Shirley Manson is a rock and roll singer-songwriter, songwriter, comedian, and all-around funny human being. She's been in the business for a long time, and she's got a great sense of humor. She also happens to be a member of the rock band Marilyn Manson's band The Maine, and we talk about the band and their early days in the band, as well as being transracial, and how it's okay to be baffled. She also talks about her love of Marilyn Manson, and why she thinks he's one of the most odd people in the world. And she's not the only one who's confused by the term "red Indian" or "blue-eyed" because of the fact that it's not a thing that's usually used in the United States. We also talk about how she doesn't like being called a "prince" or a "chick" and how she's okay with that. And, of course, she talks about being a little bit of a freak. Thanks for listening to this episode, and Happy New Year, Shirley! Thank you so much for tuning in! If you like what you hear, please leave us a review on Apple Podcasts! and tell a friend about what you think of the podcast! Timestamps: 5:00 - What do you like about it? 6:30 - What are you're uncomfortable with? 7:15 - Are you too old to be scared of something? 8:40 - How do you feel uncomfortable? 9:00: Are you afraid of fear? 10:20 - Do you feel comfortable? 11: Do you have a fear of something you don't like? 15:00 16:00 | Fearless? 17:30 | Are you uncomfortable about something you like to be comfortable or not? 18:40 | Can you control your fears? 19:30 21:40 22:20 | Is it a good thing or fear driven? 23:30 Are you a freak? 24:00 Are you scared of anything? 25:00 Is it bad? 26:00 Can you be a freak?! 27:00 Do you like it or don t you like them? 29:00 / 26:30 Is it better or not a problem? 30:30 Do you think they're a freak??
00:01:32.000Indian is actually kind of offensive to some people now, where it was like standard for a long time.
00:01:38.000Well, I'm ashamed to say when I first came to America 20 years ago, I always, because it was the way we were brought up, we referred to Native Americans as Red Indians.
00:01:48.000And every time I would say Red Indian, everybody in my band would be going...
00:03:30.000And then you come in, like, and just...
00:03:31.000Yeah, you don't even know it's coming.
00:03:33.000...quick blow to the left side of the head.
00:03:35.000No, I'm uncomfortable about a lot of things, but I hear what you're saying and yeah, I feel like maybe if you feel like you've failed and then you've stepped back up, then you either crumble and you can't build your life back up or you find a place to stand and you build your career again on your own terms and then it is comfortable.
00:04:41.000Did you take any comfort in the artistic success?
00:04:45.000I did eventually, but at the time I felt like we were being creatively adventurous and we were getting punished for it and it made me really angry.
00:04:54.000Oh, so you feel like, were you getting published?
00:04:57.000I mean, was it the publishers, the music publishers that were punishing you?
00:05:01.000No, it wasn't even that personal, although I took it personally.
00:05:04.000It was really much more a cultural shift, you know?
00:05:07.000Right, so it just wasn't received as well.
00:05:13.000And so we've been used to being on top of the charts, you know, and then when that stops, all of a sudden you're like, well, is everything we're doing, all our ideas, rubbish?
00:05:21.000But deep down you know they're not, but you're being rejected anyway, and so you have to find a way through that, and that's complicated, I think.
00:05:28.000It was complicated for a simple girl like me.
00:05:31.000Well, I would imagine any time you were as big as garbage was in the 90s, I mean, you guys were gigantic.
00:05:37.000I mean, it was hard to go into a clothing store without hearing your music blaring.
00:05:59.000But I would imagine that as big as you guys were, you either stay that big and then you become a crazy person.
00:06:06.000You're probably better off doing what you did, taking artistic chances, settling in, and then doing what you're doing now, being more comfortable.
00:08:35.000And he was sitting next to this gigantic tycoon billionaire character, this flamboyant, boisterous sort of a guy who was going on his usual flamboyant, boisterous tirades.
00:09:08.000The world is currently angry and we don't really know why, but we get fed a lot of negative information and I don't know if the human brain knows how to cope with it.
00:09:16.000So it's very early on in this sort of technological revolution, so to speak, and I don't think our brains have quite caught up with how much bad news we're absorbing on a daily basis.
00:09:26.000And so I think, yeah, I think people are angry.
00:09:29.000Upset, and they don't know what to do with it, and there's certain figures that attract that kind of rage or wrath, and people use these people as hot rods for their own chaos in their brains.
00:10:00.000You flick through Twitter, you flick through Instagram or look on Facebook, every single thing from every corner of the globe, you're hearing bad news.
00:10:20.000Yeah, I was going to be really curious as to see where the human race goes and how we do manage with all this information.
00:10:27.000Because even if you stand up for a cause, like today I did a post for Amnesty International who's standing up for the Turkish journalists who are all imprisoned for just doing their jobs.
00:10:40.000And so you stand up for that cause because I feel very strongly in a free press and you just become...
00:10:47.000I'm inundated with people saying, well, what about Venezuela?
00:10:50.000And they have their legitimate concerns about what's going on in their country.
00:10:53.000What about the women in Argentina, you know, and so on and so forth, and Brazil and Mexico?
00:10:59.000I just don't even know what to do with all the information in Venezuela.
00:11:02.000Yeah, that is a part of the problem, too, is that people expect you to comment on every single thing.
00:11:06.000And if you comment on one thing, especially if you comment on one funny, silly thing, they'll say, well, what about this?
00:11:12.000How come you're not talking about this terrible thing that's happening?
00:13:24.000Yeah, Indian was a thing that you could say all the time when I was a kid, but now if it accidentally slips out of my mouth, you don't say cowboys and Indians anymore.
00:13:33.000You're supposed to say cowboys and Native Americans.
00:13:35.000But it doesn't roll off the tongue as quickly.
00:13:38.000But we can break our habits, can't we?
00:14:54.000I love the goat, but then I'm partial to a sheep.
00:14:58.000I was reading this article yesterday about music, and they were talking about how people get very rigid in their musical tastes.
00:15:05.000Like, what they liked when they were younger, they get to a certain stage in their life, and then they just lock on, and any new music they just sort of reject.
00:15:12.000But there's a neurological reason for that, right?
00:15:15.000It's something to do with the pathways in your brain.
00:15:17.000I don't know that when you first make these insane connections, and it's usually during adolescence, apparently, where you make these connections with, I suppose, adventure and independence.
00:15:29.000I don't know enough about it, but they have done all these studies.
00:15:32.000During studies on the brain and dementia, they've discovered all these incredible neurological pathways that are formed by music and how somebody can't even remember...
00:15:42.000How to, you know, button their shirt, but they can sing every single word and every note perfectly to some opera that they performed when they were young.
00:15:53.000There's definitely weird pathways that get established in the brain.
00:15:57.000And they say that, like, there's something about music and especially, like, musical pathways that literally invoke these physiological changes in a person that are unlike anything else.
00:16:08.000Like, when I was a kid, That rocky Eye of the Tiger song would come on.
00:16:18.000He would just want to lift weights or just run up a hill or something like that.
00:16:21.000I mean, it would make your body change.
00:16:23.000It was like, if that was a drug, if you could take that drug, if you could sniff it and feel how you felt when that song came on, be like, yeah!
00:16:41.000And I'm reading his biography right now, or autobiography, should I say.
00:16:46.000And he's talking about some of his, like, really sick patients who have dementia or there's some other form of weird virus that shuts them down completely and they can't even stand, really.
00:16:58.000And then if they play a certain piece of music, someone who is essentially...
00:17:02.000An unconscious being snaps to, stands up and can dance and recite words even though they've been mute for years.
00:19:04.000We're having a fun time, having a fun conversation and laugh.
00:19:06.000But, like, say if, like, you were in a tribe of people and there was this one leader or this one, you know, warrior that saved you from the jaguar and you would look up to that person.
00:19:15.000Like, that's like a hero in a movie, right?
00:19:20.000When we tap into these ancient reward systems, I think there were ways that human beings could learn and ways that we could share energy with each other that existed before media, before music, before movies and books.
00:19:34.000And I think what we've done with media, music and books and movies especially, is tap into those human reward systems in this really crazy way.
00:20:08.000And then you have also people that are the same victims as your dog that's a bad dog.
00:20:13.000Like you have people that are born and raised in horrible environments and abused when they're young.
00:20:19.000I think that's a giant part of the problem, a giant part of what we are.
00:20:24.000And if we just address that, it's one of the main problems that I have with our culture is that we don't address, really at all, the raising of children and the doing it from the beginning as a culture.
00:20:37.000But we don't address very much that's painful or dark or complicated, do we?
00:20:42.000We don't talk about death, which I think is a big mistake because then you rear people to not live their lives fully because they're so scared of dying.
00:20:50.000They spend their whole lives worrying about getting sick.
00:20:52.000Yeah, they don't even like to talk about it.
00:20:53.000Yeah, my parents don't like to talk about it.
00:21:07.000If you mention anything difficult, it just shuts down a conversation.
00:21:12.000Well, that was one of the main problems that a lot of psychologists had with hiding caskets.
00:21:18.000Like when they were bringing people back from the war, that they were taking these photographs of the caskets and they wouldn't let them be released.
00:21:25.000Like it was a big thing during the Bush administration in America.
00:21:29.000And psychologists were saying, do you understand, like, you are programming people to have a very specific notion of war, then, because you're not showing them the actual consequences.
00:21:39.000I mean, in a casket is almost a symbolic consequence, because you're only seeing a box, and you know that a person, a child's, you know, some parent's child is in that box.
00:22:02.000It's psychological warfare in a lot of ways on the people because it allows people to accept the consequences in some sort of a weird, almost abstract way.
00:22:24.000But it goes back to the idea of rearing children, and that goes back to education as well, and that we seem to have fallen by the wayside there too.
00:22:34.000Well, I think we have, but my feeling...
00:22:36.000Let's go back to the human reward system.
00:22:39.000Because I think that what we're doing with technology in the form of music and movies and media and all that thing is just one step in this multifaceted experience that we have of integrating technology.
00:22:51.000And the more sophisticated this technology gets, it seems like the closer it brings people and ideas.
00:23:01.000Honestly, people think that I have too much of a utopian view of it, but I really feel like that technology is essentially going to balance it all out.
00:23:11.000I really feel like as much as we want to try to hold back information and we try to hold back education or try to program people, I feel like technology is ultimately going to connect people instantaneously with ideas.
00:23:24.000Well, it's kind of doing that already, really.
00:23:54.000You might not miss it because you're on the tip right now of the scientific and medical advancements that are going to allow people to live to be 300, 400 years.
00:25:41.000When he's really trying hard to work it.
00:25:44.000And that has long been left in the dust, I can assure you.
00:25:47.000Like literally, now I'm like, I have to beg.
00:25:50.000I had a friend of mine before he's married now, but before he's married, he had gone through a series of really horrendous relationships, and we were sitting around talking once.
00:25:57.000We were super high, and he goes, I think what I'm going to do is just have two-week relationships.
00:26:04.000He goes, because two weeks is like the perfect amount of time.
00:28:11.000There's also just a, I mean, there's a broad spectrum of behavior that is on one side of the fence or the other side of the fence, whether it's male or female.
00:28:19.000But there's definitely a male and female in most people.
00:28:24.000And then there's people that are, you know, then it gets real weird.
00:28:27.000People that are born or in some way don't want to be whatever gender they are.
00:31:09.000Just for those of you who are not in the studio right now, who are listening, just take my word for it that Joe is fucking with me right now.
00:32:26.000And she's been somewhat of a mentor to me, in a way.
00:32:28.000Because she was managed by a very famous music manager called Gary Kerferst, who managed the Ramones and Talking Heads and Blondie and so on and so forth.
00:32:37.000He was the one who basically sort of plucked me from my band.
00:32:42.000And he was like, you know, I think you have potential to be...
00:32:44.000In the music business and he signed me in the end and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
00:32:49.000And anyway, he introduced me to Debbie and Debbie came and saw my band open for the Ramones in the Academy in New York during the new music seminar one year.
00:35:18.000It was just written work and, you know, people would duplicate that written work and that's how you would get to see the genius of their ideas.
00:35:32.000But when you compare that to, like, a record, a modern record, I mean, we'll call it a record, but, I mean, a recording, a modern recording, like Blondie, like Rapture, or something like that, I mean, that is...
00:35:46.000There's never been anything like that in human history up until the 19th or the 20th century.
00:35:54.000So when you think about like pop stars, you know, I mean, Etta May or I mean, however far you can go back to where you can legitimately say someone was a popular music star.
00:36:17.000We were talking about this recently with a bunch of friends, is how accomplished young musicians are right now.
00:36:22.000They can be 15 years old and you can watch them perform and they've got all the moves and they can sing perfectly because they've practiced singing along on YouTube to digitally enhanced recordings so they can do stuff with their voice that we never could.
00:36:36.000And so they're learning at an accelerated rate.
00:36:40.000But they don't understand what it means to have any kind of motivation or like have any authentic taste or, you know, it's really peculiar.
00:37:10.000They can sing along to these mad records that have been all sort of, you know, auto-tuned and this, that, the next thing, and they can sing it perfectly.
00:37:19.000Well, I was reading about this 24-year-old motivational speaker, and I was like, I want to find that person, tell them to shut the fuck up.
00:38:35.000I feel sad for all these young hipsters that get lauded by...
00:38:39.000You know, fashion magazines, literally at the age of 15. I think it's the fetishizing of young people right now really gives me the creeps and I feel very sad for these young people who basically are like these beautiful butterflies and a, you know, a glass jar gets shoved on top of them and then they're stuck there being cool and hip.
00:39:27.000I saw this kid, somebody sent me this thing on Twitter, some kid, I forget where it was, some pop festival, but he's like 12 years old, playing the guitar, and he's fucking incredible.
00:40:39.000So something's happened somewhere along the line.
00:40:40.000But very recently, I mean literally in the last, I'm serious, in the last 10 years, I was like, I'm really good at this actually and I enjoy it and I guess this is what I do for a living.
00:41:06.000And then, by total default, I was in a youth theatre when I was young, and I met this guy, and he was like, oh, would you come and play keyboards in my band for a weekend?
00:41:15.000Because we've lost our keyboard player, and I joined the band.
00:41:17.000And then I just ended up being in that band for 10 years, playing keyboards and doing back of vocals.
00:41:23.000I didn't harbour any ambition to be a lead singer at all.
00:41:27.000And then just a billion and one things happened and I ended up being the lead singer of this very same band just so that we could survive because we'd been dropped by our record label for going to Berlin and spending all our money on our record advance on drugs.
00:43:19.000You know, that's a really common thing.
00:43:21.000We were just talking about this the other day with somebody, I forget who it was, where they were saying that so many really talented people feel illegitimate.
00:43:28.000They felt like they're not legitimate or they felt- But do you think everybody feels legit?
00:43:56.000Yeah, or almost seven rather and I was hanging out all day with the almost seven yesterday and You know we're just having a great old time like we have days We split up where I just hang out with one kid and my wife will hang out with one kid Because I think sometimes when you get the two of them together the young ones they don't get enough attention especially the little one suffers a little bit so we have like specific days where it's just and so the entire time We're trying to have a good time.
00:44:47.000Well, it's definitely not good to throw cigarettes out the window, but you have to think, this poor person, what kind of a mind do they have?
00:44:53.000The way their brain works, they think it's okay.
00:45:16.000It's very hard to describe to someone the love that you experience between you and this little tiny person like me and the six almost seven when when we talk like and she just jumps on me and hugs me like my whole body has this reaction like the love meter It's like,
00:45:34.000you know a carnival thing where you hit the thing on the bottom and the bell goes ding!
00:46:46.000I'm like, I just don't think I could handle that.
00:46:48.000I'm too hypersensitive to, I think, take the responsibility on of being a parent.
00:46:54.000You think, though, but it changes you.
00:46:56.000Like you become, whoever you are now, if a little person comes out of your body, you just, you're like, okay, now I'm Shirley with a person.
00:47:03.000There's like chapter two, you know, or Shirley 2.0 or whatever it is.
00:47:07.000Yeah, I'm sure it changes how you view yourself and your function on earth, I would imagine.
00:47:25.000Like, I don't really have to do anything.
00:47:26.000I choose to do a lot of different things.
00:47:28.000But people that do have to do things, like, especially couples where both work and they work long hours, that's incredibly hard to raise children.
00:47:38.000I mean you see how tired they are too when they come home from a 9-10 hour day and their kid has been in daycare and the kid just can't wait to see them and you literally only have an hour with them before they go to bed.
00:47:50.000My relationship was like that with my dad.
00:47:52.000When my mom died a few years ago my dad came over here to Los Angeles to stay with us and we went out for lunch and I'm sitting across from my dad.
00:48:00.000I'm 45 years old and I'm thinking to myself I have never sat alone with you In a restaurant in my life.
00:49:20.000My parents split up when I was five, and it was a very good thing.
00:49:23.000And it taught me that my mom was strong for leaving my dad and that, like, you have to make tough choices in life, and then things are gonna suck for a while, but there's a reason for it.
00:49:34.000But, you know, pressure makes diamonds.
00:49:37.000You said it much more articulately than I did.
00:49:41.000But we're getting to the same place, I guess.
00:49:44.000Yeah, well, it's an uncomfortable moment that I have with a lot of my friends that have children, too, because we sit around and we think about it.
00:50:15.000But see, I've gone quiet and I've gone quiet because it's getting back to the moment that I have or the feeling I have in myself that I am an inauthentic artist because I didn't come from a fucked up background.
00:51:30.000I always sort of feel, and this is really sick, a mild envy when I hear my friends talk about their fucked up upbringings because I'm like, God, I'm so normal.
00:51:42.000I used to feel that way about people who are drug addicts.
00:51:54.000They all had like huge cocaine problems and they, you know, Hicks was the only one that got through it, but then he wound up dying of cancer, you know, who knows, maybe because of that.
00:52:03.000But, you know, Kinnison was a cocaine addict.
00:53:13.000She takes me out to the parking lot, and she's doing this bit about, there's a real news story about these homosexual necrophiliacs who would pay these morgues to spend a few hours undisturbed with the freshest male corpses.
00:53:33.000That a group of homosexual necrophiliacs have been going around to mortuaries offering them money to let them come in at night and spend a couple hours undisturbed with the freshest male corpse.
00:53:53.000I wasn't trying to sell this as a fucking home game, alright?
00:55:29.000I was crying laughing and I was like, I gotta see this, I gotta see this.
00:55:33.000And so, I think I got it from a video store.
00:55:35.000I think it was back when you would rent it from a VHS, you know, cassette.
00:55:40.000And that's how I found out about Sam Kinison, and that's one of the reasons why I got into stand-up comedy, because I didn't know that comedy was ever like that.
00:55:46.000I thought comedy was a guy who just stood in front of the microphone and said, did you ever notice?
00:57:22.000So, see, this is a bit of a surprise to me because when people fight, you know, semi-professionally or otherwise, or at school or what have you, it's nerve-wracking.
00:58:15.000We moved across the country from New Jersey to San Francisco, and then we lived there for a while, and then we moved to Florida, and then we moved to Boston, and he switched careers, and he was a computer programmer, and then we became an architect, and so it was a lot of- Good lord!
00:58:45.000But when it gets to be like 13 and 14, then it starts getting violent.
00:58:48.000And so like kids would pick on me and I didn't know how to fight and it drove me crazy Like I was like god I fucking I hate the fact that when these kids want to fight me I don't know what to do and I'm terrified So I'd be like go go home the long way around so I'd avoid everybody and that kind of shit So I decided to learn martial arts.
01:02:47.000But I have a serious attention deficit disorder.
01:02:51.000Yeah, see, I hear that a lot from people.
01:02:54.000I usually think that what that means is you really enjoy certain things so much that other things suck for you and you just get distracted.
01:03:03.000I bet you don't have an attention deficit disorder when you're singing your songs.
01:04:04.000How many people are ever gonna feel that?
01:04:07.000How many people are ever gonna rock out in front of 300,000 people?
01:04:11.000So I think that some people The moments of brilliance, these moments of spectacular experience that they have are so different than most people's lives.
01:04:29.000Because I know that people's capacity for joy...
01:04:34.000It's a certain experience that we all have.
01:04:37.000I can go out to dinner and if you're having a really great meal and you're with people that you love and you are laughing yourself sick, I have the same feelings as I do when I'm having a good show.
01:04:50.000It's not like my career is the highlight of my life.
01:04:53.000It's a joyous part of my life that plays a role in my enjoyment of being on Earth.
01:05:05.000My point being is that I just think if you enjoy your job, if you love your wife, if you have great sex with your boyfriend or your girlfriend, if you have a baby, you know, that moment when they put the baby in your arms, you know exactly what it's like to play in front of 300,000 people.
01:05:34.000What I was going to say though is that your experience and the intensity is so high that your capacity to appreciate boring shit is probably very low.
01:05:43.000And that's one of the reasons why people would label it like attention deficit.
01:05:48.000You probably just don't want to pay attention to shit that you're not passionate about.
01:07:45.000You know, it's a small culture because it's bad weather.
01:07:48.000I mean, these are stupefying sort of cliches I'm spewing here.
01:07:53.000But because it's a small country, because it's bad weather, because we spend a lot of time talking to one another, passing one another in the street, there's a lot of humour that in America I find is not quite as acute.
01:08:06.000You know, people are used to verbally sparring in Scotland because you're against people all the time.
01:08:11.000Pushing past them in shops, you know, traveling in the tube, being on the bus, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
01:08:15.000Whereas in America, everything's more spread out and you're not around people so much.
01:08:19.000So when you are in face to face with them, people are a little more polite.
01:08:22.000In Scotland, there is absolutely no politeness.
01:08:26.000Well, you guys have that big comedy festival there every year.
01:12:40.000I mean, I'm sure there is a certain kind of high you get when you go off on the road and you can stop worrying about bills, stop worrying about money, stop worrying about the pain in your ankle.
01:12:52.000You just go on the tour bus and you get bussed from A to B. You get a little email every day that tells you exactly what you're doing at noon.
01:13:01.000Do you have a tour manager that handles all this stuff?
01:15:11.000It's not my place to worry about it really, but they just continued to want to make money via CDs and physical sales and they refused to make the kind of deals that they really needed to.
01:16:01.000Well, they're tiny crimes committed against each artist that compiles a vast library of digital content through which massive companies, conglomerates, make money from by just sheer mass.
01:16:17.000But the artist themselves makes, you know, less than a penny a pop.
01:16:38.000By a lot of getting fucked up the arse and no lube was used.
01:16:43.000We were around long enough that some of our masters reverted to us and so we could make really lucrative deals for ourselves and protect our catalogue.
01:17:39.000I mean, they now do 360 degrees, so they take a percentage of absolutely everything a band earns, which was not the case before.
01:17:45.000Generally speaking, they now sew up your publishing, they sew up your performance rights, they sew up your merch, any endorsements you get.
01:17:56.000Like, what do they bring to the table?
01:17:58.000All they are is just a bunch of people stealing money.
01:18:00.000Except if you're a massive pop star, like you're a Beyonce or a Gaga or Kate Perry or Bieber or what have you, then that company can use its resources to make you even bigger.
01:18:12.000And that's why these pop stars who continue to make commercial sounding music get bigger and bigger and bigger and more and more powerful until they can just buy their way into the consciousness of public culture.
01:18:25.000Hmm, but radio is not much of a thing anymore.
01:18:32.000So what is it that's getting people visible these days?
01:18:35.000Like it used to be a song would be a top 40 hit on the radio and then everybody would hear about it and you'd want to go out and buy the record.
01:18:42.000Well, I think most young people get it on the web.
01:18:48.000If you release a song with your label, it's your own thing, and you put it on YouTube, and say someone like me comes along that has a lot of Twitter followers, and I say, this is awesome, and I retweet it, and then a bunch of other people retweet it, that's all it takes today, right?
01:19:04.000I mean, you have to have a song, though, that's easily digestible, which is why there's so few musicians now taking real risks, because if they take a risk...
01:19:13.000They don't have a shareable song, you know, that appeals to the masses, then so you die.
01:20:15.000If someone is not in the business, it's creepy because I'm looking at what they bring to the table, and there's not a lot.
01:20:21.000Well, they bring, as I said, distribution.
01:20:23.000I know this firsthand because it's very difficult for us to distribute our music because we don't have a distribution label that can compete.
01:20:32.000Right, but when you say distribution, distribute it where?
01:20:37.000So whether that's ads on the street, whether that's ads on the television, whether it's ads on the radio, whether it's ads on YouTube, and so on and so forth.
01:20:46.000It's just an accumulative awareness of an artist.
01:20:50.000So they're almost manufacturing public interest?
01:21:17.000They figured out how to remain indoors.
01:21:19.000Yeah, it's very strange and it's kind of sad, really.
01:21:25.000That's why you're seeing fewer and fewer artists that have long careers, because, like I said, you can generate a lot of excitement when it's your first record.
01:21:35.000By the time it comes to your second record, a lot of these artists that we hear about are already dead and buried under a billion and one other new artists.
01:21:44.000Yeah, I'm sure you read that Courtney Love article that she wrote many, many years ago about the music business, about how complicated it is, and this is pre all of this digital stuff.
01:21:54.000She wrote this way back in the day when she was explaining how these artists get fucked over by music companies about how everything gets written off as an expense.
01:22:04.000So by the time they get paid, everybody else has been paid, everybody else is, like, the record companies made money, the executives have made money, and then the artists get money.
01:25:10.000I think younger artists are going to get way smarter than we ever were and just go, hold on a minute, we're not signing these rights to you.
01:25:16.000They have to, because there's no reason for that today.
01:26:17.000We're one of the bands who don't have to pay a percentage of our touring and our merch.
01:26:22.000And we're one of the bands who get a very high royalty on our records because we only give away a tiny, tiny percentage of every record to our distribution company.
01:26:42.000And there's a big thing about young artists, they have to pretend that they're rich.
01:26:45.000So everybody has to drive around a Ferrari, you have to have a $30,000 watch on your wrist, you have to walk around like a baller.
01:26:51.000But I really reject all that and I think I advise everybody else to reject it too.
01:26:55.000I think we're beginning to move towards a new world order because the worshipping of money, we can't sustain our lives and our world the way things are right now.
01:27:04.000Well, it comes from people being poor and wanting to aspire to be rich, and then once you make it, you have to sort of put that show on, right?
01:27:12.000I mean, that's a huge thing in the rap community, right?
01:27:52.000I mean, how many fucking rap songs are about jewelry and diamonds and cars and mansions and...
01:27:59.000You see, when I was growing up, as we were talking about being the same age earlier on, it was really uncool to talk about money.
01:28:06.000And all the cultural heroes didn't have money and would never talk about money.
01:28:12.000And actually often it was heartbreaking when you've discovered they were rich because they were kind of our working men's heroes, you know, our working man heroes.
01:28:34.000For which I'm actually eternally grateful for.
01:28:36.000I don't want to be somebody who worships money.
01:28:39.000Well, it's a foolish thing to worship because, you know, ultimately what an artist is doing is they're trying to express themselves in the most unique way possible and connect with people, right?
01:28:53.000You're trying to show the world through your eyes.
01:30:03.000And I know, I could count on my hands the amount of really rich people I know who live happy lives, who seem like they know what to do with their money.
01:30:11.000And these people definitely are out there.
01:30:14.000They have happy marriages, happy kids, balanced kids, you know, they know when to have fun, they know how to work hard, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah.
01:30:21.000But they're the exception to the rule.
01:30:23.000Well, the pursuit is such a strange pursuit because, you know, oftentimes when you're pursuing wealth, you're pursuing wealth at all costs.
01:30:33.000I mean, the ultimate goal is the score that you put on the board.
01:30:36.000I mean, that's the Gordon Gekko philosophy.
01:31:18.000He certainly has inherited quite a bit of it, no doubt about it.
01:31:21.000But my point is that his philosophy and what he's always pursued is extravagance, like the big gold letters on the side of the skyscrapers.
01:31:42.000So what are you then saying to people who have that, who will never have that?
01:31:45.000That's kind of what leaves me in great dismay.
01:31:48.000I understand the pursuit of money and economic well-being, but I feel like, what do we then say to the people that don't have that and never will have that?
01:31:59.000There has to be something else other than the worshipping of money.
01:32:44.000You say it's the wrong thought process, but it's the thought process is his in his eye He had examined it like his in his ideas like at one point in time We were Africans we were kings we were the we were on top and then you know slavery and all this other stuff So his like his thought process was kind of convoluted and by saying we were kings I was like you don't want to be a fucking king man Like nobody should be a fucking king should be zero kings You definitely don't want to see we were kings like we can be kings again like don't be a king Yeah,
01:33:38.000But I guess sometimes when you feel that you're at a disadvantage in a society, you know, words are powerful and the words we tell ourselves are really powerful and perhaps you can manifest a power that you need sometimes.
01:33:57.000You know, where, you know, you think to yourself, okay, you need to remember what you have done, what you've accomplished, who you are, who your mother is, you know.
01:34:05.000I think that there's a lot to be said, I guess, for the casual use of certain words.
01:35:57.000And you get to hear him talk, and the reporter called him in jail.
01:36:02.000And it's a really fascinating way they have to communicate, because they're only allowed to communicate for 15 minutes, and then they have to, the phone is disconnected, and then they have to wait 15 minutes before they can reconnect.
01:36:29.000It's weird hearing him talk about these people that he ripped off and finding these like, oh, they're fine.
01:36:35.000These people, you know, they had money.
01:36:37.000It's like, you know, it's no big deal.
01:36:40.000You're listening to the way this guy is sort of rationalized, but he is essentially the poster boy for that greed at all costs because he was just running a Ponzi scheme, stealing money from people.
01:36:51.000It's funny, I was again talking about this with my husband earlier on today, because we were talking about what is the difference between a Republican and a Democrat?
01:36:59.000Like, what is essentially the difference?
01:37:01.000Because I know lots, I have very good friends who are Republicans who I respect enormously, and they have taught me a lot, and they have changed the way I view the world, and so on and so forth.
01:38:00.000And I think people, it's very easy to influence someone to get them to adopt a predetermined pattern of thinking.
01:38:06.000And if that predetermined pattern of thinking is right wing or left wing, if you're around those people and you seek social status by committing to a certain ideology, You get embedded in it.
01:38:22.000You dig deep trenches in terms of your psychology.
01:38:25.000You dig deep trenches in your mind that are unwavering.
01:38:29.000And whether they're left-wing or right-wing, it becomes very problematic when you have two teams like that.
01:38:34.000We were talking about Haaland the other day, that Haaland has something like 17 different parties, viable parties.
01:38:41.000You know, unlike what we have, where we have this one, two, and then we have a few joke parties, like the Green Party, that no one takes seriously.
01:38:48.000They never even come close to winning.
01:38:50.000And when you have one or two, and one of them is conservative, and one of them is liberal, it just automatically, people identify with one or the other.
01:39:00.000And they, whether it's from upbringing, or the community that they're attached to, or what have you, or life experiences past generations, Positive or negative, they just immediately gravitate towards one or the other, they dig in, and then they start talking shit about the left, or they start talking shit about the right,
01:39:16.000and you know, you got Salon.com, and you got Fox News, and everybody's lobbing bombs at each other, and it's just fucking weird.
01:39:24.000I mean, I get that, generally speaking, like I understand, and I totally agree with what you're saying, that generally that is what occurs.
01:39:31.000But surely on both sides of the fence you have free thinkers.
01:39:37.000I think there's more now than ever before.
01:39:39.000But this is a very weird time in terms of Trump and Trump winning because he's sort of engaged the...
01:39:50.000There's a bunch of people that are not necessarily political, that are really into being a right-winger now.
01:39:56.000It's almost like online trolls and people that just like to be a part of a team, and they just like to fuck with people who they call snowflakes or liberals.
01:40:43.000But the thing about the free press, that's what worries me as a foreigner living in this country and seeing this sort of stuff that's being spewed about the free press really is worrisome.
01:40:54.000It's worrisome when it comes from the president himself.
01:40:57.000There's only been two presidents in our history that have actually gone to war with the press.
01:43:17.000And I think the US press, since September 11th, have actually, the standard of journalism has been sliding now for a decade, if not longer.
01:43:29.000And now all of a sudden, journalists are being held to account and they are having to step up their game again, which I think is great for the American people to enjoy good journalism.