They're all rebellious and shit.
Are you much of a sexter?
You know, I’ve never partaken in sexting. But I’m about to go on tour, and I’m thinking I’m going to have to sext my girlfriend a little bit.
It’s like porn where you know the person and it’s delivered directly to your hand-held device. If you had an iPad and some kind of messaging service, I bet that would be pretty good, too. You could get in on that retina display. Hi-res and shit. So, I hear San Jose has a lot of drugs.
I wouldn’t know.
Dude, you’re in a band, you’re supposed to know all the cool drug hot-spots. How am I supposed to get booger-sugar if my band hook-ups don’t know where to get it?
Booger-sugar? Man, that’s all BS, maaaaan.
Yea, “booger-sugar,” BS.
No, that’s all bullshit.
No, man, that’s that Kate Moss diet, that’s where it’s at.
The wanna-be rock star diet.
I wanna be a rock-star, that’d be awesome. You could just sit around doing booger-sugar and hump Kate Moss. As it is, I get worried about having a beer within 10 hours of having to go to work.
Excess is not rebellion.
Well, that may or may not be true, but it’s punk as fuck. Are you a big rebellious-type person?
Depends on what your definition of “rebellious” is.
“One who rebels.”
I guess.
Well, tell me, what are you rebelling against!
Well, I don’t follow the typical “I’m in a band, so I have to be loaded all the time” and act like a jerk. It’s all a big cliché. Typically, people go out and get drunk, and you’re just drinking what the man is trying to sell you, you go to Hot Topic and get a “cool” shirt and you know, “rebellion” is for 1999. And the truth is, the government, you know, do you think the government wants people to be self-aware and intelligent? No, they want you to be doped up and drugged up and drunk and occupied so that you don’t think about things and you don’t care.
That works REALLY well for me, because I am the cliché writer who loves to be drunk. The government and I are going to have a solid little symbiotic relationship where they keep allowing the beer to go into my face-hole and I will then not give two shits about who’s in office. This seems like a good plan to me.
I hope that works out for you.
So far, so good. One of my issues with your chosen moniker of “Them Rude Boys” is the improper grammar, why couldn’t you call it “Those Rude Boys?” Is that something we can change? Can we fix that?
“Those Rude Boys?” No, we’re going to stick with Dem Rude Boys.
What about sticking a Z on the end and changing it to “Dem” to get a full and proper “street” version of your name?
No, no, it’s just the name. It’s Them Rude Boys. To be honest, it’s a name I wasn’t too hot on at first. We were going over several different band names and someone was like “Why don’t we call ourselves ‘Them Rude Boys?’” I thought, well, we’ll keep that name for a little while until we think of something better. Then we started writing songs and it just caught on and it kind of stuck.
Come on, man, you’re the singer, you gotta assert your dominance. Kind of like you do on the website bio, where you are the only band member given a last name. I thought that was a nice little power-move done by you.
What were some of your suggestions for the band name? They were all over the place. Audio Revolution, The Kush…
Wait, what?
You know, The Kush.
Wait a minute, I swear to God that we just had a conversation where you said that you’re not into drugs.
I’m not, the thing is, you always play in bands with people who are. Those were just the first two names I thought of, but we never went by these names.
Is it “rude” like ska, or “rude” like you’re just a bunch of dicks to waiters and valet guys?
No, no, like the ska. And truthfully, and I didn’t know this when we picked the name, the “rude boys” were those disenfranchised in Kingston, Jamaica, and were people basically rebelling against what was going on in Jamaica and the time and it was just a slang name. They were labeled as gang-bangers, but they were disenfranchised young people, the government was going through revolution and there were a lot of bad things going on. Then rude boys became associated with punk and the two-toned ska thing that was going on in England in the 70’s. And I didn’t know it, a lot of that music was music that I was into. You know, The Clash and Bad Brains and Operation Ivy. And it was this weird thing, because when you’re writing this kind of punky ska songs, and we call ourselves Them Rude Boys and it all just came together.
You have mentioned rebellious elements and “the system,” is that a topic you hit on a lot.
You know, it kind of is. There’s been periods in my songwriting where I try not to write about that all the fucking time, but it’s just so easy for me to write about that. It’s everywhere, you just have to turn on the news. I feel like songwriters are like story-tellers of their time. I mean, what am I going to write about, you write about how you feel. You see what’s going on around you, $7 trillion in debt, the central banking system, the fact that it’s in the interest of a few people who control everything. I know it sounds like conspiracy theory, and I know it sounds like that out loud, and I don’t want to be lumped in with those people, but a lot of those people are irrational. They can be like “fuck the government,” but have no idea what they are talking about. I don’t really think “fuck the government,” but there are some things that are really bad and really fucked up and no body seems to really care. What do you do, how do you even go about getting things to change? There are things that are so ingrained into our society, where do you even begin? It’s so easy to not care. To take the side of “there’s nothing I can do and I’m fat and happy and I have my iPad and I’ve got my porn and case of beer, so who cares?” It’s so easy to take that, because it’s the human condition to want to take the easy route.
There is nothing wrong with porn and a case of beer.
Yea, I mean, yea. I don’t totally disagree with that.
I think that the problem is that some of the things that are terrible are also really awesome. It’s hard to get people to want to change that because porn and beer are awesome. That’s science. Now I love reading band bios, and yours says that you are “taking the scene back.” Who has taken the scene from you guys in the first place?
Taking the scene back? What bio is that on?
Umm, yours. ThemRudeBoys.com.
There’s a lot of good music going on right now, and a lot of people look at the music that’s on TV and on the radio and they kind of think that that’s what’s going on. Like Lady Gaga and all that, but what they don’t realize is that there’s this whole world of music growing due to the Internet. The ability for bands to make their own music, there’s this huge garage-rock movement [Editor’s note: More like GarageBand movement, amirite?] going on in the country, and a lot of people don’t know about it and that it was going on in the 70’s and that it’s a real soulful music. That’s kind of the new punk. Music that has a lot of blues influences, taking elements from classic music and bringing it up to date and bringing it forward.
This last question is kind of a doozy, and I can understand if you don’t want to answer it; but what sounds better for lunch: fried chicken or Thai food?
I’d probably go with Thai food.
Solid choice. I’m gonna go get me some curry.
Ehhhh…I gotta be in a mood for curry. I can’t do curry every day. Curry every once in a while, I can handle.
Are you a Pad Thai guy?
Oh, yes.
Got it.
-Jonathan Yost