photo by Neil Visel
Like most 30-year olds who make it a priority to carp about the state of indie rock, Max Bemis appears to have better things to do with his time. Though the loquacious Say Anything frontman was once pegged "the next Billie Joe" thanks to the 2004 cult classic ...Is A Real Boy and would go on to release two more divisive, anything-goes records, he now lives in relative calm with his wife/occasional musical collaborator Sherri DuPree and kid in his Texas home. Still, during the first verse of “Judas Decapitation”, the second single from Say Anything's bonkers new album Hebrews, Bemis finds it necessary to shout, “American indie rock is a game of pricks!!!”
This might seem like an odd concern for someone who’s made a career completely outside the game of indie rock. “I feel like I've spent a lot of time impotently trying to take digs at indie culture because it's really an aspect of me hating myself," Bemis tells me, "I'm kind of a part of it.” While the song is mostly intended to clap back at former fans who consider Bemis’ newfound happiness an artistic liability, “Judas Decapitation” caps an unofficial trilogy of outsider indie-rock criticism songs that began when Bemis wrote “Admit It!!!” in 2002. The closing outlier on ...Is A Real Boy reminded you of who Bemis really was before he got swept into the booming Hot Topic-emo scene of Fall Out Boy and My Chemical Romance with no return ticket: a Sarah Lawrence dropout who saw the gatekeepers of indie-rock culture serving the same function as the jocks at his Los Angeles private high school. Eight years later and disillusioned by chillwave, preening poptimism and this very publication, “Admit It Again!” skewered people who lied about themselves to present a hip facade for their latent insecurities: "You were listening to my band in 2004 though you claim you were reared on the Stooges."
And now, with “Judas Decapitation”, the circularity of trends has made him something of a representative elder statesman for a burgeoning demographic: a 30-something whose music and scene spent the past decade being ridiculed, only now a new crop of bands and fans have... well, come to admit it. Hebrews becomes something of a summit for these friends, peers and acolytes alike, including Gareth and Kim from Los Campesinos!, Bob Nanna (Braid), Jeremy Bolm (Touché Amoré), Jon Simmons (Balance and Composure), Brianna Collins from (Tigers Jaw) and Chris Conley (Saves the Day).
Even though Bemis is capable of both profound groaners and weirdly moving confessions within the same verse, Hebrews is his most mature record by a mile. Still, he can't help but qualify it with a gripe: “One thing that I never get to talk about is the frustration when people don't realize that bands like mine aren't necessarily made up of these ignorant single-minded kids who only listen to blink-182 and Saves the Day their entire lives. But I think people are getting that now.”
Pitchfork: What experiences did you draw on to write “Admit It!!!”?
MB: I grew up in L.A. and you can really latch onto a cultural phenomenon pretty early because everyone's scrambling to be cool. At the age of 15 and 16, the girls at my school were literally dressing like models circa that time and my friends were in this growing scene of what would later become the “indie movement.” Without naming names, a lot of kids of famous people started all congregating and going to shows. They were dressing like members of Led Zeppelin, and they were part-time models and people in bands. And I felt really alienated by it.
I was like, "OK, the East Coast is gonna be better." So I went to Sarah Lawrence for, like, a semester, and I was expecting, "OK, maybe there are some people who actually are real outcasts." But it was just worse. And, eventually, it drove me to drop out of college and pursue music. "Admit It!!!" it was written around 2002, after the first Strokes record came out. This is pre-Vampire Weekend, it's pre-fun. and stuff like that. It was literally the beginnings of the "hipster." It was right then, people were just starting to move to Brooklyn to reclaim it and gentrify it. But I feel like I skirt that line—if you look at me, I could just be any other 30-year-old dude walking around in Greenpoint and my friends and tastes and sense of humor could just put me directly into what could be considered "contrived modern indie guy." But I've always felt so turned off by so many aspects of what that culture has become that I feel like ever since then I've been overcompensating.
Pitchfork: Do feel you feel like you’d have to overcompensate to the same extent if Say Anything were just getting started in 2014?
MB: It’s a conscious choice to keep making the type of music that I do. It's not like I'm relegating myself because of ignorance. I think people understand that a little more. When people put on the You Blew It! record or the Touché Amoré record, you don't really hear, "Well, yeah, they're just these kids who like hardcore and they don't really know any better and it just happens to be good." People understand that those guys are really knowledgeable and they just happen to really like Cap'n Jazz, and they’re like, "I'd rather sound like that than sound like Animal Collective." So I think there's a respect, to some degree, that we didn't get.
Pitchfork: When I saw Saves the Day last year, what stood out was just how engaged the crowd was regardless if they were 35 or 15, singing along to every lyric. It’s the sort of environment you didn’t see at typical “indie rock” shows over the past couple of years.
MB: The bands that were turning me on were the ones that pulled off that level of engagement. Like, Japandroids, when they came out, but no one really noticed that they kind of sound exactly like Rainer Maria [laughs]. People were like, "What is this sort of fast-paced uptempo pop punk-ish thing? It's so good!" I was reading an interview with them, and they were asked, "So what about all the people who are saying you sound a little emo?" One of those back-handed questions. And the drummer was like, "Yeah, I don't know. I guess we kind of do." He didn't even really know. He was like, "Yeah, we like the Get Up Kids." And I was like, "Wow!" he just said that. He just said that with no shame. I was like, "That's rad." He referenced the fact that the Get Up Kids are a viable indie band and he shouldn't be ashamed to be influenced by them.
I like Washed Out, I think he's good. But once that started to become the dominant thing, my friends who are more clued in than I am would bring me bands be like, "Check this out!" And it would literally be some dude looping his own farts and singing with a falsetto over it that's completely reverbed and you can barely hear what he's saying. I was like, “This is good, I think this is creative and cool, but I just wouldn't put it on.”
Pitchfork: When you say "American indie rock," are you talking about the bands specifically or the industrial complex?
MB: It's the gatekeepers. I do think that the main beef I've ever had with American indie rock, quote unquote, I no longer have. Because I think it's morphing into something else. I'm an anarchist in a very loose sense. I don't like big business very much. I don't like society functioning as this organism that eats its young, and it's why every punk band has written [songs with the message] "fuck the man." But in reality, indie culture was something that almost no one paid attention to for years, and it was functioning on its own, because people loved the music and people loved to dress a certain way and hang out with certain people, and it was cool. It was genuine. And then I think it got co-opted by this beast, which is the same beast that created the darker aspects of the nü-metal movement, or the darker aspects of punk. So that was my gripe.
Around the time when I wrote "Judas," it looked like there wasn't much hope. For a long time, people were afraid to say what they think, afraid to dress a certain way, afraid to be in a certain band, afraid to vocalize their opinions. And when that happens, no matter what it is, I get really pissed off.
Pitchfork: In “Admit It Again”, you confront people who used to listen to Say Anything in their teens and were conditioned to be embarrassed by that. Have you been surprised by anyone publicly showing their support?
MB: I tweeted at Jon [Simmons from Balance & Composure] and I was like, "I'm obsessed with your CD." He was tripped out by that. And then that tripped me out. We started texting and he was very forthcoming about the fact that they grew up listening to Say Anything. I don't think he could really comprehend how much their band means to me. I literally almost listen to them everyday. You Blew It!, the Hotelier and Balance and Composure among other things, but those newer punk bands, those are some of my favorite bands of the year. I think those bands may surpass us, and I would be very glad to see that happen.