patient patient

We are the product of our collective environments. We are the direct result of the worlds we've created. We have gone in search of solace from the maddening "real world" in the only place we know to be safe, the only thing that can offer an escape, the whispered myth of a pure form of music, free from any limiting corporate influences or trends. We have gone searching and been left wanting, left shuddering from the discovery that such a thing is nearly extinct. For the most part, that dream died somewhere around ‘95 or maybe it never really existed at all. We hear echoes of the pure of heart from time to time and have come to the conclusion that there is a sort of Big Bang/Big Crunch Theory apparent in the trends in music, relapsing every 10 years or so. A huge explosion expanding out as far as is possible until it becomes spread too thin, reaching for too much and then collapsing into itself again. A period of darkness then ensues when all things become one color making them unrecognizable, everything now the same sound. What was once believed to be the answer has since become the same problem it was intended to solve. This period lasts for a short eternity only to explode again in a cosmic backlash, a raucous protest to all that has become evil in itself. When the ways of the world contaminate it and destroy its purity with corrupted values and twisted ideals, it self-destructs in the form of a flood. This is a flood of new typicality, the radio waves overflowing with countless songs all sounding the same and saying the same things. We are discontented with the state of our own existence, unsatisfied with our lots in life, unhappy with the state of the world. We are the disenchanted youths of ‘83, ‘84, and yes, even ‘85; members of a generation defined by a letter, our title not even being original, but a reference to the generation before us. We tell people we’re from the city that started it all, the city that gave generation X an angst-ridden voice, but really we’re just from the lesser cities surrounding the once thriving mecca of 90’s rock music. We are pretentious. Members of the pretentious proletariat – arrogant enough to propose that music will save the world, cynical enough to know it won’t. We want to make money so that we can afford to hate money. Capitalism will pay for our platform to protest its strangle-hold on the “civilized” world. Really we just want to be able to earn enough money to keep our snowballing tour debts to a manageable minimum, and to be able to keep doing what it is we’ve deemed as our collective destiny: play music for the starving masses. We do not wish to make millions, or to be on any sort of countdown on VH1 (–Top 10 Ways to Further Denigrate American Values–) but if we’ve only got fifteen minutes we’ll take what we can get. “Give us your sick and hungry” we call, “give us your tired and weary.” Let us be your voice. Let us write your anthem. We are, after all, a music group composed of four semi-nihilistic twenty-somethings, why shouldn’t we be given the opportunity to save the world? Enable us to develop a rather large messiah-complex by replying with great poster-painted signs held overhead at our concerts: --“Absolve us of our sins with your songs.” – “Purge us of the monotony of things like reality television, and W-2 forms, and morning papers with exaggerated headlines crying wolf or terrorist.” – “Give us the benison of music that can speak to our souls or at least give us something to play loud enough to drown out the fury-laden world around us.” – “Give us something different and unique to listen to, music that will be immediately pigeon-holed into some sub-sub-genre with a name that sounds like a kind of cereal.” – The combined powers of the four of us and anyone who will listen to what we have to say– what we have to play– will probably change nothing in the long run, blur nothing in the “big picture”, but we demand the chance to be heard over large, dilapidated, black felt-covered speaker arrays in small, over-crowded—more likely under-crowded, to be perfectly honest—clubs, buildings most likely in violation of numerous health, safety and fire codes. We want to be blared over the radio on the stations we’ve been complaining about since 1996 and we want to be played every half hour directly following the hyped up songs we’ve been criticizing as being overplayed, dismissing them as nothing more than musical propaganda. We want to receive obscene amounts of ill-deserved hype from corrupt, gravel-voiced DJ’s who’ve lost their love and palette for good music long ago, functioning now merely as clever puppets whose strings go up to one – of a very select few – major monopolies. We are pretentious, idealistic, college-age denizens of a media-driven world we seldom agree with. We are not as preachy, in person, as we may come across in a word-processed diatribe, originally intended to serve as a brief bio for the band. We, all of us I think, watched the last episod