Ian Svenonius of Chain And The Gang
Down with liberty! (No, seriously.)
Ian Svenonius is an anomaly in the world of underground music. A staple of the indie-music scene for more than two decades, Svenonius has managed to remain relevant while his fellow “alternative” luminaries faded into obsolescence. He made his name in the late ’80s with Dischord post-hardcore act Nation Of Ulysses and has continued to redefine himself ever since, fronting genre-smashing groups like the gospel-tinged The Make-Up and Weird War, a boogie-rocking collaboration with Royal Trux’s Neil Hagerty. Along with his knowledgeable, probing interviews as host of VBS.tv’s Soft Focus, Svenonius is a prolific writer whose essays on the symbolic and geopolitical ramifications of rock ’n’ roll have been compiled into the widely praised (and recently reprinted) The Psychic Soviet. Those esoteric tendencies also inform his newest musical project, Chain And The Gang, whose debut Down With Liberty... Up With Chains! is dedicated to the death of America’s so-called “freedom.” Before the band’s inaugural tour (which stops through Emo’s on Saturday), Decider spoke with Svenonius about outgrowing the desire to injure himself, the dubiousness of free will, and why the rise of downloaded music is making bands seem less important.
Decider: Some of the vocals on Down With Liberty sound more like spoken-word conversations than singing. Was that your intention?
Ian Svenonius: That’s my approach, because I’m not really a musician. I’m more like a rapper. Actually, the record was going to be spoken word with musical accompaniment. You could call it music, but it’s still spoken word.
D: Do you expect that to change live?
IS: Hopefully we’ll lay back, but that’s inevitable. You get enthusiastic and you start playing more, yelling more, doing everything more. But that’s fine. A record and a live show should be different.
D: In the 20 years you’ve been playing, have you noticed a change in how audiences interact with you?
IS: Honestly, I don’t know. What is an audience? It’s like referring to “the ruling class,” since it’s always composed of different people. Even during the concert, some people leave and some arrive. It’s a shifting, amorphous blob. The big difference would be that a lot of the people who are checking it out aren’t involved. It used to have a more cultish aspect. It felt more important, more vital. But that meant that there were more stringent rules—which is exciting, because it’s easy to break the rules. Challenge the accepted parameters. Rules are arbitrary and dumb.
D: You used to get hurt a lot at shows.
IS: Yeah, and that’s not so interesting to me anymore. That was a D.C. thing. This exposition of being crazy, where every show is the last show. It all emanates from the Bad Brains. What I realized at a certain point is, tactically, you have to choose your battles. All this energy output isn’t necessarily engaging or entertaining. You can fall on your knees and be dramatic, but if you’re doing it in a dark basement and nobody can see it, you’re just hurting yourself. I’m just not interested in those kinds of displays. Somebody like Tom Jones, he’s a great dancer. He’s engaging. He’s charismatic. That seems more useful than jumping on your head.
D: What do you think has allowed you to stay relevant for so long?
IS: It’s not based on overwhelming popularity, obviously. I’ve been lucky that I wasn’t stymied by dumb contracts or expectations. A friend of mine said to me, “I’m glad I never made it, because I’ll never be a has-been.” If you have huge success, then you’ve expanded the pool of interested parties to include a lot of people who aren’t adventurous, people who just want to hear a particular hit. If you stay unpopular, it gives you all this elbow room.
D: What do you mean by “down with liberty, up with chains”?
IS: “Down with liberty” is an anti-imperialistic slogan. Imperialism is all based on this idea of freedom—“freeing the world,” “freeing Iraq,” “freeing Iran,” “free markets.” I’m identifying as an anti-imperialist. Also, Chain Gang is a great metaphor for a group. It’s a bunch of people chained together, they sing for people’s amusement, they’re laboring without compensation. People in groups are kind of imprisoned. I’m dubious about free will. Liberty is one of those things that everybody thinks is good, but I’m not so sure. Free will is a relatively recent, Enlightenment-era idea. Why are we so eager to believe in such a new concept? I’d rather go with an old concept like astrology.
D: On “What Is A Dollar?” you talk about the economic system forcing people to do stuff they don’t want to.
IS: That’s asking about this really abstract concept that we deal with everyday. It was prescient, because now that’s the whole theme of society: “Oh, we’re poor.” But people don’t realize they were poor the whole time. The last 20 years everyone has been buying on credit. America’s wealth was largely a fantasy.
D: Has music allowed you to avoid this?
IS: Yeah—not in the sense of living off the music, but avoiding the normal pursuits that people adopt. If you make music, that’s an industry that requires very little capitol. If you listen to music, that’s a pastime that requires little capitol. If you were making model rockets, that might be more expensive.
D: What are your thoughts on the way piracy has made music pretty much free?
IS: I don’t know if something so easy to acquire has any worth. Air is precious if you can’t breathe, but otherwise it just is. I never sold a lot of records, so it doesn’t affect me that much, but it means an absolute change in the way people listen to music. The whole way that bands are important to people is based on an album cover. There’s this huge, propagandistic piece of paper; it’s what made groups so evangelical. You have Elvis Presley on this cover, and it’s very religious. It wasn’t enough to have people enjoy the music. They had to be acolytes. With the record already almost gone, you really see a difference. Groups are no longer acting like they’re important. Groups just kind of accept that they’re something disposable.
D: Are you consciously trying to reject disposability?
IS: Absolutely. The reason I’m so into gospel is that it’s communication and ritual. Music is this way of talking to your tribe. It has prehistoric origins based on survival. People’s capacity for music is a primal thing. Gospel music reflects what music is at its very basic root, because simultaneously it’s really cerebral and animalistic.
