"Somebody Spoke, and I Went Into a (Phosphene) Dream": Part Two of an Interview
with The Black Angels
by Nick Courtright, mobile.austinist.com
Image from CrystalBordi Black Angels at Austin Psych Fest
Sunday, May 1
Seaholm Power Plant (214 West Avenue)
10:45, Stage 1
[info] | [tickets]
Editor's Note: this interview was contributed by guest writer Ryan Muldoon of
Revolt of the Apes.
The Austin Psych Fest - now approaching the deployment of its fourth
mind-blowing year - is a creature with an atom brain conceived and created by
The Black Angels, being an effort to pay homage to the psychedelic pioneers of
Austin’s past while also providing a stage for psychedelic pioneers on the
ascent. Mission accomplished. If it’s tempting to describe the line-up in this
fourth year (or for that matter, any other year) as “eclectic,” it also feels
somewhat unnecessary - which is to say those making plans to attend the Austin
Psych Fest are generally uninterested in an atmosphere that suffers from a
poverty of eclecticism (read: weirdos).
Somehow, someway, in between Austin Psych Fest 3 and Austin Psych Fest 4, in
between the scheduling, the planning, the procurement of permits, the printing
of posters, the losing of sleep, The Black Angels also managed to release their
third full-length album. The incomparable Phosphene Dream is a statement that
continues to astound, impress, provoke questions of and provide context for a
suite of songs and emotions that, after six months of repeated listening, we
find ourselves returning to again and again, with new angles to explore.
George Bernard Shaw said the following: “No man ever believes that the Bible
means what is says - he is always convinced it says what he means.” Considering
the topics discussed, it feels like a fitting epigraph for our talk with Alex
Maas of The Black Angels---this is part two, click here for part one.
The lyrics at the beginning [of the title track] are essentially what I
translate as you thinking about your life at that point - thoughts about your
parents, thoughts about your sister. And then there’s the sort of dramatic part
of the song - “Our President then was dead to us, Hallelujah!” And while I
would assume you would prefer for everyone to come up with their own personal
impression of what that means, I’d like to ask if there was perhaps a single
event that led you to that line.
Yeah. Well, just to go to the “hallelujah” thing first, I always think it’s an
interesting thing when you see leaders use religion as a means to conquer
others. And I’m talking specifically about George Bush here, when I say “Our
President then was dead to us, Hallelujah.” It definitely was a very personal
song, but I think it’s the type of thing that a lot of people can relate to,
thought I didn’t think too much about it until after the album was done and
recorded. Y’know, the lines “Mom and dad look old again, where am I heading?” -
that kind of a confused, almost paranoid expression of where your life may be
heading, and am I spending enough time with my family? And then what the hell
is going on with our country?
Y’know, our country is being lead by these people who feed us false information
and then use religion as a factor to justify it, to say, “This is OK - it’s
God’s will.” That’s very fucking scary to me, a very scary thing. And I think
“Phosphene Dream” is kind of - and I have to say, I don’t often think about
these things until they’re brought up to me, kind of how it is now - but I do
feel that song consists of these highlights of the major things I was thinking
about in my life at the time. And I don’t even think I realized they were major
things until they came out in the song, like, “Wow - I just said that.” Like,
sometimes you may be talking to your wife or your loved ones and you’re talking
about your feelings and you say something that makes you stop for a moment and
say, “Wow, I didn’t realize I felt that way.”
We surprise ourselves when we express our emotions.
Right, especially about ourselves. I think it’s hard especially when we’re
talking about ourselves, because it’s hardest to understand yourself. It’s easy
for me to understand you, or for me to come up with an interpretation of
something you’re doing and why you’re doing it - whether it’s true or not, it’s
easy for me to come up with that interpretation. But it’s much harder to
understand ourselves.
The line that says, “praise the bible” - do you think of that line as standing
in contrast to the later line of “raise the rifle”? Or are they two sides of
the same coin?
They’re kind of two sides of the same coin. But I’m not like … It’s a good
question again, and I do think it’s both things - the religion is the rifle.
Consider the NRA, y’know - essentially backed by people who hold popular
Christian beliefs, for the most part. But you can look at it in so many
different ways. But I felt those were two things that went hand-in-hand in the
context, at the time. Yeah. But I do like that people can say, “So, does he
mean that he likes the bible, that he praises the bible? What does he mean by
that?”
Oh, yeah. On one hand it’s very succinct, short and to the point, these two
sets of three words apiece - “praise the bible” and “raise the rifle.” But
there’s a lot of ambiguity in there. It could be, like, “choose your weapon.”
Or maybe scoff at these weapons, or …
See Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ePDYiWatv1g
Yeah, exactly.
But there’s biblical imagery all over the album, all over your music - not only
the lines we’ve been discussing, but other places as well, and kind of through
the entirety of “True Believers.” Do you enjoy the idea that these things can
be misconstrued, misinterpreted or otherwise alternately defined?
Well, yeah. I guess to answer that question I would refer back to how The
Beatles wrote music. The Beatles would write music that had so many different
interpretations. For example, think of a song like [sings opening to “All You
Need Is Love”], “love, love, love” - if you were to ask John Lennon, he might
say, “Yeah, that was a protest song,” or “It’s about how little love there is
in the world,” or “It’s about how to achieve more love in our world.”
Lyrically, I really like ambiguity, because it provides for more
personification on behalf of the listener. And sometimes I don’t even know what
the meaning is and maybe someone else can better describe what the meaning is.
Because I’m usually describing how the music makes me feel and … I mean, I’m
not going to say, “George Bush then was dead to us.” I’m going to say, “The
President then was dead to us” - which could have been true for the past four
years, which could have been true for the past forty years, who knows? I’m
never trying to be sneaky or anything like that, but it is about leaving it up
to the listener, which is one of the main things about the band and our music.
We encourage people to think for themselves, we encourage people to seek out
truths for themselves, to always be educating themselves, and I think the
writing just goes hand in hand with that. We encourage people to question
authority - including us, including our authority.
But in music, I’ve always liked … for example, if you were listening to The
Velvet Underground, and a song like “Waiting for the Man.” Well, obviously it
has drug connotations, but you can also read into it whatever you want, you can
read into it perhaps Lou Reed having a slight attraction to men - it could be
anything. But I think I’m just drawn to people who have come before me who’ve
done that.
Thinking about “True Believers” specifically now, where you mention the falling
walls of Jericho - is there anything particularly significant about the Battle
of Jericho as it relates to the song?
The idea for that specific theme was that a lot of things will happen to you in
your life, regardless of your religious beliefs. If you’re a devout Christian,
bad things are going to happen to you. If you’re into Theravada, bad things are
going to happen to you. For me, personally, I find all religions to be the same
to some degree, or at least they all have commonalities. And I think religion
was definitely needed in society, or at least certain areas of society, in
order to reach a certain level of social evolution.
And whether we still need religion or not, I don’t know, but I definitely think
we’ve reached a point where social evolution can be attained largely through
education, with the internet being a part of that, and the fastest, easiest way
to do that, I believe. I was always fascinated by the Baha’i religion, the
Baha’i faith, which took all these different parts of all these different
religions and put them together in one religion, which says that all religions
are equal or all religions have something good to offer us, and if we can just
get past the disagreements and begin to understand that, there wouldn’t be any
more religious wars. These are just abstract ideas that don’t have any concrete
thought behind them - we make them concrete, humans make them concrete by their
actions and their defense of their beliefs. Yet all of these people consider
themselves to be true believers - they believe their religion to be the one. I
could probably talk to you about this for a long time, talking about the impact
of religion on society.
I could probably do the same and it’s interesting to me to see how society
evolves with religion and also apart from religion, and how religion does the
same, sometimes evolving along with the society, but also without, to the point
where it becomes marginalized. But it always springs up! It is a constant in
our lives, in our world - y’know, man’s search for “the other” or meaning or
salvation or whatever, and whether we define that as Christianity, as Buddhism,
as Baha’i, as whatever. But it’s all coming from a similar place. And the
concept of Christianity today, in 2011, in America, is vastly different than
the concept of what Christianity was in Roman times.
Yeah, exactly. I love thinking about that stuff, reading about that stuff,
definitely from when I was in college, but after college as well. I don’t know
if you read this book called “The Spirit Molecule”?
No, but I’ve read about it. The scientist who studied DMT, right?
Right. That was a very interesting book for me, and in some ways it points to
the cause of why people look to religion, or look for religion, and the idea
that DMT is produced by the pineal gland, and it’s a chemical that makes people
see things and have these spiritual experiences, these near-death experiences,
and the idea that DMT is produced at the time death, and we get these visions
of white light and looking over your entire life, and all of these repeated
patterns with religious or spiritual significance. And anyone who has done DMT
knows that it does create these vivid religious experiences.
There’s another book that you would like called “The Evolution of God,” which
really does just that - tracking the evolution of the concept of God through
history, through the evolutions of society. It’s fascinating - and this quest
for a messiah or a savior and the willingness to be subservient to that force,
whether from a personal standpoint or from a purely religious standpoint, it’s
a constant in society, in human behavior. So, what does that mean? We could
talk about that forever.
Right, right. And it’s just, I mean … when you’re down here for Austin Psych
Fest, we could just sit around and talk about this stuff the whole time.
Yeah, we might, we might.
You don’t think there’ll be too much else going on?
I think there may be too much going on, so let me end by asking you this about
Austin Psych Fest 4 before I steal any more of your time. Which bands that you
have not seen before are you most excited to see?
Oh, man … yeah. A lot. There are a lot of bands this year that I haven’t
actually seen. I’m really looking forward to seeing Beaches, from Australia.
I’m looking forward to seeing Black Ryder, who we’ve been in contact with,
really since the conception of our band, before they were even really Black
Ryder. I’m looking forward to seeing … oh, man. So many. God, there’s so many
bands. There’s gonna be so many great bands.
Filed in Arts and Entertainment and tagged interviews, music, phosphenedream,
psychfest, theblackangels
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http://mobile.austinist.com/2011/04/26/somebody_spoke_and_i_went_into_a_ph_1.php
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