The Stool Pigeon

Within the dark underbelly of the creative process lies a fate worse than sudden death; a destiny that will render you a cog in a big bastard corporate machine of marketing, admin and other soul-destroying bollocks. For any individual who values art over material gain it is, in short, a nightmare. And so it is for TV On The Radio’s Kyp Malone and Tunde Adebimpe, who would probably rather be somewhere - anywhere - but here, pimping their latest album, Dear Science.

“If you told me five years ago that I’d be selling a song to an advertising agency or a corporation, I would have laughed in your face,” says socialist crusader Malone. “But as long as I’m participating in the system and not working actively to bring it down...” He pauses for a moment. “I gotta pay for my brother’s school. I gotta eat.”

“I feel like the reason you end up making music is that you’re not so great at talking about it so much,” adds Adebimpe. “It’s kind of a necessary evil.”

“I want to see my drawing up on my parents’ refrigerator wall as much as the next person,” says Malone. “I want people to like Dear Science, but I hope it’s not the main motivator of the creative process for me or anyone else in the band. If I didn’t want people to like the work I did, I wouldn’t be talking to you; I wouldn’t have agreed to get into the machine, you know?”

Dear Science is the New York quintet’s third studio album. It follows their elaborately layered and textured sophomore LP, Return To Cookie Mountain, which was released in 2006 to great reviews, a nomination for the Shortlist Prize (the US version of the Mercury) and a growing army of fans, tuned into to TV On The Radio by their 2004 debut album Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes, and 2002’s Young Liars EP.

Indeed, since Adebimpe and David Andrew Sitek formed the band in Williamsburg, Brooklyn in 2001 during a drunken karaoke night (where among other tracks a rendition of Hall & Oates’s ‘Maneater’ was belted out), TV On The Radio have become something of a monster. The elements they fuse in their music - rock, funk, jazz, hip hop, trip hop, shoegaze - shouldn’t work together but they do, and without parallel. Soulful tag-team vocals are provided by Malone and Adebimpe, intricate guitar playing and production genius by Sitek, and they’ve got a rumbling rhythm section in Gerard Smith (bass) and drummer Jaleel Bunton. And not only do they push musical ideas and concepts to their extremities, their songs speak on an emotional and socio-political level to boot.

But it could have been a very different story for TV On The Radio had it not been for their mischievous streak. Adebimpe once said that following OK Calculator, a 2002 self-release that the band pressed onto CDs and littered in random shops and clubs, TV On The Radio wanted to make a super-over-produced record “almost as a joke”. The “joke” backfired: when the Young Liars EP came out, it was heralded as a masterpiece.

“I think this record will be the end of all that,” says Adebimpe, giggling. “It’s really awesome that people like what we do, but I also know that half of the purpose of liking what someone does, in critical eyes, is to schedule something to tear apart in the future. They’re kind of like, ‘This is great, but in two years I’ll think it sucks.’”

Critical acclaim and dissection certainly does have its downside. TV On The Radio’s music is often overshadowed by the fact that it is seen to be unusual; that somehow a band that is four-fifths black shouldn’t be making it.

“I remember playing a show while we were recording Desperate Youth and some dude was there wanting to do an interview, supposedly for BBC radio about bands and race and he just wouldn’t fucking take no for an answer,” recalls Malone. “He just kept saying, ‘Isn’t it crazy that you’re playing rock music instead of hip hop?’ The question was so stupid to me I thought I was dealing with someone that was mentally challenged. But then it happened over and over again and I understood that I was dealing with a culture in a world that’s mentally challenged.”

It’s this kind of fuel that has fired TV On The Radio since the release of Desperate Youth, a politically-charged nugget that included the tracks ‘Bomb Yourself’ (“You’ve made a family / Now kill ’em dead / Oh it’s not me ma / It’s what the TV said”) and ‘Dreams’, the video for which included footage of soldiers on the front line.

“Around the time we were recording Desperate Youth, David and I thought, ‘Oh weird, the apocalypse is going to happen in our thirties,’” Adebimpe says, laughing. “I think that record reflects the anxiety we were feeling. It’s not like that anxiety has gone with our new record, and it’s not that any of us care any less about that stuff, but for me personally, as far as art-making goes, you have to feel like you’re in complete terror of the universe. I was writing about the other side of death and trying very hard to not view death as this negative, frightening thing that I’ve been instructed to view since I was a child. I’m not going to give fear more power than my happiness. I’ve got no evidence that being nervous all the time is going to cure anything.”

When Cookie Mountain came out, TV On The Radio were describing it as “apocalyptic”. What kind of record does that make Dear Science?

“Apocalypseso?” Adebimpe says, joking. “I’m not really sure. Hopefully it’s fun to listen to and fun to dance to and it’s, to borrow a phrase from David Byrne, like 60 minutes on acid. Sixty minutes on acid with a boom-box strapped to it.”

True enough, you can dance your socks off to Dear Science, but it does possess a social conscience: it’s title was conceived from a letter Sitek wrote about an article he read on the internet concerning a group of scientists wanting to blow up the moon in order to stabilise the world’s climate. Needless to say, Sitek’s response was less than favourable: “Dear Science, please start finding cures for diseases and solving problems or shut the fuck up.”

And the album is still well in keeping with the band’s hybrid amalgamation of sounds and genres, even if it is a less frenetic and frenzied offering than its predecessor.

“On this record we attempted clarity of sound and ideas,” says Malone. “It was constructed with more specificities than the record that came before, which has a lot of layers that wash in and out of each other.”

“Sonically,” says Adebimpe, “things got stripped down a lot because that was something we hadn’t really tried so much before. We recorded most of it in Pro Tools, so everything came in very, very clean.”

“There’s more emotional space covered and more perspectives involved,” adds Malone. “It makes for a richer record, I think. I would like it if there was even more voices and perspectives coming through, as I feel like you guys haven’t heard Jaleel sing. Jaleel’s got a beautiful fucking voice and he’s a really good musician. And you haven’t heard much of what Gerard writes and Gerard is a really good musician and a really good songwriter. I hope that people get to hear them in the context of this band.”

On first listen, it feels as if you can split Dear Science almost in half: lyrically, six of the album’s 11 tracks were penned by Adebimpe, five by Malone. When Malone’s tracks kick in there’s a funky Prince and David Bowie vibe to them (the Starman, who sung on ‘Province’ off Cookie Mountain, is a firm favourite in the TV On The Radio camp), which is especially noticeable on ‘Red Dress’ and ‘Golden Age’, the latter of which hankers for monumental social change backed by a quixotic brass section. “There’s a golden age coming round,” he sings, “I know there’s violence”. Is this mere guarded cynicism from TV On The Radio?

“I was in no way trying to draw any cynical outlook on that song,” says Malone. “I feel like, if I was trying to do anything, it was to do something I know to be naïve. I wanted to put forth a utopic ideal in a four-minute song. It’s a hopeful song. I know if you look around there’s not a hell of a lot of reason to feel hopeful, but I don’t need to contribute any more darkness to what’s out there.”

The same glint of optimism can’t be said of ‘Red Dress’, however, on which he bellows: “I’m scared to live... than living a life not worth dying for.”

“That song is about taking responsibility,” he explains. “It’s important to look at the whole picture, and a really big part of that picture is us; us the people who do not fear the corporations or high ranking government officials or any number of the thieving bastards who are steering the world into the nearest shit pile they can find. At the same time, the bigger question to me is how did we let that happen? Bitching about fucking Bush and his team of fuckheads is not enough. Fuck ’em, fuck ’em for real, but that’s not where the responsibility ends at all.”

By contrast, the majority of Adebimpe’s tracks take on a more personal tone and appear more introspective.

“When Kyp talks about events in the world, it’s his own personal take on them,” he says, “it’s not just journalism. It’s a subjective view of these things and how they’re affecting him. I feel like I’m usually just flailing around and grabbing things out of a closet that make sense.”

The Adebimpe-penned ‘Love Dog’ is a soulful love lament and the heart-aching ‘Family Tree’ is a nostalgic number punctuated with some heavy-duty strings. Were both informed by the fact he was struggling with the death of a friend and close family member before recording ensued for Dear Science?

“Struggling is sort of a weird way to put it,” he explains. “I don’t know. Everybody you know has lost someone, or will. My feelings on that are still pretty unformed. I’m sure that there are things on the album that were written as a direct result of both those events.”

But not all Adebimpe’s songs carry an aura or melancholy. Far from it. ‘DLZ’ is a sultry, sexy number that recalls the gentle vocals of Lamb’s Lou Rhodes, while ‘Dancing Choose’ is an infectious foot-stomper with some far out lyrics that reference Guns N’ Roses’ frontman: “I see you figured in your action pose / Foam injected Axl Rose.”

“I think Axl Rose is a fascinating specimen,” concedes Adebimpe. “I feel like he’s truly mythological. He’s in the same category as Michael Jackson and the Minotaur. I’m sure he’s still a dude. It’s strange to have this figure who has occupied your consciousness since you were a teenager and now he’s got corn rows and a face full of botox.”

Does Adebimpe hope that one day he’ll become mythological enough for someone to write a song about him?

“I hope that I become enough of a caricature of myself that someone does. I hope that this record does so well that I’ll have no choice but to go completely insane. I would not only get a sex change, I’d have three breasts spotted across my chest - go full Jocelyn Wildenstein. I hope to look back on all this when I’m a 68-year-old woman with three breasts living in the Himalayas and ask, ‘Who was that guy that I used to be?” He cracks up. “I hope to God no one buys this record. I pray people save me from myself and download this record from the internet.”

Some might see the dominance of Malone and Adebimpe on Dear Science as proof that founding member Sitek has taken a backseat to concentrate on other projects, not least producing records by Scarlett Johansson and Telepathe. Is that the case?

“I don’t think so at all,” insists Adebimpe. “Everyone was just as present on this record as they were on the others. The way that we all work is like a mural painting where someone will work on something and draw the outline for it, and someone else will come and say, ‘Yeah that’s good, but I think I need to fill this in over here and add this on top of this,’ and by the end it’s completely different and it makes sense.”

But is this a formula that’s always going to suit TV On The Radio?

“We’re gonna try and figure out a different paradigm for it,” adds Malone. “I love making music with TV On The Radio. It has by far been the most enriching creative experience of my life. And we are family. But our family is broader than just us five in a bus. As we get older, a lot of us want more than just the rusty bucket of drink at the end of the rainbow. So maybe we can find another way to do it. Keep making music together but not being a slave to the process.”

It needn’t matter if TV On The Radio never escape the rigmarole of the “machine”. As long as they keep making charged music that thunders through your every vital organ, they’ll still manage to stick it to the man.

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