Music Makers

Three Music Thingz with SILLY

Oh gosh, it's another rendition of Three Music Thingz, the blogseries where I ask musicians for three thingz that are essential to their music-making.

Today we have SILLY! SILLY is the newest project of Canadian musician and world wide web adulte terrible Josiah Hughes. In the past, he played in the bands Grown-Ups and Pre Nup, but you might know him best from his impressively deranged podcast blink-155, where he, along with co-host Sam Sutherland, discussed every blink-182 song in existence. (They eventually covered other pop punk luminaries, and the podcast culminated in the solicitation and curation of hundreds of blink-182 covers, like 28 versions of "Dammit" from previous guests of the show like Robin Hatch and Gay Meat.) You might also know Josiah from his general web presence, freaking people out by saying Elon Musk is punk or encouraging Starbucks customers to add upsetting combinations of flavor 'pumps' to their drinks.

I must disclose for journalistic reasons that Josiah is a friend—I appeared on Blink-155 on the episode about "Shut Up," which is two hours and forty minutes of discussion about a three-minute song, and Josiah and Sam came on my podcast And Introducing to talk about Fugazi and the American Idiot musical (not on the same episode). But I wouldn't cover SILLY's new album 0 Views if I didn't think it was good and interesting, I promise!

Listened to sans context, 0 Views is a collection of songs in skate punk mode, scuffed with lo-fi grit and occasionally elongated into moody, broken-guitar reveries. Imagine Phil Elverum wearing a pair of those really puffy Etnies sneakers. I also can't help but notice the molten Blink-ish core of the album, that special combination of irony and sincerity, thrash and feelings, that tempers the poseurs and softens the punks.

With context, 0 Views gets a little more complicated. On Bandcamp, the album is accompanied by an academic essay by Caleb William MacKenzie-Margulies which, among other things, tackles the "millennial attraction to incessant pastiche and intertextuality." And the album's press release emphasizes Josiah's "pro obscurity mindset," an attitude that pre-empts and even seems to embrace an album's inevitable failure, down to the title itself. If you scratch the scrappy skate punk surface, you get a philosophical quandary: is it worth it to put out music for no one, and can that problem be fixed with a smidge of self-awareness?

It's an interesting energy to bring to an album's release—I am noticing every day how much things like visible view counts and likes on various social platforms are warping our brains, and how increasingly the idea of "flopping" haunts both artists and casual internet users alike. There's something nice about putting that fear/inevitability up front and center. And of course, here I am, complicating this whole mechanism further by blogging about an album that is somewhat about not being afraid of having no one listen to your album. Will this post flop? Finding some kind of harmonic medium between the anxious ego of a carefully written blog and the wild id of a shitpost...maybe I'm projecting but that's what 0 Views feels like it's all about.

Wow lots of words to precede Josiah's THREE MUSIC THINGZ...let's get into it quickly...

The computer
I have played in a lot of bands in my life, and I previously had idealized the sound of "analog" recording, and I've loved recording on 4-tracks or recording to tape with my bud Chris Dadge at his home studio. But I'm also coming to terms with the fact that I love the computer so much. I love posting, I love YouTube, I love stealing videos from YouTube, I love making dumb inside jokes that are sometimes only inside jokes with myself. And musically, I love doing weird little tricks or flipping parts backwards or writing impossible guitar solos that I have to punch in because they're too hard to play in one run, and I love that I can collaborate with people from around the world. I think you can achieve a "warmth" without leaving the computer if you really want to.

For the SILLY album, we achieved an insane workflow just using Google Drive and Discord. I'd record the demos on my computer (using MIDI drums from NOFX songs, lifted from those early 00s sites called "freemidi.org" or whatever, then sped up and distorted in GarageBand), then I'd send them to Ned [Paige] in New York, who would record real drums at a practice space in Times Square, then he'd send those to [sparkling] Caleb in Chicago, who would mix and process the drums, and then the drums would be sent to Shoes [Robinson] in a small town in Texas, who would add them to his ingenious mixes of the songs.

I always wanted the project to be a "solo album," but then it evolved into a bizarre recording project, but not a band. It's not learning a bunch of songs so you can record them to tape over a weekend and hope for the best. Instead it's like an ongoing and insane recording project made possible by the computer. And I think more people should be using the computer to its fullest creative potential. When techbros talk about AI they say it's another tool to help with creativity, but we're not really using the tools we already have to their fullest. You can do literally so much on your computer. You can make an album or a movie or a TV show and it doesn't have to follow any blueprint whatsoever. I don't even really know what I'm doing but I love tinkering on the computer.
This photograph of David Bazan playing the MxPx bass

[ed. note - it's at the end of the segment, my blog formatting keeps fucking up when I put it at the beginning sorrryyy. enjoy the suspense]

Speaking of the computer, I remembered this image and wanted to include it, but it wasn't available online anymore. I knew I had saved it on my phone, but I save like 50 images a day and have been for years (anyone who follows me on Twitter will see that I just subconsciously post images I find online all the time). I hadn't really thought about it at the time, but when I saved this pic, of David Bazan of Pedro the Lion playing Mike Herrera from MxPx's bass, it sort of created a bridge in my brain at these two sides of myself that I've been trying to rectify for pretty much my entire life — my love of "bad" pop-punk and "serious" music.

Bazan and Herrera are both from the Christian music world, something they've both distanced themselves from, but that was also my introduction to a lot of independent music, and it was somehow a cringe enough world that it meant I was listening to all kinds of things at the same time without really noticing it was weird: Figure Four and The Deadlines and Soul-Junk and Larry Norman and deleriou5? and Slick Shoes and Training for Utopia and Roadside Monument. If you don't know what I'm talking about, don't worry about it. But as I got older and became a professional music writer among other things, I was also fascinated by my love of low- and high-brow music equally, not necessarily in an ironic way but more just genuine interest. I loved Epitaph and Fat Wreck but I also loved Up Records and K and P.W. Elverum & Sun and Kompakt and Ostgut Ton and Editions Mego and Kranky.

In making SILLY, I was trying to make sense of creating music that maintains some of the elements of pop-punk that I loved (specifically limited to the fast "oompah" style skate punk drums and the octave chords from MxPx's Life in General, Gob's Too Late... No Friends, and of course blink-182's Dude Ranch) while maintaining the kind of simple, harmonic guitar-and-bass interplay and deadened vocal delivery of slowcore artists (my favs being Pedro the Lion's Winners Never Quit and Julie Doiron's Heart & Crime). That tension between fast and slow helped me make sense of these two disparate sounds, which really informs the music I'm trying to make, which is not a gimmick or meme but an expression of something deeper. I actually sent the album to Tooth & Nail but their demos inbox was full, which is probably a blessing in disguise.

Mod Sun
I think writing, recording, and releasing music is just about one of the most embarrassing things a person can do. It's just so corny, the adult equivalent of telling all the adults to watch you while you jump in the pool. Yeah, most people can jump in the pool. It's not impressive, and you're being annoying. But I'm still compelled to make music, even when I don't want to. As a result, I find myself really drawn to artists that make me feel uncomfortable because what they're doing is so cringe, so sincere, and so artistic.

This year I've been listening to MGK and Porter Robinson the most, two seemingly opposite artists who both lowkey look like anime princes, and both make music that I genuinely love but also feel really embarrassed to be playing if someone else walks into the room. I'm also obsessed with MGK's frequent collaborator Mod Sun, who is like a struggle artist that has just kept going and going and going, struggling as a form of #grindset. His story is completely insane and he keeps reinventing himself.

This documentary about him is one of the most insane things I've ever seen, and it doesn't even include his break up with Avril Lavigne, which inspired his genuinely great song "Strangers" (which I remixed using samples ripped from YouTube, a process that influenced SILLY).

I have written thousands of words about Mod Sun, and as a fellow sober person I feel a sort of kinship with him. He keeps reinventing himself, and has gone from Warped Tour struggle rapper to mainstream oogle pop-punk guy and he now kinda looks like Mickey Rourke trying to look like Johnny Depp, with some interesting folk rock songs to boot.

But the main thing I love about Mod Sun is his motto, which he has said many times: remove the bone of embarrassment from your body. That's something I genuinely think about all the time. I'm 39 years old and I'm making music and putting it on the internet. I'm no different than any other delusional blues rock dad or white rapper making promoted posts on Instagram to try and get their awful new single playlisted. But once you realize that, you can make whatever music you want. I still do keep my embarrassment bone close by, though. You should never go full Mod Sun.

Thank you Josiah! Listen to 0 Views here. Also, the 155 podcast is now a newsletter you may subscribe to.

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