| Interviewer: How did you come up with using positive press quotes as album artwork? Casey: That came from graphic designers that we've worked with from Paris called Work In Progress. One was using fake quotes, and we decided to go all balls out and actually list quotes from real press. It seemed to make sense because of the way we use the press and manipulate the press. And I like how it's kind of like advertisements for movies where they pull one word out of context: "'Brilliant,' Peter Travers, Rolling Stone." Interviewer: Was it fun to have record labels fight over you? Casey: It was, to a certain degree, but it was also kind of torturous, because we took a lot of time, and it's very stressful. It's a tricky game, and I was really poor and hungry. So it was difficult to make the right choices in the long run and not collapse in your immediacy. It was hard to stand my ground and retain creative rights and control of the project. It's a real bait and switch, like "Here, let me take you out to a really expensive dinner, let me give you some of this money," but ultimately you're signing your life away. It's difficult when you're going to do a cover shoot for a magazine and you have to borrow $20 to get home afterwards. Interviewer: Is the goal always to achieve some sort of excess, or are there parts where you went, "This is going a bit over the edge?" Casey: Oh, God, no! I don't think we've gone anywhere near going over the top. I'm really excited because we're meeting with some people about making a Vegas production. When we make it to Vegas, we've really fulfilled our full potential. We haven't even worked with a helicopter yet. Whilst in his native, pre-9/11 NY, Dubya is still that redneck who stole the election and Rudolph Giuliani remains best known for sending ‘The City That Never Sleeps’ to bed. (“You know you can get a ticket for dancing? I’m not teasing. Thank god he got colon cancer.”) “It’s the idea that’s there’s truth in artifice. It’s like through artifice there’s an idea that’s conveyed and ultimately celebrity is just another artifice. The interesting thing about the project is that there’s always this kind of tension between the real and artificial: Really singing and lip-synching and pretending to fuck up and really fucking up. I’m totally reserving the right to fuck up. It’s kind of fun that because you’re like ‘Okay, I look like a complete retard’, but you know that you’re only going to look this way once.” Casey is kicked out of painting class because his work was ‘shit’. “Well, they weren’t that harsh, but they said the most compelling part was when I stood up to explain,” he says. “I’m not an audio geek. I don’t know labels and producers. I’m just a PR poser. I just walk around, dress up, talk to everybody, act charming, do the robot, lip-synch, go home, cry, get up, watch TV.” “It’s good to use nature when you’re crossing all these disciplines - hair, make-up, fashion, set design – because people always have some sort of connection to it. Like, if I go to a set person and use a fashion trend reference, ‘you know, it’s very much like the Marc Jacobs campaign of last year’, they’re not going to understand it, so it’s better to have a point of access that everyone has reference to. The other thing is the motivation behind this project is universality. We all came from more underground forms, avant-garde music, performance, whatever, and I know that I want it to be popular. “It’s a little bit myth making because it can only exist by word of mouth. I think one of our successes is not that a lot of people have seen us but that a lot of people have heard about us. I’m very nervous about doing something small and have all the press come out and have all this philosophising and articles and then people show up and be like ‘Oh yeah, it’s some jackass doing the robot with some ladies in underwear. Okay, that is the best bullshit I’ve ever seen.’ But fuck it. What the hell.” "You have to put your personal issues aside and just let it be that tag on the record rack. I'm just thankful to be in the paper at all. I worked for years in experimental theater, and I couldn't even get a listing in a listing section. Now I don't care whether a mention is good or bad. I just want the picture to be good." |
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| "I'm living the best novel -- art fags make fake pop band and are suddenly at helm of movement. The made-for-TV movie is going to be genius." |
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