#punk rock renegade | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

sophaeros · 8 months

Text

arctic monkeys for q magazine, june 2011 (x) (x)

ARCTIC MONKEYS: Inside Alex Turner's Head

Words Sylvia Patterson Portrait John Wright

The day Arctic Monkeys moved into their six bedroom, Spanish-style villa in the Hollywood Hills, where the first-floor balcony looked over the patio swimming pool, they knew exactly what to do.

"From the balcony, you could get on t'roof and jump in't pool," chirps the Monkeys' most gregarious member, drummer Matt Helders, in his homely Yorkshire way. "We looked at it and said, That's definitely gonna happen. So by the end, we did a couple of 'em. Somersaults in t'pool, from the roof. At night time."

In January 2011, as Sheffield and the rest of Britain endured its bitterest winter in a century, Arctic Monkeys capered among the palm trees, eschewing hotels for a millionaire's Hollywood homestead as they recorded and mixed their fourth studio album, Suck It and See.

The four Monkeys, alongside producer James Ford and engineer James Brown, lived what they called the "American man thing": watched Super Bowl on giant TVs, played ping-pong, hired two Mustangs, cooked cartoon Tom And Jerry-sized steaks on barbecues on Sundays, had girlfriends over to visit, all cooking and drinking around the colossal outdoor kitchen area featuring a fridge and two dishwashers. Living atop the Hills, they could see the Pacific Ocean beyond by day, the infinite glittering lights of downtown LA by night.

Every day, en route to Sound City Studios, they'd travel in a seven-seater four-by-four through the mountains, via bohemian 60s enclave Laurel Canyon, blaring out the tunes: The Stones Roses, The Cramps, the Misfits' Hollywood Babylon. For the sometime teenage art-punk renegades whose guitarist, Jamie Cook, was once ejected from London's Met Bar for refusing to pay €22 for two beers, the comedy rock'n'roll life still feels, however, absolutely nothing like reality.

NICK O'MALLEY: "It were really as if we were on holiday. When we came back it's the most post-holiday blues I've ever had!"

JAMIE COOK: "It's hard to comment on that. It were just really good fun."

MATT HELDERS: "We always said, As soon as things like that feel normal, we're in trouble. But it's just funny. You might think it would get more and more serious as you get older but it's getting funnier. We've done four albums now and I'm still only 24, I'm still immature to an extent. So who cares?"

Alex? Al? Are you there?

ALEX TURNER: "Yeah, it were good times. But we were in the studio most of the time. So there's no real wild Hollywood stories. Hmn. Yeah."

Wednesday, 16 March 2011, Strongroom Bar, Shoreditch, East London, 11am. Alex Turner, 25, slips entirely alone into an empty art-crowd brasserie looking like an indie girl's indie dream boy: mop-top bouffant hair which coils, in curlicues, directly into his cheekbones, army-green waist-length jacket, baggy-arsed skinny jeans, black cord zip-up cardigan, simple gold chain, supermoon sized chocolate-brown eyes.

Almost six years after I Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor became the indie-punk anthem of a generation (from the first of Arctic Monkeys' three Number 1 albums), and nothing prepares you for the curious phenomenon of Alex Turner "in conversation". Unlike so many of the Monkeys frenetic early songs, he operates in slow motion, seemingly underwater, carrying a protective shell on his back, perhaps indie rock's very own diamond-backed terrapin. The most celebrated young wordsmith in rock'n roll today talks fulsomely, in fact, only in shapeless, curling sentences punctuated with "maybe... hmn.. yeah", an anecdotal wilderness sketching pictures as vague as a cloud. He is, though, simultaneously adorable: amenable, gentle, graceful, and as Northern as a 70s grandpa who literally greets you with "ey oop?".

"People think I'm a miserable bastard," he notes, cheerfully, "but it's just the way me face falls." Still profoundly private, if not as hermetically sealed as a vacuum-packed length of Frankfurter, his fante-shy reticence extends not only to his personal life (his four-year relationship with It-girl/TV presenter Alexa Chung, whom he never mentions) but to insider details generally. Take the Monkeys’ Hollywood high jinks documented above: not one word of it was described by Turner. Before Q was informed by his other Monkey bandmates, Turner’s anecdotal aversion unfolded like this:

Describe the lovely villa you were in. AT: "Well... we certainly had a... good view."

Of what? AT: "Well, we were up quite high."

The downtown LA lights going on forever? AT: "I dunno. It was definitely that thing of getting a bit of sort of sunshine. Is it vitamin D? If you can get vitamin D on your record, you've got a bit of a head start. So we'd get up and drive to the studio."

What were you driving? AT: "Nothing... spectacular. But yeah, we'd drive up the studio, spend all day there and sort of, y know, get back. To be honest... we had limited time. So we spent as much time as possible kind of getting into it, like, in the studio.

So your favourite adventures were what? AT: "Well, they were really… minimal. We were working out there!"

Any nightclubs or anything, perhaps? AT: "You really want the goss 'ere, don't you?"

Yes, please. AT: "I could make some up. Nah!"

And this was on the second time of asking. It's perhaps obvious: Alex Turner, one of the most prolific songwriters of his generation (four Monkeys albums and two EPs in five years, The Last Shadow Puppets side-project, a bewitching acoustic soundtrack for his actor/video director friend Richard Ayoade's feature-length debut Submarine), is dedicated only to the cause – of being the best he can possibly be. He simply remembers the songs much more than the somersaults.

Throughout 2009, Arctic Monkeys toured third album Humbug – the record mostly made in the Californian desert with Queens Of The Stone Age man-monolith Josh Homme – across the planet. While hardly some cranium-blistering opus, its heavier sonic meanderings considerably slowed the Arctic Monkeys' live sets and on 23 August 2009, Q watched them headline the Lowlands Festival, Holland and witnessed a hitherto unthinkable sight – swathes of perplexed Monkeys fans trudging away from the stage. With the sludge rock mood matching their cascading dude-rock hair it seemed obvious: they'd smoked way too much outrageously strong weed in the desert.

"Heheheh, yeah," responds Turner, unperturbed. "That's your theory. You probably weren't alone."

Back in the Strongroom Bar, Turner's arm is now nonchalantly draped along the back of a beaten-up brown leather sofa. He ponders his band's somewhat contrary reputation…

"I think starting the headline set at Reading with a cover of a Nick Cave tune perhaps was a bit contrary. D'youknowhat Imean?! But to be honest, that summer, at those festivals, we had a great time. And I know some fans enjoyed those sets 10 times more. And you can't just do, y’know, another Mardy Bum or whatever. Because how could you, really?"

With Humbug, notes Turner, "I went into corners I hadn't before, because I needed to see what were there," but by spring 2010 he wanted their fourth album to be "more song-based" and less lyrically "removed". He was "organised this time", studied "the good songwriters" (from Nick Cave, The Byrds and Leonard Cohen to country colossi Johnny Cash and Patsy Cline), discovered "the other three strings" on his guitar, and wrote 12 songs through the spring and summer of 2010, mostly in the fourth-floor New York flat he shared with Chung before the couple moved back to London late last summer (the New York MTV show It's On With Alexa Chung was cancelled after two seasons). The result: major-key melodies, harmonised singing and classic song structures.

At the same time he revisited the opposite extreme: bands such as Black Sabbath and The Stooges ("we wanted a few wig-outs as well"); he was also still heavily influenced by the oil-thick grinder rock of Josh Homme, who is clearly now a permanent Monkeys hero. After four months' rehearsals in London, on 8 January the Monkeys relocated to LA for five swift weeks of production and Homme came to visit, singing backing vocals on All My Own Stunts. Tequila was involved.

"Tequila is probably me favourite," manages Turner, by way of an anecdote. "But it takes a certain climate... It's not the same... in the rain. Yeah. [Looks to be contemplating a lyric] Tequila in the rain."

Vocally, he developed the caramel richness first unveiled on The Last Shadow Puppets' Scott Walker-esque The Age Of The Understatement, finding a crooner's vibrato. "Everything before was so tight,” he notes, clutching his neck. "Probably just through nerves. That's just not there any more." Suck It and See contains at least four of the most glittering, sing-along, world-class pop songs (and obvious singles) of Arctic Monkeys' career: the towering, clanging She's Thunderstorms, the summertime stunner The Hellcat Spangled Shalalala, the heavenly harmonised title track and the Echo & The Bunnymen-esque jangly pop of closer That's Where You're Wrong.

Elsewhere, in typically contrary "fashion", there's preposterous head-banger bedlam (Brick By Brick, the rollicking faux-heavy rock download they released in March "just for fun", featuring vocals by Helders; Don't Sit Down 'Cause I've Moved Your Chair, and Library Pictures). News arrives that the first single proper will be Don't Sit Down 'Cause I've Moved Your Chair. Q is perplexed. Brilliantly titled, certainly, but arriving after Brick By Brick, the new album will appear to the planet as some comedy pastiche metal album for 12-year-old boys.

You've got all these colossal, summery, indie-pop classics and you've gone for... The Chair? AT: [Laughing uproariously] "The Chair! I'm now calling it The Chair, that's cool. Well for once it weren't even our suggestion. It was Laurence's (Bell, Domino label boss). And I were, Fucking too right! He's awesome. It'd be good to get a bit of fucking rock'n'roll out there, won't it? It's riffs. It's loud. It's funny."

If you don't release The Hellcat Spangled Shalalala as a single I'm going round Domino to kick Laurence's "awesome" butt. AT: "I think it'll be the next one!"

The record's title, meanwhile, could've been more enigmatically original than the un-loved phrase Suck It and See. The band, struggling with ideas due to the opposing sonic moods, invented an inspiration-conjuring ruse: to think of new names for effects pedals in the style of Tom Wolfe, Turner being long enamoured with the American author's legendarily psychedelic books The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, "cos that just sounds awesome".

"There's the Big Muff pedal," he elaborates, "That’s the classic. I've got the Valve Slapper. And there's the Tube Screamer. So we came up with the Thunder Suckle Fuzz Canyon. And… wait till I assemble it in me mind… em… it'll come to me… The Blonde-O-Sonic Shimmer Trap. So we were going for summat like that."

A wasted opportunity?

"Nah. Because some of those things ended up in the lyrics anyway. Suck It and See was just easier."

Alex Turner, rock'n'roll's premier descriptive art-poet, still writes his lyrics long-hand in spiral-bound notebooks. "Writing lyrics is a craft that I've practised a bit now," he avers. "In me notebook it looks like sums. Theories. There's words and arrows going everywhere. There's always a few possibilities and I write the word 'OR' in a square."

For our most celebrated colloquial sketch-writer of the everyday observation (all betting pencils, boy slags and ice-cream van aggravations) the more successful he becomes, the less he orbits the ordinary. "I'm not struggling with that, to be honest," he decides. "In fact I'm enjoying writing lyrics much more than I did. Stories. Describing a picture. Um. There's quite a bit of weather and time in this one. Which is probably not reassuring. 'Oh God, he's writing about the weather.' Maybe leave that out!"

There are also some direct, funny, romantic observations: "That's not a skirt, girl, that's a sawn-off shotgun/And I only hope you've got it aimed at me..." (from the title track).

Some of your romantic quips, now, must be about Alexa. AT: "Right. Yeah. Definitely. Well... there's always been that side to our songs, when we weren't writing about... the fucking taxi rank. It's kind of inevitably... people you're with." [At the mention of Chung's name, Turner is visibly aggrieved, head sliding into his neck, terrapin-esque indeed.]

It must have been very grounding being in a proper relationship through all this madness. Because if you weren't, girls would be jumping all over your head. AT: "Em. Hmn. Well, of course that helps you to... I don't really know.. what the other way would be."

Does Alexa wonder if the lyrics are about her? AT: "Oh there's none of that. Yeah, no, there's no looking over the shoulder."

She must be curious, at least. "Maybe."

Did you ever watch Popworld? AT: [Nervous laughter] "Em! Now and again."

Did you ever see the episode where she helps Paul McCartney write a song about shoes? AT: "Ah, yeah I think so, maybe I did see that."

Well, if I was you, I'd have been thinking, "She's the one for me." AT: "Well. Yeah... maybe that would've... sealed the deal! Hmn. But maybe that wasn't when i got the ray of light. When was? Nah [buries head in hands]. I might have to go for a cigarette..."

Q can't torture him any more and joins him for a snout. Turner smokes Camels from a crumpled, sad, soft-pack and resembles a teenager again. As early song You Probably Couldn't See For The Lights But You Were Staring Straight At Me says, "Never tenser/Could all go a bit Frank Spencer…”

In January 2006, when Arctic Monkeys' Number 1 album Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not became the fastest-selling debut in UK history, inadvertently redefining the concept of autonomy and further imploding the decimated music industry (& wasn't their idea to be "the MySpace band", it was their fans': the Monkeys merely kick-started viral marketing by giving away demos at gigs), the 19- and 20-year-old Monkeys were terrible at fame. They weren't so much insurrectionary teenage upstarts as teenage innocents culturally traumatised by the peak-era fame democracy.

To their generation (born in the mid-'80s) fame was now synonymous with some-twat-off-the-telly a world of foaming tabloid hysteria where renown and celebrity meant, in fact, you were talentless. Hence their interview diffidence and receiving awards via videos dressed up as the Wizard OfOz and the Village People. Which only, ironically, made them even more celebrated and famous. (“That were a product of us just trying to hold onto the reins," thinks Turner today. "Being uncooperative.")

Q meets The Other Three one morning at 11am, in the well-appointed, empty bar of the Bethnal Green, Bast London hotel they're staying in (all three live in Sheffield, with their girlfriends, in their own homes). First to arrive is the industrious, sensible and cheerful Helders, crunching into a hangover-curing green apple. He has recovered from last year's boxing accident at the gym, which left his broken arm requiring a fitted plate. Now impressively purple-scarred, the break felt "interesting" and the doctor couldn't resist the one-armed drummer jest: "D'you like Def Leppard?"

Currently enjoying an enduring bromance with Diddy, he still doesn't feel famous, "it just doesn't feel that real, there's no paparazzi waiting for me to trip up." He and Turner, during the four-month rehearsals last year, became an accomplished roast dinner cooking duo for the band. "I reckon we could have us our own cookbook," he beams. "Pictures of us stirring, with a whisk."

O'Malley, an agreeable, twinkly-eyed 25-year-old with a strikingly deep voice and a winningly huge smile, is still coyly embarrassed by the interview process. A replacement for the departed original bass player Andy Nicholson in May 2006, he went from Asda shelf-filler to Glastonbury headliner in 13 months and still finds the Monkeys "a massive adventure". His life in Sheffield is profoundly normal – he's delighted that his new home since last October has an open-hearth fireplace: "Me parents had electric bars." He has also discovered cooking. “I’m just a pretty shit-hot housewife, most of the time," he smiles. "I cook stews, fish combinations, curries, chillies. I made a beef pho noodle soup the other day, Vietnamese, I surprised meself, had some mates round for that."

Recently, at his dad's 50th birthday bash, the party band, made up of family and friends, insisted he join them onstage "for ...The Dancefloor. So I were up there [mimes playing bass, all sheepish] and it were the wrong pitch, they didn't know the words or 'owt, going, Makin eyes... er..." He has no extra-curricular musical ambitions. "I'm happy just playing bass," he smiles. "I've never had the skill of doing songs meself. It'd be shit!"

Cook, 25, is still spectacularly embarrassed by the interview process. He perches upright, with a fixed nervous smile, newly shorn of the beard and ponytail he sported in LA: "Rockin' a pone, yeah, because I could get away with it." With his classic preppy haircut and dapper green military coat (from London's swish department store, Liberty), he looks like a handsome '40s film star. (Turner deems Cook "the band heartbreaker" and had a word with him post-LA: "I said to him, Come on, mate, you've got to get that beard shaved off. Get the girls back into us. Shift some posters.")

His life in Sheffield is also profoundly normal. He still plays Sunday League football with his local pub team, The Pack Horse FC (position, left back), remains in his long-term relationship with page-three-model-turned-make-up-artist Katie Downes and "potters about" at home, refusing to describe said home, "cos I'll get burgled".

A tiler by trade, he always vowed, should the Monkeys sign a deal, that he'd throw his trowel in a Sheffield river on his last day of work. "I never did fling me trowel," he confirms. "Probably still in me shed." He's never considered what his band represents to his generation. "I'd go insane thinking about it, I'm pretty good at not thinking about it… Oh God. I'm terrible at this!"

Back in the Strongroom Bar, Alex Turner is cloudily describing his everyday life. "I just keep meself to meself," he confounds. He mostly stays indoors and his perfect night in with Alexa is "watching loads of Sopranos. And doing roast dinners".

No longer spindle-limbed, he attends a gym and has handsomely well-defined arms – "You have to look after yourself."

Suddenly, Crying Lightning from Humbug rumbles over the bar stereo. "Wow. How about that? I was quite happy the other morning cos Brick By Brick were on the round-up goals on Soccer AM. It's still exciting when that happens. It was like Brick By Brick is real."

He spends his days writing music, "listening to records", and recommends Blues Run The Game by doomed '60s minstrel Jackson C Frank ("who's that lass?... Laura Marling, she did a cover recently), a simple, acoustic, deep and regretful stunner about missing someone on the road.

Lyrically, he cites as an example of greatness the Nick Cave B-side Little Empty Boat [from ‘97 single Into My Arms ], a comically sinister paean to a sexual power struggle: "Your knowledge is impressive and your argument is good/But I am the resurrection babe and you're standing on my foot."

"I need a hobby," he suddenly decides. "I'd like to learn another language." Since his mum is a German teacher (his dad teaches music), surely he can speak some German? "I know how to ask somebody if they've had fun at Christmas." Go on, then. "Nah!"

Where Turner's creative gifts stem from remains a contemporary rock'n'roll mystery; he became a fledgling songwriter at 16, after the gift of a guitar at Christmas from his parents. An only child, did his folks, perhaps, foresee artistic greatness? "I doubt it!" he balks. "Cos I didn't. I wasn't... a show kid." Like the others, he doesn't analyse the past, or the future.

"You can't constantly be thinking about what's happened," he reasons, "it's just about getting on with it." The elaborate pinky ring he now constantly wears, however, a silver, gold and ruby metal-goth corker featuring the words DEATH RAMPS is a permanent reminder of he and his best friends’ past. The Death Ramps is not only a Monkeys pseudonym and B-side to Teddy Picker, but a place they used to ride their bikes in Sheffield as kids.

"Up in the woods near where we lived," he nods. "Just little hills. But when you're eight years old they're death ramps." The ring was custom made by a friend of his, who runs top-end rock'n'roll jewellery emporium The Great Frog near London's Carnaby Street. Ask Turner why he thinks the chase between his writing and speaking eloquence is quite so mesmerisingly vast and he attempts a theory.

"Well, writing isn't the same as speaking," he muses. "Not for me. I seem to struggle more and more with... conversation. Talking onstage... I can't do it any more. Hmn. I'll have to work on that."

The ever-helpful Helders has a better theory.

"Since he's been writing songs," he ponders, “It seems like he’s always thinking about that. So even when he’s talking to you now, he’s thinking about the next thing that rhymes with a word. Even when he’s driving. We joke he’s a bad driver, his focus is never 100 per cent on what he’s doing. Which is good for us cos it means he’s got another 12 songs up his sleeve. I think music must be the easiest way for him to be concise and get everything out. Otherwise his head would explode.”

The Shoreditch.com photo studios, 18 March. Alex Turner, today, is more ethereally distracted than ever, transfixed by the studio iPod, playing Led Zeppelin, The Rolling Stones, a version of I’d Rather Go Blind. Occasionally, he’ll completely lose his conversational thread, “Um. I’ve dropped a stitch.”

The first to arrive for Q’s photoshoot, he greets his incoming bandmates with enormous hugs (and also hugs them goodbye). Today, Q feels it’s pointless poking its pickaxe of serious enquiry further into Turner’s vacuum-packed soul and wonders if he’ll play, instead, a daft game. It’s called Popworld Questions, as first posed by someone he knows rather well.

“Oh, OK. Let’s do it,” he blinks, now perched in an empty dressing room. He then vigorously shakes his head, “Um…I’ve gotta snap back into it.”

Here, then, are some genuine “Alexa Chung on Popworld” questions (2006-2007), as originally posed to Matt Willis, Amy Winehouse, Robbie Williams, Pussycat Dolls, Kaiser Chiefs and Diddy.

Why do indie bands wear such tight jeans? AT: “Um. I supposed they do. They haven’t always. When we first were playing I was definitely in flares. You need to be quite tall to get the full effect, though. So, that's why this indie band wears such tight jeans, cos we've not got the legs for flares."

What makes you tick in the sexy department? AT: "Wow. Pass. What do I find most attractive in a woman? Something in the head? That's definitely a requirement. Well... Hmn. I'm struggling."

Tell us about all the lovely groupies. AT: "No!"

If dogs had human hands instead of paws, would you consider trying to teach them to play the piano? AT: "Absolutely. I'd teach Hey Jude."

How many plums d'you think you can comfortably fit in one hand? AT: "They're not very big. [Holds small, pale, girly hand up for inspection] It's a shame. Probably three. Diddy only managed two? Maybe not then. I can carry a lot of glasses at once, though. If they're small ones I can do four."

Are you cool? AT: "Not as much as I'd like to be. There's this clip where Clint Eastwood is on a talkshow and he gets asked, Everybody thinks of you as defining cool, what d'you think about that? And he gets his cigs out, takes one out, flicks it into his mouth, lights it and says, I have no idea what you're talking about."

Here, Turner locates his Camels soft-pack and attempts to do a Clint Eastwood. He flicks one upwards towards his mouth. And misses. Flicks another. And misses. "Third time lucky?" He misses. "I'll get it the next time." And succeeds. "Hey. Fourth time. Don't put that in! So there you go. I'm four steps away from where I wanna be."

Thank you very much for joining me here on Popworld, here's my clammy hand again. There it is, let it slip, hmmn. You can let go now. AT: "OK! Were you a Popworld fan, then? It was funny. Cool. What were we talking about, before?"

Blimey, Alex. What must you be like when you're completely stoned out of your head? AT: "Stoned? What d'you mean, cos I seem like that anyway? Yeah. A lot of people... tell me I'm a bit... dreamy. But I like the idea of that. Of being somewhere else."

Two days earlier, Turner had contemplated what he wanted from all this, in the end. Many seconds later he gave his deceptively ambitious answer.

"I just wanna write better songs," he decided. "And better lyrics. I just definitely wanna be good at it. Hmn. Yeah.”

—

RUFUS BLACK: AKA Matt Helders, on his ongoing bromance with Diddy

Matt Helders has known preposterous rap titan Diddy since they met in Miami in 2008. “He goes, Arctic Monkeys! Then he said summat about a B-side and I was like, He's not lying! I just thought, This is funny, I'm gonna go with this for a while." Last October Diddy texted Helders, suggesting he play drums with his Diddy Dirty Money band on Friday Night With Jonathan Ross, to give his own drummer a day off. “I were bowling with me girifriend at the time. In Sheffield, on a Sunday." On the day of recording, says Helder, "We had a musical director. That were one of the maddest times of my life. Next day Diddy said, Why don't you just stay? Come along with me. So I went everywhere with him." Diddy had "a convoy of cars" and made sure Helders was always in his. "He'd stop his car and go, Where's Matt? You're coming with me! So I'd get in his car. Just me, him, his security, driver." Diddy, by now, had given him a pseudonym - Rufus Black. "He kept saying, I don't wanna fuck up your image. And I'm, I don't think it's gonna do me any harm!" He stayed in Diddy's spectacularly expensive hotel. Some weeks later, Helders almost returned to the Dirty Money drumstool for a gig in Glasgow. "But we were rehearsing in London. I were like, I might come, how are you getting there? And he were like, Jet. Jump on t’jet with me. But I had to stay in Bethnal Green instead.”

Love’s young dream: Diddy (left) with Helders

#arctic monkeys #alex turner #matt helders #nick o'malley #jamie cook #sias era #interviews #q magazine #my image id #bands #this is such a funny interview honestly shfjwjs #self proclaimed housewife nick my beloved......#also why did the interviewer describe alex's hands as small pale and girly HELPME #btw im missing page 93 it's probabky just a photospread but yeah #i managed to find the dead links' images on vk #eye contact #not my scan

279 notes · View notes

the-hottest-band-tournament · 3 months

Text

Round Three of The Hottest 80s Band Tournament

The Go Go’s

Defeated opponents: Kraftwerk, Commodores

Formed in: 1978

Genres: new wave, power pop, pop rock, punk rock

Lineup: Belinda Carlisle- vocals

Jane Weidlin- rhythm guitar

Charlotte Caffey- lead guitar

Gina Schock- drums

Kathy Valentine- bass

Albums from the 80s:

Beauty and the Beat (1981)

Vacation (1982)

Talk Show (1984)

Propaganda: While their biggest hits were very bubblegum and upbeat, these girls came up in the LA Punk scene and had the bite to back that up. Rolling Stone ranked the Hardest Partying Bands and The Go Go's came in 3rd, right behind Mötley Crüe and Led Zeppelin. Their songs are certified bops and great to blast on a road trip and their style was pure LA Mall Rat which, frankly, still iconic.

Thin Lizzy

Defeated opponents: The Human League, The Jesus and Mary Chain

Formed in: 1969

Genres: Hard rock, heavy metal

Lineup: Phil Lynott- bass, vocals

Scott Gorham- guitar

Snowy White- guitar

Darren Wharton- keyboards, organ

Brian Downey- drums, percussion

Albums from the 80s:

Chinatown (1980)

Renegade (1981)

Thunder and Lightning (1983)

Propaganda:

#Round 3 #the go go's #thin lizzy #belinda carlisle #jane weidlin #charlotte caffey #gine schock #kathy valentine #phil lynott #scott gorham #snowy white #Darren wharton #brian downey #the hottest 80s band tournament #the hottest 80s band tourney

14 notes · View notes

crackshipoftheweek · 2 days

Text

Crack Ship of the Week back again with another post! (After nearly an entire month) Lately I've been working a lot of 10+ hour shifts at my current job, along with helping out at my family's restaurant, updating my résumé, and searching for other jobs to advance my culinary career, so I've been really busy, sorry for not posting in quite a while. On the plus side, I've managed to network with some industry professionals higher up the ladder, and I was recently contracted by a personal chef agency!

Without further ado, let's bring out

This Week's Crackship:

Party Poison (Danger Days) × Johnny Silverhand (Cyberpunk)

Ship Name(s):

Poison Hand, Dim Mak (see notes below for explanation), Rockerboys, Ronin (see notes below for explanation)

Why It's Crack:

No interactions (separate canons)

Why It's Cracked:

Canons share many similarities. Both are cyberpunk series set in an alternate universe California in the near future (now partially set in the near past, as well), following a war or series of wars that negatively impacted the United States' geopolitical power, costing it territory that would be filled in by an independent city-state (Battery City in Danger Days, and Night City in Cyberpunk) and the resultant power vacuum being filled in by megacorporations (Better Living Industries in Danger Days and Arasaka in Cyberpunk. Like Arasaka, Better Living also seems to be a multinational corporation with at least some notable amount of presence in Japan, hence Better Living having had a .jp domain during the Danger Days album's promotional period, as well as using both English and Japanese writing in much of its content). Crossover potential abounds

Both fill very similar niches in their respective stories (renegade rockers who rebel against corporate overreach with the power of punk rock, and occasionally this gun they found. They both became the exemplar of their respective series' spin on the "rebel with a cause" archetype [Killjoys in Danger Days, and Rockerboys in Cyberpunk])

Both lived and operated in similar timeframes, not taking into account Johnny's engram whom stars in Cyberpunk 2077. Party was active in the 2010s up until his death in 2019, and Johnny was active throughout the 2000s up until his death in 2023)

Both may also be war veterans (Johnny is a confirmed war veteran who deserted the US Military in protest of the government's corruption and purposeful destabilization of Central and South America. Party Poison may have been one of the many Killjoys to take part in the Analog Wars, though this isn't confirmed iirc)

Both died a similar death, to somewhat similar people, for similar reasons. Both raided the main HQ of their respective antagonistic megacorps in order to rescue an abducted loved one (surrogate little sister "The Girl" in Party's case, and former lover Alt Cunningham in Johnny's case), during which they were brutally gunned down by their corporate foes' bald and sociopathic enforcer (Korse and Adam Smasher, respectively)

Both dye their hair. Party Poison's hair is dyed red (natural color unknown afaik), and Johnny Silverhand dyes his hair black, with it being naturally blond.

Notes

"Dim Mak", also known as "Poison Hand" or "Touch of Death" is a purported system of acupressure-based martial arts said to have originated in ancient China and been culturally imported to Japan. Count Juan Raphael Dante, an eccentric martial arts practitioner who taught karate in the 60s and 70s, also claimed to be able to teach Dim Mak to prospective students, infamously advertising this alleged service in the back page ad spaces in Marvel comic books of the time. This likely was seen at times by Gerard Way, an avid comic fan, as he titled one of the songs in the wider Danger Days multimedia project as Black Dragon Fighting Society, which shares an identical name with the martial arts organization founded by Count Dante. "Dim Mak" is also the name of a record label founded by Steve Aoki, who made a remix of the famous My Chemical Romance song "Welcome to the Black Parade". This fact is also relevant to the ship as Dim Mak distributes punk rock music, with punk rock being the primary genre performed by both Party Poison and Johnny Silverhand.

"Ronin" was chosen a ship name due to their shared status as outlaw warriors, similar to (but generally less shitty towards bystanders than) the ronin of Sengoku and early Edo-period Japan. Party is an outlaw vigilante who fights against BLI, whereas Johnny is a former US soldier who deserted and fled prosecution by moving to Night City. In addition, this name was chosen in reference to Johnny's band, Samurai. Keanu Reeves, who portrays Johnny in Cyberpunk 2077, also starred in the 2013 American remake of The 47 Ronin (unfortunately)

10 notes · View notes

coolfire333 · 25 days

Note

1, 4, 19, 29 and 30? :]

Who was your first ever OC? Do you still “use” them? How have they evolved over time?

Her name is/was Cloudy! She's a weird bug-like alien who I'm currently figuring out what to do with because she's a huge self-insert and I feel like I can't do much with her in her current state because I have trouble putting a pin in what makes me "me" so writing her is difficult. I'm trying to make her have more elements of myself and not be entirely a me-stand-in, if that makes sense. No idea what to do with her otherwise! She also has a friend, Shadowmoore, and a friend/love interest, Quinen, a bug alien girl and bug alien guy respectively. They're all equally old because I liked the idea of trios as a kid hehe

4. What kind of music do your OCs listen to?

Whew boy I actually think about this a lot...I have a list of songs that I think fit my ocs in some way, here it is in all its (current) glory (I have way more ocs than this but these are the ones I found songs for):

The Surgeon

Sexual Healing--Marvin Gaye

Shake the Disease--Depeche Mode

Strangelove--Depeche Mode

Bad Medicine--Bon Jovi

I Want a New Drug--Huey Lewis and the News

The Paramedic

Otome Dissection--DECO*27

I Don’t Want to Set the World on Fire--The Inkspots

My Name Is…--DECO*27

Call Me--Blondie

I Wanna Dance With Somebody--Whitney Houston

The Renegade

The Reflex--Duran Duran

Oh No!--Marina and the Diamonds

Somebody That I Used To Know--Gotye

Your Love--The Outfield

When Doves Cry--Prince

Little Lion Man--Mumford and Sons

The Merchant

Cookie Scene--The Go! Team

Bad Reputation--Joan Jett and the Blackhearts

The Secret Life of Me--Waterparks

Bad Romance--Lady Gaga

One Week--Barenaked Ladies

Red Wine Supernova--Chappell Roan

HOT TO GO!--Chappell Roan

You Didn’t Have To Be So Nice--The Lovin’ Spoonful

Q--DECO*27

Lavender

Summer in the City--The Lovin’ Spoonful

The Hitman

Mask of My Own Face--Lemon Demon

Drunk--The Living Tombstone

Jean Doe

Eighth Wonder--Lemon Demon

I Would Die 4 U--Prince

As far as "what music would they listen to" I do have some ideas:

The Merchant would like hard-girl-pop (whatever genre Remi Wolf and Marina and the Diamonds are) and Chappell Roan (once again hard-girl-pop and she's also a lesbian like her). Anything upbeat with an edge to it, really. She'd probably also like punk rock, like Weezer or the Beastie Boys or Blink-182, anything catchy and just a bit cheesy/lame (I mean this affectionately). Also Joan Jett and Heart! Anything with women who rock and go hard, really

The Surgeon would listen to depeche mode because they have odd yet darkly erotic vibes. I feel like he'd be into that weird kind of new wave 80s music in general. He also probably listens to horribly numbing elevator jazz (also saying this affectionately as someone who loves this music too). POV you're getting stitches and the doctor won't stop humming along to the "your call is put on hold" music he's blasting in the background

The Paramedic also likes depeche mode for the same reasons. Other than that I can't think of music she'd like...maybe someday I will think up more for her

Q loves bubblegum pop. He'd also like cheery love songs, probably from the 60s or earlier because they tend to have no swearing or overtly sexual themes. She's not a prude, he just gets squeamish around listening to that kind of thing. I feel like Q would also listen to a lot of chiptune and video game soundtracks (Bubblegum K.K. from animal crossing comes to mind as a potential fave of hers)

Jean Doe would listen to breakcore and metal, anything loud with a lot of bass (partially because they're hard of hearing and like feeling the music). They probably prefer instrumental songs over songs with lyrics. They're also very proudly french canadian so there's probably some underground drum-and-bass group from canada that they really like, but alas, I am not super into that genre so I do not know any specific artists they'd listen to...

The Renegade would be a total music snob about her favorite genre...but I have no idea what she's listen to. I almost wanna go the classic "stuck up formal lady listens to only classical/orchestral music" route but I feel like it might be more interesting if her favorite music genre was something unexpected for someone to be snobbish about, like non-serious rap or boy bands or joke/parody songs or something. Starting to actually like the "she's stuck up about the quality of parody songs" concept. She'll put on The Saga Begins by Weird Al and pour a glass of red wine before launcing into a tasteful rant about the ingenuity of using American Pie to create a star wars parody (it's clever and funny on a surface level but it also accurately captures the musical odyssey that is American Pie combined with the sprawling narrative that is star wars, you see, so it has immense dual thematic value--)

Other than that I have no other music thoughts...too many ocs not enough brain space lol but I especially love thinking about their music tastes :D

19. What are some things that inspired your stories? Real events? Maybe a dream?

That's funny that this question mentions dreams because I do have a character who is inspired by a weird recurring nightmare I used to have. Still working on how to fit him into my story as a whole but he's neat I think. Most of my other story ideas are just things I find interesting or messed up or cool or compelling tbh :)

29. What was your first fandom you were in? Did you make any art/fanfic for it?

I joined tumblr back in 2016 for steven universe actually! I was also into homestuck at the time so those were my main two fandoms. I still think fondly of homestuck (mainly the intermission though) and although I never finished steven universe I still think it's a pretty cute show. I didn't start making fanart until mid-2020 (I literally only drew my ocs haha) and I started writing fanfic (again only wrote about my ocs) in early 2023

30. How are you doing? <3

I'm doing good! And thank you for asking about my guys!! I do think of them a lot :)

#long post #asks for me #talking #mutual shenanigans #my ocs

4 notes · View notes

acronym-chaos · 13 days

Text

Gorillaz Themed ID Pack

[PT: Gorillaz Themed ID Pack].

[ID: A purple thin line divider shaded at the bottom. End ID].

Names

[PT: Names].

Ace, Axel, Banshee, Blaze, Blitz, Bones, Brick, Byte, Cipher, Colt, Dash, Decker, Diesel, Drift, Duke, Echo, Ember, Fang, Finley, Flux, Ghost, Glitch, Grit, Haze, Hunter, Jet, Jinx, Juno, Knox, Lazer, Mojo, Neo, Nero, Nyx, Pulse, Quake, Raze, Rex, Riff, Riot, Rocco, Ryder, Shade, Shift, Skye, Slade, Slick, Sly, Spike, Steezy, Storm, Tonic, Trace, Trip, Twitch, Vandal, Venom, Vex, Volt, Vox, Zeke, Zen, Zephyr

Pronouns

[PT: Pronouns].

Amp / Amps / Amps [Amplifier]; Ba / Bass / Bass'; Bea / Beat / Beats; Bit / Byte / Bits; Bu / Buz / Buzz; Ec / Echo / Echos; Groo / Groove / Grooves; Jam / Jams / Jams; Riff / Riffs / Riffs; Ro / Rock / Rocks; Sy / Syn / Synth; Tu / Tune / Tunes; Vi / Vibe / Vibes; Vo / Voca / Vocas [Vocals];

Titles

[PT: Titles].

The Audio Alchemist, The Beat Dealer, The Dystopian Dreamer, The Echo in the Machine, The Glitch in the System, The Pixelated Punk, The Rebel Beatmaker, The Rhythm Renegade, The Sonic Trickster, The Urban Phantom, The Virtual Rebel, The Voice of the Streets, [Pronoun] Who Echoes in the Underground, [Pronoun] Who Surfs the Digital Waves

[ID: A purple thin line divider shaded at the bottom, end ID].

Requested by anon!

Also tagging: @pronoun-arc @id-pack-archive

#gorillaz #id pack #npts #npt pack #npt #npt list #names pronouns titles #name suggestions #pronoun suggestions #title suggestions #- 📞

3 notes · View notes

sunburnacoustic · 1 year

Text

Rich Costey: Producer

Recording Muse's Absolution

(article in Sound On Sound by Richard Buskin in December 2003)

Photo: Tom Kirk

With their number one album Absolution, British three-piece Muse have established themselves as one of the most ambitious and innovative rock bands in the world — and in Rich Costey, they've found an engineer and producer who understands their aims and encourages them to experiment.

"I believe that anything should be possible at any moment," says Rich Costey. "The records that I'm most fond of are ones where people have taken as many chances as possible in service of the material. The process itself may yield both successes and defeats, but you'll never know unless you're free to explore, and that's something an outfit like Muse is very comfortable with. Those guys have been playing together for a long time, and as a result they are completely fearless and will try anything. That's one of the reasons why we had such a good working relationship."

A guitarist in high school who turned to producing indie bands in Boston and New York, Costey spent three years as the in-house engineer at Looking Glass Studios in Manhattan during the mid-'90s, assisting modern classical composer Philip Glass, and it was there that he steeped himself in the experimental approach to recording that has characterised much of his subsequent work, including the aforementioned Muse's acclaimed new album Absolution.

"My time at Looking Glass was just a thrill for me," he recalls. "I had been a huge admirer of Philip's, and it was no trivial matter for me to be able to work on his records day after day. When you're mixing for him, he holds out the score the whole time to ensure that you can hear all of the parts and are following the dynamics, as he simply composes on paper in the traditional manner. One day I was mixing something for him, and he was describing some of his compositional methods — he would use his motifs in an almost modular fashion, plugging in and reusing different parts of the same material within the same piece — and he told me 'Attempting to exactly repeat a success is bound to seem a failure, whereas if you move forward it's far more likely to seem a success.'

"How that translates to me in terms of making records is that I tend to reject the notion that there's a sort of penned-in area regarding how rock music is supposed to sound. These days there's a certain guitar sound that people think of as the guitar sound, and that's unfortunate. Previously, artists were more comfortable pushing things forward and trying things out, and obviously there are still artists who do that, but not many. That's what I'm interested in doing, though it usually means a bit more effort and occasionally a bit of risk."

Finding The Muse

After relocating to Los Angeles in the late 1990s, Costey teamed up with Jon Brion to produce and mix Fiona Apple's second album When The Pawn Hits The Conflicts... This led to assignments from producer Rick Rubin, which included the mix of Rage Against The Machine's Renegades album in 2000. Since then, Costey has undertaken numerous mixing projects, as well as production and engineering for the likes of Dave Navarro and, most recently, the London-based Muse trio of guitarist/vocalist Matthew Bellamy, bassist Chris Wolstenhome, and drummer Dominic Howard.

Originally hailing from Teignmouth, Devon, the three began playing together at the age of 13, first as Gothic Plague, then as Fixed Penalty and Baby Rocket Dolls, before adopting their current name in 1997, when they released their eponymous debut EP on Dangerous Records. A second EP, 1998's Muscle Museum, led to critical acclaim, a rapidly growing live following, and a contract with Maverick in the US, and in the wake of albums Showbiz (1999) and Origin Of Symmetry (2001), the band have attracted plenty of interest thanks to songs that meld melodic, sometimes unconventional lead vocals with strains of grunge, punk, psychedelia and arena rock. All of these elements are prevalent on Muse's new album, Absolution.

"I had become a fan of theirs, particularly after hearing their last record," says Rich Costey. "This was conveyed to them by some mutual acquaintances and we decided to collaborate. They had worked with the same people for a while, and I think they were interested in mixing it up a bit. By the time that I came into the picture, they had already recorded several tracks for the new album with John Cornfield and Paul Reed: 'Butterflies And Hurricanes' and 'Blackout' were among them. Those had gone very well, but they were interested in trying out some other ideas and seeing what else might be out there."

Costey would end up mixing 'Blackout', which utilised mandolin and real strings recorded at AIR Lyndhurst in north-west London, and recutting the vocal, bass and piano on 'Butterflies And Hurricanes'.

"Initially, we went to AIR just to see how things would work out between us," he recalls. "I did what I normally do, and they sat back and observed me. In retrospect it's kind of funny, because now, having gotten to know them so well, I realise they were a bit coy. There was also something of a continental divide between the American use of superlatives and the more reserved English use of them, but I wasn't aware of this at the time. For instance, soon after we went into AIR, my engineer Wally Gagel and I got what I thought was a great sound for the band to track live, and when I finally rolled some tape and they came in the control room to listen back, I thought they'd be over the moon. However, their response was along the lines of 'Uh, yeah, it's fine. All right, let's crack on...' and I felt deflated. It turned out that they did like it, but they were simply a bit reserved. They loosened up later — and I'm sure I did, too — when we got to know each other better.

Tractors & Water Sports

Grouse Lodge Studios, where much of the tracking for Absolution took place.Photo: Tom Kirk

Opting for a rural residential facility to complete the recording sessions for Absolution, the band members located Grouse Lodge in Ireland via the Internet, and it turned out to be a successful choice. "We just showed up and took our chances, and the place was fantastic," Costey remarks. "We had a great time there. It's the only place I've ever been where there are windows all the way around the control room and tracking room. And it was kind of funny, because at one point Dominic was in the live area while we were sitting in the control room, and just as he was playing a really intense drum part, some guy on a tractor drove by the window that was behind him. You don't see that too often in a studio! Fortunately the isolation was good — there's no tractor on the record.

"Grouse Lodge has a Neve VR, and although it was a good-sized board, we still brought in 14 [Neve] 1073s and several [UREI] 1176s as well as some Pultec EQs. The studio contacted a number of rental companies for additional mic pres, and apparently that was all we could get because Iron Maiden were tracking somewhere and using up all of the other 1073s in the UK.

Recording the introduction to 'Apocalypse Please': Dominic Howard plays a drum fill from the Grouse Lodge swimming pool, with the driver from an NS10 speaker used as a close mic.Photo: Tom Kirk

"Of course, one of the advantages of a residential studio is that you can just kind of take over the place, and so we were able to do things like set up mics in the residences, while for the song 'Ruled By Secrecy' I had this idea that I wanted the drums to be intimate and very close, yet with a unique distant ambience.

"At one point, while we were rehearsing in the smaller Studio B, the band was running through the number with the doors open and I could hear it echoing around the courtyard. It sounded fantastic, so one afternoon while we were tracking I decided to set up the drums outside. We brought out a whole bunch of mic pres to ensure that the mic line was as short as possible, and we spent a number of hours setting this all up.

A less successful experiment: Dominic Howard plays drums outdoors in the Grouse Lodge courtyard. Photo: Tom Kirk

"The kit was backed up into a sort of corner, with brick on one side and stone masonry on the other, alongside a tractor. Directly behind it was open, and it was good that Dominic was close to the wall because that enabled him to get a little more bass out of his kit. We set up a couple of distant mics and ran them through some Neves, and then I sat down in the control room and he started playing... and it sounded terrible. I think we captured one take, but we didn't use it at all. We got a little bit of ambience out of the courtyard, but the overall sound was unbearably thin and it just didn't have the presence that I'd expected.

"Still, one idea that we did try and that was really good found its way onto the tracks 'Apocalypse Please' and 'Time Is Running Out'. The intro to 'Apocalypse Please' has a tom section, and I really wanted that to sound just ridiculous and as epic as possible. So, lo and behold, the studio had a swimming pool, which of course was full of water, and what we did was bring over a couple of kick drums, put them on stands, and miked one of them really close with the disembodied woofer of an NS10 to get a low, thumping sound, while a few C12 ambient mics were placed in the swimming pool area. We also had to bring mic pres into the pool area for all the same reasons, and Wally and I set things up so that Dominic could actually stand in the water while he was playing, just because it looked really good."

So, were there any lapping sounds? "Not during that section, although we did do some hot-tub overdubs later on. We did a couple of takes of the bubbling water, but again we didn't use it. In fact, we did a bunch of stuff. I'd seen a modern classical performance a few years back where there was a whole back line of people hitting gongs and dipping them in water. The water gong is not an unusual 20th-century classical instrument, but as we were gong-poor, we took some samples of doing the same thing with cymbals, hitting them loads and loads of times while dipping them into the water. Of course, cymbals have nowhere near the sustain and heft of an actual gong, and whatever they did have would dissipate as soon as they went into the water, so that was pointless. But it was funny.

"One thing that actually was useful was recording a couple of takes of Chris diving into the pool — we used that on the start to the bridge of 'Thoughts Of A Dying Atheist'. Listen really closely and, right where the bridge hits, you can hear him jumping into the pool. We used rather nice microphones to capture that, so we made sure to keep them clear of the water, and we also had to move really quickly because I was concerned about humidity affecting the mics."

Reaching For The Overheads

"I didn't want to do anything that sounded like their previous records. I liked Origin Of Symmetry quite a lot, but one of the reasons why I thought I might make a good producer for Muse is that I believed I could hear what they were reaching for and felt there were moments where they weren't quite getting there. For example, it struck me that at their basic level they wanted to sound like a colossal, dynamic, epic and powerful rock band, but there were a lot of moments on their past two records when they didn't quite achieve that. So, the first thing I wanted to do was make sure that they sounded pretty damned big and aggressive when they were supposed to, and that was down to the recording methods as well as their performance.

The control room at Grouse Lodge is based around a Neve VR desk. Photo: Tom Kirk

"For their part, the guys had heard some of my mixes for Rage Against The Machine and Audioslave and they were quite keen to get a sound that was just as big and assertive. They play extremely well together and they sound quite powerful on their own, but as usual we needed to explore different drum kits to obtain the right sound. Dominic's very good at tuning his drums and Chris has his own bass tone down really well — he's got three amps with different degrees of distortion coming out of each. I also brought in a Diesel guitar head, which I'm pretty fond of, and Matthew played a bit through that as well as his own custom Marshall, and overall I set them up a bit differently to what they were used to.

"In fact, I spent quite a while trying to sort out the drum sound, because Dominic is a pretty aggressive drummer and he tends to hit his cymbals rather hard. A bit of thought went into how to have the individual drums sounding defined without being washed out by the cymbals, and to that end I did something that I wouldn't recommend anyone doing carelessly, using far too many microphones. For overheads you might use a stereo pair, maybe accompanied by a mono microphone, but we ended up using that for an overall kit sound and tight-miking each of the cymbals. I myself normally use [AKG] C12s, and then for the close mics I use [Neumann] KM84s whenever they can be found, and I'll slightly mix those in to get a lot of attack — that way, the overheads themselves can be fairly low, and you can mix up the attack of the cymbals without the overall sound being too brash.

"Chris's monstrous amp rig consisted of three Marshall bass heads and three different Marshall cabinets, and how much room we had in any given studio basically determined what size of cabinets we set up. One of them produces a cleaner bass tone, while the second amp largely goes through [an Electro-Harmonix] Big Muff [distortion pedal], as well as a few other pedals that he'll occasionally hit. Then his third amp, which is the most distorted, uses an obscure Japanese distortion pedal, which is pretty weird, expensive and apparently difficult to find. It has a real nasally tone that doesn't necessarily make any sense on its own, but when you mix it within the context of the rest of the bass sound it's critical to what Chris wants. He has several bass guitars, and there's a well-worn Pedulla that he's particularly fond of.

"I like to use condenser mics whenever possible on the bass cabinets. They tend to have a much more open sound, the transients come through a lot stronger, and the net result sounds a lot more like you're standing in front of the amp. There certainly is a place for dynamics and I am a fan of them as well, but to me they colour the sound much more than a good condenser. That having been said, I've actually got a fair bit into recording the bass with this mic made by Blue, called the Mouse. Wally Gagel and I used it last year on the Antenna album by Cave In and it was excellent, so I used that on Chris's bass rig and I also used it on the snare, doubled with an SM57 whenever possible. I sometimes use a Neumann FET47 to record the bass, but Chris's rig was so loud that I didn't think we could get away with that — nowadays, I think people play much louder than they did when 47s were introduced, and one of the advantages with a newer mic like the Blue is that it can take a stunning amount of level.

"Aside from that, we used a pretty standard setup on the bass: [Sennheiser] 421s and [Electro-voice] RE20s. We tried a whole host of things while working at different studios, and we used different stuff each time. The full band was set up at AIR in the lead-up to Christmas, and then a couple of months later we set up at a place in Ireland called Grouse Lodge, where we did the majority of the recording over the course of about four weeks. We didn't have exactly the same microphones to choose from there, but we tried to copy the AIR setup as much as possible so that the basic tracks didn't sound totally foreign next to one another."

Learning Reserve

Muse singer Matthew Bellamy hits some pretty amazing vocal notes on the new record, most notably on cuts such as 'Apocalypse Please', 'Time Is Running Out', 'Hysteria', 'Blackout' and 'Butterflies And Hurricanes'. "He has an amazing voice and an amazing range," confirms Rich Costey. "He is completely confident with what he's doing. He'll just get in and, in three takes, he'll have everything he needs. Sometimes, with the vocals, not unlike the rest of the process, we would try out different things, different directions even once we knew we had something great, and while this would occasionally produce improved results, most of the time it wouldn't because Matthew's own first instinct was exactly right.

"In terms of the vocal mics, we would switch between different ones according to the song. I'm a big believer in that as well. For example, he sang 'TSP' into a [Shure] SM7 that I had — one of the advantages for many singers who do a lot of shows is that they can grab hold of the SM7, carry it around the room and do whatever they want without creating very much handling noise. To me, that sounds quite a bit better than your more typical SM58, which a lot of people might use in the studio. The singer can press his face right up against the microphone without any worry whatsoever, so we used that on a few songs, while we mainly used a C12 for Matt on most of the more sedate vocals. Then again, in the case of 'Endlessly', we tried out a few mics — we tried an RCA 44, but that was just a little too dark, so we ended up going with the 77.

"Matthew has tremendous vocal capabilities, and if anything he's still learning what those capabilities are. I think one of the things that he became more comfortable with during this project was the ability to sing in a little more reserved fashion. Like on the verses of 'Sing For Absolution', his tenor voice is very quiet and just beautiful, whereas normally he's pushing himself quite hard. Any time you work with a great vocalist it's pretty exciting.

"Matthew's styling determined, to some degree, what I'd want to do with his vocals. For example, when he's singing loud, part of his sound frequently amounts to clipping the mic pre — I'd deliberately clip the mic pre on 'Time Is Running Out' as he sang louder and louder, adding more intensity and grit to his vocal. Distorting a vocal is so commonplace nowadays that to me it's the same as distorting a guitar or a bass. And much of the time when I'm mixing records for other people I'm distorting the vocal... whether they know it or not!"

Things That Have Character

In the months between the AIR and Grouse Lodge sessions (see box), Matthew Bellamy did more songwriting and Rich Costey took care of overdubbing some of the first-batch songs at AIR: 'Sing For Absolution', 'Stockholm Syndrome', 'Hysteria', 'TSP' and 'Fury' (which would end up as a bonus track on the Japanese release). These were then completed at North London's Livingstone Studios during a 10-day period following the Christmas/New Year break.

"We used the custom vintage Neve console at AIR, and whenever possible I only monitor on ATC SCM20s, which they also had there," says Costey. "Every facility was booked at the last minute, and when you're going from studio to studio it's really a crap shoot as to what you're listening to. On the other hand, the console at Livingstone was an SSL G-series, and it made a big difference switching to that from the vintage Neve. We rented a bunch of Neve 1073s to use as front-end mic preamps, and I also brought my old Universal Audio 1108s with me to warm up the sound. The UA mic pres are Class AB, whereas the 1073s are Class A. I largely only record through vintage Neves, but in this case we couldn't find a UK studio with one at short notice, and while I wasn't able to completely match the sound, I didn't mind that. I find it tedious when records sound the same all the way through. I'm much more interested in things that have character, and so long as they sound good, that's all that matters."

Rich Costey and Matthew Bellamy in debate at the desk in Grouse Lodge. Photo: Tom Kirk

Matthew Bellamy's custom Manson guitars were mostly recorded through the aforementioned Diesel and Marshall amps running into a variety of cabinets. "The band played live together, facing each other in a semi-circle, and Matthew was singing, too, which he apparently doesn't normally do when they're cutting basic tracks," Costey explains. "Still, once we'd created those basics, it was a case of anything goes. I don't really believe in any hard and fast rules after that, and I don't necessarily like to go with one setup for a whole record. So, after we got the basics, we would try to push every single overdub to make it as interesting as possible.

"The way that I and the band chose to work — and I like to work this way, anyhow — was to concentrate on one song at a time for a while. I remember that we did quite a bit of work on 'Stockholm Syndrome' and 'Sing For Absolution' at AIR. We'd just put up a song, see what it needed, and explore it for hours, days, whatever, and then at the point where we felt we were slowing down we'd move on to the next thing. That process continued at Livingstone.

"On 'Sing For Absolution', I had a pretty clear idea as to what I wanted to hear on the chorus: big, broad-sounding guitars with a little bit of echo — it's hardly ever the case that something goes down without getting run through a [Maestro] Echoplex. I'm addicted to them, although recently both of mine unfortunately have gone ill on me. Still, I wanted the big, broad guitars with Matthew's voice just peeking out over them without being too far in front, keeping the chorus kind of subdued and real simple whereas the verses really needed to sound expansive and three-dimensional. We did some basic stuff at AIR on that song, and then when we got to Livingstone we spent time treating different pianos.

One of Rich Costey's much-loved Maestro EP4 Echoplex delays. Photo: Katy Alverson

"The main piano sound on that song was heavily treated. I laid nails, guitar strings and all sorts of metal objects on top of the piano strings themselves so that they rattled, and then I miked all that with a pair of C12s. I had the dry piano coming into the console and I then split the signal so that half of it went to tape and the other half went to a [Digitech] Whammy pedal. In fact, the Whammy pedal also got split, so that half of it went to — no surprise here — an Echoplex and the other half went to a [Lovetone] Doppelganger pedal. That achieved a fake stereo, with a dry attack front and centre, while the Doppelganger with the echo was on one side and the Whammy's echo was on the other. Then we doubled it, so that it wasn't even fake stereo any more; it was two performances, which made a lot more sense.

"Once we had that down, the song took on a much more melancholy sound, and thanks to the piano it also had kind of a broken sound which, I think, worked well with the lyrics. After that, we did some ambient passes of various synths running through different effects and doing volume sweeps while Matthew played throughout the song. We just wanted things to sweep in and out around the vocals."

Although the songs were all comped, with each of the band members performing a minimum of passes, Costey was keen to guard against too much editing. He typically treats Pro Tools as if it were a tape machine, not because of a retro mindset but simply in order to enhance the music by way of a more human touch, and he'd therefore utilise as much as possible of a single take before editing in parts only where this was absolutely necessary. The same applied to overdubs — he'd use as much as possible of complete takes, and never once was a performance flown into another section of a song.

"I made that mistake years ago," Costey admits, "and what ends up happening is that the record has a real thin veneer to it, almost like a genetically engineered tomato that looks perfect but has absolutely no flavour."

Three People Trying to Sound Like 10

The approach paid off. Absolution boasts a collection of very live-sounding tracks that convey the effect of the band members playing complete performances. Then again, in terms of aural imaging, for all of the reverb and power chords, the manner in which the instruments blend into one another creates a sense of the musicians being bunched close together within a fairly confined space.

"I think that's partly the design of the band," says Costey. "Because they're only a three-piece, Chris's bass tone is engineered from the ground up to go from the low lows of the bass through the bottom end of the guitar. And Matthew, by extension, because he switches quite frequently to the piano, doesn't necessarily feel like he has to carry the brunt of things with his guitar. What you have is three people trying to sound like 10, and they've got it down pretty good, so that their instruments sonically tend to overlap one another, and the way they play off each other tends to overlap more than it does with a lot of other bands. Often you hear bass players who tend to double the guitar roots very low and function as a mere guitar support, but that isn't the case with Muse.

The Grouse Lodge live room. Photo: Tom Kirk"

At the same time, another reason for the tight sound may be that I don't tend to use much reverb on things like drums when I'm mixing. I pretty much just used whatever ambience was to be found on the room mics. Then again, when we were at Grouse Lodge in Ireland, we occasionally augmented things in terms of the drum sound, and this was especially so on 'Falling Away With You'. We ran a couple of Earthworks mics way down to the other end of the building, in the hallway towards the residences, and the track had this ridiculous, cavernous pomposity to it. This wasn't very useful if the drum part was busy, but if it was a simple part then it sounded terrific, and so there were a couple of moments where I cranked those up quite a bit."

One notable aspect of 'Falling Away With You', which starts off as a ballad before seguing into heavy rock, is the prevalent sound of Matthew Bellamy's fingers sliding on the strings of his guitar. "That's simply the sound of a human playing guitar," says Costey. "Matthew was playing his black Manson guitar very quietly through an Overbuilt amp, and all we added was a bit of reverb, so it was fairly clean. However, if you run just a little bit of compression you're bound to enhance those finger noises. A lot of people find them distracting, but for me that's the sound of someone playing an instrument. I have worked with people who play in such a manner that you don't hear any finger noises at all, and in those cases I just defer to the musician, but with Matthew you can hear the sound of his fingers on the strings, and this created a kind of intimacy that perfectly suited the quiet section of 'Falling Away With You'."

On some tracks, Matthew Bellamy didn't want to track his vocals until he really had a feel for where the music was going to lead him, whereas on others he'd record his part and, in so doing, highlight the fact that some more musical texture needed to be developed underneath the vocal. One example of this was the song 'Endlessly', with its loungey-sounding Wurlitzer intro and backwards cymbal and conga during the short instrumental break.

"That song was really a work in progress up until almost the last minute, and we took a different sort of vocal approach with it," Costey recalls. "Obviously, it's too slow to be a dance number, but there is a kind of subdued four-to-the-floor, 909-sounding rhythm going on throughout the track. That's largely due to the fact that Matthew did a couple of demos, and one of them featured him performing on a piano as well as a drum machine that was playing that pattern. There was such an honesty to it and a directness to it that even though we tried it with a full band approach, nothing seemed to work as well as what he had on that demo, which was just a real pure intro and a really heartfelt vocal. We therefore took that approach and built on it, and we had Dominic play loads of different drum patterns within that tempo and then actually cut up ones that had kind of a light jazz feel with a couple of fills."

More Chet Baker, Less Arthur Baker

After the work was completed at Grouse Lodge, the project switched location once again, this time to Cello Studios in Los Angeles, where three weeks were spent overdubbing before the mix then took place. It was here, during the overdubs, that 'Endlessly' really came together.

"Although we were happy with the drumming aspects of the song, we were still dissatisfied with a lot of it," Costey explains. "We were in Studio Three, where the Beach Boys had once recorded Pet Sounds [when the facility was still known as United Western Recorders], so we tried to conjure up the spirit of Brian Wilson by bringing in an old S6 tube monophonic synthesizer. I mostly wanted Matthew to use it to play some arpeggios, but those didn't end up sounding very good, and so he then reached over to these auto-chord figures on the left-hand side of the keyboard, where you can just hit one button and it will play the chord. Underneath it is a button that you can press to control the volume of that note, and while we were running the track down Matthew started playing the chords to the song and using the dynamic button to tap out a rhythm. That ended up being the main thing that the rest of the song was centred about: the real soft, moody, warm keyboard sound that plays in the chorus.

"At that point, we absolutely knew that we wanted the sound more Chet Baker and less Arthur Baker. So, Matthew sang into a big old RCA 77 ribbon mic, and we did a number of other overdubs on the track, but we tried to keep it as sedate as possible even if, by the end of the song, it gets a bit expansive. There's a treated type of opera vocal coming in later in the song, and we tried to be very careful with that, because it's a dangerous area."

Meanwhile, another song that starts off in fairly staid and straightforward fashion before building in force is 'Ruled By Secrecy', on which thundering piano bass notes are interspersed with high notes that ride over the top of the vocal. "A lot of the time we would actually cut the right-hand and left-hand parts separately and treat them separately," Costey remarks. "The beginning of 'Ruled By Secrecy' was all CP80, which is an old Yamaha electric piano, and while that was a left-hand part we also doubled it up with a right-hand part that was actual piano. We also took the CP80 and ran it through a couple of guitar amps only for the left hand, so that the left hand would have a larger tone to it when Matthew hit those notes. Then, by the end of the song, when he was hitting the more sustained left-handed parts, I trotted out the old Echoplex as well."

'Time Is Running Out' was probably the most difficult song for band and producer to nail down, especially with regard to an intro that required mucho experimentation. "We tried out all sorts of percussion ideas," says Costey, "including people clapping their hands and slapping their knees. At one point Wally even miked up Chris and Dominic scratching their heads to produce a shaker track, and that worked suprisingly well, but we didn't end up using it. Eventually, we concluded that the bass would comprise the centrepiece of the intro, so we had to come up with a unique, very characteristic tone, although I wasn't totally convinced about the bass line that we initially settled on. We spent an entire day trying to get the greatest bass intro sound ever created in all humanity, and by the end of that time we went with an acoustic bass guitar running through a ton of pedals and different amps. Then, just as we'd attained a sound that we thought was pretty good, Matthew walked in, listened to it and said, 'Fantastic, you've just spent eight hours on a flanged bass?' He was right of course, not having spent hours on the floor, toying with pedals and cables. We didn't keep any of it. Still, there was always good give-and-take like that, and we trusted each other enough to go with our respective ideas."

The well-stocked gear rack in Cello Sound, where Absolution was mixed, with Rich Costey's own gear on top and in the portable rack to the right.

As most arrangement decisions regarding the songs were made while recording, the overall modus operandi amounted to settling on a direction that would subsequently determine the nature of the overdubs and then the mix. This, in turn, ensured that the mixing process was relatively short and strightforward; about three weeks in all.

"The biggest challenge on Absolution was making sure that the whole thing hung together cohesively," Costey asserts. "We tried out so many different ideas, and in a couple of songs we didn't get the arrangements totally nailed down until it was time to mix. At that point, if you're not happy with something it's too late to go back and change it. So, during the last week there was a certain amount of making sure that all those loose ends were dialled in, and that the songs sounded good next to one another and sounded like the same band. Hopefully, that's what we achieved. By the end, for all of their British reserve and my over-the-top American enthusiasm, the guys were very excited about this record — and so, of course, was I."

#muse band #muse #Rich Costey #2003 #Sound On Sound #on production #Muse Absolution #production #hi! I've been away for a lil bit haven't I? Have a cool interview with Rich about recording Absolution #fitting for 20 years since this beautiful beautiful album #(also don't you think I've left tumblr this is temporary; Sept is a bit busy)#Muse interviews #long post #music production #producers #Sound On Sound full interview #Long post

16 notes · View notes

catrakomtrikru · 2 months

Text

@houseunderfoot thanks for tagging me! It took me sooo long to pick songs!

Rules: pick a song for each letter of your url and tag that many people (if you can)

C: Cautious by House parties

A: All bite by Belmont

T: Tiny rooms by House parties

R: Rock n roll by Avril Lavigne

A: Answers by Waiting 4 April

K: King for a day by Pierce the veil

O: Oh well, Oh well by Mayday parade

M: Maybe sometimes by Neutral snap

T: Trust no one by TX2

R: Renegade by Paramore

I: I'd do anything by Simple plan

K: Kinda tired but whatever by Thru it all

R: Replacement by Jarrett Adlof band

U: I used to get messed up by college radio (I know that technically starts with an I but I scrolled by whole Playlist and nothing started with U)

@paigesinafull-lengthnovel @punk-bxtch @angels-in-overcoats @chris-in-eugene I don't think I can come up with 14 people to tag 😅😂

2 notes · View notes

pk-kipster · 3 months

Text

shit i guess i should make a (re) introduction post?

hello all I'm kainoa/kip (kainoa is my real name, but this is the internet so you can call me kip too)

uhhhh i wanted to get back into using tumblr, at least a little bit, so here i am! I'm a big ol dumb nerd and will mostly be using this for reblogs of shit i like and memes and perhaps original shitposts idk. also maybe my writing stuff and MAYBE original music stuff one day.

i loosely call myself an anarchist, but firmly a leftist. that's important to me, but i think on here i won't run into nearly as much trouble with that

heres a buncha media/fandoms/etc i like so you can be like "ooh he seems cool i GOTTA follow this guy"

anime/cartoons: jojo, ATLA, fooly cooly, steven universe, adventure time, smiling friends, xavier renegade angel, cowboy bebop, princess jellyfish, really most animation stuff

games: most nintendo stuff but especially earthbound/mother and pokemon, fallout new vegas, phoenix wright, disco elsyium, psychonauts,

music: i really am one of those fuckers who will listen to everything from balkan brass band to harsh noise but i predominantly listen to punk, indie rock, ska, folk punk, and weird pop shit. but literally everything is great i love music. favorite musicians rn are jeff rosenstock, ging nang boyz, weezer, they might be giants, ween, mischief brew, pat the bunny, will wood, car seat headrest, taxpayers, midori, black dresses.... you should check out my rateyourmusic account for more of my music stuff!!

i really don't have any specific DNI rules besides the obvious like. don't be racist/homophobic/transphobic/etc.

anyways be my friend and/or also add me on other places too!!!

discord: @pk_kipster

twitter: @pk_kipster

rateyourmusic: https://rateyourmusic.com/~Kipster

DM me for my instagram if u want lol

ok thx bye

#looking for moots #jjba #jeff rosenstock #folk punk #anarchism #flcl #ging nang boyz #black dresses #smiling friends #KIWI

3 notes · View notes

ask-teos · 1 year

Note

What sorta music are y'all into?

// TRANSCRIPT

Shadow: [eyes sparkling] Ooh!! I listen to punk, rock and metal of all kinds!! But my favorite genre is pop-punk!! And my FAVORITE band is Roses & Renegades!!

Shadow: They're a pretty obscure band, but there's really no one else out there like them!! I own every album!! On both vinyl and CD!!

Shadow: Favorite album?? They're all amazing but they really kicked their discography off with a massive bang(er) with "Think Different"!!

Shadow: Favorite song?? Well honestly, despite "Think Different" being my favorite album - my favorite song of theirs, "Homesick", actually comes from their third album "Surrender"!! It's not listed on the album list but if you let the title track play past its ending for a bit, then you'll find it!!

Shadow: OOOH!! Everyone!! I've gotten you guys to listen to Roses & Renegades too!! So, what's YOUR favorite song from them??

Ezrieal: I think I'd have to go with "Second Chances and Third Degree Burns" for my answer? I'm really trying to get through their discography since Shadow loves them so much, and the music is good! But my "go-tos" are typically more metal aligned.

Shadow: YEAHHHH!!! Our favorite songs are from the same album!! Hooray!!

Relic: There's just something about the acoustic variants from the deluxe edition of "Think Different" that make them perfect for listening to while I work! If I really did need to pick just one of those as my favorite, I think I'd go with "Mind Control"!

Shadow: THINK DIFFERENT HYPE!!!!

Wilma: I find "Postcards from the Apocalypse" very comforting, personally. It reminds me of my late husband and our old friends in that same sort of nostalgic comforting that I get from, say, Nirvana’s "Smells Like Teen Spirit". It reminds me of and takes me back to those good ol days just enough to make me feel like they're still alive and with me, even for just a little while… "Chaotic" also falls into this category, and is a close second.

Shadow: Woohoo!! Some love for "Extra/Reality"!! And just when I was worried that it would become the unloved middle child of the albums!!

#ask blog #the era of shadow #functionally described #sonic au #volume 1: clinic ama

9 notes · View notes

cyarskj1899 · 2 years

Text

Sent from my iPhone

20 - 1615 - 1110 - 65 - 1

MUSIC

The 25 Best Rage Against the Machine Songs

From funky, radical bombtracks to incendiary covers, here are the rap-metal masters' finest moments

DAN EPSTEIN, ANDY GREENE, KORY GROW, DANIEL KREPS, HANK SHTEAMER

WHEN RAGE AGAINST the Machine emerged in the early Nineties, there was no other band even remotely like them. They not only fused rock with rap at a time when there was a stark divide between the two genres, but their radical lyrics called for a political revolution during the supposedly peaceful decade after the Cold War and before 9/11. This was a time when most bands were looking inward toward their own pain, not outward to the struggles of minorities in America and people living under oppressive regimes across the globe.

“It was one of those rare instances when the planets just lined up right and the alchemy of musical magic and history just poured out,” Chuck D recalled of Rage in 2016. “I saw them in concert [early on], and what I remember most is how wiped-out the crowd was afterwards. I had never seen a place destroyed; sweat and blood on the walls. The fucking tables were turned over and rafters pulled down. It was crazy. They’re the Led Zeppelin of our time.”

Rage broke up in 2000 and left behind just three albums of original material, but those songs aged remarkably well during the chaos and tumult of the past two decades. And when they announced a reunion tour, which finally kicks off July 7 after several pandemic-related delays, tickets sold out with remarkable speed. There’s no hint that they’ve recorded any new music, but they really have no need to. They somehow created the soundtrack for our time a quarter-century ago. Here, we count down their 25 greatest songs.

‘Darkness’ (1994)

MICK HUTSON/REDFERNS/GETTY IMAGES

One of Rage’s earliest and most incisive songs, “Darkness” first showed up on the band’s self-titled 1991 demo tape before it got a major-label makeover — complete with one of Morello’s most chaotic, acrobatic solos — for its inclusion on the soundtrack to 1994 Brandon Lee movie The Crow. Originally titled “Darkness of Greed,” the song, which toggles between mellowed-out jazz funk and steely metallic groove, likened the spread of AIDS in Africa — and the U.S. government’s “procrastination” toward stemming the virus — as genocide. “They say, ‘We’ll kill them off, take their land, and go there for vacation,'” de la Rocha whispers on the track. —D.K.

SCROLL TO CONTINUE WITH CONTENT

‘How I Could Just Kill a Man’ (2000)

MICK HUTSON/REDFERNS/GETTY IMAGES

On “How I Could Just Kill a Man,” Cypress Hill’s first single and first hit, rappers B-Real and Sen Dog traded verses about “takin’ out some putos” with a Magnum and making young punks pay. Their funky tableaus of terror built to the sort of wanton observation that would make any mother shudder: “Here is something you can’t understand — how I could just kill a man.” When Rage Against the Machine covered the track for Renegades, de la Rocha took all the verses for himself while Morello and bassist Tim Commerford (or “tim.com,” as he billed himself on the record) ratcheted up the noise to deafening levels on the chorus. “The first Cypress Hill record and [Public Enemy’s] It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back were two of the biggest hip-hop influences on Rage Against the Machine,” tim.com later told Rolling Stone.Rage might not have killed a man, but they definitely laid a few speakers to rest with their rendition. —K.G.

SCROLL TO CONTINUE WITH CONTENT

‘Maggie’s Farm’ (2000)

BRIAN RASIC/GETTY IMAGES

Bob Dylan was saying goodbye to the folk world when he wrote “Maggie’s Farm” in 1965, and it’s very tempting to read some of the lyrics as an angry kiss-off to folkies who wanted him to remain stuck in the past. “Well, I try my best to be just like I am,” he sneered. “But everybody wants you to be just like them/They sing while you slave and I just get bored.” When Rage tackled the song for their 2000 covers collection, Renegades, they were also at a crossroads of sorts. Communication lines between members were breaking down, and when de la Rocha sang “I ain’t gonna work at Maggie’s Farm no more,” he might as well have been putting in notice that he was done with the band itself. —A.G.

‘War Within a Breath’ (1999)

FRANK MICELOTTA/GETTY IMAGES

“War Within a Breath” closes out Rage’s final LP of original material, 1999’s The Battle of Los Angeles, and it’s somehow fitting that these are the last notes we’ve heard to date of the band’s unmistakable sound. It’s an extremely on-brand tune that touches on everything from the Zapatismo movement to the Palestinian Intifada. Simply put, it sums up the entire Rage ethos in three and a half minutes. “Every official that comes in, cripples us, leaves us maimed,” de la Rocha roars. “Silent and tamed/And with our flesh and bones, he builds his homes/Southern fist, rise through the jungle mist.” —A.G.

‘Settle for Nothing’ (1992)

MICHAEL PUTLAND/GETTY IMAGES

Rage’s self-titled debut was more or less a 52-minute onslaught, which is why “Settle for Nothing” — the album’s most understated track and maybe the closest thing the band ever did to a power ballad — stands out so starkly. Over an eerily somber riff with shades of Metallica’s “One,” de la Rocha narrates the inner monologue of a desperate kid who chooses the cold comfort of gang life (“I’ve got a nine, a sign, a set, and now I got a name …”) over the trauma of a broken and abusive home. His voice rises to a livid howl (“Death is on my side … suicide!”) as the band blasts into a sinister Black Flag–meets–Black Sabbath wallop. The delicate filigree of Morello’s clean-toned solo suggests a warped spin on cocktail jazz — a quietly arresting sonic lament for the grim cycle of violence the song portrays. —H.S.

‘Microphone Fiend’ (2000)

FRANK MICELOTTA/IMAGEDIRECT/GETTY IMAGES

Rage kicked off their covers album, Renegades, with an ultra-heavy rendition of Eric B. and Rakim’s hip-hop anthem “Microphone Fiend.” Where the original sampled Average White Band’s funky guitar intro to “School Boy Crush,” Morello summons his own devastating wah-wah fury for Rage’s version, while bassist Commerford does most of the heavy lifting in the riff department. De la Rocha edited the lyrics to give the tune more of a rock chorus, and in a rare show of hip-hop humility, he side-stepped the lines Rakim wrote to shout himself out. The makeover translated to a direct rap-rock hit showing how smooth operators really do operate correctly for a heavy E-F-F-E-C-T. —K.G.

‘Calm Like a Bomb’ (1999)

FRANK MICELOTTA ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES

“Hope lies in the smoldering rubble of empires,” spits de la Rocha on this blistering highlight from The Battle of Los Angeles,perfectly summing up the RATM ethos in a single line before setting his sights on the global plight of the underclass. (“Stroll through the shanties and the cities’ remains/The same bodies buried hungry/But with different last names.”) And speaking of smoldering, “Calm Like a Bomb” finds Morello offering up a veritable master class in the use of the DigiTech Whammy pedal, conjuring impossibly sick and searing waves of undulating noise from his guitar. —D.E.

‘The Ghost of Tom Joad’ (2000)

EBET ROBERTS/REDFERNS/GETTY IMAGES

Rage Against the Machine were opening up for U2 on 1997’s PopMart stadium tour when they first played Bruce Springsteen’s “The Ghost of Tom Joad.” The original recording is a somber tale of urban poverty that Springsteen delivers in a hushed, resigned tone, but Rage present it like a lost song from the Evil Empire sessions — complete with a crushing Morello riff that bears little resemblance to the folky source material, yet still fits perfectly. The version worked so well that Rage kept it in their live set until they split three years later, making it the most-played cover song in their live repertoire by a huge margin. It also appeared on their 2000 covers collection, Renegades. And in 2008, Morello guested with Springsteen and the E Street Band to play a more traditional version of the song. Morello even became a temporary E Street–er in 2014, when Steve Van Zandt had to miss a tour to film his show Lillyhammer. The idea of Morello playing in the E Street Band would have seemed pretty far-fetched circa 1997, but time can make strange things happen. —A.G.

‘Born of a Broken Man’ (1999)

FRANK MICELOTTA/GETTY IMAGES

One of the most emotional and evocative songs in the RATM catalog, this standout track from The Battle of Los Angeles finds de la Rocha musing on the mental-health struggles endured by his father, the influential Chicano artist Beto de la Rocha. With Morello’s guitar ringing like a mournful church bell, lyrics like “His thoughts like a hundred moths/Trapped in a lampshade/Somewhere within/Their wings banging and burning/On through the endless night” are unforgettably haunting — but so, too, is the younger de la Rocha’s defiant mantra of refusal to suffer the same fate. “Born of a broken man,” he insists, “Never a broken man.” —D.E.

‘Wake Up’ (1992)

STEVE EICHNER/GETTY IMAGES

In six funky minutes, Rage Against the Machine unpack decades of institutional racism within the U.S. government on “Wake Up,” a deep cut off their self-titled debut. De la Rocha lambastes former FBI director J. Edgar Hoover and his policies, condemning the way the government targeted Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. for protesting Vietnam and claiming it murdered Malcolm X “and tried to blame it on Islam.” “He turned the power to the have-nots,” the singer says, “and then came the shot.” The track ends with de la Rocha screaming “Wake up!” eight times in a row (a climax that, taken out of context, fits perfectly in the final scene of The Matrix) and a quote from King: “How long? Not long, ’cause what you reap is what you sow.” —K.G.

‘Year of tha Boomerang’ (1996)

GIE KNAEPS/GETTY IMAGES

“Year of tha Boomerang” marked the first preview of the band’s much-anticipated sophomore album, having been featured — as “Year of the Boomerang” — on the soundtrack for John Singleton’s 1994 film, Higher Learning, more than 18 months before Evil Empire’s release. Inspired by a quote from French anti-imperialist Frantz Fanon, the song offered a crash course on the “doctrines of the right” that de la Rocha would further rage against on Evil Empire: imperialism, the oppression of both minorities’ and women’s rights, and genocide, all punctuated by Morello’s screeching riot-siren riff. —D.K.

‘Sleep Now in the Fire’ (1999)

RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE/YOUTUBE

One of Professor de la Rocha’s greatest social-studies dissertations, “Sleep Now in the Fire” traces how American avarice has decimated Third World countries, as well as marginalized people at home. “The party blessed me with its future,” he sings, playing the role of a Washington bigwig, “and I protect it with fire.” When the chorus comes with its elastic Morello riff, de la Rocha sarcastically encourages the oppressed peoples he’s singing about to “sleep now in the fire.” Later, he ominously catalogs the legacy of imperialism, slavery, and deadly force underlying the American myth, vowing, “I am the Niña, the Pinta, the Santa Maria/The noose and the rapist, the fields’ overseer/The agents of orange, the priests of Hiroshima.” In 2000, the band shot the song’s video on the steps of the New York Stock Exchange (without permission) and in one portentous moment, the camera captured someone in the crowd holding a “Donald J. Trump for President 2000” sign. In 2020, Morello joked, “I would say that we are karmically entirely responsible [for Trump running for president], and my apologies.” —K.G.

‘Maria’ (1999)

TIM MOSENFELDER/GETTY IMAGES

Marrying one of Morello’s weightiest riffs to one of de la Rocha’s most vividly devastating portraits of injustice, this Battle of Los Angeles deep cut demonstrates how the band just kept sharpening its attack all the way through its original lifespan. De la Rocha tells the story of Maria, a Mexican woman smuggled into the U.S. as “human contraband” and put to work in a sweatshop, where she finds herself at the mercy of an abusive foreman. Eventually she chooses a grisly suicide on the job over being treated “like cattle.” The song frames Maria as a kind of martyr figure, her story a constant reminder of North America’s long cycle of oppression and exploitation: “And through history’s rivers of blood she regenerates/And like the sun disappears only to reappear, Maria, she’s eternally here.” The song makes masterful use of dynamics, dipping down to a hush as de la Rocha recites the prior lines, and then explodes into a full-force stomp, with Morello’s swaggering, irrepressible guitar line symbolizing Maria’s phoenix-like rebirth. —H.S.

‘Vietnow’ (1996)

NIELS VAN IPEREN/GETTY IMAGES

Before Fox News brainwashed a generation of TV viewers who Alex Jones then pushed down the Q tunnel, Rage Against the Machine took aim at the insidious presence of right-wing talk radio on the Evil Empire cut “Vietnow.” With microphone fixed on Rush Limbaugh and the duplicitous Christian right, de la Rocha throws lyrical barbs like “Let’s capture this AM mayhem, undressed and blessed by the Lord,” “Terror’s the product you push,” “The sheep tremble and here come the votes,” and, on the chorus, “Fear is your only god on the radio/Nah, fuck it, turn it off.” The final single from Evil Empire, “Vietnow” served as an AM/FM foil of sorts to The Battle of Los Angeles’ first single “Guerrilla Radio” three years later, a track that demanded the listener “Turn that shit up.” —D.K.

‘Bullet in the Head’ (1992)

LINDSAY BRICE/GETTY IMAGE

Rage wrote “Bullet in the Head” just as America was declaring victory in the Gulf War, a conflict that Americans watched in real time on CNN and supported in overwhelming numbers. To de la Rocha, the made-for-TV war was a sham designed to benefit the military-industrial complex, and anyone who bought into it was a zombie brainwashed by the media. To put it another way, their brains had been hit with propaganda bullets. “They say jump and ya say how high,” he screams on the song. “Ya gotta fuckin’ bullet in ya head.” When introducing the song at an early concert, he made his point even clearer. “This song is about being an individual, about searching and finding new information,” he said, “and using your strength as an individual to attack systems like America who continue to rob and rape and murder people in the name of freedom.” —A.G.

‘Down Rodeo’ (1996)

GIE KNAEPS/GETTY IMAGES

This Evil Empire highlight uses Rodeo Drive, Beverly Hills’ glitziest shopping district, as a launching pad for de la Rocha’s bitter musings on consumerism, wealth disparity, and socioeconomic segregation: “So now I’m rollin’ down Rodeo with a shotgun,” he raps, before delivering an even harsher follow-up: “These people ain’t seen a brown-skin man since their grandparents bought one.” Filled with bracing couplets like “Can’t waste a day/When the night brings a hearse/So make a move and plead the Fifth/‘Cause you can’t plead the First,” and harnessed to a powerful, swaggering groove, “Down Rodeo” also features some synth-like glitch bursts from Morello’s multi-pronged guitar, which prods the music until it finally gives way to de la Rocha’s anguished whisper. “Just a quiet peaceful dance for the things we’ll never have,” he laments as the track fades out. —D.E.

‘Freedom’ (1992)

LINDSAY BRICE/GETTY IMAGES

With one of the best guitar riffs this side of Black Sabbath’s Tony Iommi, “Freedom” calls for the release of Leonard Peltier, a Native American activist serving two life sentences for the deaths of two FBI agents in 1975. Peltier has always maintained his innocence. “Freedom, yeah!” de la Rocha screams at the end of the song before sarcastically revising the lyric to, “Freedom, yeah right!” In the song’s video, during the breakdown, the group displayed the words “We demand and support the request that Leonard Peltier … be released. Justice has not been done.” “To me, the reaction to the music and things like the ‘Freedom’ video are very encouraging,” de la Rocha said in 1996. “I know that some people look at us as just rabble-rousing or ranting or whining. But I think a lot of that reflects the cynicism that people have when it comes to dealing with political problems.… What we are trying to show is that people can make a difference … that we aren’t all powerless.” —K.G.

‘Testify’ (1999)

RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE/YOUTUBE

“Testify” was the opening salvo from Rage’s third LP, The Battle of Los Angeles, which Rolling Stone deemed as the Best Album of 1999. Originally titled “Hendrix” when the song debuted live due to its usage of a “Purple Haze” chord — “I recently found out that Jimi Hendrix used to play a song called ‘Testify’ when he was a backing musician for the Isley Brothers. It all comes full circle,” Morello later quipped to Guitar World — “Testify” later transformed into an outlet criticizing the impending 2000 presidential election, a showdown where both candidates — George W. Bush and Al Gore — seemed to spout the same capitalist ideology. The song’s music video, directed by documentarian Michael Moore, reflected this pre-election anxiety; eerily prescient, the clip also concludes with a quote by Ralph Nader, who later played an unfortunately crucial role in the 2000 election, as the presence of the Green Party candidate is often blamed for throwing the presidency to Bush. —D.K.

‘Take the Power Back’ (1992)

LINDSAY BRICE/GETTY IMAGES

This funky blast from Rage Against the Machine went Public Enemy (and the Isley Brothers) one better, not only encouraging us to fight the powers that be, but reminding us that the power was actually ours in the first place. Three decades before the 1619 Project, de la Rocha decried the Eurocentric teachings of U.S. schools — “One-sided stories for years and years and years/I’m inferior?/Who’s inferior?/Yeah, we need to check the interior/Of the system that cares about only one culture” — over the fiery interplay of Brad Wilk’s slamming drums, Tim Commerford’s slinky, slap-driven bass lines, and Tom Morello’s stabbing chords. —D.E.

‘Bombtrack’ (1992)

RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE/YOUTUBE

Rage Against the Machine wasted no time getting down to serious business on their self-titled 1992 debut, opening the proceedings with this confrontational track. Though the official video for “Bombtrack” would salute the guerilla group Sendero Luminoso (or “Shining Path”) for its 13-year fight against Peru’s oppressive U.S.-backed government, the hard-grooving song itself lays out the band’s stance in broader terms, pledging solidarity with all indigenous peoples who have been abused, exploited, and slaughtered on the altar of imperialism. “Enough/I call the bluff/Fuck Manifest Destiny,” Zack de la Rocha cries. “Landlords and power whores/On my people/They took turns/Dispute the suits/I ignite and then watch ‘em burn.” —D.E.

‘People of the Sun’ (1996)

NIELS VAN IPEREN/GETTY IMAGES

Inspired by the 1994 Zapatista uprising in Chiapas, “People of the Sun” prophesies a new day for the descendants of the Aztecs, invoking the civilization’s final emperor — “The fifth sun sets/Get back/Reclaim/The spirit of Cuauhtémoc/Alive and untamed” — while serving up angry reminders of both Spain’s 16th-century conquest of Mexico and the racism-driven Zoot Suit Riots of 1940s Los Angeles. Clocking in at only two minutes and 30 seconds, “People of the Sun” is the shortest song in the entire RATM catalog, but its compact burst of furious intensity makes it the perfect opener for 1996’s Evil Empire. —D.E.

‘Guerilla Radio’ (1999)

TIM MOSENFELDER/GETTY IMAGES

When guerrilla wars waged throughout the Latin American world in the Eighties, many of the combatants used underground radio stations like Radio Venceremos in El Salvador to communicate and show solidarity with each other. The leadoff single to Rage’s 1999 LP, The Battle of Los Angeles, draws a direct comparison between those guerrilla radio stations and the band’s own efforts to build a fan base when Top 40 radio and other mainstream outlets never went near their work. The song came out just as the 2000 election was beginning to heat up, and it castigates both of the major candidates. “More for Gore or the son of a drug lord,” de la Rocha raps. “None of the above/Fuck it, cut the cord.” The song concludes with a furious call for a revolution. “It has to start somewhere, it has to start sometime/What better place than here, what better time than now?” Had Rage stuck around through the post-9/11 era, things could have gotten really interesting. Sadly, Rage’s guerrilla radio network was silenced not long after this song hit. —A.G.

‘Know Your Enemy’ (1992)

MARK BAKER/SONY MUSIC ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES

“Know Your Enemy” remains one of the most fiery moments in the whole Rage catalog: a quintessential pairing of a killer, upbeat Morello funk-metal riff with a furious de la Rocha anti-authoritarian manifesto, marked by lines like, “Cause I’ll rip the mic, rip the stage, rip the system/I was born to rage against ‘em.” (In case the object of his ire wasn’t clear, he later adds, “What? The land of the free? Whoever told you that is your enemy.”) Musically it’s one of the most diverse tracks in the band’s early canon, sporting an almost festive-sounding slap-bass-driven intro and a moody bridge featuring a memorable guest shriek from Tool frontman (and old Morello pal) Maynard James Keenan and percussion from Jane’s Addiction drummer Stephen Perkins. But the song’s brilliant climax comes around four minutes in, when Commerford’s bass grinds out the verse riff, Morello’s guitar comes in blaring out in an uncanny approximation of an emergency siren, and de la Rocha grunts “Come on!” as the band comes slamming back in — the perfect soundtrack to any act of, to quote one memorable line, “D, the E, the F, the I, the A, the N, the C, the E” you could possibly conceive. —H.S.

‘Killing in the Name’ (1992)

GIE KNAEPS/GETTY IMAGES

In 1991, four white LAPD officers severely beat Rodney King, a Black man, while arresting him; when a jury acquitted those officers of using excessive force, Los Angeles exploded in riots. Zack de la Rocha channeled his outrage into the lyrics for “Killing in the Name,” a funky update of N.W.A’s “Fuck tha Police.” “Some of those that work forces/Are the same that burn crosses,” he chants repeatedly, condemning police racism and a cycle of above-the-law violence. He drills down on these themes as the song escalates, shouting “Those who died are justified for wearing the badge/They’re the chosen whites.” The song builds and builds until de la Rocha hollers, “Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me,” 16 times in a row, topping one of history’s most incendiary protest songs. “After our second show ever, we had record-company interest in the band,” guitarist Tom Morello later recalled. “So these executives were coming down to our grimy studio in the San Fernando Valley.… I remember one of the executives squeaking after [‘Killing in the Name’] was done, ‘So is that the direction you’re heading in?'” —K.G.

‘Bulls on Parade’ (1996)

GIE KNAEPS/GETTY IMAGES

Rage Against the Machine called their second LP Evil Empire, and many of the songs focused on American foreign policy. On “Bulls on Parade,” de la Rocha, accompanied by an ingeniously minimal Morello riff, aims his fire at the hypocrisy of D.C. policymakers. “Weapons not food, not homes, not shoes,” he roars. “Not need, just feed the war cannibal animal.” He also calls out politicians who pretend to be pro-family, but actually have a “pocket full of shells.” Near the end, Morello blasts off a career-defining guitar solo in which he replicates the sound of a record scratching. Taken as a whole, the track is perhaps the finest distillation of the the sonic Molotov cocktail that is Rage. Fittingly, one of the all-time great “Bulls” performances took place outside the Democratic National Convention in 2000, months before the group originally broke up. “Brothers and sisters, our electoral freedoms in this country are over so long as it’s controlled by corporations,” de la Rocha said before starting “Bulls on Parade.” “Brothers and sisters, we are not going to allow these streets to be taken over by Democrats or Republicans.” —A.G.

IN THIS ARTICLE:

Rage Against the Machine,

Tom Morello,

Zack de la Rocha

MUSIC

MUSIC LISTS

By Taboola