A Quote by Mat McNerney
Before the 90s, black metal wasn't a selling tool [and didn't] have money behind it. Then it became a pop sensation. Now that the record industry has collapsed and started to rot, things are livening up a bit again.
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The industrial thing came about mainly through giving up trying to write pop songs in the early '90s. I don't think I was ever very good at pop music and as soon as I stopped trying, and started to write more the things I loved, it became much heavier and more aggressive.
I was in bands all through my youth. Things started out more acoustic and then piano ballads. Then R&B followed by sappy pop music and then rock, punk and heavy metal.
The Pandoras began as a '60s punk group. Then they went pop, then metal. When they went metal, I quit because I hate heavy metal music and I wanted to write my own songs.
[Jack Johnson] became a superstar and started his own record label, and then he made and produced my first record, he co-wrote the songs on there, and then he let me open up for him for two years all around the world. And that was like the best start I could've had, the best way I could've started in the music scene.
All the big pop acts that I've been into over the years - whether it's ABBA or Prince - managed to combine amazing melodies and honest human emotion. But coming out of the super-super-commerical pop industry in the 90s, maybe people forgot about the fact that pop music can do both of those things.
What the entertainment industry can do is tempt you into making stupid mistakes, but the only tool that they have to tempt you is money. So if youre okay saying no to money, then you can say no to a lot of things that you might be embarrassed of later.
Black metal - especially from the '90s - contains a certain production aesthetic that keys you into the emotive content. You feel it more intimately than, say, technical death metal, where everything is produced super-precisely.
I knew very well that I could not stay. Everything collapsed. Everything in my life just collapsed, and it started with the kidnapping of three teenaged settlers and then judging the life - the young Palestinian from Jerusalem. That was the day that I decided that I have to go now.
I started selling corn dogs, ended up in the music industry. That's how it all started.
I grew up in the '80s, when breaking was cool, and then it got corny in the '90s, and it became cool again with all these choreographed B-Boy dance crews.
Having money hasn't changed me. If anything it's made my life worse. People come up to you who knew you before you were famous and who didn't come up to you before. I'm a clever designer. I can do what the client wants. But I'm prepared to forget about money if it affects my creativity because, remember, I started off with nothing. And I can do that again.
Starship was a whole different thing. It was pop rock. It made more money and had more hit songs than Airplane. There was no cultural or social ethic behind it. For me, it was like selling out. I was the only one selling out. The rest enjoyed doing what they were doing.
I guess even the prettiest things eventually end up stinking. Everything does. We all will die and rot and decay and be reborn as dirt or flowers or worms, or polar bears who will drown because their ice is all melting, or presidents of war-torn countries, or whales swimming around acidifying seas. And then we will rot and decay again. And so it goes.
And once the music is out there, when you're selling a record and selling music and people are going to do whatever they want with it, it's kind of hard to resist certain opportunities, especially in the record market now.
When we started out, we were among the first. Beijing had no and Shanghai had very few large buildings. At that time, it was all about building, building, building - and then selling, selling, selling. We were working like a manufacturer. Soon, however, we realized that land was running out in Beijing and Shanghai. So we started keeping our buildings, and managing and renting them out. We became landowners. That was the second act.
I started doing drag in Seattle because I started doing my column before I moved here, and then moved here and wanted to be able to go out and do things as Dan Savage without being recognized the next day, because the column was just in Seattle and it was kind of a sensation and I was beating people up. I was really worried and I didn't want to beat somebody up in a column and have that person know what I look like when I didn't know what they looked like.
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