{"id":8600,"date":"2014-03-06T16:11:46","date_gmt":"2014-03-06T16:11:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stylusmagazine.ca\/?p=8600"},"modified":"2014-03-06T16:11:46","modified_gmt":"2014-03-06T16:11:46","slug":"electric-six-money-and-dipshits","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/2014\/03\/06\/electric-six-money-and-dipshits\/","title":{"rendered":"Electric Six :: Money and Dipshits"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"photo<\/a>
photo Johnny Firecloud<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

by Gonzalo Riedel\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

There\u2019s always that point when you\u2019re listening to Electric Six that you wonder how much of the music is sincere and how much is tongue-in-cheek. Take my favourite song, for example: \u201cShe\u2019s White,\u201d off the band\u2019s 2003 debut Fire.<\/em> On the surface it\u2019s one of those rockers that makes you crank the volume and play air guitar, but the lyrics are silly enough to make you feel weird about singing along. \u201cShe\u2019s white, she is so white, I was born to excite her, she could never be whiter.\u201d You know there\u2019s a joke somewhere, but you aren\u2019t sure what exactly the joke is.<\/p>\n

Even now, I\u2019m unsure where the joke is in a few of their songs. I ask Dick Valentine, singer of Electric Six, about \u201cAdam Levine,\u201d a track off the band\u2019s recently-released ninth record, Mustang<\/em>. Valentine begins with the lyrics, \u201cGive all your money to Adam Levine, but Adam Levine don’t need your money.\u201d At first, the digs on the Maroon 5 frontman don\u2019t seem all that personal, that maybe Levine is a stand-in for all pop music icons. But when the chorus kicks in and Valentine, with his signature growl, repeats the line, \u201cBurn in Hell, rot in Hell, burn in Hell, motherfucker,\u201d then it feels personal.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve got nothing against the guy, really,\u201d Valentine says, speaking to Stylus<\/em> from his Brooklyn home. \u201cI\u2019ve never met him. In America it seems there are only two bands that ever get airtime for, like, a two-year cycle. Just the same bands playing the Super Bowl or The Today Show<\/em>. And it seems that everyone is content listening to those same groups over and over until the next group comes along. When you finally get around to actually hearing this glossy music that\u2019s being packaged, there\u2019s just nothing there. It\u2019s empty.\u201d<\/p>\n

Valentine insists it isn\u2019t sour grapes speaking. \u201cSure, it\u2019d be nice to play those kinds of shows [that Maroon 5 plays]. We got to do a lot of TV spots in Europe back when Fire came out and was charting well, but after a while it gets exhausting being up that early.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cBut I\u2019m happy where we are. Right from the get-go,\u201d he says, \u201cI wanted my band to be like Guided By Voices, recording an album a year and touring as much as we could.\u201d<\/p>\n

I ask how it\u2019s possible to keep up a pace like that.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s pretty easy,\u201d Valentine says, \u201cas long as you take it a year at a time. Everyone in the band is a really good writer, and so, really, each person writes two good songs a year, you have twelve songs, that\u2019s an album. Besides that, we all have a yearly meeting together where we check in and make sure everyone\u2019s good to go another year, that everyone still likes being in the band. Everyone said \u2018Yes, let\u2019s go another year,\u2019 so we\u2019re now working on the tenth album. It\u2019s been getting easier. On Mustang<\/em> I brought the least amount of finished ideas to the table, and people have been saying it\u2019s our best, so that says something. I\u2019m happy about that.\u201d<\/p>\n

Valentine sounds grateful that he can lean on his bandmates right now. He has been busy raising his first child, which is resulting in shorter tours. Valentine is also working on solo material.<\/p>\n

\u201cThose came from being pragmatic,\u201d he says of the solo albums. \u201cI was playing a lot of acoustic sets that were getting popular, so I recorded the albums so I\u2019d have something to sell at the shows. I can be pretty money-motivated with things like that.\u201d<\/p>\n

As for Electric Six\u2019s work, Mustang fits right in with the rest of the band\u2019s discography, for anyone familiar with their music – that same kind of irony-soaked, fist-pumping Detroit hard rock that they’ve been turning out since 2003. As always, many of the songs have clever lyrics and often hilarious titles like \u201cJessica Dresses Like a Dragon\u201d<\/a> and \u201cI Never Fucked Her.\u201d Sure, nothing really matches the jokiness of earlier songs like \u201cNaked Pictures of Your Mother,\u201d but it\u2019s good fun all the same.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe only mandate the band had when working on the record was that it couldn\u2019t be a synth record,\u201d Valentine says, \u201cbecause the last album was a synth record, and we didn\u2019t want to repeat ourselves.\u201d<\/p>\n

In response to the level of comedy in his songs, Valentine says, \u201cI don\u2019t really try to write anything funny, I just tend to write something that interests me from a certain character\u2019s standpoint. It changes over time. Like the song, \u2018I’m the Bomb\u2019 [from Fire<\/em>]; I think it\u2019s a great song, but I don\u2019t think I could approach a song like that again. I was in my 20s when I wrote that, and I\u2019m in my 40s now. I\u2019d go about writing a song like that in a completely different way.\u201d<\/p>\n

His mention of \u201cI’m the Bomb\u201d<\/a> proves to me that even Dick Valentine\u2019s reference points for Electric Six go back to Fire<\/em>, the band\u2019s best-known work. You can witness the album\u2019s popularity at their live shows. I caught the band play The Pyramid about two years ago, and no surprise, when the band broke into \u201cGay Bar\u201d and \u201cDanger! High Voltage,\u201d much of the crowd responded in the way that drunken hooligans do, by shoving everyone with their obnoxious dancing. When that happened, I remember Valentine looking on with a kind of curious amusement that I\u2019d never been able to decipher.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt happens more often than it doesn\u2019t,\u201d Valentine says about the audience\u2019s outburst. \u201cI think when that happens, my thought process is to kind of laugh at it. I mean, those of us in the band, when we were growing up, going to rock shows, we never did dipshit things like that. We usually stood toward the back and watched the shows and didn’t move. So we don’t really understand why people would act that way.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cBut it\u2019s not like it bothers us at all,\u201d he adds. \u201cDipshits buy t-shirts too.\u201d<\/p>\n

Electric Six are performing at the Pyramid March 18, with the Mohrs. Tickets are $17 in advance, available at Into the Music, Music Trader, and ticketworkshop.com<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Gonzalo Riedel\u00a0 There\u2019s always that point when you\u2019re listening to Electric Six that you wonder how much of the music is sincere and how much is tongue-in-cheek. Take my favourite song, for example: \u201cShe\u2019s White,\u201d off the band\u2019s 2003 debut Fire. On the surface it\u2019s one of those rockers that makes you crank the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8600","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-features"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8600","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8600"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8600\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8600"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8600"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8600"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}