letlive.’s Jason Aalon Butler is angry. In fact, he’s positively seething. That’s evident from listening to “Good Mourning, America,” the first track to be released from If I’m The Devil…, the LA four-piece’s forthcoming record, and also when talking to him about it. It’s a song, like much of letlive.’s material, that’s borne out of visceral anger and frustration at the state of the world. And that’s just scratching the surface, as to be expected from a band whose intellectual and cerebral vision is on a par with its primal, untamed energy. “Good Mourning, America” addresses the history of discrimination, particularly racial, in the USA, while also casting a critical eye over the nature of protest and standing up for rights that sections of society see becoming more eroded every day.
If I'm The Devil... will be released on June 10 via Epitaph Records.
Noisey: Why did you choose to release this song first, and what does it mean to you?Jason Aalon Butler: A couple tours ago we were like, “What should we play live? What track, without any knowledge of it, would hit in a way that would inherently make people bounce?” and we just kind of landed on “Good Mourning, America.” We’ve been playing it live for a couple of months now, so since we’ve been playing it, we have this connection with it, and we feel that introducing it to people and having them react to it the way that they do live—we think that in a recorded setting, it may be just as compelling. So that, and its sonic value. It makes you groove and bop your head, and that’s how we want to reintroduce letlive..
I was going to say, there’s definitely an element of Michael Jackson to this song.
When I write most things, I always try to apply my Michael Jackson filter on things to see if it works, but this one, I definitely tried to harness that spirit. Especially because there’s a song, “They Don’t Care About Us,” that Michael Jackson did and it was really controversial and confronting, and just that approach is something that’s really inspired me. I’ve always wanted to write a song like that, and this isn’t that song, but I do feel like I was inspired by that.
I haven’t heard that song in so long, but I remember there were lyrics that went “Jew me, sue me” and “Kick me, kike me” and there was a lot of controversy because of that—but that controversy was the whole reason he was singing those lines in the first place, to make a point about it. And that was lost on most people. And it seems you’re doing a little bit of that in this. You’re talking about the value of protest, but also the insincerity of how a lot of people go about protesting. Am I on the right track?
You are, my fucking dude. Yes! That’s the thing—we find this weird, apocryphal sense of protest because we want to popularize it or create some sort of trend that runs concurrently with the idea of subversion. But that’s the thing—subversion and protest were never trends. In its heresy is where you find its value, the antithetical idea of going against and subverting whatever is popular belief or dogma or doctrine or whatever—that in and of itself is the value of protest. So for me, lyrically with this song, I was just saying when you finally get your moment, it’s going to be a dangerous moment. It’s going to a moment that could very well harm you or could be fatal. There are moments in few people’s lives where they actually get to say something that may affect change. And I believe that most of us now, today, we’ve found a way to romanticize a very difficult thing, which is protest and this sense of freedom we’ve been trying to reach essentially since we created these guidelines that we know as love and race and sex and gender and sexuality. Once we were able to partition these things and implement them into our society, we’ve been looking for ways to be free from them. I feel like as human beings all we really want is to feel free. And this song is that. It’s the contradiction in all this talk that I hear about change and liberal thought and progressive thinking—and then when we get the chance to really do something, how many of us will really speak up, and at the very least speak up. I don’t know.
With that in mind, should there be more protest music, or just more protest?
Man… I want to believe that they’re going to have to be one and the same. I guess, as an artist, I have to say that, but personally, more protest. I don’t want to discredit those messages of protest, which are music and art, but I think that the fuel for a lot of protest songs I think we’ve confused. We know that things are wrong. It’s very obvious, it’s very ostensible to sit down and see that there is some sort of anxiety that we are feeling as a collective consciousness. There’s a disruption boiling and it’s going to happen. For me, personally, being involved in numerous protests, even recently, what fuels my fire for a lot of the more political and societal themes on this record was my actual involvement in them, seeing the essence and seeing the life that breathes heavily and that needed to be recognized in these protests and movements. I think that we can talk and we can sing and we can dance about it all we want, but once you actually invest yourself in that cause is when you really see and feel the change. And I’m not saying you have to be on the streets smashing things or yelling at cops—even just picking up literature and truly investing your mind and some of your efforts into that literature or a speech or whatever. I think that’s very necessary.
Where does your racial heritage come into play in this song? It obviously starts with the cops as killers thing, which we’ve seen a lot recently with the murders of Eric Garner, Mike Brown, Trayvon Martin, and Freddie Gray, but I imagine that when you were growing up you saw a lot of antipathy between police and black people…
I said this in another interview, but for many years I felt like a double agent of sorts. Because at times I could be white-passing, but then other times I was clearly not white. So depending on my environment or my company that I was around, it was one or the other. And as I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized that my blackness is indelible. It’s nothing that I can remove. When you really go statistically and look at people whose bodies are being exploited they are those of a darker complexion. My parents put me in a school that I was outside of my jurisdiction so I could get a better education, and they very much instilled the idea of being aware in me, so I’ve been aware for a very long time. But I think something that I really grasped the concept of recently was the steps ahead that my peers were than I, just because of where I lived. Even if you want to put race aside, which I don’t, by way of policy I was put in a place where if my friends were to live where I lived, there’s a very good chance their household would still be making two-and-a-half to three times as much as my family was making. Now that’s policy. People want to deflect or evade the truth, which is we have built a country off the backs of slaves. I mean, truly. One of our biggest exports was cotton, and that was in the South and the North at the time. When they were creating the FHA [Federal Housing Administration] and the GI Bill, there was one culture—aside from, of course, Native Americans—that was taken out of those bills, which were two of the largest wealth-growing acts quite possibly in our country’s history, and that was black people. That’s just the truth. And then we have this sort of fucking stigma against those coming from behind, literally, a fence that used to be a line drawn in the sand, coming from South America and Mexico, where even the people working the borders, who I’ve spoken with, do not believe in those borders. They’re just doing their job. I want people to try to shred the idea of inborn racism. A lot of this racism is, in fact, by way of laws. There are things that are enacted for a reason to keep certain people subjugated, to keep certain people exploited, and if you just look, if you just turn on your television and look at the people who are being killed or exploited or subjugated, they would have to be fucking superhuman to get out of that and to then not hold any resentment and to not have any issues that come along with all that disenfranchised and marginalized living. There have been cultures that have been chosen to bear these circumstances of living—I believe that 100 percent. And that may be because my father, my grandfather, my grandmother—not only are they black, but they lived in a time when segregation was real. And just a few generations back, my greater-grandfather and mother were slaves. That’s a very real thing on my timeline, so for people to say that institutional racism or blatant racism is gone, you’re lying to yourself, and it’s because you’re uncomfortable with the fact that you may be seen as a racist. And it’s not your fault. I don’t think that people that aren’t black or Mexican or of color are racist. My mother is a white woman. Everyone should remember that. She is not a racist. She taught me what to be aware of as a person of color, as well as how to navigate myself with some kind of candor through uncomfortable situations where people are being racist because they think that I’m white-passing. I know friends that I grew up with who may have not done as well on tests as I did or may not have been as good at sports as I was. I got scholarships and grants, but I still went back to my house, where I watched my neighbor get shot and then watched my friend get shot and have my mother be shot at. And these areas are filled with vitriol not because of happenstance, but because of policy. We are upset because of policy. That’s the reality.
from Noisey http://ift.tt/23dnFAc
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