A Quote by Jonathan Levine
Zombies have always had a lot of built-in social commentary.
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I don't profess to be a political rapper, like groups such as 'Dead Prez' or 'Public Enemy', but I think social commentary should make its way into your music. Speaking on your neighbourhood is social commentary - what happens, what's going on.
I felt I had an opportunity to follow in the footsteps of great soul musicians of the past, who made a lot of social and political commentary through their music.
There are always going to be critics... and I have always had a rule: no matter how good the commentary is, or how bad the commentary is, it's more important that you do what you think is right.
To me, the zombies have always just been zombies. They've always been a cigar. When I first made 'Night of the Living Dead,' it got analyzed and overanalyzed way out of proportion. The zombies were written about as if they represented Nixon's Silent Majority or whatever. But I never thought about it that way.
There were a lot of times where I didn't get any shows and even until recently got a lot of kind of negative commentary from social media about my runway walk.
I also have always liked the monster within idea. I like the zombies being us. Zombies are the blue-collar monsters.
Remember all of the 'me too' social networks built just to have a social feature Facebook and MySpace didn't have? I built one for political discussion called Essembly. It enabled unique and potentially transformative social interactions, but only 20,000 people ever used it.
Zombies are so popular. There's a lot of chaff out there. For every one person who is legitimately passionate about zombies, there are a hundred people who are thinking, 'Hey, I can make a buck off of this.' The problem is that some of their stuff is so lame.
If you look at zombie movies throughout history, they're always making adjustments. Even the idea of the virus zombies and the back-from-the-dead zombies... there's been tons of tweaks.
The worst part about zombies raging unchecked is the slow paralysis that they induce in people who aren't quite zombies yet. The rest of us un-zombies turn our heads, hoping the ghouls will just go away.
Since zombies are not fully dead, they upset the essential balance of nature: no animals eat zombies, apparently, and zombies do not seem to decay, at least, not to the point of disintegration and reintegration back into the soil, so the food chain, or the circle of life, seems to end or be short-circuited by their existence. Zombies fulfill the worst potentialities of humans to create a hellish kingdom on earth of endless, sterile repetition and boredom.
I quickly decided my zombies weren't really zombies. It was instead something you called people who were on this club drug, who then exhibited aggressive behaviors. And then like everyone who writes about zombies, I found it was so much fun.
I think the world's big enough for all kinds of zombies. You can have yours and I can have mine. I think by going with slow zombies I maybe have been asserting my own kind of zombie snobbery, but I don't begrudge the youngsters their tackling, running, jumping zombies.
I had made all these rules for myself: I'm not writing social commentary, I'm not writing love songs.
We've done a zombie episode - only one - and the way we look at it as is we understand that there probably aren't zombies out there for real, but there's a lot of interesting stuff we can test about them. We've tested how bodies of zombies pressing against a gate, would they push it through and things like that.
As a child I always had a sense of social conditions and political situations. I think it had to do with the fact that my mother was always discussing things with my sister and me - also because I read a lot.
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