 | .Electrical Storm. |
| | Come da titolo.. "Today is what, Thursday? And I woke up in Chicago this morning,” McIlrath says, on the line from a San Diego tour stop a day before Halloween. “I dressed up my four-year-old daughter in a witch costume—she wanted to be a dark princess, which is essentially a witch, but she said it was a dark princess—and then dropped her off at school. And then I hopped on a plane to San Diego, where I’ll be tonight. So I won’t be there for Halloween—that’s one holiday that I’ve actually never been home for. Being home this morning to dress her up is the closest I’ve got."
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"Much of my tumultuous adolescence is behind me, and I can sing about it now in sort of retrospect, but when I see a kid in front of me singing it, I realize ‘Oh man, he’s going through this, like, today. You know, like, tonight. Like he’s going through it RIGHT NOW,’ you know? To witness that sort of transformation is something that’s really powerful"
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"All ages shows are important, and we always do all ages shows. It’s a pretty strict policy with the band, with a few exceptions, we’ve always played all-ages shows. That’s cause I would never ever want to exclude anyone from what we do. Nothing makes me feel worse than if I get an email from a 16 year old kid that says, listen, your band has changed my life and I’ve been waiting for two years for you to come to my town, and now I can’t go. There is no point for a band like us to do age restricted shows. Except for today, where we give you the option. Punk rock, or at least the brand of Punk rock that we do, it’s designed to speak to a younger audience. Our hope is to get these songs out to people who can relate to them at a time in their life when they’re sort of figuring out who they are and are trying to identify with something out there. The songs that we have are so relevant to younger people, that’s my attempt in all the lyric writing is to try to relate to somebody else my own experiences in hopes that they might not feel so alone in their experiences. So, excluding them from the show makes no sense at all."
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"I think the American dream has always been this intangible concept and I think that we’ve all grown up with some sort of idea as to what that is. It is an idea that we can grow up in this country and raise a family in this country and get a job and sort of live maybe how our parents did and how the generation before them lived. It seems like so much of that idea is under attack in America today. We could sit back and speculate as to who it is under attack by as we watch income disparity occur and see the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Throughout all of this it is the working class American that seems to take the brunt of the hit. You start to feel that the American dream is something that only the privileged elite are entitled to. This is most noticeable in a country like the United States where the gap between the rich and the poor grows and grows every year. That gap isn’t shrinking and coming closer together, it’s getting further apart almost to the point where we are erasing a middle class America. We are going to soon be looking at an elite ruling class that lives off of the backs of the lower class."
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"A whole bunch of my friends started snowboarding,” he recalls. “I saved up $400 and found a snowboard I wanted to buy. I was like, ‘Okay, I’m gonna be a snowboarder. That’s it.’ But as I was walking down to the snowboard shop, I passed by a guitar shop, and in the window there was a 1984 Gibson SG, just sitting there. I fell in love with it and bought it. I never got the snowboard. I’ve never even been snowboarding. But I’ve still got that guitar, and I’ve used it on every record I’ve played guitar on"
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“I’m really uncomfortable with the idea of being a role model, only because I feel that a role model separates you,” he admits. “It puts you on a pedestal; it puts you on this sort of level and I don’t want anybody to think that what I’ve accomplished or where I am is something that is unattainable to that person. I think what we do is all about breaking down the walls between the band and the audience, the musician and the audience,” he concludes. “I think the idea of a role model is only another brick in that wall.”
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Out there there are people talking about issues. Issues that have to do with…my future, your future…all of us together. And I’m proud to stand here with his many people who still give a shit about our future
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"You know you’re playing a great festival when the fucking rain doesn’t faze the crowd one bit"
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"Canada is the first country on the planet that really embraced this band on a large, large scale,” he said during a recent phone interview. “At the time when we were still beating down the doors of the world trying to get them to listen to us, Canada got it right away and we immediately had an incredibly rabid fan base all across the country. It always made us look forward to playing Canada"
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I’m a big believer in the phrase, ‘a picture is worth a thousand words. You can read a paper all day or a magazine all day about the war but, until you see the pictures, it’s not going to hit home to you. If you see a picture, how many lies can you tell in a picture? There it is – there’s somebody dying. There are many people dead. Who killed them? Who cares – they’re dead, they’ve died. That kind of thing needs to be seen, especially in the States, the war is presented in a very seamless package. ‘Here’s the war: it’s a class act, we have great weapons and great soldiers and everyone is happy. We’re winning, the Iraqis love us, you know, I think somebody died yesterday, but anyway.’ That’s how it’s presented. It’s presented as this very, oh I don’t know…it’s almost the same way we present sports. It’s just so terrible.”
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I bring a copy of Fugazi’s Instrument DVD on every tour, to remind myself why I got into this whole punk thing in the first place. It ends just the other day in my kitchen, where I was making pizza with my wife and 4-year-old, and “Promises” comes up on the shuffle. It ends as the song swells into the frenzied conclusion, and as the guitars turn into noise while Ian chants, “Promises/Words,” over and over, and my little girl says, “Daddy, I like this song.” She doesn’t look up; she’s concentrating hard on spreading tomato sauce over the kneaded dough. It ends as I stop what I’m doing, grab her by the shoulders and tell her, “Me too, kiddo.” And somewhere in the midst of a father’s pride and a new music fan’s discovery, it begins all over again. Viva Fugazi"
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It’s not OK to glorify violence and it’s not OK to excuse culprits from wrongdoing but its also not OK, its also not OK to dismiss what happened in London as criminality pure and fucking simple ‘cause we all know that there was more than that happening. When you take peoples’ future away from them, they fucking riot. When you take peoples’ hope away from them, they fucking riot. So let’s demand a better future, let’s demand hope for every single one of us in here today. The Clash said it better than we can say it; “Are we taking over, or are we taking orders?
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TKT represents a place deep inside us, a place where a
paranoid voice is always telling us you that you are ugly, you’re friends
all hate you, you’re lover doesn’t love you, the world thinks your shit, and
you are a fucking fake. TKT is a medium where we can lash back at this voice and at these feelings. It’s about making a conscious choice not to be the victim. Ever read The Giving Tree (by Shel Silverstien)? We’re the sequel where the Tree wins this time…CITAZIONE she wanted to be a dark princess, which is essentially a witch, but she said it was a dark princess xD questi papà che non capiscono niente u.u Edited by .Electrical Storm. - 2/9/2011, 13:25 | | | |
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facepalm per tutti e due u.u
