Bad Bands Revolution, part three: Better Than Everyone

The final installment of the Bad Bands Revolution discussion comes courtesy of Toronto band Better Than Everyone. While preparing my radio piece for CBC Radio 3 on this phenomenon, I wanted to have a naysayer’s perspective—someone who thought the whole idea was ridiculous. God knows there are more than a few hundred of those floating around. But Eric Warner of Dollarama suggested I contact the band Better Than Everyone, which turned out to be a perfect choice.

Better Than Everyone are on the Bad Bands Revolution CD, but don’t feel a part of the stated aesthetic, to say the least. And the fact that they’re friends with Dollarama doesn’t lessen their loathing for that band in particular. Not having seen Better Than Everyone live, I’m not sure how their theatrical approach enhances the music, which still sounds green—there isn’t a readymade gimmick or specific sound to latch on to, so instead they sound simply like nerdy, goofy guys trying anything they can. Judging by this conversation, they’re obviously serious enough about what they do that it will likely evolve into something bigger some day. In the meantime, however, they’re welcome dissidents in this debate, precisely because they’re active participants, not knee-jerk naysayers.

Not having heard them before, and conducting this interview a month later after this long-delayed piece got going, I approached it with more a sense of duty than any kind of anticipation. But after meeting them, both gentlemen were intelligent, warm and funny, and helped the piece immensely.

But speaking of Bad Bands, this week for my decidedly more mainstream column in the K-W Record, I’ve been forcing myself to listen to new albums by Meat Loaf, The Who, and My Chemical Romance. It makes the Revolution seem even more urgent.

Again, this was conducted for a CBC Radio 3 piece, hence the clunky, expository line of questioning.

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Better Than Everyone
Michael Rosenberg and Professor Lindy
August 21, 2006
Locale: Ellington’s Café, St. Clair W./Christie, Toronto

Can you introduce yourselves for the record, please.
M: I’m Michael Rosenberg from Better Than Everyone, aka Dr. Motorcycle.
P: And I’m Professor Lindy from Better Than Everyone

How long have you been around?
M: We were asked to do something at a Halloween party, maybe four years ago. Someone had made me a mermaid costume. That’s it, that’s how it started.
P: Then we played together at a U of T talent show and realised that our forces could come together.
M: We were also in actual bands for many years, and still are. But we found at practices that we were the funny ones.

How do you differentiate actual bands from what you do in Better Than Everyone?
M: These days there is no separation. We were doing Better Than Everyone while trying to get an actual band going, but then Better Than Everyone was taking up too much time, so we just merged the two, and that’s what we’re doing right now.
P: In our lingo, when we say ‘actual band,’ we mean the band that’s a traditional serious band, where you play with a blank stare on your face. We realised that our personalities need to put humour into the music as well. What connects us to all the bad bands is that we share the need to put humour into music without it just being silly.
M: It’s a lot scarier making serious music, because people can make fun of you and you have no excuse at all.

Does self-deprecation take the wind out of any real criticism you get on stage?
P: You can be criticised in different ways as a joke band. If you criticise a serious band, you can use the excuse, ‘It’s not your taste in music.’ Here, you can say, “It’s not your sense of humour.” It’s all more light-hearted. Then again the bad bands thing has a lot of people up in arms.
M: It’s a little extreme.

How would describe the music of Better Than Everyone to someone who hasn’t heard it?
M: We’ve always wanted to make the recorded stuff sound different, because we can actually play our instruments—I guess, whatever. When we go to record, it’s more of a real song. Live, there are skits and stuff. Usually when we have a theme it works better. It’s just stupid keyboard songs and overly dramatic sad bass songs. Really moody, stupid kid stuff, I guess.

What are some of the theme shows you’ve done?
P: A friend of ours had a birthday party, and he’s into—I don’t know if we can say this on the radio—but he’s into medicinal aids of certain sorts. So we themed all our songs to that regard.
M: For me, the highlight was playing a friend’s baby shower, so it was all baby-themed material.
P: (sings) ‘Who’s gonna drop the baby bomb!’ The highlight for me from that set was when we incorporated Lamaze breathing into the songs.
M: Yeah, then he went freestyle with the breathing.

Freestyle Lamaze, you mean?
P: Oh yeah. [demonstrates] You can imagine.

So the band’s been around four years now, so obviously it predates the current discussion…
M: Yeah, we were before MySpace.

Oh, that discussion too, I suppose.
M: We’re a LiveJournal-era band.
P: We’re the self-described underappreciated grandfathers of this scene.

How did you hear about the bad bands and what links you to them, if anything?
P: It happened at the baby shower night, because Matt and Kat Collins were there. They saw us play and asked us to be on the CD.
M: Though he had heard a song of ours and put it on a mix tape for his friends. He put the Creeping Nobodies cover on there. An old band of mine played with Ninja High School years ago. Being in real bands too, you can’t help but know people from around.
P: Nearly all the bands in the bad bands scene have the duality of being in both a serious and a humourous band.

What did you think when you saw the manifesto?
(collective groans)
P: Ah, the manifesto! I’d say that’s the source of it all.
M: It’s a problem for me.

What about it?
M: I don’t have it memorized, so…

Well, take a moment to read it. (Pause while they read it again.) So what do you say?
M: It’s a little bit upsetting that we’re lumped into it. When they’re saying it doesn’t matter how much effort or skill you put into it. It’s a problem for us because we sound like a bad band, but we put so much thought into every stupid little detail. It takes forever sometimes. Not to mention, I feel like sometimes when we’re playing in real bands we’re being a little bit technical, and then in our stupid band we’re being just as technical sometimes…
P: Technical with stupidity!
M: Yeah, and in that context, we’re not even being taken seriously. Therefore, it’s like we’re not even playing our instruments. But sometimes, those bass lines are pretty good, you know? If I had a crazy singer and a drummer doing their thing, it would be totally appreciated, like, ‘sweet bass line!’ We work out every little detail, like here’s a bit of improv, this joke, this punchline. It’s so well-planned and thought out and strategic.
PL: It’s so amazing!

Do you think the moniker itself implicitly means amateurism? Do you disagree with the Bad Bands credo of embracing amateurism?
PL: That’s where my problem comes in. I have no problem with embrace. I’m all for embrace. But with bad bands, I’ve found that it’s a pretty selective embrace. If you go to a bad bands show, you get the sense that all of the bands and all of their friends are really into it, and they all support each other. But for the people who are outside of that limited circle, they’re lost from that embrace. All they have is music that is made to sound bad to them. Their reaction of feeling excluded is actually the butt of the joke for a lot of the bands. Dollarama, you get what you pay for, because they always do free shows. If you don’t like it, that’s the point. I prefer to make everybody the butt of the joke, and let that be the embracing factor.

So it’s exclusionary for you. It’s not inviting people in.
PL: It’s inviting people who are in on the joke, and the people who are out of the joke, are really out of it.

Dollarama told me that their first gig was at an open stage where they tried to get kicked off.
M: That sounds about right.

And they were shocked and confused when the plan backfired and people liked it.
P: Everybody wants to be liked.
M: Maybe that’s how it started off, but they were telling me about the recording, and Aaron said, ‘This may be stupid, but this is totally a record I would buy and listen to.’ It’s a bit more serious now.
P: Don’t get us wrong. They’re all our friends, they’re all great people, and they’re all nice to us. But I hate Dollarama with a passion inside of me.

I believe you have a song called: “Everyone is (Better Than) Dollarama”
M: The ‘Better Than’ is in brackets, so it’s also saying “Everyone Is Dollarama.” That goes with their philosophy that they’re doing something that everybody can do, therefore everyone is involved, everyone’s included.
P: Anyone can join their band.
M: But to tell you the truth, if you yell something like, ‘Get off the stage, you suck,’ someone who’s really into the bad bands revolution might kick your bum.
P: Part of the reason we were upset with Dollarama is because when they came out they were getting a lot more attention and we’d been around. So we decided to start an internet feud with them, because we’re all friends and it wouldn’t get personal.
M: Yeah, I played in a band with two of them.
P: At the Bad Bands CD release show, we set it up where we would charge the stage and accuse them of having caviar with them, which is well over $1.
M: We paid four bucks!
P: But as we were going onstage, members of other bands grabbed my hand and twisted it and all of the sudden the joke was off. ‘Seriously man, stay off the stage.’
M: They thought you were a regular person.
P: Right. And we’re better than everyone, right? RIGHT? (laughs)

The whole notion of that show, the fact that it was free, and the fact that people were angry that it was going on, and apparently people went up to take the mic…
M: That might have been us.
P: No, there was a lady, too.

It fascinates me that people take it personally. People really get their back up.
P: Bands like Dollarama do want to be hated, and people do hate them. They’re going for that strong reaction, they’re creating that strong emotion and that will polarize people. If you think it’s hilarious, you’re going to fight for them. If you don’t, you feel violated and sad.

Have you had extreme reactions at your shows?
M: We’ve had personal insults. Let me just segue here: We’re a bit offended to be a bad band, but we’re also offended that we’re a bad band and we’re not being mentioned for some things. Pyramid Culture were in the paper and being touted as the first bad band to venture into a mainstream show because they opened for Of Montreal. But we opened for Of Montreal a year before them, as a bad band, and we opened for The Books and for the Unicorns. It was because we opened for these bands before the genre was established that we didn’t get any recognition. So anyways, when we opened for Of Montreal, we had people yelling that I looked Napoleon Dynamite. I was acting stupid too, so I guess I deserved it?

Every band has hecklers, though.
P: We don’t go for that reaction, though. We go for a whimsical feel. We want everyone to be happy. We’re not ashamed of that.
M: I think we win people back. They hate us, and then they think we’re okay.
P: I think the only thing can be angry about is our low technology. We use Casios we got when we were kids, which can be grating. But that’s only if you have a bad sound guy, in which case it’s his fault. Or soundwoman. Sound person.

Does the greatest art always offend someone?
M: Hmm. Not bad.

And mediocre art pleases everybody?
M: Maybe that’s true, but here’s my problem: I don’t feel like everything is art, that’s the problem. Partying with your friends in a dorm is not art to me. Just because you’re putting that on a stage doesn’t make it art, it just means you’re doing it in front of people.

If you put a urinal in an art gallery, does that make it art?
M: Well… it depends on who put it there!
P: It’s all the context. For me, if the urinal was fully functional and was being used in the art gallery, I think that would be a broad statement.
M: Also if it had been thought about, and served a purpose. The manifesto says ‘we don’t believe in a quarantine theory, that people should do it now.’ But I believe that at all. You should hesitate before you do things. You gotta filter your ideas. Not every idea is good.
P: Okay, going back to your last question. I think good art needs to create a reaction of some sort. Not anger, necessarily. I’ll take pure euphoria anyday. It’s easy to get someone really angry. It’s the easy way out, the laziest thing you could ever do.
M: I totally agree.
P: There is a joy in craftsmanship. We’re old men, that’s our thing!

How old are you?
P: No, in spirit. We’re not actually old. We’re too old for these young kids hitting each other over the head with their keyboards or whatever they’re doing. It actually descended into a real live mosh pit at the [CD release] show. It was a regression. We’re all about a regression to childhood, but they stop at 13, 14, 15, the aggressive years. Whereas we go back to pre-puberty, before you get confused and angry at things.

Do you think some of these bands are a reaction to the kind of indie rock that People magazine would write about? A reaction to the fact that indie rock is now lucrative, and how that might create a new conformist model? Part of what appeals to me about this movement is that it doesn’t have to be about that. It’s okay to make music that doesn’t aspire to that, that won’t get love from Maclean’s magazine.
P: To me, it’s the opposite. The real bands we’ve been in, the serious bands, since we’re playing music that we thought was serious, it was never music that our parents would like. Whereas this, I really like the fact that my dad likes what we’re doing. We’re coming from the other direction. We want to write songs that people love, that make you tap your toe.

We’re picking on Dollarama here, but you can certainly sing along to Pyramid Culture songs.
M: I like Pyramid Culture
P. We both love Pyramid Culture, and there’s lots of bands on there we love.
M: Well, a couple.
P: Yeah, a couple.

-end-

Bad Bands Revolution, part two: Dollarama

Discussion of the Bad Bands Revolution continues today in conversation with Dollarama, unquestionably the most controversial of the Bad Bands. And no wonder—they openly admit that the whole reason they formed was to get kicked off an open stage. And early material—like the track “World Music” that appears on the Bad Bands Revolution CD, which would be offensive if it wasn’t so colossally stupid—didn’t suggest that there was any artistry underneath the overall prank.

I’ll confess that I have yet to see the band. Since arriving back in Toronto and promptly disappearing for most of the summer, I just haven’t got around to it. I was in NYC for their CD release on Halloween. And I haven’t heard their new album, Chinese Democracy, though the tracks on their MySpace site suggest that they actually are taking themselves a bit more seriously and making moderately listenable avant-garde music—then again, maybe the joke’s still on us pundits who insist on taking such an absurd idea somewhat seriously. (Can I squeeze any more qualifiers into this post?)

As the band’s main mouthpiece, Eric Warner is also an interesting guy. He first made a name for himself in Toronto as an aggressive (read: busy and active, not necessarily metal and punk) promoter of all-ages shows, both one-offs and his annual Over the Top festival. He has a keen ear for new bands, and is often the first person to bring Later-Respected Artist X to Toronto. His day job is at V2 Records’ Canadian office; he also runs his own label We Are Busy Bodies and manages the Meligrove Band.

The first time I ever interviewed him was many moons ago when he was still a teenager. Nike had hired him to book an all-ages club in Kensington Market, which generated much controversy among the No Logo crowd, and the club only lasted one summer. (I don’t know where my piece is on the eternally frustrating Exclaim website, but here’s something my esteemed colleague Stuart Berman wrote at Eye at the time.) At that time, he wasn’t allowed to do interviews on his own; his boss had to be on the phone line with him to make sure the interview didn’t get out of hand… or whatever. Ridiculous, in retrospect, and really, it has absolutely nothing to do with what he’s up to (or stands for) now. I only bring it up as an odd piece of trivia.

But for today, Dollarama! Again, this was conducted for a very short piece on CBC Radio 3.

(side note: I did a fill-in slot at CFRU today, my first radio experience since leaving Brave New Waves, and realized how much I missed it. Audio archive can be heard here as MP3; I was on the air on Thursday November 9 from 8AM-11AM.)

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Dollarama
August 10, 2006
Eric Warner and Matthew King
Location: executive board room at Toronto office of V2 Records, where Eric works

Could you sum up the concept of Dollarama in a sentence?
E: I think the best way to put it is if you took a nine-year old to a birthday party, gave him free reign of the house and let anything happen. And also, our objective is that you can’t spend more than $25 per show to join our band, and everything has to cost a dollar plus tax or less.

How do you enforce that? Do people have to produce receipts?
E: That would make it a bit too complicated.

What were the origins of the band?
E: We found an open mic night, and we wanted to see if we could play and be kicked off. It backfired and people were really into it, which confused us even more. We booked more shows and for the most part we played a lot of themed events: we played in a woman’s washroom at a movie theatre, we played the fringe festival in Montreal, and events that catered to the oddball, off-kilter audience. It’s been really interesting to be embraced, because it was never expected or intended.
We just recorded our first record, which we’re actually pretty proud of. It’s going to be called Chinese Democracy. As a concept, we’re leaps and bounds beyond what we ever expected. Initially it was a big joke to us, and it may be still on some levels.

Are you in danger of becoming a good band?
E: I don’t think that’s ever going to happen. I think we’re more realised now, and we can feed off each other. But when you’re an open-ended collective, anyone can show up and it can go in any direction.

How many core members are there?
E: That would be Matt, when he’s not playing with DD/MM/YY; Aaron, whose idea it was, and me, our friend Lee. With what we’re doing, we’re allowing ourselves to feel free and be open to whatever may arise… it’s all about found sounds and messing around to see what we can create. There are no necessarily long term goals. It would be great if someone decided to pick up the concept and allow us to go across the country. We may apply for a Canada Arts Grant and create a piece and see what happens with that. It would be really interesting to see other people’s reactions.
M: My idea is to have a Dollarama tour where we go across the country and play in front of Dollaramas, play with a big marquee behind us.

Have you heard from Dollarama?
E: I think if anything, if they’re not feeling it, it will probably be a cease and desist order. Then we’ll just add ‘1979’ behind us.
(update: the band was served with a cease-and-desist order a couple of weeks back, which they received while on the road at the Halifax Pop Explosion.)

I know one of your short term goals is to open for Beck. Why?
E: Because I thought it was funny, and I think it would fit with Dollarama in a big way.
M: He’s the biggest person who might actually consider the idea.
E: We thought it was a possibility that if we got to the right people, that it might happen. We have a website and an online petition, and I know he has a new record coming out. I feel the time to strike is now. With our own record coming out, I think nothing can stop us.

If not Beck, who’s the runner-up?
E: I don’t know. Dweezil Zappa? Animal Collective? Maybe Thornley. Or Hedley. Something where we’ll just end up confusing people. That would be more fun. Beck is up there for the moment, but if we could tour with someone and play to hundreds or thousands of people and confuse the audiences, I’d love that. I don’t mind being booed. I enjoy watching people’s reactions and seeing how they interpret what they’re seeing.

Were you disappointed at that first show that people didn’t hate you even more?
E: It was weird. We covered Korn that night, and I didn’t know the words but it worked out really well.

Does anyone know the words?
E: Believe it or not, Aaron—whose idea this is—does know all the words.

Do any of you play in “real” bands?
M: Am I the only one? I think so.
E: Matt and I were both in a band called the Viking Club, and we put out a record with Japanther and did a bunch of shows all over Eastern Canada.
M: And currently I’m in a band called DD/MM/YY.
E: Other than that, no. You don’t have to be in a band to join this one.
M: It’s more successful if you’re not. Less knowledge of music can definitely bring new ideas into the realm of music.

How does the audience get involved at a Dollarama show?
E: Some shows have been pretty crazy, actually. One of the standard shows would have been the Bad Bands Revolution CD release. We went on at 2AM at Boat. Everyone in the audience grabbed stuff and tried to make sounds. It was a big mess, a horrible mess. We used to bring garbage bags to our shows, but we try not to break anything at this point. We just break hearts. There was a girl at that show who came on stage and tried to grab the microphone from me, because she was mad at our performance. She kept telling me it wasn’t music and that we should stop. It was a free show, so I don’t know why she was complaining. And you have to keep in mind that this was a Bad Bands Revolution show, so whatever this girl was thinking…
M: The feeling in the room… it wasn’t a negative feeling, but because everything was bad, it didn’t make you feel good. It was an experience you don’t normally have. Normally you go out to have a good time. This left you feeling not dirty, just unclean.
One thing I noticed in the middle of the night that when some bands would play, the local bands, the people involved in the “bad bands,” people were there supporting their buddies and laughing. But when a couple of the bad bands from out of town—I think one was from Waterloo—when they played, nobody was watching them, nobody was paying attention, everyone was outside or getting a drink. It struck me as odd, and not necessarily people looking for interesting ideas, but maybe they just wanted to watch their friends make asses of themselves.

Is the “bad bands” concept an inbred clique of friends, as some have suggested?
E: We’re not really friends with that many people.
M: There are satellite bands and the core people who put it together.
E: We get grouped in with not the main bands, but at the time we were one of the people starting to do that kind of stuff.
M: It came out of a lot of people who were doing performances, but not necessarily as bad bands. Kat and Matt Collins noticed this trend going on and collected this group of people. It’s interesting to think about who the audience is.
E: I think it’s a tween demographic at this point.

Do you get people outside your group of friends coming to shows?
E: I think more so now, because in a weird way we’re actually getting somewhere.
M: It’s great to look up from mashing some cheese graters together to see some people with their arms crossed, scratching their chins and thinking about the sounds. In one way, it’s silly that people are pontificating about something that’s ridiculous. But at the same time, the reason why I joined is that I thought there was a strong conceptual basis to the idea of Dollarama performing noise music and trashing disposable consumer products.
E: We’re actually exploring now, and not just breaking everything and freaking out. With the record we recorded, I’m biased in saying this, but I think it’s really cool and innovative, because we did the recording in three hours and we did ten tracks and we’ll probably use seven, but it sounds like a really interesting record or concept album.
M: There are lots of sounds that we were able to create that are interesting to listen to, sometimes abrasive, sometimes nice percussion.
E: I don’t think you can say that it’s self-indulgent because we didn’t really care enough at the moment. But it was interesting to do it. We do like the idea of having fun and seeing what could happen. And hopefully we’ll get to the point where we’re playing for 600 people at Queen’s Park or something. And if the cops show up and try to shut us down, we can just run away, because it’s not as if we’ll be losing our drum kit or our custom Fender guitars.

Have you done guerilla performances?
E: Soon.
M: It would be interesting to perform for the customers of Dollarama, because right now we’re just performing for a certain crowd of people in the Toronto underground music scene.
E: One of the best shows was playing with Cursed, the hardcore band. All these people were going nuts for the hardcore bands, and then there was us.
M: Was that the show where I got taped to Thomas’s head?
E: Yeah, that was actually a very violent show. We’re not pro-violence, just pro-confusion. We like playing places where it doesn’t make a lot of sense, because it makes it more interesting. It’s great to be grouped in with stuff, but it’s also fun to go out there and play where you’re least expected to play.

What’s involved when you go shopping for instruments at Dollarama?
E: With what we pick up, it could be anything. We don’t have a set mission: ‘we need to get this garbage can so we can put marbles into it.’
M: I like the idea of going to Dollarama and looking at their stock to writing a song. You find materials and it’s like, ‘okay, I’ve got this bungee cord. Can I stretch this bungee cord to make a loud enough sound? Or, if I strap it to a clipboard and pull it will it make a whacking sound?’
E: We built something of a drum kit, but that got broken when we played as Ninja High School’s backing band. Again, it’s all about having fun and doing something different.
M: With our record, a lot of bad bands started as silly performances, and now there are some bands who are not legitimising themselves, but at least playing shows regularly, and we’re recording an album. Some of the bands are being persistent, while some were gimmicks for a couple of nights.
E: Pyramid Culture are great. They sing about all kinds of educational topics.
M: That’s the thing—Pyramid Culture are a great band with a great idea.
E: Great people. It’s actually interesting if you listen to what they’re singing about. You learn about concepts you wouldn’t necessarily have known about.
M: Education through bubblegum pop.

Dollarama predated the manifesto, obviously. How did you feel about it when you read it?
E: Not offended, because they’re all nice people doing interesting things. It was nice of them to include us in it. Maybe it was unexpected, but it was still appreciated. It just happened at a similar time that we had this idea, and now the Bad Bands Revolution is at full steam. It’s nice to have other people involved who can push things forward and make it more realistic to do something like this.
M: I didn’t really react at all. I just found out we were going to be on the compilation, and I thought, ‘great.’
E: Better Than Everyone are a great band.
M: But we have a beef with each other. They were upset they weren’t invited to play the Bad Bands Revolution show, so they planted some caviar on me at the show, exposing me in the middle of the set.

As what, bourgeoisie?
M: Yeah, as holding instruments that cost more than a dollar. Some people actually got mad at them for trying to come on stage. One guy held them back and told them, ‘Hey, you better not go up there. I’m an athelete.’ We had to tell him to let them go because it was part of the set.

What would be your ideal audience?
E: Tween. Seriously. I’d say 10-16. That’d be great. Disposable income, open-minded. And Dollarama is full of sex appeal, and we can use that to our advantage.

Obviously there are many similar things happening in Toronto now, but when you started the band were you aware of other people like the Nihilist Spasm Band in London, who have been improvising on junk-assembled instruments for the last 40 years?
E: I would love to play at one of their Monday night gigs in London. I’ve actually booked them twice in Toronto for my Over the Top festival. I think they’re really interesting guys. They did this without any provocation. They wanted to have fun and experiment and they weren’t aware of anything else going on around them. It’s really interesting that they’re still going strong. I guess it’s 40-odd years now. They’re still true to their ideology, which is creating these instruments and going off on them. I don’t know if we took nods from them when we started this project, it’s really interesting to see what else is out there, and be respectful to it all. It’s amazing that it goes on.

What bill did you put Nihlist Spasm Band on recently?
E: It was with Awesome and I Have Eaten the City. It worked pretty well. The audience attendance grew when they were on, but everyone worked well together. The other show I did with them was with Drums and Tuba, which was really interesting. Both bands jam on certain ideas, from different sides of the spectrum stylistically. Which worked to their advantage, because it wasn’t as if you had to hear one style for an entire evening. It wasn’t just noise or experimental music all night, it was also experimental from a jazzy/blues side. It’s great to mix and match those kind of things. Why have the same kind of music on every bill? Who wants to hear four hours of the same thing?

What would happen if Dollarama opened for the Meligrove Band? [ed note: Eric manages them]
E: It would be interesting. Obviously you never know how everyone in a crowd will react, but there’s always a few people who are into it. That’s all that matters, because you’re not always going to reach a mass audience—especially Dollarama—but even if you reach a few people, you’re still doing your part and inspiring someone or getting someone to think. That’s really important, for what we’re doing. If you can get someone to think about your concepts, then you’ve already succeeded.

Do you think the Bad Bands Manifesto is a reaction against the codification of indie rock culture as it becomes mainstream? Now there’s a new star system, and every indie rock band—no matter how humble—still has certain expectations of success, even if that just means getting a booking agent. It went from having no expectations to another set branch of the industry. So with this, where the rule book is being thrown out and it’s definitely not meant for any kind of mass consumption, do you think that plays to it?
E: I need to make it clear that our record is coming out on a major label in the early winter, and our booking agent has done a great job for us across the country. We’re going to be doing a bunch of frosh week shows. But to answer the question properly… Matthew!
M: That’s interesting, I’ve never thought about that.

It’s in the manifesto itself, and it’s one of the things that struck me. Broken Social Scene and Arcade Fire played the same shows that everyone else in this town did, or they played house shows illuminated only by flashlights. I love those bands, but with that success comes a conservatism where young artists think, ‘Well, if I can just be like that, it will be my ticket.’
M: Yeah, then it’s just the indie sound like the emo sound or the grunge sound.

Whereas Bad Bands to me is all about not thinking too much about what it is or what it means, and just doing it.
E: I feel like I need to re-read the manifesto. We were just having fun. We weren’t reading too far into it.
M: We definitely didn’t read the manifesto before we submitted a song.
E: But I’m sure it’s really eloquent! I don’t know really where we stand on it, though. We’re really having fun now learning what we’re doing and again, it started as a big joke and still within reason is a big joke to an extent – because it is still just us making sounds with dollar-store material and fooling around with it. But in a weird way, I think we’re actually getting somewhere. At least we’re trying to progress past playing an open mic night and breaking things and doing Korn covers into something that, who knows where it could end up down the road. It’s not as if we’re trying to put this at the helm of our being right now, it’s just fun when it happens… If anything, this Bad Bands revolution and manifesto has taught us that it’s cool and interesting that other people have adopted this ideology, but who knows where’s it going to go after a certain point? And if you don’t like Dollarama, you can check out our ska project.
M: Which is what, Skallorama?

-end-

Bad Bands Revolution, part one

Now that we’re back in Toronto, and distracted enough from the Torontopia files that dominated the early days of this blog, it’s time to turn to the Bad Bands Revolution. For some reason, these two concepts continually get confused, even though most people have never heard of the latter (never mind the former). Much of the criticism that appeared following the publication of my Torontopia article in Exclaim seemed to think that the very idea of Torontopia was merely an excuse for the wilful amateurism of the Bad Bands Revolution.

(See Chromewaves and Zoilus for some of this discussion--which, if I'm not mistaken, prompted a larger avalanche of comments than I've ever seen on either of these worthy and popular sites.)

Not true at all, but so what if it is? As Toronto becomes more and more internationally identifiable as a hotspot for music, most of those acts fall into some kind of preconceived norm of what “acceptable indie music” should be—and surely there’s plenty of room outside of that construct. What if someone’s artistic goal is—god forbid—not to strive for a classic album that vies for the Polaris or an international record deal? What if someone wants to try something new, with new people, and it goes away after a few gigs? What if it evolves into something else?

Some explanation: Bad Bands Revolution is a CD out on the non-label Jennifer Lopez Knife (CD-Rs only, good luck trying to find a website), run by Matt and Kat Collins: he is also Ninja High School, she leads Pyramid Culture and used to be in Barcelona Pavilion and Republic of Safety. Kat wrote the manifesto in question, which doubled as liner notes for the album. Considering how limited the CD’s release has been, the entire concept has been extremely controversial—at least in the echo chamber that is the stillepost community. And the CD release show they held during Canadian Music Week back in March was threatened to be shut down by audience members—both audience plants, and the genuinely bewildered and infuriated who nonetheless stayed in the same free venue for three hours only to anger themselves more.

What was likely to be a minor debate among the city’s scenesters has surfaced in mainstream articles in the Toronto Star, the Globe and Mail, and in a short radio piece I did for CBC Radio 3, which basically outlined the concept without going into much depth. The interviews appearing here were conducted for that piece.

The concept of self-identifying as a Bad Band negates those built-in expectations on the part of critics and audiences, and builds a more creative atmosphere. Of course, it also inspires some indisputably masturbatory exercises that quite honestly should never leave the bedroom. But what is art unless these risks are taken? Great art is always equally about failure as it is about success. And perfect art always leaves me wanting more: more of a glimpse into the process, more of a plank walk, more elements of danger.

The Bad Bands Revolution CD is shockingly listenable. Much of it reminds me of the ephemeral weirdness I would record onto cassette from listening to Brave New Waves and Night Lines in the 80s; speaking of the latter, many of the freaks that David Wisdom cultivated to write songs and material for the show would definitely be kindred spirits to the Bad Bands crowd. Eve Rice and Maurice Pooby, where are you?

I began my Bad Bands conversation with Kat Collins, the same day we discussed Torontopia. I started out by getting her to read the manifesto into a microphone for the radio piece.

---

Kat Collins
July 21, 2006
Back patio of a bar near Bloor/Ossington, Toronto

The manifesto:
Bad Bands are united by a bond – the bond isn’t in the tools they use to make their music or in the type of music they create, and it certainly isn’t in the degree of skill or effort they put into their work or in the degree of seriousness with which they do it. Bad Bands are united by a common desire to build around themselves a new type of creative atmosphere within an already thriving music scene in Toronto.

Bad Bands believe in replacing independence with interindependence, and creating a scene which welcomes musical failure as well as musical success, because it thrives on experimentation and risk. We await the future and recognize the past, but in our work we reject both as the false idols of cultural mediocrity.

Bad Bands don’t believe there should be an incubation period before creative ideas are brought into the public realm, to be performed, discussed or critiqued. We believe in DOING IT NOW, not in waiting until you’re “ready”.

Bad Bands aren't bad bands, nor are they good bands – they’re bands whose ideas about music are too radical for the mainstream independent music scene to accept as serious. Our goals aren’t to create a lasting legacy of well-crafted pop songs and hit albums that will establish Toronto as a respected cultural hub. Our goal is to build a revolutionary army which will establish Toronto as the centre of a coming coup d'état on the arts establishment – both corporate and independent – in order to awaken the sleeping monster from its smug apathy.

(laughs heartily) That is hilarious to read now. I’ve certainly never read it aloud before. I’d forgotten how strongly I worded it! The idea of writing a manifesto at all was intended to be funny, to poke fun at the fact that people were taking us seriously for the wrong reasons, taking us seriously as though we were actually sort of ruin their idea of fun by doing this other thing. The manifesto does seem like a funny way to address that. But I’d forgotten how immersed in the language of manifestos I got when I wrote it. Those are strong words!

When did you write it?
I wrote the Bad Bands Manifesto at the beginning of March, in anticipation of the CD release. We wanted something in the liner notes that was more than just the band descriptions. It was stuff we had talked about before, but never fully articulated.

When did the idea of “bad bands” begin? And how does it relate to your CDR label Jennifer Lopez Knife [run with her husband and Ninja High School founder Matt Collins]?
Jennifer Lopez knife started as an idea a couple of years ago. It was mostly just an idea for a while. We had plans for what kind of music we wanted to release, and we wanted to be the annoying little brother of Blocks. A similar ethos, similar ideas of how we wanted to make music and the kind of relationships we’d have with the artists, but we wanted to release stuff that wouldn’t be put out otherwise at all, either because it was terrible or hard to listen to for other reasons, or strange one-off projects like the Christmas album, or Matt put out a short, small run of Weird Al covers. Those kind of things that would be neat. We wanted to put out records by the bands we thought were really interesting and creative, but were never going to be taken seriously. It was born out of that idea originally, but we didn’t articulate any kind of label philosophy—at least to the public— until the Bad Bands compilation. Then it blew up into a big thing.

Were you surprised at all that it’s generated so much discussion? Last time I checked, there were 27 pages of it on Stillepost.
I didn’t expect people to have such strong opinions about it, one way or another. I was expecting a bit of debate and discussion, but people were really divided and really took it seriously, and the arguments were extensive, to say the least.

Can you recap some of those arguments?
At first, there was a group of bands that had participated in making the CD who were really excited about it. The initial negative reaction that we got was from people who thought it was bad and not worth bothering with. It was the reaction we expected of, ‘Oh, who cares, and why is anyone paying any attention to this.’
Then there was this second wave of criticism where people took our words and the words of the manifesto very much at face value and started reacting in a way that I wasn’t expecting at all. They basically were implying by creating this type of CD and by stating it the way that we did, that we were in some way trying to suggest that other types of making music were actually not valuable and stupid and not worth it, and that people who play their instruments well, people who care about crafting music carefully and thoughtfully are in fact wasting their time and that we have a better idea than them.
That was never our intention. I was surprised that was the reaction. A lot of people took it very personally, an attack on their idea of what music is. I don’t think we envisioned that people would take it as a personal attack. I can certainly see how the language of the manifesto sounds, that we’re implying that we’re right and everyone else is wrong.
It was strange to hear those kinds of criticisms. It spiralled into a conversation where people seemed to feel attacked by the bad bands revolution, what they saw as the bad bands clique, and reacted by defending their ideas about music, which was interesting to read. I had a lot of interesting conversations with people about that. But also by suggesting that maybe we should stop doing what we were doing because… I’m not even sure.

It seems to be to come from a notion that it challenges someone’s set of beliefs. This is an obviously extreme parallel, but if you challenge someone’s belief in God, suddenly they get very defensive if someone attacks this thing they’ve understood as a truth their entire life. Whether you like the music of “bad bands” or not, opposing it with such vitriol has this strong anti-art underpinning, anti-creativity, telling people to just shut up.
There’s a huge difference between saying ‘I don’t like this thing and I’m probably not going to listen to it because it’s not what I’m interested in,” and saying that it’s bad and not worth doing, or that it shouldn’t be done because of how terrible it is. It’s a strange, and extremely dogmatic statement. That’s what I wasn’t expecting. I expected a lot of people not to like it, to come to the show and leave during the first band, but I didn’t expect people to stay until the very last band to tell us every half hour that we should turn it off.

A lot of the discussion I heard didn’t seem to be based on actually being at that show or hearing the compilation. It was an entirely aesthetic discussion. So could you describe to me exactly what happened that night? By the way, that was the night before I moved back to Toronto.
And it was a whole new world! (laughs) We had booked the show at the Boat, and the Boat was then incorporated into CMW as one of their venues. Trevor, who was really interested in having the bad bands showcase at the Boat, arranged it with them in some way that we would be the Saturday showcase. I think we ultimately filled in the artists’ agreement that they have, and we got passes, which I don’t think any of us used, because we forgot we were getting them. The whole thing seemed like a joke.

It’s certainly the exact opposite of everything else that usually happens that week. I heard that admission was free, and that weasels and media were going to be charged admission.
Our original plan was that the show would be free. If CMW sent volunteers to try and charge at the door, that we would kick them out and tell our door person to refuse them entry because we were at capacity, and then we would charge people with wristbands and the media, and everyone else would get in for free. That seemed the best revolutionary stance for that show. Antagonize as many people as possible.

How was the attendance?
A lot of people did show up. I don’t think we were at capacity, but there were probably 100 people there. A lot of them were friends and friends of the bands and people I expected to see. A lot of them were people from the music scene that I didn’t expect to see, because it didn’t seem like their kind of thing. Then there were random people who walked in because it was a CMW show and they wanted to check out the bands. There were a few walkouts, a few people stormed out after having been there for a while. But the vast majority of people stayed until the very end of the show.
There was a lot of really interesting conversation that I overheard just walking around inside the bar, between people who were there and knew what was going on… and people who just walked in off the street. It was very much that type of thing.
The people who were trying to defend the bad bands idea had to actually defend our right to continue the show, essentially, to these people who thought that someone in charge ought to have shut it down by now, because it was outrageous.

What would shutting it down prove? Why wouldn’t they just leave?
Exactly—it was a free show, and you’re not being held captive. People’s outrage was really surprising, because it was entirely voluntary. There were people who stayed for that entire show who later joined that thread to complain about it, but spent three hours listening to this music. I don’t understand why they bothered. Is outrage so attractive that you want to build it up by making yourself angrier and angrier by listening to something that you don’t enjoy? I generally leave shows if I don’t like what I’m listening to.

It’s hard to imagine what they were expecting when it’s called Bad Bands Revolution.
It’s called bad bands. If people take the words of the manifesto so literally, it’s surprising that they don’t take the title literally, and assume that it will be bad. I think the compilation is not that. There are a few bands who are being bad at playing their instruments and sounding poorly recorded and being not professional in any sense of the word, and then there are some bands who take that seriously and do sound bad in a conventional sense. A lot of the bands are actually extremely interesting and have interesting musical ideas and are not recorded badly, and the songwriting is interesting.
As a compilation, a CD that you might throw on and listen to, I think it’s excellent and the songs actually hold up. It’s more of an approach to making music and to what binds bands to each other more than the music itself. There are a lot of very, very different sounding bands on the compilation that musically have very little to do with each other.
But I think the bands that volunteered or contacted us about being on the compilation, didn’t need to have the idea explained to them. They got what we were saying with the bad bands concept right away, and felt that they were already part of that.

You use the term ‘interindependence’ in the manifesto. What does this mean?
We had been talking about how the music scene in Toronto, that using the word independent is very much the wrong word to use. None of us function independently. Most of us have a huge network of support, whether it’s friends or people we collaborate with to make music or people who help us put out records or help us record or put on shows. Independent in relation to a larger corporate structure—sure. But independent in terms of our community is really not the case.
But I kind of feel like interdependent isn’t the right word either. We do depend on each other, but interindependence implies some combination of the two. It’s an interdependent community in the sense that we all depend on each other for support of various kinds, but that ultimately as individual artists we can ideally retain a level of independence in our work and ideas.
The idea was to have a very free and open kind of approach to making music where, in fact these kinds of discussions about who should stop doing what shouldn’t even be an issue. Of course bands make different kinds of music that the people involved don’t necessarily even listen to or enjoy. But they’re able to work together because they see the value in helping the kind of grassroots community, when it comes to the arts.
It’s not a matter of liking all the other bands or making music that sounds like all the other bands. It’s understanding that as an individual artist or an independent group, you can have an interdependent community without feeling boxed into any kind of product.

The whole manifesto is very carpe diem. ‘Don’t worry about precedents in the past, don’t worry about building for the future.’ What’s the difference between this and improv musicians, who have a set of parameters and conjure something out of thin air. Is it because these bands play with a pop format that makes it different to both those scenes?
I think it’s very similar to improv music. Originally our doing-it-now ideas grew out of the panel discussions at the Wavelength anniversary, which brought up a lot of disagreement about the legacy that this incarnation of the music scene in Toronto was going to be leaving, and whether these kinds of projects were too fleeting to be taken seriously, because they weren’t going to stand the test of time.
We thought about that and came to the conclusion that the legacy we were much more interested in leaving—more so than awesome records that sell well—was a legacy of this type of approach to creativity. If, in ten years no one remembers this compilation, but people feel like it’s a given that you can make this music and start these bands and experiment and argue with people about it—if that kind of freedom and approach to making music, which is inclusive and doesn’t divide audiences from performers—that’s much more the kind of legacy I’d be interested in leaving. In that sense, it is very much about the present moment and creating things that don’t necessarily become artifacts, but they change the atmosphere of the place.

Something that’s definitely happened in the last couple of years is that when independent music has proved to be very commercially successful, that there then becomes this notion that anything you’re doing is towards that same goal. That becomes the new model for people working independently, as if it’s everybody’s goal to headline a huge show on Olympic Island with all your friends as supporting acts—which I happen to think is a great goal to have, but that’s not necessarily everyone’s aesthetic. Lots of people don’t have the ultimate goal of appealing to as many people as possible, which still seems to be a radical idea to some.
[cell phone rings.] So sorry, I thought I turned off my ringer. Ah, I’ve lost my train of thought.

Goals.
A lot of the bands on this compilation have never played a live show. One of them we don’t even know who they are. They just emailed us, and I’ve never seen their name on any kind of poster or bill. Maybe they don’t want to play in front of people. But there’s nothing wrong with that. There’s no reason not to encourage different types of goals when it comes to creative expression. One of the traps we fell into with the whole manifesto and everything is that we stated a slightly different goal than the commercial success goal that a lot of people hold. I think we made people feel like we were attacking their goals. A lot of people took it personally, not so much because they hate the music, but because we were telling them that their goals with what they want to achieve with their music were false, and not worth pursuing. I don’t think that’s necessarily the case. It would be sad if that was everyone’s goal. There is certain kinds of music that even if that was your goal, you couldn’t possibly attain it because it just doesn’t work in that context, that venue. It would be a shame for those kinds of musical ideas not to be expressed just because they don’t fit into that kind of structure.

The irony here is that the elephant in the room that is Toronto, is Broken Social Scene. When I think of what that band was when it started, what the concept was, was: new songs every night, a workshop in progress, who’s in the band—who knows? Once they actually became successful, people came to shows expecting to hear songs from the record, which they never intended to do when the record first came out. The band changed to meet people’s expectations, and yet it was borne from this idea of always being in the moment with whoever’s around you. That continues to a lesser degree, somewhat. But it’s interesting to see that happen on a macro level and become one of the city’s biggest success stories.
Yeah, it’s totally a curious thing. It’s the kind of thing that a lot of people are actually afraid of, that they will have to compromise their ideas if they attain a certain kind of success. I don’t think we’re necessarily anti-commercial success with Bad Bands. I mean, if the Bad Bands compilation somehow sold a million copies, I would find that hilarious. I wouldn’t object to that! But it’s the idea that you have to change what you’re doing or what you’re interested in or have to compromise your artistic integrity or however you want to phrase it—in order to have that kind of success, that’s unappealing, for obvious reasons. I think that a lot of people who do strive for that kind of success, take this sort of approach to music as essentially that whatever they do is compromised because that is their inherent goal. That’s where a lot of the arguments start.

How does your band, Pyramid Culture, fit into this?
Pyramid Culture is an interesting thing. We have songs, we practice, we’re not professionally trained singers so we don’t always hit the right notes in tune. But we’re actually actively working on improving our singing. We’re not interested in being sloppy.
We work hard on writing our beats and we take our subject matter very seriously. Our songs started out being about weird scientific anomalies and occasionally more serious scientific issues and discoveries. We’ve moved into the realm of scientific and ecological issues that are pressing in the present day that people might not know about. We have a new song about salmon poaching in Siberia. It’s scary—wild salmon could be extinct in 30 years if they don’t shut down what’s going on there. We feel strongly about that kind of stuff. We enjoy putting it into these cutesy, poppy sounding songs.
In relation to the bad bands scene or movement, it was very interesting to see people in those discussion threads defending Pyramid Culture as not being a bad band. Defending us on our behalf, not that we necessarily asked. They could see that either the subject matter or the approach we take was serious to us, so they didn’t want us to be lumped in with these other crazies. That was curious to hear. I agree that we’re not trying to be bad in a technical sense, but we very much subscribe to these kinds of ideas.
I think there are a lot of examples of bands who are on the CD or just in general who are supporters and friends and whatnot who came out of this approach, this little scene that inadvertently exploded into the public sphere, who very much make beautiful music that is extremely complex and interesting and well-rehearsed. Pyramid Culture is somewhere in between. We’re not pros, we don’t have the training or the background to do what we’re doing exceptionally well, but we take it very seriously.
Because of the way the songs sound, we often don’t get taken seriously. It seems like it must be a joke to sing about these things in a cheerful, poppy way with this very video-game-sounding electronic music in the background, and we wear matching outfits and we look like it’s gotta be a schtick.

Which it is, in many ways.
It absolutely is schticky, but we’re often met with not so much criticism as confusion.

-end-