Trash Talk

Ian Svenonius is the ringleader of a new outfit called Chain and the
Gang, whose debut, Down with Liberty…Up with Chains!, is out
now on K Records. Previously, Ian Svenonius has fronted such acts as
Nation of Ulysses, the Make Up, Scene Creamers, and Weird War, to name
a few. He’s also published an absolutely essential book of essays,
The Psychic Soviet, and hosts a web TV talk show called Soft
Focus. He spoke to The Stranger by phone from a tour stop in
Iowa City.

How are the shows going so far?

Oh, they’re fine. You know, fun to play, not necessarily fun for the
audience—I don’t know. I have little patience for watching
groups.

How would you describe the relationship between yourself,
the gang leader, and the rest of the group?

The relationship is strained…

Exploitative?

Yes, exploitative. I’m the work-gang leader. I wear mirrored shades
and a cowboy hat and a shotgun, and they do all the work.

Can you tell me a little bit about the title of the record?
Why Down with Liberty?

“Down with liberty” is supposedly what the partisans, the Spanish
nationals, said. That was their battle cry when they fought Napoleon in
Spain, when Napoleon was trying to liberate the continent under the
pretense of spreading the ideals of the French revolution. People who
opposed him said, “Oh, liberty? Well, down with liberty, and up with
the chains.” I think we’re in an analogous era now. American
imperialism always exists under the pretense of exporting liberty. So,
down with liberty, down with America. Anti-Americanism—it’s out
of vogue now, but I don’t care. I’ve always been one to buck the
trend.

On the first song on the record, “Chain Gang Theme (I See
Progress),” you talk about seeing progress in signs of decay, which
seems like a counterintuitive thing, much like the record title. Can
you elaborate on that?

I’m just offended that capitalism is based on endless growth. If
you’re not expanding, you’re contracting—you’re dying. I feel
like there’s an American problem, a capitalist problem, and Americans
have to—well, not Americans, Americans are very nice people. It’s
the capitalist model. It’s really offensive. Everybody is talking about
how to grow the economy, but the inclination should be to maintain…
It seems really insane.

No matter where you’re living, you’re living in a world where
everything beautiful has been destroyed in the name of progress. Any
old building has been pillaged, replaced with cheap Tyvek and drywall.
It’s horrifying. There’s no respect, and there’s a stupefaction,
aesthetically. I feel like the architects should be put in prison,
these people who are responsible for these buildings. I mean, maybe
it’s not all down to them, but what’s replacing everything is
horrifying—bad use of materials, bad use of space, terrible.

So, I see progress in decay. I’d rather see paint peeling. I like
seeing the disintegration. I don’t mind the idea of industrial slowdown
or factories closing in America if it means that… I don’t know.
People behave like army ants. If you go to a country where every
industrial city is abandoned and left to rot… and then everybody
talks about going west, this whole myth of the west, endless
territories to plunder and exploit, it seems really wrongheaded.

But the existence of the rock-and-roll outfit seems like
it’s predicated on a certain amount of industrial progress. Do you
worry that too much decay could threaten your livelihood?

No, not at all. It’ll affect something like The Stranger before it affects Chain and the Gang, because Chain and the Gang is not
a real business model. You know, we’re not selling advertising. Almost
any [musical] group is operating at a loss all the time. You know
people in bands… the whole money thing is kind of a farce. That’s a
myth they propagate so people don’t think that they’re pathetic.

Tell me about “Deathbed Confession” and the sort of weird
conspiracy-theory/secret-history stuff going on there.

Well, the song “Deathbed Confession” is just about the ego of people
who are involved with covert assassinations. They’re sworn to secrecy,
but they also have to let everybody know that they were part of this
thing. When they get old, they really want to take credit—all
these tell-alls, these CIA guys, and they’re decrying it but really the
point of the book isn’t just to decry it but to boast about it. Like a
Tommy Lee autobiography that is like, ” I was so bad, check it out” or
like drug addicts, like NA, it’s boasting about the thing but also
condemning it. That’s what “Deathbed Confession” is about.

Is that a different attitude than you’ve found with some of
the aging punk-rock musicians that you’ve interviewed for your show? Do
you find that they don’t have the same sort of urge to talk about their
exploits?

No, they don’t at all, that’s true. I never thought about that. No
one talks about their sexploits and their hotel smashing, because it’s
marketed differently. Punk is really a work cult; it’s really all about
working. And rock and roll is all about… it was for a repressed
society. It was really like, “Look at all the sex!” I mean, Led
Zeppelin were working really hard, but they never talk about the work
they were doing. They talk about the sex they were supposedly having,
which you can barely believe they were having because they were working
really hard. So the whole thing with them, it’s all about sexual
heroics—but punk, because it’s supposed to be a movement of
peers, it’s like you don’t actually want to incite that kind of… that
would just incite resentment. People aren’t really fans anymore,
they’re begrudging peers. It’s an interesting dynamic, there’s none of
that fandom, unless it’s someone of another race or very much older,
then you can have an unabashed fan’s appreciation of that person.

Do you think something is lost there?

I think it’s sad that people can’t be just fans, but at the same
time it’s a strange relationship. Like, why did people have this fan
relationship with the people? Honestly, I think a lot of it has to do
with the format of the 12-inch LP being so big. It had this big picture
on it, and I think that to a certain extent that really influenced
people’s idea of the importance of the artist, because there was a big
picture and you had liner notes on the back. And the liner notes and
the picture made the whole thing into something that not only convinced
the listener it was a big thing but also the performer was convinced of
their own importance.

I think now in the age of MP3s, where there’s often no physical
evidence of the group existing, except for them as people or their
performance, you really notice it, nobody is talking about themselves
very self-importantly anymore. People don’t feel like they are
entitled. They might think of themselves as musical geniuses, but
that’s very different. There are a lot of people that might think they
are Brian Wilson, but there’s no longer the pronouncement about
politics that you once had, like nobody is making pretentious
statements anymore… unless they are from that old generation, the
album era.

You have a song “Interview with the Chain Gang,” which is
kind of a hilarious send-up of a textbook-terrible band interview. Let
me ask you this: Do you prefer being interviewed or, as you do on your
web TV show Soft Focus, conducting the interview?

I have very little experience interviewing people. Really, the only
interviews I’ve ever done have been the ones for Soft Focus. I
appreciate the difficulty of doing that now that I’ve done it. I guess
I enjoy being interviewed more, because it’s something I have more
experience doing. What do you think of that?

Interviewing people is pretty… I don’t know, it’s difficult.
Especially the people I interview, they’re all people who have, like,
20-year careers and have done a million things. So then you’re faced
with this thing where these people have been interviewed so many times,
and you don’t want to ask them all the same questions, and you also
don’t want to get into this Actor’s Workshop thing of reciting their
whole career to them, because people can find that information
anywhere. Maybe I’d enjoy interviewing people more if I could edit
it.

You don’t have final cut on your interviews?

Well, I do… but I just let them do it.