Lorde may have sported a Cramps shirt on the cover of Rolling Stone, but don’t except fellow deep-dark punk band the Black Lips to collaborate with her any time soon. According to guitarist Cole Alexander, “Royals” is his least favorite song — ever.
“We’d probably say no [if Lorde asked us to collaborate],” Alexander told the A.V. Club as part of the publication’s “Hatesong” column, in which musicians explicate why they’re not down with a certain tune.
“We’ve said no to stuff like that before. Sometimes I’ll try to open myself because some things will be so ridiculous that I might actually do it, but I don’t think I’d do it with her,” he said.
Ridiculous — and awesome — decisions include the band’s stop at this year’s Hangout Festival and their upcoming tour for Underneath the Rainbow, during which the band will pump manufactured smells into venues around the globe.
Alexander emphasizes that he doesn’t dislike Lorde herself, just the naïveté and style of the popular song. “It’s hard to say I actually hate it, but it’s a bit confused,” he said, pointing to the familiar lyrics decrying pop stars’ and rappers’ fascination with Maybachs and diamonds.
“Most of the people that are rapping about Maybachs and diamonds come from really ‘torn-up towns,'” Alexander said. “I feel like they come from worse parts and they aspire to get Maybachs and diamonds because they come from ratchet-ass ‘hoods where they have no hope. I think it’s a bit righteous of her.”
Still, he amended, “I feel like she’s got it a little bit confused. I also heard she’s 17, so maybe she’s naäve.”
The musician also points out that he’s not down with Lorde’s voice in general, opining, “I don’t like the groove of it and all these singers they have this inflection in their voice — I can’t even put my finger on it — on what it is, but they’re trying to sing like they’re trying to sing or something. It’s not a natural voice.”
So I’m guessing a “Bad Kids”/”White Teeth Teens” mashup is out of the question, huh?
Alexander also dug into a few other hated jams, including Drake and DJ Khaled’s “No New Friends,” saying that he doesn’t hear any “pain in [Drake’s] voice,” and that he seems “fake to me.”
“I like my rappers more ghetto and ratchet sounding,” he added. “Personally, I like more melodramatic, ignorant rap where they’re talking about violence and anger and it’s just evil. … To me, it’s just like a gangster movie. In a gangster movie, you don’t want to see polite guys; you want to see them do horrible shit. It’s a movie, it’s entertainment, and, at the end of the day, music is entertainment.”
If you’ve seen the Black Lips’ new video for “Boys In The Wood,” that assertion should really come as no surprise. It’s good, not bad — but more than kind of evil.
Macklemore also came under fire for his hit song “Thrift Shop,” which Alexander took issue with for its use of the word “h—ky.”
“My problem isn’t the fact that he says ‘honky,'” Alexander said. “It’s that he puts ‘honky’ in a black person’s mouth and they actually say it instead of him. He put a racist term into a black person’s mouth and had it thrown back at him to satiate his white guilt.”
What do you think of Alexander’s assertions? Let us know in the comments.
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