Interview with Opium for the Masses, an Intelligent Band for Discerning Listeners
Timothy Sexton
May 13, 2007
Let me guess. You and Dave Pollack were both originally trained as classical musicians at some snobby musical conservatory and fell into electronic music by accident.
We actually have no musical training at all. I simply picked up everything from my friends. Dave Pollack, on the other hand, has always been that guy with the acoustic guitar who taught himself. Dave Pollack does most of the writing, whereas I do most of the engineering and arrangement. We both use Apple Logic Pro to build our tracks with its built in instrumentation, but we also use guitars externally.
Electronic music was really at the forefront of the social counterculture in the 1980s. Even a band as big as New Order is still considered something of an underground cult band in many ways. That electronic revolution exploded in the 90s with the rise of the computer and the democratization of art. Where does Opium for the Masses fit into this evolution?
Opium of the Masses was borne out of the ashes of our decaying electronic music scene. The electronic music scene started out with the best intentions--a place for a community, but somehow it became prone to corporate label infiltration, then ultimately its downfall. There was a time when electronic music was amazing, every time you attended a party, you were greeted by true heads who were there for the beats and the environment. These are the right reasons for attending an event. The media kept making a big deal about the use of drugs at parties and how the fabric of America's youth was being taken over by these "raves." Instead of drinking alcohol at a bar, lamenting over how mundane life was, and competing over sexual mates, people congregated around two turntables and danced their problems away as one. This was true culture, which mirrored the hippy movement of the 1960s and 1970s, but this time it was North American youth dealing with their disenfranchisement from society. Sure there was a lot of drug use, but it was to enhance the moment, not to define it. Local news station repeatedly opened the late night news with: "It's 11 o'clock, do you know where your kids are?", alluding to the dances that were going on in local warehouses. A lot of kids began hearing about these raves because of all this hype. Instead of coming for the music, these newcomers came to get high and experience these hyped-up taboo raves. When the scene peaked in 2000, it was difficult to figure out why people were attending parties. Was it for the advancement of the scene, or was it to get messed-up and have a laugh?
There seems to a pattern in the music industry that keeps getting repeated ad nauseum. From the days when black music was repackaged with the pretty white face of Elvis to the retrofitting of the rap culture to appeal to middle class white kids struggling desperately to act and dress like they could spend a night in a ghetto without getting their butts kicked, all the exciting movements in music seem destined to be watered down for public consumption. Is this what hurt the techno scene as well?
Eventually the electronic music scene left the underground and was forced above ground due to anti-cabaret/anti-rave laws. The situation was made worse as soon as record labels figured they could make a buck off of these beats. A lot of money was infused into the production and marketing of radio-friendly electronic music. A lot of acts came together to make cheesy and tired-out trance, house and breaks. This caused much of the music to stop being progressive and cutting-edge, too palatable to the masses and marketable. Parties went from underground to South Beach, where they were effectively destroyed. We are part of an effort to revive electronic music culture, but with some much needed depth. This time around, unlike the late 1990s and early 2000s we have a new-world order to deal with that finally people are catching on to.
At last we get to the meat. What do you mean a new-world order that people are catching on to?
It is clear that our generation will be forced to deal with the imperialistic ties that the past generation plunged us into. Poor, developing nations have had it with the hegemony of the United States and their dependence on industrial societies. Internationally, there is a giant class-gap between industrialized nations and the poor, southern, developing nations. Multi-national corporations and international banks are sucking the life out most of South America, Asia and Africa states. Domestically, the disparity between the rich and the poor is out of control. The government can no longer be counted on to ease the poor man's burden. So many families work and work, just to get by without the benefit of health care and education for their children. This leaves most of them in debt with no chance of saving for a future. The rich are not being taxed progressively enough, the neo-conservatives made sure of this.
Some might say you’re being ungrateful. You admit you’re from Canada, yet you have the nerve to denigrate a country that is offering you an opportunity. Is it really the government’s job to support the health care and education needs of its citizens?
We never understood how hardcore and perverted capitalism could be until we saw it here in the US. The disparity between the rich and the poor is tremendous. So many Americans live in debt, work like dogs for pennies and have little social services provided by the government. I use to work those crappy customer service, collections and telemarketing jobs while in school. I hated the environment and the unfair working conditions....working these jobs can make anyone go insane. I was always poor, looking for change in my car to buy a Whopper.
Look, I’m sure we’ve both run into that type of personality who will read what you just said and immediately castigate you as a Marxist. As if that’s a bad thing. Let’s face it, most people who use Marxist in the pejorative sense have only gotten their information about it from founts of misinformation like Rush Limbaugh. Are you a Marxist?
We were both born in Canada so our education is profoundly different to most Americans. When we went to high school, we were reading Marx, Nietzsche, Sartre, Derrida, Hegel, Machiavelli, Descartes, Locke and Hobbes original pieces for assignments. So at a very early age we read the classics. I personally studied international relations theory as a grad student. When you do this you mostly see the world through a realist, idealist or Marxist lens. Whenever I need to explain something to myself I use a non-vulgar Marxist lens with realism as a background I was the only Marxist in my MA program at Florida Atlantic University.
Makes me want to move my family to Canada. And believe me when I say there are a lot of people who wish I would. But let’s be honest. Probably the most famous Marxist band to come out of an English-speaking country was Gang of Four. If I mention Gang of Four to most people I get a blank stare. How does holding unpopular political views affect your music career?
Unfortunately, record labels don't want to mess with us because of our political views. Yes, we do see things through a non-vulgar Marxist lens and then apply it to realist theory, but realistically, is this going to sell albums? We also hand out a lot of our music for free from MySpace, making it available for free downloads. Record companies just hate that. When we play live, we take it to the turntables as a DJ act which further compounds our issue with record labels because it's not a money-maker. Honestly, we are suffering from a lack of exposure because we don't have adequate marketing. We aren't going to spend hours a day pushing our music, because that's what record labels are for....and they have no use for us. We aren't about to sell-out or make our music more palatable for the radio. This was never a ploy to make money.
So your interest in making music is a ploy to draw attention to the world’s problems rather than make enough money to buy a Hummer or a five pound gold necklace. What world problem is the most pressing today, do you think?
We are facing an inevitable energy crisis where industrialized nations are fighting over the table scraps of the 20th century. Peak Oil is coming in the next few years (if not already), and we have no energy plans to replace our huge consumption of fossil fuels. America, with its 5% of the world population, consumes 25% of its fossil fuels. No matter what energy companies or the government says, there is no replacement to America's energy consumption. Our economy is directly tied to energy and its availability. This is why we are in Iraq, it's a resource war. If competition heats up amongst industrialized states, resource wars, of larger scale, may be coming.
It takes energy to make energy, so it is never even implied that energy input closely matches energy output. As an example we'll speak of hydrogen. Hydrogen is a type of energy storage, it's not a natural resource we can simply extract. In order to get hydrogen, you must apply electricity to water, then extract hydrogen. Well where does the electricity come from? Fossil fuels. What about Ethanol? Why don't government officials state that it takes energy to plant, fertilize, pesticide, water, and harvest corn? What about the energy it takes to convert corn into ethanol? We don't even have enough land to plant all of these crops for energy alone, where is our food agriculture going to go? Interested parties consistently fail to mention the full formula of what it takes to make energy. They do this because one, there is too much invested in the current oil and coal infrastructure, and two, there is a lot of lobbying money. We really don't have a plan for the future. Our environmental climate has reached the point of no return, and change has to come quickly. It is very clear that global warming is scientific fact and not theory. We're in a lot of trouble here, whether Al Gore explains it to us or not. The question is how do you stop or reduce the industries that are making so much money from allowing harmful emissions into the air?
If only bands that could speak eloquently on such matters got the kind of media coverage that bald-headed party girls and prefab American Idol singing billboards get. What’s next for Opium for the Masses?
Trying to tie the issues facing newer generations, with a revival of underground electronic music. We do a lot of covers and remixes of songs that we find socially-progressive. Sometimes a band can be lyrically stale but have a socio-political gem in its catalog. Songs about disenfranchisement are what we love best. We cover and re-do songs to make them dance-floor ready; putting them back into underground warehouses for dancing. We get permission to do these covers and remixes. A lot of widely-known and local DJs spin our tracks at parties. In the future we have a few projects coming up. In the next few weeks we will have a remix of TV on The Radio's "Staring at the Sun". We will then follow that with nothing but original pieces for the next few months. We do have day jobs. David Mirand is a middle school social studies teacher. David Pollack is a theatre production manager. So sometimes getting to work on tracks is hard from our heavy workloads.
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