Notes from Underground

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: September 29, 2010

An article on Tuesday about a poll in which Americans fared poorly in answering questions about religion misspelled the name of a beatified Roman Catholic nun and Nobel Peace Prize winner. She was Mother Teresa, not Theresa.

Can you talk about Shellac’s involvement with All Tomorrow’s Parties over the years, and how the festival has changed?

Very early on in Shellac’s existence we decided we weren’t going to play festivals because they were so unpleasant. And then Barry Hogan who runs ATP contacted us. For the first ATP, we just said “No, we don’t do festivals.” But then we got contacted again by Mogwai, who were curating the second All Tomorrow’s Parties. They convinced us that it would be at least worth an experiment to see if it was a different experience. And it was. They completely changed the festival game. Now the whole world has to operate under the knowledge that there are these cool, curated festivals where everyone is treated well and the experience is a generally pleasant one. Now there are a handful of similar, interesting curated festivals worldwide that are directly attributable to Barry Hogan and ATP doing it so well, showing that it can be profitable, and showing that it was actually good business to treat people well.

Shellac is known as a band that has a hard line regarding what kind of shows you will play, and how your music is commoditized. What other bands do you consider to be ethical?
Most people in their daily lives are pretty reasonable. A lot of people that end up being in bands give themselves license to act like assholes because they’re involved in music. If they didn’t see the music world as separate from the real world, most people would continue to behave honorably in their interactions with the music scene. I don’t think that what Shellac does is remarkable, really. I feel like it’s just normal. There’s a perversion of normal ethical standards, indulged and encouraged by a music industry that feels more important the more it is removed from regular life. For those of us in Shellac and the other bands we admire, being in a band is just part of normal, regular life. You don’t act like an asshole when you go to the barber. So why act like an asshole when you’re in a band?

What are your thoughts on bands like Chumbawamba, that once had ‘indie’ ethics but decided to take their political ideas into the mainstream by signing a major label?
I’m not really interested in participating in mainstream culture. Participating in the mainstream music business is, to me, like getting involved in a racket. There’s no way you can get involved in a racket and not someway be filthied by it. You’re another catalog item, another name on the list of people who are collaborating with the enemy. But by the same token I don’t know what circumstances every other band is in and what they feel forces their hand at some point. I know some bands feel like they have the choice between working with someone at the independent level who they think is inept, or working with someone in the mainstream—who may also be inept, but at the very least may give them some money. That’s the kind of choice I never want to have to make for myself. If I had been approached by a big record label when I was eighteen years old, after I had just made my first demo—that happens quite often now, bands get approached quite young—I have no doubt whatsoever I would have signed the first thing anybody waggled in front of my nose. I can’t fault someone who operates out of ignorance and gets involved with a corrupt industry. They literally don’t know any better. I can fault the people who put them in that position—agents, lawyers, music business professionals who put him in a position of signing away the next twenty years of his life. But the kid who’s in those circumstances, I can’t really cast any judgment.

What about bands like Sonic Youth, who signed to a major label with a full adult understanding of the choice they were making.
I don’t know the exact circumstances of Sonic Youth’s decision, so I’m not comfortable saying they did it wrong. But a lot of the things they were involved with as part of the mainstream were distasteful to me. And a lot of the things that happened as a direct result of their association with the mainstream music industry gave credibility to some of the nonsense notions that hover around the star-making machinery. A lot of that stuff was offensive to me and I saw it as a sellout and a corruption of a perfectly valid, well-oiled music scene. Sonic Youth chose to abandon it in order to become a modestly successful mainstream band—as opposed to being a quite successful independent band that could have used their resources and influence to extend that end of the culture. They chose to join the mainstream culture and become a foot soldier for that culture’s encroachment into my neck of the woods by acting as scouts. I thought it was crass and I thought it reflected poorly on them. I still consider them friends and their music has its own integrity, but that kind of behavior—I can’t say that I think it’s not embarrassing for them. I think they should be embarrassed about it.

How do you think music might be different today if Sonic Youth hadn’t brought all those bands—Bikini Kill, Pavement, Nirvana, to name a few—into the mainstream fold?
I think what they did was take a lot of people who didn’t have aspirations or ambitions and encouraged them to be part of the mainstream music industry. They validated the fleeting notions that these kids had that they might one day be rock stars. And then they participated in inducing a lot of them to make very stupid career moves. That was a period where the music scene got quite ugly—there were a lot of parasitic people involved like lawyers and managers. There were people who were making a living on the backs of bands, who were doing all the work. Had Sonic Youth not done what they did I don’t know what would have happened—the alternative history game is kind of silly. But I think it cheapened music quite a bit. It made music culture kind of empty and ugly and was generally a kind of bad influence.

You wrote an article in the early 1990s called “The Problem With Music” that explored parasitism of the music industry and the economic issues with the top-down model—Does that model even exist anymore, in this new era of digital downloads, iTunes, Pitchfork, and viral trends where bands have to shamelessly promote themselves online to get ahead?
This is a terrific time to be in a band. Every band has access to the entire world by default. I know quite a few bands that have been able to establish themselves internationally based on nothing other their web presence. It’s an incredible tool. It’s also revived the careers of a lot of bands that came before the Internet era and never had enough penetration to find their natural audience. But because the music survived, some people were interested in disseminating it for no other reason than because they like it. People put stuff on YouTube or torrent clients or whatever, not because they’re going to make money off of it, which is the only reason the mainstream industry would do something, but because they think it’s good. It’s a like a worldwide mix tape. An awful lot of bands that had no audience in their first incarnation were able to revive their careers and have a second lap. It’s so exceedingly rare that somebody gets more than one bite at an apple like that. I think it’s fantastic.

Is there a young artist with integrity who inspires you today?
I have an unusual perspective in that I make records every day for a living. I see a lot of bands on a weekly basis. I see little bits and pieces of behavior that are encouraging. There was a band that came into the studio a while back called Grandfather. They were an art rock band that organized the funding of their record through Kickstarter. They were really well rehearsed and came into the studio and knocked the record out in a couple of days. Because they didn’t have a record label or any promotion schedule to adhere to, they were able to get their record manufactured and distributed within a couple of months. That’s the kind of nimble, efficient behavior that was previously impossible when there was a corporate structure involved. It gives me confidence other bands will figure it out. The last time Shellac put out a record, we finished it in June 2006. It wasn’t actually in the stores until June of the following year. It took an entire calendar year for that record to inch its way through the production, manufacturing and distribution steps and get into the store. I’m impressed when I see bands taking advantage of these efficiencies that we’re allowed now. That’s something that gives me great confidence about the way bands are going to function in the future.

Are you an avid consumer of media?
Not avid. Funny cat videos on YouTube, that’s about it. I don’t really like movies. I don’t rate movies as an art form. If somebody asked me to describe our culture, I would fail.

What would be your dream band, performing a dream album, past present or future?
Seeing The Stooges play Fun House was pretty amazing. Seeing them play Raw Power was also great, but Fun House is a very special record for me. But there’s something about this whole recreating an album thing that I’m not that into. I feel like bands should be growing, living, functioning entities and to crystallize a band into a single album, and for that to be a touchstone—I understand it from a fan’s perspective but I also feel like it’s a little bit misleading in terms of the way bands actually function. Shellac was asked to do a recreation of our first album, but we’ve always been a band that improvised our sets. That’s critical to the way that we function on stage. Whatever the mood takes us on stage can vary from night to night with what you feel like playing. I feel like if we knew what we were going to be playing before we were playing it that would prevent us from having a really great show.

It’s the end of analog. Do you lament the era of palpable commodities that the Internet is replacing?
Well, the Internet has replaced radio. For the same reason that having a radio didn’t mean that you wouldn’t also have a record collection, having the Internet available doesn’t mean that you won’t also have a record collection. The scale of things has changed dramatically. The one thing that has survived intact has been vinyl record sales. There are vinyl reissue labels and labels that now do better business with their vinyl releases than they do with CD releases. Obviously the primary mode of music is going to be electronic, but people still want to have permanent evidence of their appreciation of a band. Hi-fi shops are doing great business selling record players. I don’t see the vinyl record disappearing in my lifetime.

You played an extended version of your song “The End of Radio” tonight. Can you talk about what that song is about?
That one changes over time. The original inspiration for it was the idea that at some point there won’t be radio anymore. Whether radio is supplanted by some kind of digital medium and it finally is no longer used for any other communication. Or maybe civilization will just run out and there won’t be anyone left to key a transmitter anymore, I don’t know. You hear pundits talking about the death of radio a lot, or the death of traditional media. But if you drive around, every spot on the dial has still got a radio station on it. And there’s still people acting like assholes on the radio all day, every day. In small towns and even in bigger cities, people can be celebrities through nothing but the radio. A disembodied voice can make someone famous. When radio came up as a new technology there was a huge run in the stock market on all the radio stocks. All these start-up radio companies just became huge. The parallels between that and the Internet are quite obvious. Everyone said that radio would kill live music and kill the existing music industry because people wouldn’t leave their houses because radio would bring the ballroom to them. It had exactly the opposite effect—it made people much more interested in music. The same thing happened with the Internet—people said access to music on the Internet was going to kill the music industry. What it killed was the record industry. The music industry—bands, concerts, things like that are doing great. The live concert experience is a valuable thing now.

Radio was once the darling of technology, and then radio becomes this technological orphan that’s no longer being actively considered. But radio is still being used. Radio is still broadcasting. Radio waves are still emanating out into space. If we are ever noticed by another civilization it will be probably through a radio broadcast of some kind. The nice thing about doing a song about the end of radio is that it allows you to talk about whatever you feel like talking about that pertains to radio at the moment. For example, when John Peel died, that closed a pretty important chapter of radio in England. The BBC is a miracle, but John Peel was one of the things that kept it human. A lot of people who I associate with radio are very, very old because they became famous during a period when radio was the new technology. Certain baseball announcers who have really fantastic grasp of the game and great style—like Vince Scully and Bob Uecker, who have a talent for making baseball over the radio a baseball experience rather than a radio experience. Then there are guys like Studs Terkel, who took everyday people and had them talk about their lives and made it like the most compelling radio in the world. All of those things, whenever we start that song, any subset of those things can be on my mind and those are the things we’ll talk about during that show.

Is there anyone who can fill John Peel’s shoes today as a cultural arbiter of music?
No. One of the things that made John Peel so valuable was that he had decades of archived material and sessions of bands that had played live and were only ever heard on the John Peel show. His work ethic was absolutely incredible. He made it a point of pride to listen to every record that anyone sent him. He would listen literally to dozens of records a day. He said something once that I thought was really profound: He said that no one would bother making a record and sending it to him if they thought it was shitty. Obviously, to the people making those records, they are important. If he doesn’t get it as a listener, if he didn’t like it in some way, that’s his fault, not the fault of the people who did something important to them. That’s a pretty amazing, humble insight for someone like him to have. A lot of radio professionals kind of feel like they know the game, they know what’s good. His way of looking at it was much more selfless: there was this culture of bands creating music and he was getting to audition some of it. Then he could spread it out to the rest of the world if it struck his fancy. Just because he didn’t like something didn’t mean it was bad. He was just deaf to it.

How would you describe your fashion?
I think fashion is repulsive. The whole idea that someone else can make clothing that is supposed to be in style and make other people look good is ridiculous. It sickens me to think that there is an industry that plays to the low self-esteem of the general public. I would like the fashion industry to collapse. I think it plays to the most superficial, most insecure parts of human nature. I hope GQ as a magazine fails. I hope that all of these people who make a living by looking pretty are eventually made destitute or forced to do something of substance. At least pornography has a function.

—Aaron Lake Smith