Questions about the Music Industry

Why do you think the music industry has shifted towards more generic manufactured bands?

The industry learns lessons as it grows, it learnt from punk and from hip-hop, learnt how it could restrict weirdness and dissent within its ranks. Get the puppets in. Market-test everything. Control the media. Repeat the mantra, "Music is a business, not an art." If the kids pick up on something that isn't manufactured... either strangle it at birth or create a hundred manufactured imitations with all the style but none of the content. Kids are being taught that rocknroll/pop is a career, not an artistic and creative labour of love. 99% of them will fail and end up in crap jobs and on anti-depressants. The bosses and producers will continue to get richer. For this role-modelling alone, Pete Waterman ought to be publicly hung. I keep reading that something's going to come along in the music scene and blow away all this stage-school crap, and I'm one part enthusiastic, hopeful, and one part cynical and worried. Then there's all the evidence about the spending power of culture shifting downwards to younger and younger people. The teenies are the powerful market-manipulators now. There's more of them, so the companies have to create product which looks and sounds like cartoon comic throwaway disposable wrappers. And y'know, I think most days that bands like Slipknot and Marilyn Manson are as manufactured as the teen bands. When I'm in a cynical mood. Everything falls into plan, here's the market, fill it's objectives, give the young boys that teen-angst-parent-rebellion that they want.

I wonder do you ever feel exploited by the media."The poster children for pop anarchism"... because it seems to me that the magazines play it up so much, it almost down-plays your message. I think that it is great you are in the limelight and being honest and political; I just wonder how you as an artist feel the ghettoisation through the media affects your message?

We accept that the way pop culture/the media functions is to concentrate on minutia and personalities. We (Chumbawamba) read most of the crap pop culture mags and collect up all the trivial little tit bits on other bands. Somewhere we have a list telling you the contents of Elvis's stomach the night he died, we have pictures of Noel's Supernova Heights and laugh at Prodigy's Keith Flint buying a suit of armour. It's the trivial little details which tell you what's really going on rather than the sycophantic interviews. Popstars let the media into their homes to buy their way into the hall of fame. They discuss their love lives and trade privacy for record sales. Chumbawamba rarely give the press personal details. There's a long line of Noels and Keiths and Jamiroquis and we don't want to join it. We try and push ideas at them rather than colour schemes and relationship details. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. There's so little honesty and integrity within pop culture that we sometimes feel that it's our job to be a bullshit detector and subversive voice; trying to do that means that half the time they paint you as a cartoon character. If you're not turning up at pop star parties or showing them round your home you must be a humourless bastard. The main thing is to have a go. We come across so few voices that aren't just obsessed with themselves and their careers. We see it as stealing time and column inches away from the bland and the right-wing. Having said that, there are bands like Asian Dub Foundation around who don't play popstar games. Their work on the Free Satpal Ram Campaign, for instance, means that the press can't pretend that they don't have a political agenda. I've never seen pictures of Asian Dub Foundation's bathrooms. I don't know how people take what we say. We try our best to be clear and coherent and that's all we can do really. I think it would be unhealthy to sit around fretting about how you're 'coming across' . We discuss what we think as a band before we talk to the press. That makes it much easier to be articulate because there are seven other people thinking for you.

Do you view pop music and culture as a way to assault the masses: candy-coat the medicine?

Pop culture is a tool that can be used to make people consider revolution as an acceptable, even desirable option. Kids now don't join political groups, they get immersed in pop culture and channel their rebellion into that. We'd be foolish not to recognise the importance of pop culture. But I have problems when I hear words like "the masses". The person using it usually thinks they belong to some sort of elite. I'm part of the masses. Liking pop music doesn't mean that someone is stupid or complacent.