[originally for Junkmedia.org]


It was probably the best night in October to go out to dance your ass off. The weather was temperate and the venue perfect (big ups to the Logan Square Auditorium!). The missing link was music, so who better to fill that role than Q and Not U? The band, who has recently released their third LP Power is the soundtrack to Election Night Fever, was ready to get people to shake it and maybe talk some politics along the way. Vocalist/bassist/guitarist Chris Richards was nice enough to lean against a building with me to answer a few questions I had on my mind.

Interviewed October 2nd, 2004.

Codebreaker: How long have you guys been on tour so far?

Chris Richards: We've been out for about a little over a week right now. It's been in these little spurts where we go out for a few days and come home, go out for a few days and come home. So now we're on a tour through the Midwest; we go back to New York for CMJ and then we go back to D.C. for just a couple more days. After that we have about three and a half weeks on the West Coast. So all in all it will be about five weeks of touring, but we've divided it up into these little... chapters, which has been nice.

Codebreaker: And how has it been going so far?

CR: Really well. We're playing a lot of new material that we're just getting used to. I think we tour a lot as a band, so the songs really become second nature to you when you're on tour so often. With all these new songs it's the first time we've been playing them, so it's just interesting to play a song like "Soft Pyramids" that we've probably played live over 250 times right after a song we're playing for the forth, fifth, sixth time. It's weird. Of course the older material feels very natural so it's really easy to slip on those. We're trying to just make it flow and all work together. I think by the end of the tour we'll have gotten our rhythm down.

Codebreaker: You guys did a tour of the UK and South Africa. What the hell was that like?

CR: It was great, man. It was a blessing and a curse of a tour. We had a really eye-opening experience to be able to travel to that area of the world, which was really amazing. As far as logistically speaking as a tour, it was kind of a failure in that sense. [laughs] Just because we weren't really the right band to bring over. Ska/punk is really popular there, and that was the scene we were playing in. We definitely weren't received as well as we have been in America before. But at the same time we were really grateful that the people that brought us over brought us over. Just interesting to be in that environment -- so different from any other. You know, when you go to Europe and Japan, it seems like the punk scene, independent scene, underground, what-have-you, is kind of modeled after the way things are operated here in America. In South Africa, so few American bands have toured there it's its own entity altogether, so touring there in that respect is very interesting.

Codebreaker: You've just released your third LP, Power. The sound is a bit more streamlined on this one -- less mathy. What brought that on?

CR: I don't really know; it wasn't any kind of conscious decision. I think we're just---we love pop music, we always have. I think we never really make conscious decisions aesthetically, I think we just follow what feels natural at the time. For this batch of songs we just surrendered to our sensitivities at the moment. We've always loved pop music, we've always loved 80s funk music, new wave and things like that. Glam rock and folk and all these kind of things, I think, are shining through a little more than in the past. I think it's very natural for us to try and take---to make music we're not initially---we're comfortable when we're making music that we're not comfortable with, if that makes any sense. I think we gravitate towards trying things that are new to us. Once we know that we can do something well it doesn't really interest us anymore. A lot of bands, I find, will find something that they're good at and really polish that element of their work; and that's totally uninteresting to us.

Codebreaker: Beating it to death?

CR: It's not even beating it to death, really. I think some people are chasing a sound or their trying perfect their craft. I don't know whether we have a short attention span or what, but I feel we operate best when we're trying to tackle new obstacles and trying to challenge ourselves. That's what keeps things interesting for us, so that's why we're always trying to change what we do and make something unexpected and surprising for ourselves and for other people.

Codebreaker: This is your first album that you didn't record with Ian Mackaye and Don Zientara. What was it like working with Rafael Cohen and Pete Cafarella?

CR: It was great. El Guapo has been a wonderful companion to use over the years. They've been a band that's been a huge influence on us because they are a band that's really operated without aesthetic borders. When they started -- I saw them for the first time when I was a teenager -- they were doing kind of this experimental punk thing, then they went to school for music and they became very influence by jazz and they became this avant, free-jazz punk; and now they've developed into this electro street-jams band. I think they're a band that doesn't give a fuck about rules and they're interested in exploring different aesthetics. To us that's always been a real influence. So working with them has been very natural, and they've been recording their records---I'm sorry, Fake French, their second record for Dischord they'd recorded on their own and we thought it sounded really great. Then they had asked us about recording, so we decided to work with them and see how it went. It was totally fruitful and a really enjoyable experience. We have really similar interests; it was cool to have a touchstone with them about contemporary hip-hop. I felt we were speaking the same language. I feel they're the best band in America right now and I'm very nervous about to play after them for thirty days.

Codebreaker: There used to be a sound that was typical of Dischord bands that you've moved away from. At the same time, there aren't many bands on Dischord that have a typical Dischord sound; there are only four active bands on the label. What is it like to be on a record label that's calmed down on their style, on the number of records they're putting out?

CR: It's weird. It's like an ebb and flow with Dischord and there's an ebb and flow with D.C. Dischord's a very unique label because their whole thing is that they're about documenting music from one city, and I don't know of any other label that does that. There are plenty of labels that follow Dischord's model of operating pretty independently from the music industry, but none of them, I think, are just documenting a specific place. I think that's really interesting, but you're also at the mercy of the natural ebb and flow of a music scene. Now might be a quieter time; who knows, next year there might be 20 bands coming out of D.C. that are trying something crazy. Getting back to your question about a Dischord sound; I don't know if I agree with that aesthetically as much as Dischord was a guitar rock label in the 90s at least. And that was central to what a lot of the bands were doing, and that might not be the case anymore. If you look at a band like Black Eyes, their thing was percussion. If you're looking at a band like El Guapo, their thing is electronic sequencing. I mean, that's just putting these bands in a nutshell, which is unfair to do 'cause I think they're all very diverse aesthetically. When it comes down to it, I think Dischord's whole thing is about freedom and giving their bands the freedom to do whatever they want to do. I think it's really encouraging that the groups are exploring all different kinds of ideas.

Codebreaker: On your new record you have songs like "Wonderful People" and "Book of Flags" that are a lot more recognizably dance-punk oriented than your previous stuff. Are you at all self conscious about being lumped into this dance-punk revival?

CR: To some degree; but I think anybody who's creative is naturally going to want to avoid labels, because if you have a curiosity in a lot of different things, to be deemed one thing is antithetical to what your mission is. In that sense, yes, it does bother me. But at the same time, we don't really get bothered by it too much because buzzwords have always followed us around. When we started off, it was "Oh, they're an emo band," then At the Drive-In got popular and so they were "Oh, they're a math-rocky, At the Drive-In band." Now dance-punk is popular so we're a dance punk band. Maybe we were doing at those times was congruent to what was going in the music scene at the moment. I think our mission is to survive any buzzword that exists and keep existing ourselves, doing our thing.

Codebreaker: At the same time, a lot of stuff on Power is mellow and seemingly introspective. Not many freak-outs on this record. Has this come with maturity or was it just a new direction to try?

CR: We might be getting more comfortable in our own shoes. With the first record we made, it's a pretty hard-hitting punk or hardcore album. We feel very distanced from that now -- it doesn't feel natural. It might have been, "OK, this is our first shot" and you just want to try and say everything you can. If you have 30 seconds on national television you're probably going to talk fast and loud. [laughs] Whereas now we're starting to realize we have a body of work behind us and hopefully a body of work ahead of us, so we can take time to explore what we want to do. I think the record is a success on the fact that we tried to put a lot of sounds and aesthetics in the same mix and make it go together and hopefully it does so.

Codebreaker: What's your song-writing structure? Onstage you have a real collective vibe -- no one's left out. Is it like that in the studio?

CR: It's always been that way. This band has always been really appealing to everyone in it because it's a total democracy and I think we always challenge each other and inspire each other to do better work. We wrote most of the first two records through improvisational jamming and practice. You might come in with a little part of a riff but the songs were achieve in practice by jamming it out then making some conclusions and organizing whatever you came up with. This record was different in that probably half the songs were reached that way but a lot of the material was written at home. I think we all brought more focused or more completed ideas to the table and they launched things in certain directions. For instance, a song like "Throw Back Your Head"; I had it all written out, the guitar part and the vocals for the whole thing and how the structure was. It was pretty raw, melancholic song and there wasn't a lot to it. John's drumming added a really airy bounce to it, and Harris had a lot of guitar, flute and synth parts that he added to it gave it this amazing buoyancy and we had no idea. Actually the ending, the finale part, it's this really cheery fairy-tale music. Whereas when I first written it it was supposed to be this doomy, gloomy, Celtic kind of [sings] doww, nahananow!! [laughs] where you're on a Viking ship. Those moments are the ones I enjoy the most, where even when you think you're bring a totally completed idea, playing with John and Harris it can turn into something else, usually something better. That's what being in a band is about. I don't think anyone's interested in being a singer songwriter, at least in this context.

Codebreaker: Your lyrics have always been very visual and alluded to much deeper topics -- full of images. How do you come up with your lyrics?

CR: It's different every time, you know. I'm glad to hear you say they're full of images because that's the way I like to provoke---I feel like imagery usually compliments a song, or music evokes imagery to me naturally, so to be able to reflect that in the lyrics usually feels natural. My lyrics on this record I tried to be a little more direct and a little clearer about what they were about. Now after doing a lot of these interviews and talking to people about it -- it didn't really work. [laughs] People are equally curious about them as they have been in the past. But to me it's good, I think a song doesn't always have to be but can be powerful if it engenders a lot of different response and ideas. So if you have a song that's just like "Smash the man, go break a window!" it's just one thing. Whereas if you have a song where the lyrics are a bit more fragmented or cryptic, it engenders multiple responses and people have different ideas. Already so far, a song like "Wet Work" which I had this idea about trying to search for intimacy during wartime when there's a high level of paranoia, and that was a very specific theme for me when I was writing the lyrics for it. Some woman came up to me last night and she goes, "Is that a song about gay marriage?" And I was like "No, not at all; but how did you arrive at that?" She gave me where she was coming from, and that, to me, is interesting.

Codebreaker: It seems that a lot of bands coming out today have vaguely political aspirations or least have a political vibe. At the same time there are a lot of bands that are political just to sound political. How do you feel about that, and how do you try and combat that yourself?

CR: I think when any band takes on a political tone -- especially right now when we're living in a very challenging political climate -- I think it's a positive thing. Some person asked me in an interview recently about how we feel about the new Green Day album. You know, "Don't you think this is wack? These guys were making pop music for kids and now they're talking about politics like they know anything." I think it's great that they made this political rock opera, it's awesome. Because if their audience is 13, 14, 15, 16-year-old kids who have never been exposed to the idea of politics and music being intertwined, that's a very powerful gesture they're making. And it's also a courageous gesture in a time where a lot of pop musicians feel cowed by the record industry and cowed by the political climate to not express their beliefs because they feel it's going to hurt their record sales or hurt their response. I think that's absolute cowardice. So when any pop musician gets involved politically; all the stuff P.Diddy's been doing for voter registration I think is fucking awesome and inspiring. Even though I think he's putting a hurting on the music industry and has killed hip-hop with a lot of his capitalist agenda, I still think a lot of the political work he's been doing has been worthwhile. I will never say that someone's political voice -- they're not entitled to it. It's just bullshit, especially when we're living in a democracy where we're all citizens. People want to say, "Oh, are you a political band?" Maybe, but I really feel we're a citizen band because everyone in this country has a voice. You don't have to be a foreign policy expert or a CNN analyst to say you have feelings on the way our country is being run.

That said, how do we deal with stuff? I think were politically charged people, we live in Washington and we're close to what the fuck's been going on. It's a big part of our mental landscape and what we do with it as much as the meals that we eat and the weather outside and the relationships we have. I think it's just natural that it comes out in our songwriting and come out in our lyrics. It's also reflected in the way that we address any other issues, which is in a way that engenders a multiplicity, or something that isn't totally didactic and one-dimensional. I feel we deal with politics in a way that I hope is never heavy-handed or boring. Try to make it in a way that people can sort what relate to and encourages people to have their own ideas about it rather than telling them what to feel.

Codebreaker: As long as we're talking politics, I was wondering about something that said last time that I saw you guys in Chicago last summer. You were saying that a year from [then] the U.S. would find the WMDs, Osama Bin Ladin, and Saddam. We'll we've only found Saddam so far. I'm not trying to bust your balls; I'm just curious about what you think about what has happened.

CR: The point that I was trying make was that they were going to save all that stuff for election time and use it. That was an idea that John had in the van when we were driving and we were talking about it, and that's why I brought it up. We've definitely still been talking about it, because these debates have been going really well for Kerry and he's doing a good job handling Bush. We're still wondering if the October surprise is going to come up; they've had [Bin Ladin] cornered a numerous of times and they've failed to bring him in. Now, the weapons of mass destruction thing is a major strike against Bush because of all the reports coming out saying it was totally ridiculous that they had a weapons program. Do they know where Bin Ladin is now? I don't know; they've got 30 days left to find this motherfucker, and if they do I'm not going to be surprised.

The other sad thing is, I feel if they do and---the Bush administration has created this structure where they're invincible and it's horrible. They can do anything for the sake of security. If Bush got his ass kicked in the first two debates and he didn't want to do the third one because he'd lose his credibility, he could easily a terror alert on the site where the debate happens and then the debate is canceled and no one's going to question it. Say for instance they find Bin Ladin next week and it creates this huge burst of enthusiasm for the Bush campaign and we find out they knew where he was for the last nine months, Bush can easily say anything to cover it up. They've created this mentality where they're parent figures and Americans are children. Listen to how George Bush talks in these debates; it's like how an adult talks to a baby. And I think the American public likes feeling like babies. We're not fucking babies! This is a democracy, we are citizens, and we can challenge our government and have a discussion about it without being reprimanded like children. That's something I'm tired of and the rest of our generation is tired of and we do not want to be treated like children. We want to be treated like part of the democratic system.
This is an intense tour for us. We're traveling during one of the most powerful intersections in the last 100 years of American history. We're going to be playing a show on Election Day, the debates are happening on nights we're playing shows. It's really charged us personally.

Codebreaker: What's coming up for Q and Not U?

CR: The record just came out and we're gonna be on tour, hopefully it will be loved by the world over. [laughs] We're excited to be playing these songs and I think the shows are going to be really interesting over the next six months. We have a break in January and I think we're going to assess what we want to do. Making this record has been really rejuvenating for us; we've been in this cycle where you make the album and tour relentlessly for two years which is very draining. Making the record was really healthy for us -- put a fresh wind in our sails. We love music so much that it makes sense that making a record is fun. I hope we can get in a cycle where we're recording more often. I don't know if that means making another album or making some singles or EPs. The punk world we grew up in was just "tour! tour! tour!" and we've followed that example. I think it might be more fruitful for us now to slow things down and make sure we ration out the time to write songs and record. It's good for our emotional and creative well-being.

Codebreaker: One last question: At the beginning of "Y Plus White Girl" [from Q and Not U's debut album No Kill No Beep Beep] there's the sound of something jingling. What was that?

CR: Definitely car keys. I'll confess to you, there's a minor league baseball team called the Fredrick Keys in Fredrick Maryland, and I used to go see them when I was a child. During certain innings they'd be like "Jingle your keys!" and everyone would [jingles keys] pull their keys out. Back in our first days when our record first came out, I was really interested in finding ways to have communion with the audience. It might have been a symptom of being unconfident in the songwriting and I wanted to find ways to connect with the audience other than them just liking the song in case they didn't. At least they can clap along or sing along, or in this case jingle your keys. It never really took off. [laughs]