MINDLESS SELF INDULGENCE
by Mary Borsellino
Originally published: Tsunami magazine, December 2007.
The Soundwave festival will be Mindless Self Indulgence's first Australian tour, and patient fans couldn't be more excited to finally get a taste of the band's live show. Mary Borsellino grabs a minute with frontman Little Jimmy Urine to talk touring, technology, and... toothpaste.
"Anybody can make a song on garageband; you have to give a lot more if you want someone to pay for a CD or a USB or a download," says Jimmy. "There better be really amazing cover art and extras to make the official version worthwhile. The world's just starting to wrap its mind around things like the internet as platforms for music, which is bizarre for us because we've been doing it for so long. And musically, too - I hear Justin Timberlake and Gwen Stefani's songs and they're just starting to experiment with effects that we've been using for a while. Sitting in the future, it's tough!"
Trying to pin a genre on Mindless Self Indulgence is nothing if not a pointless, ridiculous, and time-wasting enterprise. But since pointless, ridiculous and time-wasting enterprises seem to be one of Mindless Self Indulgence's favourite things, they've made up a genre of their very own: "industrial jungle pussy punk". That makes them sound like they belong in a tiny, obscure niche, though, when nothing could be further from the truth: the band has toured with most of the biggest names in rock.
"When we play with bands like My Chemical Romance or Korn, it's a different animal to when we're doing our own shows," Jimmy explains. "Because when I'm onstage, I don't want to break anything, because it's not my stuff!"
"And I think of our own shows, where it's just us playing, as being like Rocky Horror in a lot of ways; we're all there to be entertained and everything goes at a million miles an hour. I gotta say, though, that I sometimes wonder how people manage to crowd surf in full Tinky Winky and Blue's Clues mascot outfits!" Jimmy laughs.
"It must be frustrating for people in Australia; you're underneath the world, and bands can't always get down to do a tour," Jimmy offers sympathetically. "Especially because you're almost all around the coast, on this huge island, and so it's a matter of flying from place to place to place. We get so many emails about it, and we've been trying to get down - that's why Soundwave is such a great opportunity."
Being as left-field and unclassifiable as MSI are can, of course, sometimes lead to being misunderstood. "Some people take the immediate face value of what we do, and miss that what we're saying is the opposite. We get called racist when we cover Method Man," says Jimmy, after I tell him about one letter I read in Kerrang calling the band misogynist. "I hadn't heard 'misogynist' before, though. It's really odd. There are ladies in the band!" he points out, referring to drummer Kitty and bassist Lyn-Z.
"You should check out the follow-up etter in the next issue. That writer didn't get anything of what we were doing, things the crowd loved and he didn't understand," Jimmy says diplomatically. Then, after a pause, he laughs. "He didn't think much of getting toothpaste poured in his hair, either."