Originally published in ‘zine issue #43, 2011
Young punks have many ways to spend their free time, and one is the age-old and time-honored tradition of the discussion of the arts. Punks dedicate untold column inches in ‘zines and magazines and countless bits and bytes on blogs debating the issues of the day in the music world, or should we say the only issue that seems to matter: who is punk and who is no longer punk; who is still DIY and who is a sellout.
One band that is the center of such a debate is Magrudergrind from Washington, D.C. They were fortunate enough, or had the misfortune, to be the first “metal” band that Scion Audio/Visual offered to work with. Scion was first known for its brand of cars, but for years the company has also been in the music business (which is where the “Audio/Visual” comes in).
Scion produced a slick on-camera Magrudergrind interview for its website, and, more’s the pity as far as many of their former supporters are concerned, paid for and released a free Magrudergrind record. They also threw in stickers and turntable mats. (Full disclosure: I performed guest vocals on this record.)
Scion’s interest in releasing music (genres like dance before also turning their attention to the underground) is that it hopes to get young people to buy its cars by throwing Scion Rock Fests that get lots of attention and putting out records and videos, presumably to increase their brand awareness. Magrudergrind doesn’t have any interest in this, nor does any band that plays a Scion Rock Fest, one guesses. They most probably do it a) for the money, or b) for the exposure, or c) for the opportunity that they wouldn’t have otherwise, or some combination thereof.
Magrudergrind in particular has received a huge ration of shit for working with Scion from everyone ranging from their close friends to MaximumRockNRoll. People’s perception of the band has changed, perhaps forever, but has the band changed? Under the name Venomous Ideas, Chris Moore, the drummer, has been organizing and promoting DIY shows in Washington, D.C. for hardworking domestic and international underground bands for years, and continues to do so. Anyone who has worked with him or benefitted from his work ethic will—or should—admit that he is one of the go-to people if you want a solid show in the D.C. area. But since his band has a record on Scion A/V, have people that turned their backs on Magrudergrind stopped attending the shows he puts on? Maybe. Attendance at the gigs would suggest this isn’t a large amount of people. Have they stopped listening to the three other bands he plays in as well as Magrudergrind? Perhaps. But those bands haven’t taken a nose dive in popularity recently.
So what’s it all about? Why does anybody care whether a band puts a record out with Scion? Should they care? D.U. went to the source and, over tofu, salad, pasta, and peach mango juice, tried to find an answer, Q&A style.
D.U.: The first time I heard about this Scion thing, you were telling me about it. And it seemed to me you were—not taking pains, but you were making it sound like you wanted to make a joke out of it, and that you were compensating for doing a record on Scion by joking about it instead of taking it serious. Like, “We’re getting all this money to do this record, but this is just stupid, so we’re just gonna have fun and make it completely obnoxious and dumb.”
Chris: I would say that the idea of the record was more of a joke to us than—I mean, the music itself is something that we all stand behind and we love and we put a lotta work into. I would say as far as the whole concept of the record, [it] was a total joke to us; the fact that we did get money to record and money for art for the record was a complete joke. So I feel like that was why we didn’t put as much effort into, y’know, getting original art for the record. We just wanted to have something that was as stupid as the idea of the record, you know what I’m saying?
So why is the idea of the record stupid?
Um, ‘cause we’re getting money to do a record that is free. It’s just a promotional record. That’s—it almost doesn’t seem like a proper release.
Why doesn’t it seem like a proper release?
Because the record’s free. The record is free and it’s not put out by a record label, it’s not put out by ourselves.
Well, it’s 2011, so does a record have to go through traditional channels in order to be taken seriously?
I think so. I mean, I don’t take any sort of promotional CD that I see at a record store or that someone’s giving away seriously at all. It’s almost as if, because it’s free, it’s not very serious, you know? I dunno. Does that make sense?
Sort of. I know what you mean, getting a promo item and just assuming that it’s garbage … but that whole release isn’t necessarily free; it’s just that version of it that you got.
Yeah, exactly.
And something being free is just a function of how much money whoever’s putting it out has, right? If they can afford to put it out for free and eat it, then they can, right?
Yeah, that’s true.
So a music product gains validity if it’s part of a “capitalist exchange”?
I wouldn’t say that in all instances it does. I would say that for me personally, I would take a record someone gave me less seriously than a record that I bought. But with that being said, this concept of having a record that we put out given away for free is very new to me, and it’s kind of given me a new … a new way of looking at it, I guess. I’m happy that I’m able to give away my music away to other people for free. And I’m happy that what we’re giving away is quality. It’s not like some garbage songs we threw together on a record.
Well, it sounds like not that you’re contradicting yourself, but you’re saying two different things. You like being able to give your music away for free—and you emphasized that it’s free in your statement of why you did the record, which I want to get to—but at the same time, you think the whole thing is stupid, and if you were on the receiving end of such a record, you wouldn’t take it seriously.
Yeah. I guess being on the end of the person who’s behind the music, I feel like I can [pause] take it seriously, but it’s—I can’t say I would feel the same way if I was in someone else’s shoes. I mean, the whole thing is very strange to us, but on the flip side, like you were saying, we were able to use this recording that we got for free, and kind of turn it into a legitimate release* with labels that our friends run and that we actually do care about, you know?
So if Scion charged for this record, would you feel different about it?
Yeah, I think so. It almost feels like the record [pause] is just a handout, as opposed to, if they charged for it, it was something that they would actually have to push to get rid of, you know what I’m saying? Whereas, with this record, they’re giving away a fucking box of these things to, like, said record label, and those people are just giving it away with their releases. So people don’t really have to try to get the record.
Well, it seems that it’s getting pushed, because Scion wants it to be downloaded, right? I mean, it’s out there online and it’s in magazines and so on.
That’s true, but I feel like that’s not a really hard thing to do. It’s easy to upload music to the internet and share a link to a million different people.
So if it’s not that valid of a release—even though you want to take it seriously, on the inside looking out—because it’s free, why’d you do it?
Well, I mean, we definitely did it because we were able to get a free recording. First and foremost, they offered us money to pay for a recording. In turn we were able to pay our friend a lot more than he would normally charge to record it, so we were helping him out. And the plan all along was to use the recording for what I was explaining before, what I felt like a legitimate release was.
Take the same recording, put a different cover on it—a free record—and charge for it.
[laughs] It wasn’t necessarily that we were, like, “Alright, we’re gonna use this recording and then we’re gonna have two copies out, and then people are gonna—even though they have it already—they’re gonna buy it again.” It was more like, we wanna use this recording, so after doing whatever we have to do with Scion as part of our agreement, we’re able to put out a legitimate record.
Why would you expect anybody to buy it when it was free, just because it’s got a different cover on it and somebody else besides Scion is putting it out?
Well, one, the Scion release is not available outside of the U.S., so our friends in Europe or South America or Japan or whatever can’t get the record, period … They can’t get a physical copy of the record. They can download it for sure. And even if no one, or less people, bought it ‘cause it was previously released as free, we would be more satisfied having a [pause] legitimate release version of it. Even the CD version doesn’t come with lyrics. It’s just a fuckin’ cardboard flap. It’s like a true promo.
You could have put that time into getting a cover that you really wanted, because you knew it was gonna come out on vinyl with an insert—setting aside the cardboard flap CD version—but you didn’t because it was gonna be free and you couldn’t get behind it.
Well, not just the fact that it was free, but because Scion was putting it out. The idea of this car company putting out our record just seems like a joke. [laughs] I mean, doesn’t it, when you think about it? Crazier things have happened for sure, but …
I think it’s odd, but—well, we could get into that statement that you guys put out at this point. You emphasized how cool the idea was, because #1, it was free, and #2, Scion’s really into this kind of music because they keep putting on these free festivals every year, so this is just great that you guys are doing this. So you didn’t say anything in your statement about how it was a joke, or this wasn’t legitimate.
Yeah, it seems [pause] when I say I think it’s not a legitimate release, what I’m meaning is that it seems less legitimate. Obviously it’s a record, it exists, it has the music that we still love on it or whatever, but, I dunno [long pause] it is cool that they offered to do this and they’re offering to put out this record, distribute it, whatever, but for us [pause] we wanna share this music with as many people as possible, so the idea of it only being available in the U.S. and the idea of it being completely free is—I guess that’s what I mean by it being strange or kind of a joke.
You didn’t show that you had mixed feelings on it in your explanation that you pushed out online about why you’re doing it. You were backing it 100% with your statement. I assumed that the statement was a response to all the shit you guys were getting online on it, part of which stemming from you doing a record put out by a car company. So I guess at the end of the day, we were talking before about how you don’t feel a record’s as legitimate if it’s not put out in a traditional way, if it’s not put out by a record label that’s charging for it because they have bills to pay and they can’t put it out for free. But if the music’s good, and somebody can get it without paying for it, what’s the issue?
That itself is not an issue. I guess it’s more of the aesthetic of the record being the way it looks or the way it’s packaged … one of the stipulations to the record being put out was that the Scion logo was on it, which is whatever, you know?
You figure if they’re putting a record out for free, they can put their logo on it.
Yeah, absolutely.
But as far as the vinyl looking the way it does, you guys did the cover art for it.
The cover art for the vinyl is exactly like the CD.
We’ve already talked about how you’re not into the package for the CD, so the package for the vinyl’s more acceptable.
The only thing that different is the vinyl having the insert.
Well, it’s got a normal package for vinyl, right? It’s got the cardboard sleeve, the record’s in it, and it’s got an insert, so there’s nothing unusual about that. It’s just that the label—we’ll call Scion the label for the moment—the label that put the record out has their logo on the front of it instead of in the back in the corner. Other than that, you could just say it’s exactly like any other record that’s come out on any label that would put out a 12”.
Well, that and the fact that it says “for promotional use only.”
That’s an industry thing so people don’t try to charge for it, right?
Yeah.
Well, that’s good.
Didn’t they also used to cut the corners of the records too, to indicate that it was for promotional use only? We shoulda asked them to do that. [laughs]
Like I said, the concept is weird, and I’m still on the fence on how I feel about it. We would rather the Euro-version with the artwork we intended for the record be the record that is in people’s record collections. I guess I would also say that it was one of those things where, yeah, we might not have been 100% confident about it when we agreed to do it, but if we didn’t agree to do it, the opportunity could have passed us up, so we just went and did it.
When they came to you and said they wanted to do this, did they present it as, “We’re gonna start putting out a bunch of metal records, and we want this to be the first one”?
Yeah, they did.
That sounds like they’re trying to be a label.
Yeah.
So is it just lame that you’re the first one and you have to deal with it?
Yeah …
I think I referenced this when I first started talking to you about this whole thing. J.R. Hayes had this great quote, the first time I interviewed Pig Destroyer [D.U. # 21]—and it’s not like he’s Socrates or anything; it just sums it all up—he said hardcore sounds the same no matter who puts it out.
That’s true. I do agree with that. Like I said before, the fact that Scion put it out doesn’t give the actual music a different meaning or anything. It’s the same whether the art is different or not. It’s just as far as us being completely satisfied with it, it needs to be the whole package. We need to be—the aesthetic of the record needs to be us. The cover of the Scion record is not our aesthetic, you know? It’s just something that was thrown together for this record.
Part of what you’re saying the limitation of this record is, you put on it consciously.
Yeah, definitely.
This might be a good place to bring up the huge backlash you guys got about working with Scion, and there’s a couple different ways to look at this. Obviously it was enough of a backlash for you guys to feel the need to put out a public statement on it, so why did you had to explain yourself? Because there was such a fuckin’ shitstorm about it?
That, and I feel a lot of people got the impression that, post-this record coming out, Magrudergrind itself was consumed by this corporate entity, and that we weren’t ourselves anymore. Like we had just transformed into whatever, you know?
Into what?
Into whatever someone’s typical idea of what a band selling out is.
Things can be done differently now and things are done differently now. But we keep coming back to that whole notion again of what selling out is, which is different to different people.
I think what a lot of people don’t realize is that, if anything, we’re losing money off of this, because, yeah, alright, they gave us money to record this record, but a lot of labels give bands money to record a record. And a good thing about having a new record when you’re on tour is that you’re able to sell the record and use that money to put into your gas tank, or use that money to buy more merch or to buy food or to do whatever, van maintenance. But we literally have a record that we can’t sell while we’re on tour, and we’re not making money off of it. It’s not like we’re getting a royalties check for this record being out.
What does that make you? Does that make you more, what?
I don’t think it makes us more anything. I just think it’s something I think a lot of people don’t realize. People have this notion that, we did this thing with Scion, we must be getting paid so much money to do it.
But that naturally makes me ask the question, what difference does it make?
Between putting this out and getting a lot of money and putting it out and not getting a lot of money?
Or not getting any money.
I mean, the difference is that [pause] we’re taking a loss in many ways for this record coming out. One, obviously we’re not making a lot of money off of it. Two, because of this record, there’s this backlash of people that thinks that we’re changed somehow because the record’s come out.
Well, that’s not gonna make anyone’s opinion change, right? ‘Cause their problem is that you did it on Scion, and whether you made money on it or not, it still doesn’t change the fact that you did it on Scion. Or is part of what they’re saying is that you can take champagne baths and shit now?
I think that’s the feeling a lot of people have, for sure.
Well, what difference does it make if you can?
I don’t think that there is a difference. Personally, I would say I’d be lying if I didn’t care what people think, because to a certain degree it is important to me. But at the same time, if people don’t wanna listen to us anymore because we did this record with Scion, they can fuck off, because they probably were never truly into us to begin with. And that’s fine. This music wasn’t meant to appeal to people. We wrote this music for ourselves, and it’s stuff that we like. We’re not formulating our songs to appeal to a certain crowd or to ignite the next mosh pit. [laughs]
I guarantee you, a lot of those people that are taking shit on it have gone to a Scion show or did download the record, but people’s voices are a lot bigger when they’re behind a computer than in real life. I guarantee most of those people won’t say anything to us in person.
So are those people the ones that you’re trying to put minds at ease with? Or are you trying to put people’s minds at ease that genuinely like Magrudergrind? I’m trying to find the balance between, “You can fuck off and you’re a hypocrite” and “We don’t want you to get the wrong impression about what our motivations are or what kind of a band we still are, having worked with Scion.”
I don’t know necessarily if the statement was just to put people’s minds at ease. It was just more to let people know what our motivations for putting out the record were.
It’s almost got a defensive position in it.
Yeah, that’s definitely true.
Would you call it damage control?
No, I guess not, because, I mean, the damage is done. [laughs] I don’t think it’s really gonna do anything.
Like I was saying, it’s weird for sure. But I’m happy it came out, I’m happy that we’re able to put it out on these two Euro labels, and I’m also stoked at the idea of someone possibly picking up a Magrudergrind record that wouldn’t normally pick up a Magrudergrind record ‘cause it’s fuckin’ free. That’s cool. Even if it ends up in trash cans or whatever, that’s no real sweat off our backs, ‘cause we’re not paying for it. ■
Photos: dining Ethiopian with Chris Moore for the first part of our interview (top); Chris preparing dinner for interview part two (bottom)
*“Turn it into a legitimate release” refers to the repackaging of the recording and re-release on CD by RSR and on vinyl by Bones Brigade/ Kaotoxin.
