So thumbing through the new issue of Urb, I was stoked to see my editor, Joshua Glazer, mention a reading at Family Bookstore that went down in March. It reminded me of an interview I did for a now defunct Website five years ago. Not my best work, but I’m always a fan of what Ian says. For the sake of posterity, I’m reposting the original interview I did. Enjoy… or not.
A Constitutional Crime with Ian Svenonius
By Antero Garcia
Ian Svenonius, lead singer of Weird War, is perched on a folding chair in the hidden innards of the Henry Fonda Theater. As sedate as he appears, in an hour he will be belting out piercing gospel-tinged screams and falling to his knees a la James Brown during his band’s performance. Ian has an iconoclastic voice that he uses as a tool for preaching revolutionary politics in such bands as Nation of Ulysses, the Make-Up, and now Weird War (formerly the Scene Creamers).
With their recently released sophomore album, If You Can’t Beat ‘Em Bite ‘Em on Drag City, Weird War have confronted listeners with near-childish sounding melodies. The chanting lyrics, fuzzed-out guitars and ploddingly simple drum and bass rhythms also contain some of the most politically confrontational songs released today. Though his lyrics are deceivingly simplistic, they are rife with political meaning and Svenonius is quick to point this out in his signature highbrow vocabulary.
Antero Garcia: How’s the tour been treating you?
Ian Svenonius: It’s the second to last show for us before heading back to d.c., going well.
AG: What are those buttons you’re wearing?
IS: This is a Walkmen button and this is the republic of Vietnam
AG: Kind of along those lines, you were pretty sincere about the Mao quotes used in the album?
IS: It’s not really Mao. It’s an idea that has been appropriated by him. It’s really revolutionary politics, meaning that despite insurmountable funds, you have to focus – even if you’re feeling like a struggle is futile. If you focus on destroying the enemy like eating a meal: one bite at a time, then it can be achieved -the piece meal solution. Mao equates killing the enemy with eating a meal. You can never conceive of eating a meal in one bite. It’s a support of revolutionary struggle.
AG: Would you consider Weird War “punk?”
IS: I don’t want to use the word punk because I feel it’s so overused. I feel like people don’t let anything die. If you were to look at these things, it sounds like ska and punk and it all coexists. We need new terms. It’s aggressive rock and roll for sure.
Michelle Mae [Bassist, from the band’s dressing room]: It’s not punk! It’s nuclear diarrhea.
IS: Yeah, exactly. Punk is an interesting term, like what does it mean? I just wrote an essay on punk and rock and roll music appropriating gay culture, but in the ’60s people called that sound garage rock. Punk has become like Christianity where people don’t know exactly what it defines.
AG: Weird War have done a lot of label jumping, one of the first things I heard from Weird War was the contribution to the concept album Colonel Pumpernickel on Off Records.
IS: That was one of the first recordings as Weird War, and Make-Up was still together. We’re not a group in the strict sense of other rock and roll bands, it’s an umbrella organization. For instance were touring with the drummer from Dirtbombs right now, Ben Blackwell.
AG: Does that also go along with the band changing names? You were called the Scene Creamers when you came through LA last fall and now you’re back to Weird War.
IS: We were always Weird War and then we started working with new people and changed to the Scene Creamers and then in a legal dispute we lost that name and went back to Weird War. Someone else had coined it it was a long and boring story. We like the name weird war.
AG: I’ve got to ask about the rumor that Rick Rubin originally approached you to front the ex-Rage Against the Machine band.
IS: That’s a rumor… a conversation Rick and I had… in the newspaper it sounds like a big thing but it wasn’t.
AG: Your songs break away from the typical “verse-chorus verse” formula. TO an extent they feel like simple riffs and chord vamps.
IS: They’re kind of based on grooves, but they’re all written. They’re not just vamps. Like “Store Bought Pot,” we were trying to make a linear song. It’s loosely inspired by Funkadelic’s “Free Your Mind and Your Ass Will Follow.” It’s different, but the drumbeat’s inspired by Donnie Hathaway. That’s how our songs are. They’re a pastiche of things that inspire us. The lyrics have to do with Babylon.
AG: So there is a definite hip-hop influence to the music?
IS: Influenced by that and the presentation of hip-hop albums, as they’re kind of a drama that’s played out over the course of a record. That’s something that has been lost in rock and roll albums. Instead of just a collection of songs, hip-hop records are a cycle, like an opera. We wanted to do something like that.
AG: How does that work in If You Can’t Beat ‘Em Bite ‘Em?
IS: We end with “One by One,” and begin with “Music for Masturbation.” We begin with this bizarre fascism that’s based on sexual anxiety. “Music for Masturbation” is also a thing where music has become a religion with no believers. Without any interaction. And it ends with this inspirational hymn of religion. It’s not done in a gospel manner, but in it’s lyrics.
AG: Would it be fair to say that “AK-47” is the emotional climax for the album?
IS: That’s the centerpiece of the album. Right now with rock and roll, music is without content. The problem is right now there s a lot of revisionism in rock and roll when in actuality culture is the greatest weapon, it’s the most potent weapon. The CIA has a station in Hollywood where they screen all of the scripts coming out. The US army subsidizes films that say what they want. The Sum of All Fears was subsidized by the army to the tune of millions and millions of dollars. It’s censorship on a level that hasn’t been seen since World War II. You know that movie with Matt Damon with memory loss….
AG: The Bourne Identity?
IS: Yeah, that wasn’t subsidized because they thought it was anti military. That’s a great big movie. So the idea that rock and roll is intrinsically apolitical or shouldn’t have any meaning is just a lie. Lyndon La Rouche even talks about the paradigm shift that occurred when the Beatles appeared on the Ed Sullivan show. Everybody talks about the effect of Elvis Presley. The idea that is institutionalized in rock and roll now is really cheating everybody to say that you’re involved in it. If you’re involved in it with no meaning that’s bogus. So “AK-47” addresses the technology gap. Every weapon that we have has been cataloged by the UN, which is essentially a US foreign policy front. We invade a country with overwhelming military superiority, and we see this and say, ‘Well, is a Vietnam kind of situation even possible now? Guerilla struggle still possible?’ I think there’s some imbalance in the technology.
AG: Do you think it’s possible?
IS: Well that’s what the song questions. We have technology that is overwhelmingly superior for killing people. The military industrial complex is a huge moneymaker, war makes a lot of money. “AK-47” is like people against technology. The FLSN, FARC, SWAPO, NPLA, etc. all these organizations rely on incredibly simple machines like the AK-47 to succeed. And that’s still happening. It’s a song of affirmation.
AG: You’re talking about Weird War countering the apathy so prevelant in rock music, but at the same time you’re opening for a band who’s current single, “The Rat” is about introversion and being completely apathetic.
IS: Right, and I love the Walkmen. I think political songs are usually a drag. But the revisionism happening now is a band that only writes nothing and is mining either soul or funk. There are only so many things you can relive – it’s all nostalgia, it’s an art show essentially. The Walkmen are nothing like that, they’re making weird music that sounds nothing like what’s been done.
AG: I’d say the same thing about Weird War.
IS: We’re a culmination of so many things. Influences are unavoidable, they’re great but when I say horrible I’m talking about groups that are like, ‘We’re cloning New Order!’ They’re not bringing anything. They’re cheating us in a way. To me we’re supposed to be forward thrusting, but college football players have been having ’80s night for the past five years. If you’re an ’80s band you’re following the tastes of a fraternity. It’s pathetic.
AG: You’ve talked about how audiences today are more diverse, you get the casual fan who may not know much about Weird War, compared to the ’80s and early ’90s underground scene where a room would be filled with die hard fans.
IS: It’s because the underground has been kind of demolished. The independent network separate from the mainstream is gone. The lines have all been blurred. One of the positive outcomes of that is there won’t be as much insularity, self-navel gazing any more – examining yourself. High art is very insurant; it refers to itself which is why people are alienated by it, except for a cabal of art people. There’s no popular high art. It’s so self-referential and only refers to its own self-aesthetic. You don’t want underground rock and roll to be like that because it’s such an important historical cultural tool.