movie based on some of your short stories, called Tales of Ordinary Madness. How did that come about?

when I started writing this novel called Women, I had to do some research. I figured I had to meet more women. So I almost did

B: I don’t really know, it happened quite suddenly. We signed a contract and the next thing I knew I was drinking with Marco Ferreri and Ben Gazzarra and we were talking to each other like we had known each other for years. I guess this is the way things happen, people just meet and say, Well let’s do it, what the hell, it’s no big thing, it’s all right. I have faith in Ferreri because he is a totally human person, he is warm. I haven’t seen any of his films; I

IT’ S HUMANITY THAT BOTHERS ME”

BUKOWSKI

just liked him when I met him. E: You’ve been drinking constantly, California Burgundy and beer, ever since we got here, and in your books, like in your life, you drink all the time. Why all this drinking? B: Oh, drinking! Listen, I’ve been a poor working stiff all my life, no job or nothing. You know, when you don’t have any money at all, the women aren’t going to bother you, so there’d be moments when you are just looking at four walls, you are wondering how to pay the rent or where your next meal is coming from. When things are very very bad, a drink is the only magic cheap thing left to give you the dream, to make you feel good for a moment. Now that I am not poor anymore, things haven’t changed, because the human race is no good. In one of my poems I say: Humanity, you’ve never had it from the beginning. It’s just a feeling I have that everything is being wasted. It’s not life, it’s humanity that bothers me. The trees don’t bother me, the cats don’t bother me, the sun doesn’t bother me. It’s humanity that has failed, that bothers me. Humanity is going to go down the same dumb ignorant path forever. But I’ll get out of it because I’ll kick off and I will be out.

This companionship I’m living with now, they don’t thrill me at all. E: It sounds very pessimistic. So if humanity is hopeless what do you hope to accomplish with your writing? B: I’m not an accomplisher. I’m like a spider spinning my web. It’s all I can do. What we do we do out of a natural instinct. We don’t even know why we are doing it, if we did we couldn’t do it. Striving is destructive. I don’t believe in control, in studying, in learning. I just believe that what occurs occurs, and I go with it. To sum it all up in two words, “don’t try,” for me that works. I still find a great deal of joy in spite of everything, I don’t know why, but often times I wake up in the morning and I feel damn good. It’s just a feeling inside. E: Is it true that you are more famous in Europe than in the U.S.? B: Definitely, 60 times more. Why? I would like to think that European civilization is at least 300 years ahead of this one in culture, knowledge, instinct, wines, graciousness, all those

things. Because things began over there, they got the taste for real things. Here in America, we are still flashy, we are blunt, we don’t quite know where the hell we are. So I think over there the seed took in ground that was ready, here the seed was dropped but the ground was sterile. E: Which one of your books do you prefer? B: I don’t know, usually the last one I wrote, Which is it? I can’t remember. I’m all involved in my new one, it’s called Ham on Rye. It begins with my first memory up to WWII. All my books are autobiographical. I put a little bit of fiction to liven it up, make it more interesting than life, but not much. My style is very simple and direct, just like your photography, it records what occurs, it doesn’t make any speeches. It says what it says, and it’s all there is to it. My poems are a little more emotional, I let myself go a little more. But in prose I’m pretty straight. W

cobain

shirtless, disheveled Kurt Cobain pauses on the backstage stairway leading to Nirvana’s dressing room at the Aragon Ballroom, in Chicago, offers a visitor a sip of his après-gig tea and says in a drop-deadpan voice, “I’m really glad you could make it for the shittiest show on the tour.”

Meeting William Burroughs and doing a record with him.”

He’s right. Tonight’s concert — Nirvana’s second of two nights at the Aragon, only a week into the band’s first U.S. tour in two years — is a real stinker. According to the Cobain press myth — “pissy, complaining, freaked-out schizophrenic,” as he quite accurately puts it — the 26-year-old singer and guitarist should have fired the soundman, canceled this interview and gone back to his hotel room to sulk. Instead, he spends his wind–down time backstage, doting on his daughter, 1-yearold Frances Bean Cobain, a petite blond beauty who barrels around the room with a smile for everyone in her path. Later, back at the hotel, armed with nothing stronger than a pack of cigarettes and two minibar bottles of Evian water, Cobain is in a thoughtful, discursive mood, taking great pains to explain that success doesn’t really suck – not as much as it used to, anyway – and that his life is pretty good. And getting better.

“I just hope,” Cobain adds, grinning, “I don’t become so blissful I become boring. I think I’ll always be neurotic enough to do something weird.”

“It was so fast and explosive,” he says in a sleepy, gravelly voice of his first crisis of confidence following the ballistic success of Nevermind. “I didn’t know how to deal with it. If there was a Rock Star 101 course, I would have liked to take it. It might have helped me.” “I still see stuff, descriptions of rock stars in some magazine — ‘Sting, the environmental guy,’ and ‘Kurt Cobain, the whiny, complaining, neurotic, bitchy guy who hates everything, hates rock stardom, hates his life.’ And I’ve never been happier in my life. Especially within the last week, because the shows have been going so well — except for tonight. I’m a much happier guy than a lot of people think I am.” “I’ve been relieved of so much pressure in the last year and a half,” Cobain says with discernible relief in his voice. “I’m still kind of mesmerized by it.” He ticks off the reasons for his content: “Pulling this record off. My family. My child.

Maybe if it was as big as “Teen Spirit,” I wouldn’t like it as much.

“Just little things that no one would recognize or care about,” he continues. “And it has a lot to do with this band. If it wasn’t for this band, those things never would have happened. I’m really thankful, and every month I come to more optimistic conclusions.”

But I can barely, especially on a bad night like tonight, get through “Teen Spirit.” I literally want to throw my guitar down and walk away. I can’t pretend to have a good time playing it. D: But you must have had a good time writing it. K: We’d been practicing for about three months. We were waiting to sign to DGC, and Dave [Grohl] and I were living in Olympia [Wash.], and Krist [Novoselic] was living in Tacoma [Wash.]. We were driving up to Tacoma every night for practice, trying to write songs. I was trying to write the ultimate pop song. I was basically trying to rip off the Pixies. I have to admit it [smiles]. When I heard the Pixies for the first time, I connected with that band so heavily I should have been in that band — or at least in a Pixies cover band. We used their sense of dynamics, being soft and quiet and then loud and hard. “Teen Spirit” was such a clichéd riff. It was so close to a Boston riff or “Louie, Louie.” When I came up with the guitar part, Krist looked at me and said, “That is so ridiculous.” I made the band play it for an hour and a half.

Along with everything else that went wrong onstage tonight, you left without playing “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” Why? That would have been the icing on the cake [smiles grimly]. That would have made everything twice as worse.

“Our man in Nirvana rages on (and on) about stardom, fatherhood, his feud with Pearl Jam, the death of grunge and why he’s never been happier in his life” read the last interview ever made to kurt cobain, by David Fricke on January 27, 1994. Out of the archive more than twenty years after his death, we remember D: How did it feel to watch one of rock n’ roll’s most tragic something you’d written in fun become the grunge naand relevant figures. I don’t even remember the guitar solo on “Teen Spirit.” It would take me five minutes to sit in the catering room and learn the solo. But I’m not interested in that kind of stuff. I don’t know if that’s so lazy that I don’t care anymore or what. I still like playing “Teen Spirit,” but it’s almost an embarrassment to play it. DAVID: In what way? Does the enormity of its success still bug you? KURT: Yeah. Everyone has focused on that song so much. The reason it gets a big reaction is people have seen it on MTV a million times. It’s been pounded into their brains. But I think there are so many other songs that I’ve written that are as good, if not better, than that song, like “Drain You.” That’s definitely as good as “Teen Spirit.” I love the lyrics, and I never get tired of playing it.

tional anthem, not to mention a defining moment in youth marketing? K: Actually, we did have our own thing for a while. For a few years in Seattle, it was the Summer of Love, and it was so great. To be able to just jump out on top of the crowd with my guitar and be held up and pushed to the back of the room, and then brought back with no harm done to me — it was a celebration of something that no one could put their finger on. But once it got into the mainstream, it was over. I’m just tired of being embarrassed by it. I’m beyond that. D: How much of the physical pain from your stomach issues do you think you channeled into your songwriting? K: That’s a scary question, because obviously if a person is having some kind of turmoil in their lives, it’s usually reflected in the music, and sometimes it’s pretty beneficial. I think it probably helped. But I would

huge extravaganza; all these people were fawning over him. If he’d just walked in by himself, it would have been no big deal. But he wanted that. You create attention to attract attention. D: Where do you stand on Pearl Jam now? It’s never been entirely clear what this feud with Vedder was about. K: There never was one. I slagged them off because I didn’t like their band. It was my fault; I should have been slagging off the record company instead of them. They were marketed — not probably against their will — but without them realizing they were being pushed into the grunge bandwagon.

give up everything to have good health. I wanted to do this interview after we’d been on tour for a while, and so far, this has been the most enjoyable tour I’ve ever had. Honestly. But then again, I was always afraid that if I lost the stomach problem, I wouldn’t be as creative. Who knows? [Pauses] I don’t have any new songs right now. Every album we’ve done so far, we’ve always had one to three songs left over from the sessions. And they usually have been pretty good, ones that we really liked, so we always had something to rely on — a hit or something that was above average. So this next record is going to be really interesting, because I have absolutely nothing left. I’m starting from scratch for the first time. I don’t know what we’re going to do. D: In Utero featured a then removed track called “I Hate Myself And Want To Die”; Have you ever been that consumed with distress or pain or rage that you actually wanted to kill yourself? K: For five years during the time I had my stomach problem, yeah. I wanted to kill myself every day. I came very close many times. I’m sorry to be so blunt about it. It was to the point where I was on tour, lying on the floor, vomiting air because I couldn’t hold down water. And then I had to play a show in 20 minutes. I would sing and cough up blood. This is no way to live a life. I love to play music, but something was not right. So I decided to medicate myself.

Even as satire, though, a song like that can hit a nerve. There are plenty of kids out there who, for whatever reasons, really do feel suicidal. That pretty much defines our band. It’s both those contradictions. It’s satirical, and it’s serious at the same time. D: What kind of mail do you get from your fans these days? K: I used to read the mail a lot, and I used to be really involved with it. But I’ve been so busy with this record, the video, the tour, that I haven’t even both-

ered to look at a single letter, and I feel really bad about it. I have to admit I’ve found myself doing the same things that a lot of other rock stars do or are forced to do. Which is not being able to respond to mail, not being able to keep up on current music, and I’m pretty much locked away a lot. The outside world is pretty foreign to me. A few years ago, we were in Detroit, playing at this club, and about 10 people showed up. And next door, there was this bar, and Axl Rose came in with 10 or 15 bodyguards. It was this

“Teen Spirit” was such a clichEd riff. It was so close to a Boston riff or “Louie, Louie.”

1986: cobain arrested for spraypainting "god is gay" in his hometown, aberdeen (washington)

D: Don’t you feel any empathy with them? They’ve been under the same intense follow-up-album pressure as you have. K: Yeah, I do. Except I’m pretty sure that they didn’t go out of their way to challenge their audience as much as we did with this record. They’re a safe rock band. They’re a pleasant rock band that everyone likes. [Laughs] God, I’ve had much better quotes in my head about this. It just kind of pisses me off to know that we work really hard to make an entire album’s worth of songs that are as good as we can make them. What I’ve realized is that you only need a couple of catchy songs on an album, and the rest can be bullshit, and it doesn’t matter. If I was smart, I would have saved most of the songs off Nevermind and spread them out over a 15-year period. But I can’t do that. All the albums I ever liked were albums that delivered a great song, one after another: , the Sex Pistols’ Never Mind the Bollocks, Led Zeppelin II, Back in Black... D: In Utero may be the most anticipated, talked-about and argued-over album of 1993. Didn’t you feel at any point during all the title changes and the press hoopla stirred up by Steve Albini that the whole thing was just getting stupid? After all, it is just an album. K: Yeah. But I’m used to it [laughs]. While making the record, that wasn’t happening. It was made really fast. All the basic tracks were done within a week. And I did 80 percent of the vocals in one day, in about seven hours. I just happened to

D: So what was the problem? K: It wasn’t the songs. It was the production. It took a very, very long time for us to realize what the problem was. We finally came to the conclusion that the vocals weren’t loud enough, and the bass was totally inaudible. We couldn’t hear any notes that Krist was playing at all. You hit and miss. It’s a really weird thing about this record. I’ve never been more confused in my life, but at the same time I’ve never been more satisfied with what we’ve done. D: Let’s talk about your songwriting. Songs like “Dumb” and “All Apologies” do suggest that you’re looking for a way to get to people without resorting to the big-bang guitar effect. K: Absolutely. I wish we could have written a few more songs like those on all the other al-

bums. Even to put “About a Girl” on Bleach was a risk. There was a lot of pressure within that social scene, the underground-like the kind of thing you get in high school. And to put a jangly R.E.M. type of pop song on a grunge record, in that scene, was risky. We have failed in showing the lighter, more dynamic side of our band. The big guitar sound is what the kids want to hear. We like playing that stuff, but I don’t know how much longer I can scream at the top of my lungs every night, for an entire year on tour. Sometimes I wish I had taken the Bob Dylan route and sang songs where my voice would not go out on me every night, so I could have a career if I wanted.

alties for Nevermind, which is pretty good size. It’s weird, though, really weird. When we were selling a lot of records during Nevermind, I thought, “God, I’m gonna have like $10 million, $15 million.” That’s not the case. We do not live large. I still eat Kraft macaroni and cheese — because I like it, I’m used to it. We’re not extravagant people. I don’t blame any kid for thinking that a person who sells 10 million records is a millionaire and set for the rest of his life. But it’s not the case. I spent a million dollars last year, and I

D: So what does this mean for the future of Nirvana? K: It’s impossible for me to look into the future and say I’m going to be able to play Nirvana songs in 10 years. There’s no way. I don’t want to have to resort to doing the Eric Clapton thing. I have immense respect for him. But I don’t want to have to change the songs to fit my age [laughs]. D: The song on In Utero that has whipped up the most controversy is “Rape Me.” K: Basically, I was trying to write a song that supported women and dealt with the issue of rape. Over the last few years, people have had such a hard time understanding what our message is, what we’re trying to convey, that I just decided to be as bold as possible. How hard should I stamp this point? How big should I make the letters? It’s not a pretty image. But a woman who is being raped, who is infuriated with the situation . . . it’s like “Go ahead, rape me, just go for it, because you’re gonna get it.” I’m a firm believer in karma, and that motherfucker is going to get what he deserves, eventually. That man will be caught, he’ll go to jail, and he’ll be raped. “So rape me, do it, get it over with. Because you’re gonna get it worse.” D: People usually assume that someone who has sold a few million records is really livin’ large. How rich are you? How rich do you feel? According to one story, you wanted to buy a new house and put a home studio in it, but your accountant said you couldn’t afford it. K: Yeah, I can’t. I just got a check a while ago for some roy-

cobain

be on a roll. It was a good day for me, and I just kept going.

"ONCE 'smells like teen spirit' GOT INTO THE MAINSTREAM, IT WAS OVER. I'm tired of being embarassed of it.”

photo: 1991, Nirvana by Kirk Weddle

have no idea how I did it. Really. I bought a house for $400,000. Taxes were another $300,000 — something. What else? I lent my mom some money. I bought a car. That was about it. D: You don’t have much to show for that million. K: It’s surprising. One of the biggest reasons we didn’t go on tour when Nevermind was really big in the States was because I thought: “Fuck this, why should I go on tour? I have this chronic stomach pain, I may die on this tour, I’m selling a lot of records, I can live the rest of my life off a million dollars.” But there’s no point in even trying to explain that to a 15-year-old kid. I never would have believed it. D: What has been the state of relations within Nirvana over the past year? K: When I was doing drugs, it was pretty bad. There was no communication. Krist and Dave, they didn’t understand the drug problem. They’d never been around drugs. They thought of heroin in the same way that I thought of heroin before I started doing it. It was just really sad. We didn’t speak very often. They were thinking the worst, like most people would, and I don’t blame them for that. But nothing is ever as bad as it seems. Since I’ve been clean, it’s gone back to pretty much normal. Except for Dave. I’m still kind

of concerned about him, because he still feels like he can be replaced at any time. He still feels like he . . . D: Hasn’t passed the audition? K: Yeah. I don’t understand it. I try to give him as many compliments as I can. I’m not a person who gives compliments very often, especially at practice. “Let’s do this song, let’s do that song, let’s do it over.” That’s it. I guess Dave is a person who needs reassurance sometimes. I notice that, so I try and do that more often. D: So you call all the shots? K: Yeah. I ask their opinions about things. But ultimately, it’s my decision. I always feel weird saying that; it feels egotistical. But we’ve never argued. Dave, Krist and I have never screamed at each other. Ever. It’s not like they’re afraid to bring up anything. I always ask their opinion, and we talk about it. And eventually, we all come to the same conclusions. D: Haven’t there been any issues where there was at least heated discussion? K: Yeah, the songwriting royalties. I get all the lyrics. The music, I get 75 percent, and they get the rest. I think that’s fair. But at the time, I was on drugs when that came up. And so they thought that I might start asking for more things. They were

cobain

afraid that I was going to go out of my mind and start putting them on salary, stuff like that. But even then we didn’t yell at each other. And we split everything else evenly. D: With all of your reservations about playing “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and writing the same kind of song over and over, do you envision a time when there is no Nirvana? That you’ll try to make it alone? K: I don’t think I could ever do a solo thing, the Kurt Cobain Project. D: Doesn’t have a very good ring to it, either. K: No [laughs]. But yes, I would like to work with people who are totally, completely the opposite of what I’m doing now. Something way out there, man. D: That doesn’t bode well for the future of Nirvana and the kind of music you make together. K: That’s what I’ve been kind of hinting at in this whole interview. That we’re almost exhausted. We’ve gone to the point where things are becoming repetitious. There’s not something you can move up toward, there’s not something you can look forward to. The best times that we ever had were right when Nevermind was coming out and we went on that American tour where we

were playing clubs. They were totally sold out, and the record was breaking big, and there was this massive feeling in the air, this vibe of energy. Something really special was happening. I hate to actually even say it, but I can’t see this band lasting more than a couple more albums, unless we really work hard on experimenting. I mean, let’s face it. When the same people are together doing the same job, they’re limited. I’m really interested in studying different things, and I know Krist and Dave are as well. But I don’t know if we are capable of doing it together. I don’t want to put out another record that sounds like the last three records. I know we’re gonna put out one more record, at least, and I have a pretty good idea what it’s going to sound like: pretty ethereal, acoustic, like R.E.M.’s last album. If I could write just a couple of songs as good as what they’ve written . . . I don’t know how that band does what they

do. God, they’re the greatest. They’ve dealt with their success like saints, and they keep delivering great music. That’s what I’d really like to see this band do. Because we are stuck in such a rut. We have been labeled. R.E.M. is what? College rock? That doesn’t really stick. Grunge is as potent a term as New Wave. You can’t get out of it. It’s going to be passé. You have to take a chance and hope that either a totally different audience accepts you or the same audience grows with you. D: And what if the kids just say, “We don’t dig it, get lost”? K: Oh, well. [Laughs] Fuck ‘em. W

pond- man it feels like space again It all adds up to an emphatic showcase of Pond’s personality, and their ability to inflict their eccentric spirit on any genre they fancy. Perhaps, for a band as strange as this, making a pop album is the ultimate experiment. The results are anything but clichéd.

slaves- are you satisfied?

grimes-art angels

Every song here is a call to arms or an affirmative flip of the table. ‘Do Something’ is the most literal of the duo’s punches to passivity. “You are not stuck in traffic”, insists Holman over Vincent’s rusty-razor guitar and his own rudimentary drums, “You are traffic... Move!”

We already knew Grimes could write a killer pop song, but ‘Art Angels’ proved she could deliver 14 of them in a row. 'Art Angels' was not so much the sound of an artist trying to fit into the pop landscape as one trying to shape it in their own image.

blur the magic whip ‘The Magic Whip’ was something of a miracle. From the Britpop revivalism of ‘Lonesome Street’ to the icy majesty of ‘Pyongyang’ and the louche beach conga of ‘Ong Ong’, it dribbled deliciously between the fingers of Blur’s iconic canon.

mac demarco another one On this record, Mac tackles the emotions of love – jealousy, frustration– as they apply to anyone. To be able to write with universality is the mark of a songwriter’s ambition growing, and here Mac DeMarco is transitioning into one of the best around.

foals what went down We always knew Foals needed more meat on their bones. For every quasi-metal riff that made it sound like rock hard cage fighters, there were more considered, airy funk moments. ‘A Knife In The Ocean’ rivalled ‘Spanish Sahara’ as their most planet-sized tune.

2015 BEST ALBUMS 26 26

tame impala.currents

The Aussie psych vanguard all but severed ties with guitar-based noise on ‘Currents’ – “They say people never change, but that’s bullshit” Kevin Parker’s reminder on ‘Yes I’m Changing’. Fans needn’t have feared the disco-flecked new sound: Parker’s insecurities still sounded intoxicating.

björkvulnicura

courtney barnett Sometimes I Sit And Think, And Sometimes I Just Sit

Masterful string arrangements by Björk, express matters of the heart with the same candour as the words, while Venezuelan producer Arca’s fractured, difficult beats– often in uncommon time signatures–reflect the disruption to Björk’s real-life rhythm; A brave, beautiful and affecting album.

For anyone haplessly trying to make sense of the meaningless din of the 2010s, Barnett’s wry observations and caustic humour made her seem the perfect spokesperson... She might not want a pedestal, but there aren’t many songwriters who’d make better use of it

sufjan stevens carrie & lowell This is Sufjan’s most fat-free and stunning record, but also his darkest. There are no brass fanfares like 2006’s ‘Adlai Stevenson’ or fancy-dress-party tunes like 2005’s ‘Chicago’. This is downbeat and delicate alt-folk drenched, very sweetly, in blood, grief and desolation.

father john misty i love you, honeybear A masterclass in how to be a modern singer-songwriter. With its sweeping string sections overlaid with lyrics about “mascara, blood, ash and cum”, it blended the poetic honesty of a divebar Leonard Cohen with the humour of Randy Newman.

viet cong Fans of Women’s challenging melodies will appreciate the songcraft here, but Viet Cong are very much their own animal; with deep forays into demonic white noise, clanging post-punk and psychedelic/progrock on sprawling closer ‘Death’, they’re expanding into adventurous new directions.”

2015 BEST ALBUMS 27

ARIEL PINK review by Louis Pattison·photos by Emma Kathan

genius, a freak, a trailblazer, a creep; maybe a misogynist, or maybe just misunderstood. Los Angeles pop jester Ariel Marcus Rosenberg has been called many things in the decade since his 2004 breakthrough ‘The Doldrums’. Asked about a controversial interview in which he talked about being “maced by a feminist”, he recently told Pitchfork: “It’s not illegal to be an asshole.” Just last month, he was accused of misogyny by 4AD labelmate Grimes, among others, after commenting on the “downward slide” of Madonna’s career. There’s evidence of pretty much everything he’s been called on ‘Pom Pom’. It’s funny, melancholy, randy, touching, disgusting and deeply, deeply strange. It will baffle many – but at 17 tracks and 70 minutes, it has the feel of a magnum opus. The Haunted Graffiti band of the Ariel Pink name has now been discarded,

but ‘Pom Pom’ is his most collaborative album to date. It was recorded across LA with a revolving cast, including Graffiti veterans Kenny Gilmore and Tim Koh, as well as Don Bolles of LA punks The Germs and Spiritualized’s Jason Pierce (whose guitar is on ‘Picture Me Gone’ and ‘Dayzed Inn Daydreams’). Still, in ways it harks back to the demented cut-and-paste of his pre-4AD lo-fi work. Pink uses musicians like electronic producers use samples, moulding them to his singular vision. The biggest outside influence is Kim Fowley, a rock impresario who’s rubbed shoulders with Phil Spector and Frank Zappa and produced novelty records that all but defined the form. Originally slated to produce, he and Pink’s autodidactic tendencies clashed; but many of these songs were conceived while Fowley was undergoing treatment for cancer, the pair im-

provising lyrics like ‘Plastic Raincoats In The Pig Parade’ – part rubber fetishist’s erotic fantasy, part children’s TV theme tune – while the latter was hooked to a morphine drip. Their partnership makes sense. Pink is a songwriter with few modern comparisons, his bewildering collages valuing perversity over authenticity, mixing tearful sincerity with deadpan absurdity. Often it is very silly: see the ecstatic surf-pop of ‘Nude Beach A G-Go’, in which we’re informed “you can do anything/Ramalama dingdong/Surf a billy bing-bong”; or ‘Dinosaur Carebears’ with what sounds like the contents of a children’s toybox. Still, there’s a long seam of sentiment here. A good thing, because Pink’s never better than on numbers like ‘Lipstick’ or ‘Put Your Number On My Phone’, which takes up the artificial sounds of ’80s pop – gated drums, syn-

POM POM ALBUM OF THE YEAR

thesized flute – and works them into something of wistful yearning. The hot-blooded moments, mind, can go either way. Sometimes they’re sweetly odd – see ‘Exile On Frog Street’, Pink a frog prince pining for his Princess Charming. Other times, it’s more icky, like the skit in ‘Black Ballerina’, where an awkward youth gropes a stripper in an ill-judged piece of comic relief. The key track is another Fowley collaboration, ‘Sexual Athletics’. It starts on a note of braggadocio, Pink rapping about being “the sex king/on a velvet swing”. But this soon softens into sad self-pity: “All I wanted was a girlfriend, all my life”. It’s hard to feel sorry for Ariel Pink, but given it’s followed by a song about wobbly desserts (‘Jell-O’), though, it pays not to take ‘Pom Pom’ too seriously. Genuine weirdos don’t come around all that often; we should at least appreciate this one while he’s here. W