The label never thought that was going to be a single. We never thought it was going to be big for us. If that doesn't bite you in the ass I don't know what will. We make this track to say 'Fuck you!' to the label, and they just use it to make the most money. That's the thing about that song that's always felt hilarious to me. The part that is the most bizarre – the most ironic – is that you write this song in defiance of the record label and the music industry, and it's the song that they use to have commercial success. But there are snakes in suits everywhere.Īt the same time, it's not some airbrushed pop song. You have this innate sense of trust for them when you're young because you think that they know something that you don't. Unfortunately, we found that out the hard way. No one is looking out for you but yourself. The first thing you better learn is none of these guys are your friends. Undead's lyrics came from our understanding of the trade we'd made and feeling that betrayal. We thought we were signing something that was going to give us freedom we were actually signing something that effectively put us in a prison. It's kind of like the deal with the Devil himself. When someone hands you half a million dollars, you'll sign anything they put in front of you. We were all poor as shit and could barely even feed ourselves. We were the dumb kids who signed the piece of paper, but we didn't have anything else. But then they point to some clause in the contract and remind us that we can't do anything until they tell us to. We thought it was our music, and we had the right to say when it came out. I didn't have a million dollars to go hire a lawyer I didn't even understand what the lawyers were talking about! All of a sudden you find yourself in this grid and you can't get out. You can't handle a problem with lawyers out on the street the same way that you handled things growing up. It was almost like an invalidation of the success you had to begin with: just very, very tough. We basically wanted to do a drive-by on the A&R guys because we were so pissed off. Looking back, there's obviously a lot of anger in there. It was the moment our frustrations boiled over. That was so disagreeable to us – in every sense. The writing-process came about after the rejection of that first album we'd turned-in. We were like, 'Woah, woah, we thought you signed us because you liked what we did?' They were like, 'We do, but we've got to make this more acceptable to middle-America and people across the ocean.' We were so worked-up. We were basically told that we had to censor the whole record. You're involved with multi-tiered corporations that basically want to package things up and turn your music into a fucking TV dinner that's digestible to everybody. We began to think that we'd made it, but the funny part is that's actually where the difficulty really started.Īll of a sudden you're involved in a world that you don't understand. We'd come so far, from being little street kids telling our street stories to being signed to a major label. It was written at the point where we'd just come into the corporate side of the music industry. "In many ways, Undead was the sound of our frustration. In this article by Kerrang!, Johnny 3 Tears talks about the track: When re-recording the song under the label of A&M/Octone, the band kept the same lyrics. When asked about who or what the attacks in the song are pointed towards, the band answered with their record label, which at the time was MySpace Records.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |