For the next few weeks leading up to the release of Beyond Inversion, weâll be posting short interviews with the bands on the comp. Today we talk to Bad News
1. Why was being a part of this comp important to you?
Washington DC was one of our favorite shows on our tour this last summer. The enthusiasm and support was really appreciated. We had a bummer show the night before and it got morale back up. There are lots of great people there and we're happy to contribute.
The Bay Area, San Francisco in particular, is a wreck right now. There's another huge tech bubble fueling a completely untenable real estate bubble. People are being pushed out of their homes by landlords trying to cash in and speculators snapping up what they can at incredibly high prices. SROs are being turned into condos. More people are ending up the streets. People are increasingly desperate, crime is rising in some neighborhoods. Non-profits that act as support structures are getting edged out as rents skyrocket. The minimum wage here is high but doesn't even remotely cover cost of living. If it weren't for tenants staying put in existing rent-controlled housing the working class would practically disappear but, still, state law gives landlords an 'out' to evict people from these rent-controlled properties. The local government and tech industry shows zero social conscience and behaves as if they want to eradicate everyone making under 100k from city limits. SF just decided to close down city parks after midnight, a move that specifically targets and displaces people who rely on them to sleep and live in. Oakland is changing rapidly by the trickle-down. Never-mind the country's problems.
It's important for everyone, artists and musicians included, to acknowledge and assess their complicity in changing the communities they live in and what of actual value they can give their neighbors. Boutiques, cafes, loca-vore-whatever restaurants, galleries that exclude the people they set up shop next to it ain't. Redirect spending to legacy neighborhood businesses of local ownership, support nonprofits doing good work, etc.
I don't have a predilection towards activism and am generally cynical but things are pretty fucked, everywhere. It's been on my mind.
Rachael's may not work with folks directly in our backyard but they deserve support, of course. It'd be nice if Beyond Inversion and projects like it inspire similar work and keep the ball rolling.
2. Tell us a little bit about the song. What itâs about etc?
Bad News might be the odd band out on the comp: I guess we're an electronic band that has guitars and songs. Sarah and I are both from noise backgrounds and are big on performance and physicality so there's a commonality there. The last band of Sarah's that she toured with, Work, was way more in the punk zone.Â
I think Sarah's lyrics are pretty direct on this one. She's off somewhere remote without much access or she'd say something. This version's a weird 'remix'.
I wanted to have some friends of Bad News play on it, ultimately it ended up being our friend Greer on bass. She's a neighbor and is similarly stubbornly staying in SF, for now. Greer's bass line is completely unlike anything Sarah or I would come up with on our own and sidesteps the "industrial" tag a bit, or at least brings it back to when the genre was more about subversion and weird experimentalism. Dreams Less Sweet was practically a Beach Boys record, after all. Inadvertently this remix ended up more fluid and less rigid than our other recorded material, it might bug some people on both ends of the spectrum. I like it.
3. What are some of your favorite comps?
"If You Can't Please Yourself You Can't, Please Your Soul" really got me at a youngish age. "Wild Dub: Dread Meets Punk Rocker" was a CD comp of old punk/post-punk dub mixes that I listened to a ton years ago, I guess this mix sort of calls back to that. I have a weird archivist sensibility so comps like Messthetics and other Hyped To Death stuff appeal to me.
4. Anything else youâd like to add?
Appreciate being asked to participate! I hope the comp gets out there, it's looking great.