When TV on the Radio frontman Tunde Adebimpe made a passing comment about the band "taking about a year off" in September 2009, it made people wonder: Was one of the most potent art-rock groups of the past 10 years headed toward an early retirement? Hardly. The planned 12-month break actually only lasted about half that long-- in March 2010, the quintet started working on their just-released fourth album, Nine Types of Light.
In late March of this year, I met with Adebimpe, singer-guitarist Kyp Malone, and multi-instrumentalist Jaleel Bunton in a casually classy spot in South Williamsburg aptly dubbed the Rabbithole, just blocks away from where TVOTR started out a decade ago. They recorded most of Nine Types of Light in L.A., but they're still a decidedly New York band-- aside from producer-guitarist Dave Sitek, who has moved out West, everyone in TVOTR still calls Brooklyn home. In person, the t-shirted Malone and the shirt-and-tied Adebimpe have a warm, odd-couple chemistry; Malone is loose and flighty while Adebimpe gently nudges him back to earth. And while they're known for making seriously roiling music about the end of the world, these guys are not afraid of a few jokes or even making up goofy songs on the spot.
Over a late lunch, we talkedabout the new record, bad sex, alcoholic clowns, Brooklyn's evolution, smelly paparazzi, and what it means to be a political band in the Age of Obama.
__Click below to watch the hour-long Nine Types of Light film, which features music videos for every song on the album. And click subsequent screen shots to check out individual videos, too:
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Pitchfork: Why did you guys decide to take a break in 2009?
Tunde Adebimpe: The Dear Science tour was long and it came after about seven years of putting out records and going on the road-- we couldn't move forward without it turning into a bloodbath. [laughs] Your bad time is not necessarily anyone else's fault but, unless you're a part of a nomadic tribe, you're not really supposed to be travelling in such close quarters. So it was nice to think that we were taking a break to relax for a second and refresh everything. Touring is really a weird social experiment, even though everyone thinks it's a party every day.
Kyp Malone: What a terrible party. I wish the alcohol would run out. [laughs]
Pitchfork: Was there a time when you guys were more into that sex, drugs, and rock'n'roll lifestyle?
TA: As a band, around 2006-2007 was the beginning, peak, and end of feeling like that type of thing was any fun. [laughs] It's insane when someone shows up to your show and is like, "You could run off with me right now!" I'm like, "It's cool, I think I'm gonna go read." We have a friend who has suggested doing some really horrible rock'n'roll indulgences as a gag. But even that's unacceptable and would come back to haunt you in so many ways. There's something about this experience that makes you not want to do anything too stupid or tweet-able.
KM: There were certainly wasted years earlier-- my sex, drugs, and no-responsibility days happened when I was working at a used bookstore. But it's different when it's your job to be in a bar or a club every night.
Pitchfork: Well, you don't seem like guys who got into music for the parties, anyway.
KM: No, but you get so bored. [laughs] We're not supposed to talk about this sort of thing, but, one time, I was going for it. I ran into an old lover or someone followed us somewhere, and I was like, "Maybe I'm just gonna try to get laid this tour." But then, like halfway through it, I felt so empty and tired. It was like this closed situation where you have so many hours in a night in this city and you're like, "What's the easiest target?" It gets fucking dark. [laughs]
TA: It's such a hardcore decrescendo from a show. One second you're having the time of your life in front of all these people, and then you come backstage to the exact opposite-- there's only lukewarm carrots back there. You turn into this desperate dude looking for a shred of attention when you just had so much. It's like, "I'm just lonely and all I really want is a hug, but I gotta capture that in something real gross." You start to understand why circus clowns are alcoholics. [laughs]
KM: They're not all alcoholics.
TA: The really good ones are!
"Caffeinated Consciousness" [Director: Tim Nackashi]
____Pitchfork: Nine Types of Light marks the first time you recorded in L.A. as a band. Do you feel like that change of scenery permeated the album at all?
TA: Ten years ago, I held quite a few edified cliches about L.A. that I have since abandoned. But the place that we were staying in while making this record-- a building called the Versailles, down the block from the Modern Institute of Plastic Surgery-- made all of that come rushing back. It was just a comedy of errors.
KM: It was at the edge of West Hollywood and the beginning of Beverly Hills, not very far from Rodeo Drive. Really great shopping. [laughs]
TA: That area is like the gate-mouth to all the TMZ stuff-- they were shooting two reality shows in different corners of a nearby café. In a way, being there made it easier to totally focus on the record. But we did make a friend at another coffee shop. The first time we were in there, she was like, "You guys from around here?" We told her we were from New York, and she whispered under her breath, "I hate it here. I want to kill myself." We were like, "OK! Keep the change!" [laughs]
Pitchfork: Did you see any decent celebrities while you were there, at least?
TA: We kept seeing [Quentin] Tarantino! We went to the opening night of Inception, and he was at the front of the line getting popcorn and then he just disappeared-- it was like he did a Jedi wave and went behind the popcorn counter. And I saw him get denied parking in front of one of those TMZ-type spots. When I first saw his car, I was like, "That looks like Bruce Lee's outfit!"
Jaleel Bunton: There's a weird values system there, and it's really unapologetic. Like, if you show up somewhere and your car isn't ridiculous and awesome, they are going to make fun of you. You're outnumbered, so you feel crazy, like, "Maybe I should dress up more and start plucking my eyebrows..." It was an alienation I haven't felt or cared about in a long time.
Like, I was at the gas station talking on my iPhone through the headphone thing like a douchebag, and this woman was looking at me and finally asked, "Do you need some money?" She thought I was crazy and homeless. I told her, "Yeah." [laughs] It wasn't fathomable that we could be anything but derelicts there.
Pitchfork: That's got to be something of a flip side to being in Brooklyn, where you guys are almost like local celebrities.
KM: Yeah, but it's not cool to care here.
TA: I feel like people just let each other live a little more in New York. When we were in L.A., we literally got pushed out of the way by these paparazzi, who ran down the street leaving the most intense wake of Axe Body Spray ever.
"Forgotten" [Director: Tunde Adebimpe]
Pitchfork: Brooklyn has changed a lot since TV on the Radio started 10 years ago. Like, when I interviewed Dave [Sitek] for Pitchfork last year, he told a story about how somebody was decapitated in front of your building in Williamsburg when you first moved there.
TA: No, well, someone did get killed in front of our building...
KM: ... he got his throat cut.
JB: He wasn't decapitated, he was assassinated. [laughs]
TA: The police knocked on our door and there were like 12 people staying over. I was like, "The jig is up!" [laughs] We figured out that the last people to come back to our apartment that night came in about half an hour before the guy had been killed. But that was a rare occurrence.
Pitchfork: Even so, I can't imagine that happening at all on those same streets now.
TA: Yeah, the place where the guy was killed is now a wine shop. And the building we recorded Young Liars in is now condo-fied.
KM: But I'm not sad that there aren't shootings where I used to live on South 3rd and Bedford; I'm not sad that you have to have to work a little harder to buy drugs now.
JB: The difference is this neighborhood is now full of rich people who have no qualms about admitting they're really rich. Back then, you had rich kids, but they lied about it. [laughs] Sometimes people romanticize what Williamsburg used to be but, for me personally, there were always great people and totally bullshit people here. I want to say that there's a conformity here that didn't exist before, but it's really just a different kind now.
"Second Song" [Director: Michael Please]
____Pitchfork: I was thinking about how James Murphy recently ended LCD Soundsystem because he feels like he's done all he needs to do with that band. Since you guys are from that same Williamsburg era, it made me wonder if you ever thought about putting a stop to the band after being around for this long.
KM: If we were cowards! [laughs]
TA: James Murphy, we're looking at you. [laughs]
KM: LCD might be done, but they're all musicians and they're going to keep making stuff. I think that's totally respectable. I don't think anyone in this band thought we were going to do this forever.
TA: We've had conversations about how much you can do without repeating yourself, and, if you're honest with yourself, it's not a whole bunch. When you think of a band like Can, they kept going because people were coming and going, and the idea of the band kept changing. Almost none of the bands that inspired me to make music are together anymore, and I'm actually glad that they're not. I have nothing against people getting their band back together, but the artists I love marked a time in my life, and to merge that time with now can be personally depressing.
KM: I think if we had it in us as a group to make yacht-buying songs, we might be happy repeating ourselves. [laughs]
JB: [huckster voice] "Sounds nice, I'll sing about it twice!"
KM: Even though situations and relationships can get boring, I still believe that there's potential. As long as I'm blessed and/or cursed to be alive, it's hard to see a time when I won't be making music. I mean, there are people older than my parents making great music right now.
JB: When I was young and first started playing guitar, guys like John Lee Hooker, Howlin' Wolf, and Skip James were my Bible. I was digging into eras and records that weren't always my own while also buying LL Cool J's album.
KM: It wasn't about skinny jeans.
TA: In terms of bands, I always think about the nine years between the Breeders' Last Splash and Title TK and how that time didn't make them any less fresh in my mind. I like the model of people getting together to make something when they want to do it and not being dictated to by a cycle.
"You" [Director: Barney Clay]
Pitchfork: This is the first TV on the Radio album where my favorite songs are the slower ones. And something like "You" is a relatively straightforward love song-- do you think that's something you wouldn't have been able to sing or write before?
TA: The weird thing about "You" is that when I first wrote it, I kept laughing at how the line "you're the only one I ever loved" is so ridiculous-- it's obviously the deranged song of someone who's telling themselves an absolute lie, like, "Believe me, there was no one else!" And the lines, "We demolished a thing or two/ But it seemed like the thing to do," are definitely coming from the person who fucked up the relationship. The other person probably doesn't think that, but the guy who's telling the story has the audacity to tell his side even though it's full of holes.
But, after going through it, I realized the song can be a very beautiful and very true sentiment for some people, too. The cynicism doesn't come across in the final; it can be taken as a very sincere plea for someone to not go away. Before, I may have gotten tied up sometimes, thinking, "I know what I want to say, but how is this going to be perceived?" But I just don't really care anymore; I can't be as self-conscious because it's a waste of energy. In the past, songwriting could be unnecessarily torturous at times, but right now it's not.
Pitchfork: Would you ever want to write songs for other people?
TA: It'd be fun. I actually keep hearing Stevie Wonder singing "You". I think it'd sound awesome.
"Killer Crane" [Directors: TV on the Radio and Dano Cerny]
Pitchfork: I was listening to your first album yesterday, and it's shocking how much cleaner Nine Types of Light and Dear Science sound in comparison.
KM: A lot of it was a learning curve for everyone in the band. I know there was a resurgence of lo-fi, reverb-y stuff recently, and I love that stuff. But after touring and playing way too fucking loudly for so long, I want to hear as many details as delicately executed as I possibly can; it's more about clarity now. I love recording on my Tascam four-track, but I'm a lot more excited about recording on Pro Tools with an HD rig. There are so many more possibilities.
TA: Oftentimes, when music is just blasting out it seems like it's overcompensating for something missing in the song's structure. When I think of the music that I listen to constantly, it's never like an assault.
KM: I played "Killer Crane" over the sound system at a bar in the neighborhood during a GQ interview-- Jessica Alba was in that magazine once, but they didn't give me her phone number. [laughs] Anyway, I played that song in this empty bar, and I think it's just fucking beautiful. And I don't usually feel free to say that about anything. It's a great feeling.
TA: I probably couldn't have the same experience listening to that song because I'm self-conscious about some of my singing parts. But I've been playing [the Kyp-sung track] "No Future Shock" probably two or three times a day.
KM: I've been watching edits of the "No Future Shock" video, and I have to mute the sound because I can't listen to myself. When you hear your voice on anything it's a mind fuck.
TA: That's why it's good that we have each other. [laughs]
Pitchfork: I liked the way you touched on technology and relationships in the "Will Do" video-- do you think things like the Internet are totally damning or is it more ambiguous than that?
KM: We were doing an interview the other day, and a lot of the conversation turned to feeling alienated from the technological aspects of society. I thought about it later on and realized that we sounded like a bunch of old people. [laughs] I mean, I'm on the computer every day, whether it's for work or because I want to watch Skip James perform something live. To cry about it as recorded musicians is just like a bad joke. This particular branch of culture only exists because of technology. It's easy to get caught up in the economic crossfire, but I'm not mad at the technology. But still, there should also be an eye trained on it with ethics in mind because the same thing that brought Skip James into my kitchen is an invention of the military.
TA: The issue I have with it is when a new technology is presented as getting rid of an old way of thinking. I wish there was a way to chart how a minute or a second has been shortened in people's minds since the advent of the unreturned email. There's that anxiety: "Why isn't this person getting back to me right now?"
"Will Do" [Director: Dugan O'Neal]
____Pitchfork: Now that you're a little bit older, do you feel like you're less angry at the world at large?
KM: I lose energy for anger. I'm glad that we didn't have the opportunity to make this a nuclear record. It's fucked up to be watching oil pump out into the Gulf of Mexico and think, "What could possibly be worse than this shit?"
TA: And then, a couple months later, "Oh, a tsunami and nuclear meltdown."
Pitchfork: It's a little eerie how you mention those things on the album.
TA: Yeah, in "Caffeinated Consciousness" I say "iminami" and "megaquake" right next to each other. I was reading a book called Everything Is Going to Kill Everybody, it's kind of a joke-y science book based in fact. And I couldn't get myself away from the facts of nature and how it's alive and shifting and churning and always has and always will. If you build something that's poisoning the thing that's carrying you through this universe, you're fucking yourself. But to rail against nature is a lot of work. You're not going to do anything about an earthquake. But you might be able to do something about...
KM: ... the last power stroke of corporate oligarchy and stripping the unions of collective bargaining rights in America.
TA: Yeah, potentially. I have no idea what the answer is. But I know that being upset without having an avenue to fix anything is a real hard place to be in for too long. But it's even worse thinking that it'll go away if you just ignore it. So what do you do? Where do you stand between those two?
KM: [sarcastically] You vote for change.
TA: Something ironed-out into a sticker is not so great, either.
KM: What a bummer.
Pitchfork: Were you excited when Barack Obama was first elected?
KM: As I understand the political system in this country, I don't believe that anyone with my interests in mind can rise to power. So I tried not to get my hopes up, but it got so contagious during the election. On election night, I was really high on that moment even though I knew Obama had more corporate backing than anyone ever. But, at the same time, I thought, "The promises you're making are promises that I would really love to see."
TA: Of course it seems really good. But he inherited such a broken system and has a couple of years to reverse what's tantamount to centuries of fuck-ups. [laughs] Everybody was like, "He's gonna turn it around!" But he'd need a time machine to turn it around.
KM: You would hope for someone that isn't going to run over the baby and then back it up and run over the baby again. [laughs] I guess I kept finding myself hoping against hope that this person who looks a little bit more like me than the last person is not gonna be a soulless douchebag.
TA: Well, as someone who lived in Nigeria-- where people in power looked exactly like me-- I can tell you that they really steered the shit into the wall. I get it, but it's not a strong criteria for someone doing right by you.
KM: Certainly. We were invited to write an actual song promoting Obama a thousand times. Every day I was getting emails like, "We can send you these lyrics." But there was no way I was going to do that. The only time I've ever done anything like that was when one of my old bands-- which had a potentially offensive name-- played for this dude who was running for city council in San Francisco in the 90s. I was like, "I don't think having Rocket Science and the Nigger Loving Faggots play your benefit is gonna get voters on board, but if you want us to play, sure!"
"Repetition" [Director: Johnerick Lawson]
____Pitchfork: Though you guys make political music, it's bigger in scope than what's happening on a day-to-day or election-to-election basis.
TA: Yeah, like if you put out a compilation of anti-Bush songs called Bustin' on Dubya, people would look back 20 years from now and be like, "What's this about?" [laughs] It's like Boss Tweed and Tammany Hall-- everyone knows it was bad, but it's a complete anachronism now.
KM: It is and it isn't because there are lives in the balance and death all over the fucking place. I was watching this documentary on Merle Haggard, who wrote "Okie from Muskogee", which was an anti-hippie, anti-Vietnam-War-protesters song. He was like, "Fuck you, this is America. Love it or leave it." Kind of like Toby Keith, except Merle Haggard was always better than Toby Keith, no matter what; he could have made a Nazi jingle and it'd be better than Toby Keith. [laughs]
But instead of being offended like I am, the Grateful Dead started covering it and the counter-culture took that song for themselves. It's also the song that got him welcomed to the White House during the Nixon administration and pardoned by Ronald Reagan when he was Governor of California, and I think he's embarrassed about it in retrospect because history proved him wrong about the Vietnam War. There are fucking pits of bodies from that bullshit.
Pitchfork: People say the protest song is dead, but maybe it's just not as specific anymore.
TA: Yeah, it's not like historical documentary-- you have to be a really talented writer if you're trying to encapsulate a news story with a song and have it live after the event. I don't have the focus to do that, really.
Pitchfork: But would you want to?
TA: Not particularly. My feelings aren't as concrete or based in time. Like, any human being oppressing another human being-- I don't care who it is-- I'm not for that.
KM: You could write a song called "I'm Not for That". [laughs]
TA: Like a 22-minute song of things I'm not for-- [sings in country voice] "I don't like my pizza in a personal pan." [laughs]
KM: [sings] "Don't take me back to Vietnam."
TA: [sings] "I'm not for that." It's great! Liquid gold!
