So many artists have this contradicting dual fixation: On the one hand, they want to believe in the precious perfect purity of their art and resent the distorting lens of media hype. Their thoughts are too ambient and sensual for the parallel march of type. On the other, they have this terrible desire for recognition and must admit that they need exposure. Interviewing one of these people is a drag.
Ian Svenonius, former frontman of the Washington, D.C.–based groups The Make-Up and Nation of Ulysses, is quite the opposite. The author of a book of idea-driven essays and the verbose host of his own interview show on Vice TV, Svenonius lives to provoke, parley and pontificate. "The interview is a big part of rock 'n' roll," he says. "Bob Dylan's interviews, they're as big a part of his myth as anything."
I got Svenonius on the phone last week, as he paced the sunny sidewalk outside a D.C. Radio Shack, to talk about his latest venture. His new band, Chain and the Gang, plays 92Y in Tribeca on Friday. He used any question about the music, though, as an on-ramp to discuss the essence of rock 'n' roll, or means of expression or the loss of a certain kind of power. "The thing about when you make a record," he says, "it is what it is, and if you talk about it too much it just demystifies it. ... What you really want to talk about is, you know, the big issues." Still, first things first.
The name Chain and the Gang is a celebration of enslavement in the face of America's brand of force-fed freedom. Its debut album, Down with Liberty, Up with Chains, is a collaboration between Svenonius and a legion of musicians that includes Arrington De Dionyso (Old Time Relijun) and Brian Weber (Dub Narcotic Sound System). On the track "Interview with the Chain Gang," for example, Svenonius answers the cooed questions of a lady reporter between runs of mean, charging guitar. There is something of a smart-alecky young Dylan in his performance.
Down with Liberty is essentially a spoken-word album, says Svenonius, adding that he had kept the poet and songwriter Rod McKuen in mind. "Ideally you emulate somebody whom you can't emulate," he says, "because their experience is so different from your own or because you have less talent or you have more talent or whatever.
"You never strive for originality because that's just precocious. ... That's just conceit or narcissism. You're trying to be part of a great tradition, like a great rug maker. Rugs aren't interesting because they're innovative, necessarily. They're interesting because you can walk on them."
So then, what's the use of Down with Liberty?
"Oh it's like a toy," he says. "I think that records are like toys. It's something that you can play and then it'll incite a little bit of discussion, like a board game maybe. Or maybe it'll elicit some kind of, uh, rapture, or tears or some fear—like a Stretch Armstrong or a can of slime."
In a way it's appropriate that Svenonius is so conceptual. He's really not a musician, but rather a concept artist who summons the right people to implement his ideas. He may hear a riff in his head and sing it to the guitarist, who will build a track around it. "I don't write lyrics," he adds. "I try to make things up so they sound free. I just start with sort of a joke, and then I try to tell the joke. And I think that's what a song is, is a kind of joke."
The record is a toy, the song is a joke, and the whole thing, the whole reigning phenomenon of pop music...
"The staying power of rock 'n' roll is that kind of uh, it's the, uh," he slows, seeking the perfect articulation, "the erotic shock of when children see, you know the sexual display of an adolescent. You know, when you're young and you see The Rolling Stones. It bewilders, disgusts and intrigues you."
There is a note of wistfulness to the things Svenonius says about pop music. He feels that the tradition he's attached to is going extinct. Each band that he formed over the years was an attempt to create a miniature movement, whether it was a political party or a gospel revival or a "shout of secession," as he once put it.
"When you played a show, you were inducting cult members, you know? And you felt like it wasn't enough for people to enjoy the group and enjoy the music, they had to subscribe to it, they had to be a part of it."
He says the things that created cult power—liner notes, T-shirts, limited edition LPs—are disappearing as the group image is dissolved in the ionizing sea of online distribution. He remembers when the local scene in D.C. was enough to make him famous.
"It used to be easy to elicit a lot of attention if you were clever at all," he says. "Now it's all global and galactic."
And the only dimension left is the music, in the form of an Mp3. Svenonius has even lost faith in the interview.
"I felt like I had an expertise at doing an interview," he says, "and now I think I've fallen off. I don't think I'm a really good interview anymore."
I think you're doing pretty well, I tell him.
"I mean," he says, "I'm all right."
> Chain and the Gang
April 26, Market Hotel, 957 Broadway (at Myrtle Ave.), Brooklyn, no phone; 8, $ TBA.
