The Mars Volta
Interview with Omar Rodriguez-Lopez
Words: Christian Crider
Photos: Ross Halfin

Appearing:
April 1, 2008
House Of Blues, Orlando

April 2, 2008
The Fillmore, Miami

When I phoned Omar Rodriguez-Lopez of The Mars Volta, I wasn’t sure what to expect. What I got was a thirty-six minute philosophical jam session with one of rock’s most prodigious songwriters. Below is the interview in its entirety, a glimpse into the strange, yet coherent, mind of an amazing musician. So without further ado...

REAX:  There is a surrealist mysticism present in almost all of The Mars Volta’s work, but especially on The Bedlam in Goliath. How does iconography and religion play into the more psychedelic elements present in your music?
Omar Rodriguez-Lopez:  I don’t know. It’s hard for me to gauge, because I’m on the inside of it. I think that’s something that other people can discuss who are far away from it. For me, and for Cedric, it’s part of our environment, part of our upbringing. In the same way that different cultures have different folklores and different elements of telling the story, but in the end, all cultures are somehow related, and there’s a mythic structure to every story that’s ever been told, there’s just variances on it. It’s sort of the same thing. Latin American culture is very much immersed in mysticism or spirituality, or whatever name you want to attach to it.

All of our folklore, all of our stories, are usually about the celebration of death, the celebration of spirits, our departed families. So even as a child growing up, this element is a big influence on the culture, it’s part of our belief system. In the same way that if you’re born in India, then you’re raised with gods that have elephant trunks and have blue skin and six arms and make love throughout all eternity. So it’s really just a cultural thing. And then comes the individual experience, and traveling, and being exposed to different cultures that have a different take on their gods and deities and where exactly we go when we pass on to a new beginning. And so, what type of influence it has, it’s hard for me to tell, I just know that it’s inherent in what we do, given how we were raised, and our belief systems.

REAX:  Drummer Thomas Pridgen is the newest addition to the band. How has his style affected the writing process?
ORL:  Um, his style doesn’t really affect the writing. I mean, the rhythms have been there from the beginning. Since I write all the musical parts, the rhythms are found within the bass, within the counterpoint rhythms which would be the guitars, and the saxaphone lines, the keyboard lines…The biggest influence of Thomas Pridgen – and he’s a phenomenal player, don’t get me wrong – it’s just I’ve had a very clear idea from the beginning of the band, what I want to do, how I want it to sound, and the rhythms that I want to be there, and they’re found – again – in the writing, and if they’re not I’ll always beatbox the beat to the drummer. But the biggest influence has been the fact that he actually likes being in the band, that he’s actually excited, that he’s not here for the paycheck, he doesn’t see it as a gig, he sees it as a home, a place to be that he can’t just clock in and clock out.

There’s no way of explaining to you what a big influence that is to have someone who’s actually exciting, who actually wants to bounce ideas off of you, and not just be told what to play and sit there moaning and griping. You can have a party with a hundred people, and ninety-nine people are all having fun. And if there’s one guy in the corner not having fun – sort of just a sauerkraut – for some reason, we as human beings will fixate on that one person and let it bring the whole vibe of the party down. Even though there’s ninety-nine motherfuckers having a great time, that one person not having a good time just sticks in your head for some reason, and you start thinking to yourself, “Oh, my party’s not that good. What can I do? Maybe I need more Gatorade laughs. Maybe I need more girls at the party, maybe I should have brought more alchol blah blah.” You start questioning yourself. But when you remove that element, and you introduce another person that’s having just as much, if not more, fun, then all of a sudden you’re uplifted because you no longer have that self-doubt.

Actually, the best way to explain it would be: if you’ve been in a relationship, and you have a girl, and she’s beautiful and you have a nice time together, and you think you’re really meant to be together, except she doesn’t really like your jokes, and she doesn’t really like your best friend, either, and she really hates it when you do this thing that’s just part of you. And so you start doubting yourself, “Maybe I shouldn’t make those jokes. Maybe I shouldn’t be hanging out with these dudes, and blah blah.” And one day you just dump her, and say, “Fuck this. I’m my own person.” And you wonder, “How did I put up with this for four years?”

And all of a sudden you meet a brand new woman, and you have this chemistry, but she also thinks you’re a funny motherfucker. She likes your jokes, not all of them, but in general she likes the way your mind works, and the things that come out of your mouth, and she really likes your friends and the way you are as a person. Once you get that girlfriend, you start running with life, and you feel truly supported because you feel like you’ve found someone who understands you…

This is probably the clearest way of describing something as abstract as how Thomas has influenced the band. He’s here and he loves the music, and he constantly wants to play, which is something very different, too, with my experiences with drummers. He says, “Oh, fuck yeah. How do you want me to play it? Like this? Yeah, I can play it like that. What if I do this? What if I add this?  What do you think about that?” And we’re able to have an exchange. In turn, I’m able to cut the string of doubt. Now I write way more than I ever have, and I play way more. We can just go and do our thing and not get caught up on bullshit, basically.

REAX:  The Bedlam in Goliath is your hardest album to date and the long spaces of ambient noise are notably absent throughout. What prompted this change?
ORL:  Just boredom with my own structure, noticing patterns in my structure. The record before was very much about space, and ambience. That’s sort of been present since the first EP. I noticed this pattern, and like I said before about getting to the core of my emotions, I want to break my patterns. I want to say, “Why am I doing this?” And I say, “I do it because I’m comfortable with it, and I feel like I can express myself through ambience, through storytelling, through building environments,” which is to say, the record starts with a sound, and one sounds turn into another, which turns into the guitar which turns into the voice, and then it builds up and there’s a crescendo – and I’m comfortable with this.

So when I start a record, my concept musically is always very simple: how can I divorce myself from the last record? How can I make myself uncomfortable? How can I get to a new place? That’s always the answer. When you take away your comfort zone, and create problems for yourself, you’re always going to get to a new place because you’re going to force yourself to think creatively, to think differently, and solve the problem that way. So I said, “Ok, if I’m most comfortable with building an environment, I’m going to take away all environment. If I’m most fascinated with the space between notes, then I’m going to take all of that away.” And what I was left with when I took away these elements was a record of pure claustrophobia, and a record that has to start with everybody in the band playing at the exact same time. You just put it on, it goes and it goes and it goes, and then it ends.

And yes, I see it as our most claustrophobic record to date. And maybe also – and I won’t know this until years from now – maybe it’s an extension of how I was feeling inside when I wrote the material. Maybe I was feeling claustrophobic from the group, from my own patterns, from my relationship, from my…whatever it is. But again, this is why I say this music is therapy, and I’ll understand it years from now when I’m able to walk further and further away from the painting.

REAX:  There was a bit of bad luck associated with the creation of Bedlam, but the album has largely been an artistic success. Tell me about The Soothsayer, and do you believe in fate?
ORL:  Oh, definitely. I believe in the fact that I can never be off my own personal task. I believe that no matter how much I don’t understand the twists and turns that life gives me that every moment is joined by another and is in perfect harmony with the universe. That’s not to say I don’t believe in my own ability to make my own choices, and to alter my fate. The Soothsayer is a great example because I wasn’t looking for anything. I finished mixing and mastering Amputechture, our last record, and I bought my ticket on a whim. I woke up the next day in New York, and rather than flying home to Amsterdam where I was living at the time, I said, “Fuck, man. I’ve always wanted to go to Israel, the Middle East, and I’ve always wanted to go to Palestine. I’m going to go now, this seems like the time, just because I work so much.” I hadn’t taken any time off in five years. And I said, “You know what, I’m going to give myself ten days off, and I just want to go experience something because I know we’re never going to play there as a group.” Only mega-groups get to play in places like that – or very small, independent punk rock groups – and we’re sort of just right in the middle. So I was like, “I’ll go there, and maybe I’ll get some sort of inspiration for the next record, and I’ll get some field recordings.” This was my thinking.

So I went there, and I ate nice food and saw all the beautiful sites, and saw things – again going back to my upbringing, to religious icons – the birthplace of Jesus, which might as well have been Buddha, Siddhartha and everything else. And I didn’t think anything of the talking board that I purchased at the time, besides that it was cool to have an actual antique, an actual artifact. And I bought a lot of artifacts while I was there. I bought 17th Century Russian icons; I bought taxidermy – all sorts of things that were just interesting to me in the way that our imagination is captured by history, and by the people that were here before us, and by the inventiveness that we have when we’re children and we watch Raiders of the Lost Ark, and shit like this. So it was all very innocent. And I brought these things back, and I gave the talking board to Cedric because I knew it was right up his alley. And it never in a million years occurred to me that he would actually want to use it, to activate it, to talk to it, to use the board. Because Cedric also comes from Latin American culture, we’re raised with these things, and they’re things that we’re told not to do, and so we take it very serious and we know it’s not something not to be played with. And he brought it out on the Chilli Peppers tour, and to my surprise he pulls it out on the bus – he and I have our own bus, so it was just he and I at the time – and he says, “What if we could say goodbye to Jeremy Ward.” And so this is where our sort of morbid curiosity comes in, and you think, well it would have been nice to say all these things. And so we started messing with it thinking we could contact Jeremy, or Julio, or Jimmy…or any of our friends who died at much too young an age.

And, you know, we didn’t laughs. We didn’t contact any of these people, and instead we embarked on a completely different, unforeseen adventure. For people who believe, and have messed with these kinds of things… what I want to say is, it’s a cultural thing. When I do interviews in South America, Spain and the Caribbean, they glance over The Soothsayer, they say, “How could you have been so stupid to have activated it, or to have talked with it?” And when we do interviews in other places in the world like America, or Germany, or places that are much more scientific, they say, “It’s a wonderful fantasy, it’s a wonderful fairytale, but of course we don’t believe it.” And that’s fine too, because we’re all looking at the same object, but we’re calling it two different things.

Rich Costey – our mixing engineer – is a very scientific man, and doesn’t believe in this sort of thing, cosmic energy and blah blah. He says, “No it’s not a curse, it’s not this, it’s not that, you’re doing something wrong, it’s a manmade problem. You’re doing something technically wrong.” And so, finally, during the mixing, tracks are disappearing all the time and we had a song we’d been working on for four days, and he sees first hand – or hears, I should say – a track disappear…it’s been there, it’s a lead guitar track. And all of a sudden, it’s gone. I look and him and say, “Did you mute that?” He says, “No, I didn’t.” We look at the screen, and the WAV form is gone.

He says, “That’s odd, I’ll just go back into the prior playlist…” And it’s not there. And we go back into the playlist before that, and it’s not there… And I bring the old drives that came before that…and it’s not there. And I say, “You see? This is what I’ve been talking about.” And he’s baffled. He says, “I can’t explain it. This is very weird.  I need to take the rest of the day off.” And so we do. And he comes back, and he goes, “Oh, I know what it is now. It’s very simple. It’s quantum entanglement!” And so I say to him, “What the fuck is quantum entanglement?” He says, “Well I did research on the internet blah blah.”

Basically, all the mumbo jumbo that he spurted out to me… was that quantum entanglement is the scientific name for that which cannot be explained. So we’re looking at the same object, but when Rich sees it, he sees quantum entanglement, and when I see it, I see the curse of Goliath. So this is a primary example of how we can look at the same object and call it two different things. And it’s fine because we’re coming from different places in the world and different cultures – that’s just the way the world works. Neither of us is wrong because we’re both right.

REAX:  There has been a history of The Mars Volta using strange objects from the past as inspiration for an album. Do you think this will be the case in the future as well?
ORL:  I don’t know. Luckily, the objects come to us. I guess so, because it’s nice to have things that enter your life and just sort of speak loudly, and tell you, “Use me! Use me! Use me!” Rock music in particular has a history of talking about the same old tired themes, which is sex, drugs, or politics. I’ve always hated the saying, “Sex drugs and rock’n’roll.” I think it sums up the whole rock’n’roll art form, if you want to call it that. I’d rather call it an industry, because it all seems to me like a selling point. The music aspect of it is last, sex is first, and drugs are second. And for us, we’ve always been interested in the therapy, which is the music, which would be called rock’n’roll, I guess. But we’re always interested in the expressive part of it because the only reason I play music is to understand myself.

We’ve said from the beginning that we’re a very selfish band, and that’s what it comes down to. It’s about being selfish, it’s about doing things that are invested in your own private interest for you to learn about yourself and get to a new place as a human being. And so my tool is music because I don’t feel comfortable with language. I speak my mother language, Spanish, and I know English, and even with all the words I learn – even if I learn another language – I still feel inadequate, I still feel unfulfilled.

So the only thing you can do as a human being then is to move on to another form of expression. Some of us break glass and make things out of it. Some of us kill animals, some of us make statues, some of us do something with our bodies, express ourselves through sex, and some of us express ourselves through music. There’s a million different ways to express yourself when you feel that words are inadequate. So there’s constantly things coming into your life that are telling you something about yourself.

And so we look at our first record Deloused in the Comatorium and say that was a gift toward Julio Venegas. Julio was one of our closest friends and part of our gang growing up, and someone who taught us a lot. He would have been in this group had he lived… We never really got to say goodbye, and we never truly dealt with his death because we were playing so much, and on the road, and he was sort of off on his own tangent. So now we make a gift to him to say goodbye, and thank you for everything that you’ve taught us.

So by the sheer act of just giving, and making a gift, we learned all sorts of things that we would have never learned had we just ignored our history. And so through the process of making that record, one simple gift led us to a question, and that question led us to another one, which led us to another one, which opened up all sorts of avenues. This is the same exact way that therapy works. You sit down, and have a conversation. And merely through having a conversation – and being asked questions that you are uncomfortable with – you come to a new point, a new light, a new open field of understanding of your life and the way you deal with people.

The diary that Jeremy Ward found when he was a repo-man was something that was simply fun at the time. There was nothing deep about it. It was just fun to be mischievous – again, morbid curiosity – to be reading someone else’s life. And so through the simple act of reading someone else’s life, and doing something that we knew we weren’t supposed to be doing, or we felt was wrong, opened up all these avenues. It opened up all these emotional states for Jeremy, because in the diary the man was talking very much about being adopted, and Jeremy was adopted. Like I said, one gesture leads to a question, leads to an emotion, leads to another one, and all these things opened up that Jeremy had never truly dealt with, and so we were able to talk about this thing, this gift, this gesture.

The talking board – as powerful and ancient as it is – was still just a gesture, just an opening point for us to deal with all sorts of issues that lie beneath the surface.  So, it’s funny talking about it in press or in public. When I was first done with this record eight months ago, I didn’t want to talk about it. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to play these songs, but I definitely didn’t want to do interviews about it. I said to Cedric, “It’ll be much easier, much better. Let’s just make up something. Let’s make up some elaborate story on what it’s about and blah blah.” Then, as the cliché says, time heals all wounds. With time, you sort of start to let go, and you find enlightenment, which is just a very funny way of saying something very simple: you find your laughter again. You find how to laugh at yourself, and to laugh at the situations that life presents to you, and to remember that it’s all part of a bigger design that’s going on, and we say, “OK, we’ll talk about it.”

But in talking about it, it’s so funny because most people are going to see the surface things. They’re going to sit and talk about it, “Well do you believe them? Do you not? This is bullshit, that could never happen…” And all of that doesn’t matter because that’s just the surface, and way below that we get to the core of human emotions and the things that we learned about ourselves, the thing that I learned about myself. So when someone says to me, “Well I don’t believe it because there’s a much more logical,” what they call logical, “explanation, which is the theory that it’s your subconscious working, and your subconscious moves your hand, and you write out what you want to say to the talking board. So really it’s just you.”

Even if that’s the case, I’m fine with that, because I think that’s interesting as fuck. Even if it’s not what I believe in my heart – for us to have truly communicated with things that we can’t see with our own two eyes – I still think it’s interesting that my subconscious was working then, and that it’s an interesting and powerful tool to crack the surface and get to the core of our emotions, and get to the core of what’s happening on the inside, because we all know that’s really where it’s at.

All of our mundane actions during our waking moments – the way we hurt people and say things we don’t mean – are all in reaction to what’s happening in our subconscious, what’s happening in the core of us as individuals. And for most of our lives we’re just too naïve and too young to notice it. So when we’re young men and we break it off with a woman, and we’re very mean to them and blah blah, we don’t know why we’re being mean, we’re just mean – we don’t call them back, and we say mean things.

Later, as we grow up and we get to the core of our emotions and we realize, “Oh, I was afraid of you. I was afraid to love because I didn’t love myself and blah blah.” This is what I’m interested in. I’m interested in the core, not the surface. Most people are only interested in the surface. So for the most part, we just talk about the surface, and we just say, “ The talking board, the Ouji, blah blah. Do you believe it? Do you not?”

That whole issue doesn’t even interest me. It’s fun to talk about it, and I could go around – as you can see now – I could talk about it forever and go ‘round and ‘round. We can talk about religion and different ideas, and people say, “How can you believe in something you can’t see?” And I say, “I don’t know, most of the world believes in God, and they don’t see it.”

What I’m really interested in is my own emotions, and the core of them, and why I behave the way I do, and how I can change my behavior so I’m not just acting out of pure animal survival instinct.

REAX:  Are there any plans to release a follow-up to Scabdates?
ORL:  Yeah. Sure. Definitely. I’ve recorded almost all of our shows to date, if not all of them. There are definitely more live records that will be coming out. I just have to find the time to mix them. I’m so much more interested in my current projects and the future – The Mars Volta records five and six, and the films I’m making, and these seventeen other records that I’ve made. I’m so much more interested in that that it’s hard to break away from  – like I said, I’m just running with life right now – the now moment, to sort of go backwards and say, “Oh yeah, this is the stuff that we did, these are old songs and here’s a live version of it.“

REAX:  Album five is rumored to be a more mellow experience. In what way?
ORL:  Again, when you try and divorce yourself from your prior work… like I said, Bedlam in Goliath is the most claustrophobic record I’ve ever made, so now being away from that experience and the darkness of that period I found myself writing a lot of acoustic-based material, and a lot of blah blah introspective, acoustic, mellow, blah blah. But when I say an acoustic album, you have to understand…that people just look at the surface. So when I say to a journalist, a person, or a fan that the next record is my version of an acoustic record, they seem to picture this MTV Unplugged, acoustic album, and they say, “Oh, that’s weird, and blah blah.”

But of course it’s not just going to be that, that’s just the surface. And below that, I’m saying that’s the influence, that’s where it starts. And after that I start to add things, and I’m sure there will be electronics in it, there will be other things that will make it a Mars Volta record, but the influence is that of an acoustic record. It’s just nowadays, when people talk about influence, all they do is make a photo copy. They say, “Oh, we’re influenced by Joy Division.” And they sound like Joy Division. But I’m talking about true influence, I’m talking about the spirit. So I take the spirit of an acoustic album, and then I have to pervert it with my own ideas, my own personality and somehow it comes out at the end with my own stamp on it.

The same way I perverted a live album. A lot of people that I talked to were upset at the time, because they said, “This is not a live album, you have all these field recordings and blah blah.” But the influence was a live album, which meant that this was the type of live album I wanted to hear when I was a kid. When I was a kid, I wanted to know more about the band. So, I start the record with how our tour starts. Our tour starts on an airplane, we meet at the airport, we go on an airplane, and we go to wherever we’re going, and the babies are screaming, and there’s turbulence and people are freaked out and half of the band is on Ambien laughs. Then we land, and what happens then? There’s a soundcheck, and our crew. Our crew is the most important facet of what we do when we play live, and so you hear all their voices and what they’re doing. Then throughout the performances I sprinkle conversations that we’re having back stage, and moments we’re laughing, jokes that we’re having, because this is the essence of a band on tour.

But for people who want to be purists and get hung up on the surface, they say, “This is not a live record. You have all this stuff that doesn’t need to be there and blah blah.” They get upset very easily. It’s really too band for them, they should make their own band so they can make their records the way they want to, because that’s what I ended up doing.

REAX:  Preceding Bedlam’s release, the promotional material included a VinylDisc of TMV covering Pink Floyd’s “Candy and a Currant Bun.” Is VinylDisc a format you’re interested in exploring further in the future?
ORL:  Oh, you mean the one that had CD and Vinyl on it? Yeah, definitely. I think it’s cool as fuck. I mean, we’ll always make vinyl, first and foremost. We’ll always make records because it’s not a record until it’s a record. Even right now, I feel unfulfilled because the CD has come out, but the record always takes a little bit longer because of politics and blah blah. But to have a brand new medium show itself, definitely. I love anything that’s new, anything that’s moving forward. I hate purists, people who just want to confine us, and keep us doing the same old things that we’ve been doing century after century. I hate cycles. I want to break the cycles of our emotions, of the core of our being, and of the tools that we play with. I want to mix everything up, and I can’t wait for the future!

There’s a great book by a Spanish writer José Vasconcelos called La Raza Cósmica, or The Cosmic Race, and it talks about how in the future things will be like in Ridley Scott’s Bladerunner, which is to say that we’ll all be mixed, and nobody will be able to claim pure raza, “Man, I’m pure Puerto Rican, I’m pure Mexican, I’m pure white, I’m pure this…” And we’ll be so fucking mixed, and so integrated with each other, that our languages will all cross and we’ll all know all sorts of different languages.

The U.S. – the country I live in right now – fights so hard against this idea. They try to keep everyone from leaving, and say, “You’ve got everything you need here.” Which doesn’t teach tolerance to other cultural ideas. And since English is the most spoken language in the world, we say, “We don’t need other languages. You got English – you’re fine… Number one! Number one! Number one!” You go to Europe, or anywhere else, it’s a necessity. When you grow up, you’re taught that you need to learn another language, if not two, if not three, if not four. And that’s why European countries are amazing, that’s why South America is amazing, that’s why everywhere else is amazing, because they’re teaching tolerance through this. And they’re teaching the idea that, you know what, you may have been born and raised here and it may seem like it’s the whole world right now, but the world is huge, and there’s all sorts of things going on. And we need to start mixing all of it. One day we’ll be speaking a mixture of Japanese, English, German, Spanish, Norwegian…whatever new language can be invented, and that’ll be the time when we really start communicating with each other.

I mean, look at the fable that they say about how God was upset because all the people started to build a tower to him, and he struck them down, and he said, “Now I’ll give you language to separate you, because I don’t ever want you to communicate so well again that you can build a tower to me.” And this is what’s so wrong with organized religion. They’re trying to teach you the love of God, but through their folklore, all they teach us is their fear of God. And that God is so different than us, so above us, yet he experiences these shallow human emotions like jealousy and anger, and he’s saying he doesn’t want us to communicate. And he loves us so much and he’s so perfect, and he gave us free will, but if you do these ten things he doesn’t agree with, then he sends you away forever and you’re going to be in eternal pain. And I just don’t buy it.

This is obviously created by humans to keep control, and to keep people in fear. Much in the same way that this whole “terrorist” thing is created by humans to keep our country in fear and to keep us from venturing out into the world and realizing that yes, the world is big, but it is small, we’re all here together and at the core of it all, no matter how many languages we have, or cultural differences, at the core of our being we all want the same thing. We all want to live, love, express ourselves, and have a good life.

REAX:  You also covered The Circle Jerks, Siouxsie & The Banshees, Nick Drake and The Sugarcubes. It’s kind of rare for you guys to release covers, so why the sudden flurry?
ORL:  Just because it seemed fun. We’ve always covered songs in the practice room, or on a personal level, and in bands before this. At the Drive-In covered a song off the first Pink Floyd album, we covered a Smiths song, and both of those got released. So it’s something we’ve always done. But, at least in this band, it’s something I’ve never found the time for, because I’ve always been interested in the now, and what I’m doing at the moment.

But at that certain now moment, something opened up, and we were in the practice room having fun, and I said to Cedric, “What about all those songs we wanted to do?” And I took one and a half to two days, and all those songs were recorded, and then “boop” we put them out. There’s no thought that has to be put into it. I’m not writing, I’m not creating architecture; I’m not having to put any real force into it. It’s just, “Oh, here’s a song we love, let’s do a version of it.” So it was just something that was a very fun exercise.

REAX:  What do you think about the current state of indie rock, and how does that relate to what you’re doing with The Mars Volta?
ORL:  I have no idea what the current state of indie rock is. I couldn’t care less about what the current state of whatever indie rock is. And it doesn’t relate in any way with what I’m doing with The Mars Volta because I live in a bubble, and I create only what I want to create, only what sounds fun to me, only what I like. And my biggest influence is actually cinema and living, or I should say, living and cinema, and my relationships with people. Indie rock, big rock, corporate rock – it’s all the same.

Corporate rock is indie rock, and indie rock is corporate rock. In indie rock, they pretend they don’t want certain things, yet they do. And indie people, whatever the fuck that is, they preach a lot. They’re sort of like the priests of music. Priests give up their sexuality, and they pretend like they’re above everyone because they’re so hardcore and they’re so underground because they’ve given up sex because of God and blah blah. But really, they’re so torn up inside – because they want all these things that are very natural for a human to want because we’re animals – that they overcompensate and they end up fucking little boys. That’s what indie rock is: they’re priests who fuck little boys.

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