In praise of self-indulgence
Friday, June 8, 2007
Omar Rodriguez-Lopez of The Mars Volta puts the punk back in prog while following his muse
By Jake TenPas
The Entertainer
Progressive rock is the new punk rock. Yes, you heard that right.
When punk bands such as The Ramones and The Sex Pistols came on the scene in the mid- to late-’70s, the music was a sped-up, no frills reaction to and rebellion against the studio wizardry of Steely Dan, the long, glossy epics of Pink Floyd and the self-consciously intricate instrumental passages and softened production values of groups ranging from Genesis to Fleetwood Mac. The short, simple song killed the long complex one, and the formulaic music of the ’80s was born out of its well-intentioned reductionism.
But we live in a very different world now, one where the dumbed-down three- to four-minute pop song has become the rule on the radio, as well as video channels, and where groups attempting to replicate the sounds of punk rock reinforce the status quo with every calculated sneer. We live in a world where long, complex songs are shunned in favor of disposable pop music made by disposable people that we gladly ridicule in the tabloids once we’ve made use of them.
The only form of rebellion left to us is to think big, to dream big, to play big. When people talk about progressive rock, they refer to an era in the ’70s, when keyboards and costumes and odd time signatures ruled, but much like punk rock, which is now meaningless as a term, progressive rock could now refer to much of the adventurous underground music that is being made in opposition to the wishes and playlists of the corporate jukeboxes that are often mainstream society’s only options.
That’s where Omar Rodriguez-Lopez comes in. The multi-instrumentalist and songwriter who, along with vocalist Cedric Bixler Zavala, left cult punk band At The Drive-In to form The Mars Volta in 2001, has been accused by some critics of being self-indulgent, of ruining music with his long, creative, unapologetically intellectual songs. But in an age of musicians trying with every synthetic fiber of their beings to imitate the latest radio hit and appeal to the masses, what could be more rebellious than looking within for inspiration?
The Mars Volta has released a series of concept albums to mixed critical response, but through it all, they’ve built a legion of followers starving for music as full of possibility for creative storytelling and musical exploration as the music of the late ’60s and early ’70s. Their live shows are legendary, mixing the band’s hard-rocking, multi-part suites with passages of wild improvisation.
This isn’t the music of yesteryear, however, as Rodriguez-Lopez’s latest solo album, “Se Dice Bisonte, No Bufalo” proves without a doubt. Throwing everything from classic funk to guitar heroics to manic tempos to free-jazz solos to spacey psychedelia into the mix, it continues the best elements of The Mars Volta’s vision while managing to find a greater range of emotion than ever before.
In anticipation of its release a few weeks back, I talked via phone with Rodriguez-Lopez:
Jake TenPas: Your albums tend to have long titles, as do your songs, which often have long running times. You’ve got a long name, as does your partner in Mars Volta, Cedric Bixler Zavala. Is everything you do a reaction, even subconsciously, to the short attention spans of our modern culture?
Omar Rodriguez-Lopez: I’m a long-winded speaker when I speak with my friends, with people when I’m trying to communicate my ideas, so my songs are going to be long-winded, my titles are going to be long-winded. I’m a packrat. I collect things. I like a collection of things. I like putting words together. I like putting images together. I just have more fun that way. I think it’s also a matter of circumstance. I’ve been making music or recordings for almost 17 years, so you start off at one place — I came from punk rock, which is two-minute songs, one-syllable titles — and you kind of evolve from there and you do things for years and years and years and then you grow out of it and you get tired of things and you just try to explore. It’s no doubt to me that sometime, by the same process, I’ll get bored of long songs and long titles and revert back to where I came from.
JT: Given the ongoing trend of short, simple pop songs, do you see your long-form music as a rebellion against the status quo in the same way punk rock was a rebellion against the longer, more-polished songs popular at that time?
ORL: It’s not a conscious thing. What you’re saying makes sense simply in that we have so many people who dislike us because of what we’re doing. Instead of leaving us alone and letting us do our thing, people are very vocal about how what we’re doing is wrong, or I meet people — the little I go out — I meet people who will come up to me and go, “You guys are ruining music.” I don’t really understand it. There does seem to be a lot of anger against our band or just my particular way of doing things. Maybe it does seem like we’re an aggressive force against mainstream culture right now. I’m fine with it. We’re just another option. It’s sad that we’re over-saturated with it. It’s sad that for a child or a kid just getting into music, that that’s the most he or she can be exposed to: these three-minute jingles, these condensed versions of songs. But at the same time, three-minute songs have their place also. For that to be the entire spectrum of the musical experience would be pretty sad.
JT: Do you feel like you have the power within the industry to be shaping musical trends, much less “ruining” it?
ORL: Not at all. That’s why I don’t understand the anger directed at us by people or by writers. If you don’t like something, you simply put it down. I’m not going to spend my time writing a full five-page article about something I don’t like.
JT: Self-indulgent seems to be a catch-phrase that some critics use to dismiss imaginative, maverick music. For you, what defines self-indulgence?
ORL: Music is my outlet. It’s one of the only things that I do good. If I’m expressing myself, I’m talking about things, I’m trying to paint things that come from the inside. That’s coming from me. I’m making the music. I am expressing myself. So when they started hitting us with the word “self-indulgent,” I had to stop and think about it. I was like, “OK, yes, it’s self-indulgent. I am writing the songs, and they are coming from me, and I’m making them the way I want to, and I’m saying things I want to say, and when I say them, I feel better. I’m not really thinking about whether you feel better or he feels better or she feels better, so OK, fine.” Then I accepted the word “self-indulgent,” and I said, “If that’s what you’re going to tie me with then definitely, I am very self-indulgent.” I love what I’m doing. I love making music. I love sharing it with my friends. I love sharing it with anyone who cares to listen. So therefore I am indulging in the self.
JT: What’s the significance of the title of your new album, “Se Dice Bisonte, No Bufalo”?
ORL: The record I made simultaneously to working on “Amputechture” and also another record for a film from Mexico by the writer Guillermo Arriaga, who did “21 Grams” and “Babel” and “Amores Peros.” I was working with him on his newest film, and this record is a reaction to that. This was the first time that I let myself be directed by someone else and kind of worked for someone and had to show someone my music and go, “Does this work? How should I change it?” It was a big growing experience for me to do something that was out of my world and answer to someone else when creating music. ... The title was a play on his film, which was taken from one of his novels, which is called “El Bufalo de la Noche,” the night buffalo. My record simply says, “Oh, you say bisonte, you don’t say buffalo.” It’s just sort of a joke between us. It’s about the fun we had getting to the place to make the music for the movie.
JT: Did that process shape the material that you brought to the new album, as well?
ORL: It helped me explore a more minimal side of what I was doing. When I first started making music for Guillermo and Jorge (Hernandez, the director of the film), I tended to do what I do with my Mars Volta music. I started to add things, to add instrumentation and all these different melodies going on, and right away they were like, “We love this, this is why we called you, but this is a different medium. This is too much. We need you to strip it down, we need you to bring it back and not have so much going on, but still have the same type of power.” It took me awhile to really understand that and get to that place. ... When I got to the place they wanted me to get to, it was really exciting and it made the headache of it really worthwhile. ... As a result, this record is a lot more minimal than other things I’ve put my time and energy into, and I really ended up liking it. It’s something that I want to develop a little bit more to balance out what I normally do, putting 96 tracks on one song and whatnot.
JT: You said this is the first time you’ve had to shape your music to somebody else’s whims. How have you been able to maintain that freedom throughout your career, and has it made your journey through the industry more difficult because you had that commitment to doing things your own way?
OLP: I guess it has, I’ve never realized it as such until I look back retrospectively at everything. Why I’ve been able to do it is because I never imagined in a million years that I would even be able to say that I had a career or that music was a career or that I would be doing this for a living. This sort of just evolved day by day from a guy who just sat in his room all the time instead of going to parties, recording on a four-track machine, and who didn’t graduate from high school and who ditched with his friends and f—cked up everywhere else in life just so that we could record songs and play music together. At some point it was like, OK let’s get out of El Paso and buy that $700 van, and we started touring around the country and making our own records. It all just happened very organically. There was never aspiration there besides “Let’s play music, and how do we do that?” ... It was all indie-labels at first, so no one tampered with us anyway, so by the time that we were even a success or that I realized we had a career in music, in the last few years of At The Drive-In being really popular and the major label coming, there had never been anyone to say, “We want to tamper with what you’re doing.” ... When I started The Mars Volta, it was pretty much the same thing. For the first two years, I did everything myself. I put together our tours, I recorded our records, I pressed our records. We existed independently for a while until I had exhausted my At The Drive-In Money and was pretty much broke, and then went and signed a deal. Again, it was with the understanding that, look, we’re doing our thing. Leave us alone. We’ll turn in a record. You go out and sell it. We’ll do our interviews. We’ll behave like good little boys, and if we can keep this kind of relationship, we’ll be cool. Just remember, we don’t need to be here. It’s not about fame. It’s not about money. I left a very successful band and broke it up to go be in a van again and start from scratch because the point is not success or money. The point is something that makes me happy, something that’s exciting. ... We want to do what we’ve always done as kids. We want to hang out with each other. We want to explore ideas, and we want to take it wherever we can take it until one of us gets bored.
To hear a podcast of the second half of this interview, go to
www.gazettetimes.com and click on the GT to Go logo.
Check it Out
“Se Dice Bisonte, No Bufalo” by Omar Rodriguez-Lopez is available now at Happy Trails Records and other fine retail outlets. His soundtrack to “El Bufalo de la Noche” will be available soon. “Amputechture,” “Frances the Mute” and “Deloused in the Comatorium” by The Mars Volta are also available. For more information, go to
www.themarsvolta.com.
