Off-Record: Jason Aalon Butler (from 2016)
The then-letlive. frontman on rock monotony, racial disparity, and that Blackest Beautiful production job.
So I wanted to start getting new-new interviews out for LOTD before drawing on old work, but in searching for inspiration (and trying to remind myself that I was pretty good at this shit once upon a time) I came across some interviews done for websites I’ve run in the past that I really wish I hadn’t written a feature around, and just let live (ha!) as a Q+A showing the full breadth of the conversation. Also, I don’t own those websites anymore so it’d be nice to own some of my best work again.
This first one is with Jason Aalon Butler, then frontman of the best band in the world, letlive.. Jason isn’t in letlive. anymore. That band broke up and he’s now the frontman of The Fever 333, a band who lean more on protest and hip hop than the post-hardcore leanings of his past.
Whenever I think about either of those bands, I think back to this interview conducted the night of what would become letlive.’s final show in the UK. We speak a whole bunch about things The Fever 333 would go on to stand for. I see a lot of questions out there along the lines of, ‘Why not just continue letlive. though?!’ - shit, I’ve asked it myself - but this chat reminds me that Jason had The Fever in him the whole time. Here’s hoping it gives some context for you guys too.
Hindsight’s a hell of a thing, isn’t it?
So the first thing out from you this time around is Good, Mourning America. The first singles off the last few letlive. records have been balls-to-the-wall post-hardcore ragers. On GMA, the intro in particular, is more reminiscent of Kendrick Lamar’s ‘Alright’ than anything with a ‘post-’ prefix…
To be one hundred, Kendrick was a beacon for me on this record. It’s been a long time since a contemporary artist that I can consider even kinda my peer – if I may – has really influenced me and pushed my art directly. Kendrick did that.
That specific intro though was a direct pull from They Don’t Care About Us, the Michael Jackson song. So yeah man, Kendrick and Michael in those moments just got it and I knew that that was what I wanted to go for.
Were you specifically trying to draw on stuff that wasn’t rock music this time out?
Yes. One hundred percent. I was bored of [rock music]. Rock music is boring. It’s stale, it’s a parody of itself right now. We’ve got bands acting like bands were in 2004 and it’s like, ‘Come on, man. We’re a decade past that.’
Music, to me, works in decades, those are the waves. We had disco in the 70s, protest music in the 60s, new wave in the 80s and hip hop killing it in the 90s. Then in the 2000s we had metalcore and emo had its rise. But here we are in 2016 in all we have is this derivative rendition of shit we saw ten years ago.
Also it’s just so fucking safe and vanilla and sterile. I don’t remember the last time I heard a rock band say some shit that made me feel the way Rage Against The Machine did or Nirvana did. And even when they do, it’s so trite. And I’m not here trying to talk shit about the homies, cause they’re out there doing some shit, but they’re not the ones on the charts.
Ultimately, I’m not out there spinning a rock record to feel artistic. So hip hop and RnB – even some more melancholy folk music like Tallest Man On Earth or whatever – that’s the shit I was feeling.
I figured this conversation would go down this route. After all the Trump shit we’ve had people going ‘ah cool, we’ll get protest music now’ and it’s like, will we though?
I heard the single most moving speech ever when I saw The Wonder Years at Riot Fest going in on the opioid problem and what that’s doing to working class communities, so there are bands with shit to say. But on the level above you guys and TWY, in that upper echelon of bands that make it onto magazine covers, what is there? Can you see it?
No. I can’t. It’d be me being presumptuous if I assumed that other bands wanted to do that and I can’t speak for anyone else, but I just know that all I can think about is writing songs that promote subversion. If other bands want to write shit like that, please do! I will accept and respect that even if it is played out and you’re saying shit everyone else has said – at this point, I don’t care, as long as it feeds into the collective consciousness of protest and of movement and change.
But I haven’t heard a rock band that makes me go, ‘Oh man, let’s take to the streets and painting our picket signs today.’
Where’s our Run The Jewels?
Exactly! Everything about Run The Jewels, Kendrick... I just don’t see it here. I’m not saying that rock music has to be that, but I will say that rock music was born of it. Rock music was alternative in its thought as well as its sound. I’m hoping for it, but I’m not holding my breath.
Why do you think hip hop is doing that and rock music isn’t?
You want my real answer?
Of course.
I think too many people in rock music are from a safe place. It’s a cultural thing. I think a lot of rock music that makes it up there is because it fits the mould.
Let’s keep it one hundred, man. Most rock music is a heterosexual white boys club. Heterosexual white boys, for the most part, aren’t being challenged that way politically. They’re not being challenged that way socially. They’re not being challenged that way sexually. So, if you’re gonna ask me why I think these two genres are so disparate, it’s because I don’t think that they stem from the same place. That’s not to say that they can’t feel the empathy, commiserate and/or can’t come from that place. But they probably haven’t lived it.
My mother’s white and I’m very white-passing. I’m not sitting here saying ‘Oh, white people can’t do this’. I’m not saying that. But I know where I come from and why I say the things I say.
But, hip hop’s derivation is from soul and rhythm and blues. Before that, we had chain gangs. We had people in the fields communicating and singing hymns just to stay alive while they pick cotton. It’s always been rooted in that.
But rock music was, too. Rock music came from soul. But at some point we monetised it and created this model and started plugging people into it. And you know what? The easiest people to plug into that – just like Elvis – is a good looking white boy who can sing. But that’s black music.
That’s why I think the root of it all, is that you have hetero-normative behaviours and you don’t have people that had to struggle. Not even struggle to get on stage. Me and my boys here when letlive. was starting out, we had to literally – fucking literally - fight people to get on stage.
With the state of the world in 2016, and the rising of racial tensions again, does that struggle have to come into your music even more now? Like, are you specifically choosing to make a stand or is it coming to you just because that’s what comes to you?
It’s a combination of both. There’s no question, as a person of colour - I’m from that. I come from section 8 housing. I come from taking the bullet out of my sister’s leg because she was shot. And then I have people telling me that where I’m from, we’re not a product of anything but our own divisive and bellicose coding. That’s fucking bullshit. I know that because I can play both sides.
I can comb my hair nicely and go somewhere and play white – I’ve done it! And because of that, I can hear what’s said behind closed doors. People think that I’m Other. Like, ‘Oh, he ain’t black, so we’ll talk about black people’. And on the other side of that, when I was younger and looked more ethnic, I heard things about white folk that I didn’t think were true because my mom didn’t exhibit those things. But overall, the idea is not an individual thing and not ‘you, genetically as a white person’. But it’s the idea of what it means to be white in America and that people need to realise that that’s a weird thing.
Why the fuck else would people be choosing to live in the ghettos? If you’ve got a choice between selling rock and struggling to get your teacher to give a fuck because the jurisdiction isn’t paid enough and the teacher isn’t paid enough and they weren’t chosen right, but they’re placed in there systemically to teach you some shit that you don’t give a fuck about... You’re gonna choose to sell rock.
This is human nature. These aren’t things that we were born into genetically because of our skin colour, this is any human being. If you tested rats and you gave a rat one easy maze with some cocaine at the end, or a harder maze to get less, they’re gonna go and get the coke. It’s the same thing. It’s this big fucking scheme that we’re living in in America and that’s not even presumption, that’s statistical and factual. You can’t tell me otherwise.
So my music, is just an outward representation of my life. Our lives. And I’m not trying to promote any separatist notions, because I don’t want to separate people at all, but I am – as a mixed person who is literally white and black – trying to ask everybody to look at the big picture. This is what’s happening in America. It’s also happening in Britain. And it’s also happening in the middle east. There’s a fucking emotional and intellectual apartheid. It’s set up. It goes deeper than where one city ends and another begins; it’s set up in people’s psyche.
And I know this is how it is because, like I said, I’ve played both sides. I got to have friends and date people on the other side. My mother made sure that I went to school outside of my hood because they weren’t paying enough attention to the people in my hood. So I went elsewhere and got an education that’s different to the one I would’ve got and I got to observe where I’m from from an outsiders perspective.
A lot of bands on your level are just trying to get to the next one. Why don’t you think bands that actually say something are getting to that next level?
Because as the music industry sees its inevitable decline, they need to monetise music more than ever. Enter the 360 deal. They’re now taking cuts from every facet of a bands career because they need to make money as a label. Enter endorsements. Bands start taking whatever endorsement they can just to make money. The compromising effect of the crumbling music industry means that they need to find a way to stay alive, and the way to do that is not to create art, it’s to make money.
Record labels are just banks. And how do banks function? Through making money and loans. So for them, if it don’t make dollars, it don’t make sense. And if we’re out here talking some abhorrent, opposing views to the popular consensus, that, plugged into an equation, doesn’t make money.
But Rage Against The Machine were huge. System of a Down were huge. Where did we go wrong?
I think it was a time and a place, man. For whatever reason, that was our tipping point. At that time, we were really seeing the effects of the Reagan administration and the mental health issues due to the Vietnam war. Then we had Desert Storm. Then we had the Clinton administration where we were truly just dropping bombs on factories making toys because we thought they were creating artillery against our country. We had some shit going on at the time that, actually, I think we’re starting to see again. Hopefully our political and social consciousness will raise to such a fever pitch again where people realise that they have to listen up and that this music means more than just the download code that we use to get it.
What do you hope the next step is then? You’re in a rock band, what do you want from your rock scene?
Awareness, man. If I say the shit I say on stage, I don’t want it to be mindblowing to people anymore. I don’t mind it for now, but after a few years... I feel like it’s going to be expeditious. The rate that this shit accelerates under Trump will be very fast. I think we’re going to see some dire and detrimental things very quickly. It’s a double-edged sword there because we realise it quicker then, but we’re also getting fucked quicker.
So for me, in rock music, I guess I just want them to be honest. I think about this often: What if every band didn’t worry about what the label thought or what the industry told them to be? I know that’s a very ambitious thought, but it’s the ambitious thoughts that keep me going musically.
We wrote The Blackest Beautiful to intentionally be cacophonous and make people feel uncomfortable. We intentionally wanted that.
So that production job was on purpose?
Absolutely. It was a response to the Joey Sturgis record or the whatever fucking band that comes out record. And good for them, Joey Sturgis and Chris Crummett, they killed it, but after a while every band started to sound like that and you can’t decipher the recording. And this isn’t to illuminate those people negatively, I just know that hella bands went to them and got their shit mixed. But there’s a model that these bands all plugged into and started writing the same fucking records every time and we were just so fucking sick of it and didn’t want to be a part of that and wanted to make it clear that we weren’t a part of that.
Of course our aesthetic and our ideology is clear that we’re different, but we also wanted out sonic representation to be different too. That’s why it’s this ballistic, gnarly, grating record.
I miss letlive. 🖤