Amirtha Kidambi is invested in the creation and performance of subversive, anti-hegemonic music, from free improvisation and avant-jazz, to Indian carnatic and devotional, experimental bands, electronic music, noise and new music. She is an educator, activist and organizer working to challenge systems of white supremacist, colonial, capitalist, patriarchy, and is co-founder and co-organizer of South Asian Artists in Diaspora and Musicians Against Police Brutality. As a bandleader and composer, she is the creative force behind the incendiary protest group Elder Ones. She is also the host of Outernational, a podcast that explores the relationship between music and revolution, featuring discussions with musicians who are using their music and platforms to grapple with the intersecting global crises of our times.
(Photo Credit: Acudus Aranyian)
Outernational is a new podcast from jazz musician, organizer, and educator Amirtha Kidambi, exploring the relationship between music and revolution. The second episode features her interview with Deerhoof’s Greg Saunier, which we’re excerpting on the site today. You can read their conversation below, and listen to the full episode here.
— Annie Fell, Editor-in-chief, Talkhouse Music
Amirtha Kidambi: When I was young in the Bay Area and I was going to places like 924 Gilman in Berkeley, maybe why I was attracted to bands like Deerhoof was that there was a DIY spirit to it that felt like more than just aesthetics. It wasn’t like all the bands sounded the same… It seemed like more a value system.
Greg Saunier: Yeah.
Amirtha: Do you feel like DIY had an ethics and a value system that was core to you in some way, that you continue? Because I know Deerhoof has maintained a certain kind of value system. Do you feel like that community had a certain set of values that you, as a person, feel resonated with you?
Greg: Yes, of course. But it wasn’t the community. I mean, I have to acknowledge how lucky I am and how lucky Deerhoof was. The timing — it might sound unlucky, because Deerhoof’s first practice actually was the day Kurt Cobain died, and we were kind of playing grunge.
Amirtha: And it was like, “Now grunge is dead.”
Greg: And it was. It was like overnight, almost every rehearsal studio was soon to become the office space for some dot-com startup. And most of the venues where a lot of people were doing some kind of wild music — you know, there was a lot of wild music in the mid-‘90s, and I’m sure even before I got there in ’91. A lot of joke bands, a lot of costume bands. Noise kind of had a mini trend. And we sort of showed up right as music that had guitars or anything like that was just like, “OK, bye. Done.” And everything was moving to electronic dance music. And although San Francisco was not yet quite the monstrosity of a tech-oriented stereotype that it is now, it was a burgeoning internet place, and people were really into anything electronic. And it was the Clinton years, and the billboards at the time were all about how you could retire at age 31 because you’re gonna make a killing in the stock market.
Amirtha: Yeah, a new tech startup and you’re good for life.
Greg: [Laughs.] Yeah. So during Nirvana’s career, it was a topic of discourse, “Did they sell out? How much did they sell out?” The concept of selling out was still a thing. I think there was a mass disillusionment in the music discourse, that at the time was still largely influenced by print magazines like Rolling Stone and SPIN, that are now very much receded into the distant background of music history.
Amirtha: Yeah, or have just been subsumed into whatever mainstream larger corporate media conglomerates at this point.
Greg: Exactly. I was reading — do you know that book No Logo by Naomi Klein? I bought it once on tour. And she was talking about this moment when there was a brief late-‘90s resurgence of… it was the neo-swing revival, and Squirrel Nut Zippers and all that stuff.
Amirtha: [Laughs.] Oh, yeah.
Greg: She posited that that actually started because of Gap ads that had these swing dancers.
Amirtha: I remember those ads!
Greg: And that that actually preceded the musical trend. It was the first time ever that a corporate ad campaign, selling pants—
Amirtha: The pants were the inspiration.
Greg: Was the inspiration.
Amirtha: It was the khakis.
Greg: People got into it, and then all these swing dancing classes started, and then all these bands popped up doing revivals. And that reversal was kind of the death knell of the idea that selling out was even a concept anymore. And that people who were young and growing up with that Gap ad would see it not as selling out, but as a plus, and a thing that you need to do in order to have a career.
I think that in the 25 years since then, the idea of a DIY… I mean, what it was for us then — sure, I can pat myself on the back and say it was an ethos, but what it was was a necessity. We didn’t have any budget to play with, and we never had any budget subsequently. What we gained with doing everything ourselves was total control. And so instead of losing your entire year’s savings for three days in the recording studio to make an album that you wish you could have mixed a little differently, or, “I think I could have played a better guitar solo but I was running out of time…” You spend a year or two making a record on your own just working on it nonstop all day, every day.
Amirtha: And you still are making records in this way.
Greg: And that’s how we still do it. We got so used to that, that for us, it was a really a stretch to start and finish a record in a recording studio, which we did a couple of years ago on the previous record [2023’s Miracle Level]. That felt like that was us experimenting, trying something we’d never done before, relinquishing a little bit of control.
Amirtha: But you must’ve been approached over the years by all kinds of cushy studios and producers.
Greg: Not really
Amirtha: No?
Greg: No. We’re big in your heart, you know. [Laughs.] We’re a small time band. Nobody knows who we are.
Amirtha: Maybe it would have been easy to seek out those opportunities if you wanted to.
Greg: Maybe so. I don’t know.
Amirtha: But it’s interesting what you’re saying about the Gap ad. Now I have to go back and read that Naomi Klein book, because I really remember that moment. And you’re right, the discourse around selling out almost seems quaint now. Because it felt like at that time, there was more of a choice of if you wanted to align yourself with certain corporate interests. And I think maybe where we’re at, 25 years later, what’s really on my mind is… you know, we talk about this idea that there’s no ethical consumption in capitalism, but I think at this point, it’s also very true that there’s no ethical production in capitalism. And because capitalism, in my mind, is wholly unethical, maybe there never was.
But let’s say as musicians, we have a certain way of thinking about music, whether it’s that we want it to be non-hierarchical, that we don’t want suffering to be created because of our music. It seems like now, the choices are becoming more and more and more limited about how to do these things ethically, and we become very complicit. I mean, just today, you posted on the Deerhoof Instagram that you’re bringing all your music off Spotify. And that’s just one of the components, right?
Greg: Right.
Amirtha: The music distribution. As a band, have you over the years made decisions in that sense of how to deal with that level of complicity? It seems kind of all-consuming at this point.
Greg: I think that to say there’s no ethical consumption or production of course has a grain of truth to it, but is also a very handy way to cop out, you know? And say that, therefore—
Amirtha: “Who cares?” [Laughs.]
Greg: [Laughs.] Exactly. I think that we have been lucky in that the amount of pressures that have been put on us to say, “Who cares,” and to say, “Your ethos is quaint, but if you wanna play in the big leagues…” — we’ve not had that many people try to do that. And I think that the few times it has happened, I don’t know what it is but it’s probably nothing more than, no member of Deerhoof ever believed that superstardom was just around the corner for our band. I think we have always believed in our ability to survive in capitalism, but not our ability to win at it, you know? Or to even participate in trying to win at it. We just want to survive, and we want to not have our band die.
Back in the Bay Area, there was this Japanese restaurant that we loved a lot called Chaya. It was a vegan Japanese restaurant in Berkeley
Amirtha: I remember the place. It was so good.
Greg: And it was often a big conversation where we’d ask somebody who was working there — because every night, you had to stand on the sidewalk in line for half an hour to get in this tiny place — we’re like, “Why don’t you expand? Why don’t you open a couple more branches?” And they’re like, “No, it’s working. This is enough. Business is great.” And it’s just that idea of “enough.” That’s not the rule under capitalism, because in its purest form infinite growth is mandatory. But there is such a thing as ethical production within that system. A place like Chaya, a mom and pop, can survive and do just fine.
Amirtha: And Deerhoof is a mom and pop.
Greg: Well, that’s what I’ve started to think! It’s just a small business. And that idea of enough… I think there has been a long period ever since that Gap change, in which the idea that your friend’s indie band got some great opportunity — they got their song into an ad for Microsoft or something — and everybody would applaud and say, “Good on them, they’re hacking the system! They must be taking six figures off of that CEO or something.” For whatever reason, Deerhoof has not had the opportunity to even attempt that kind of stuff. I mean, we’ve turned down a few ads — Target was one — that would have paid us a lot of money. But we just knew that it would kill us. I mean, once you’ve discovered that the people who like your music like it for certain reasons, like that it surprises them or it’s unpredictable or that it always seems to be a little bit underground, that becomes part of the charm. And we all know what that feels like when we have a favorite band that really isn’t that big, and the mainstream doesn’t know about them and it’s like they’re speaking in code to you. It’s like a secret handshake.
Amirtha: And sometimes it’s not even something you can help. Like, personally, I think it’s hard for me to separate what drew me towards more experimental sounds or noisy sounds, or things that were just sort of sonically against whatever the mainstream was — I don’t know if it was just that I was always a tiny ardent anti-capitalist who was like, “I wanna do anything that’s counter to the mainstream market,” or if it was just I had a curiosity about these sounds and then those things aligned as values somehow.
Greg: Totally. It’s like… What’s that guy’s name? That Caribbean philosopher who talks about “the right of opacity.” [Édouard Glissant.] The right of opacity is, you have the right to not be understood. You have the right to say things that go over the heads of your colonizers. And he’s speaking from the perspective of a colonized population. But when I read this, it just was like a ton of bricks, because that’s what it is when you’re talking about music that a major label record exec — you know, David Geffen, he wouldn’t get it. He’s not gonna understand it. And I think that speaking in code becomes more and more crucial when, for example, all of your contributions to culture, it’s mandatory that they be mediated via Spotify, via Instagram. They’re going through corporate platforms. And not just corporate, but literally oligarchs. I mean, we’re talking multi-billionaires who have designs on, in X’s case, the militarization of the globe with artificial intelligence. Computerized warfare that will use facial recognition that sometimes fails, or it will plow through spreadsheets of names and addresses—
Amirtha: For bombing campaigns.
Greg: And the computer will just decide, “OK, this building’s next.” Boom, poof, all those people are instantly incinerated — as a way to automate warfare and take human emotion out of the equation of it, so that there’s no remorse involved. A way of advancing warfare to be more efficient. It’s like a Star Trek episode or something.
Amirtha: It’s insane. And the idea not just that maybe you can wash your hands of it morally, but also that it’s like, “No, it’s smart bombs!”
Greg: And it’s an investment, so it’s gonna make whoever invests in it a lot of money. And then if you’re talking about Instagram and Zuckerberg’s thing, it’s clear that he’s very interested in political control. Trump probably would not have won the first time had it not been for Facebook. That’s why Deerhoof left Facebook… Both of them are clearly authoritarian and fascist, they see the human race as so many data points for their potential domination and control.
Amirtha: Yeah, I saw Peter Thiel was asked if he cared about the survival of the human race, and he really struggled to answer that question, because it doesn’t seem like he really does. Or he thinks he can live beyond it…
Greg: I mean, Naomi Klein’s most recent publication was a pretty long essay with Astra Taylor where they discussed this exact topic. The super billionaires, along with Trump and members of the ruling class — what really is their vision for the future? It would appear to the untrained eye that they’re simply destroying it, but in fact, what they’re doing is setting up enclaves for themselves that will be protected by the military and the police. Which, Huh, I wonder why it doesn’t matter what party’s in power, the Pentagon budget and the police budgets just keep going up. The police keep getting more militarized.
Amirtha: And it’s crazy because Spotify already, before we found out about this Daniel Ek $700 million investment in — what’s the company called?
Greg: Helsing. It’s a German AI warfare company.
Amirtha: Military tech. But even before that, it was already, “We’re paying .004 cents per stream.” Already from a labor perspective, all of that was awful. But it’s not just Spotify to contend with, right? We find out SXSW, the CIA is sponsoring events and doing talks. The level of complicity of certain festivals being owned by major companies that also have ties. Like, I work at a university—
Greg: Obviously that’s a major controversy, yeah.
Amirtha: And it can feel like — not just to absolve ourselves of the responsibility of, “Oh, well, it’s too big, I can’t do anything, why care,” because I definitely do care — but it does feel overwhelming. So to see Deerhoof say, “We’re done with Spotify and this is why,” or on the most recent record of Noble and Godlike in Ruin, releasing a single on Craigslist — how are those decisions made as a band? Why now for Spotify? Because for me to see it as another musician, I do have my music on Spotify, and I’ve known this stuff about Spotify for a very, very, very long time.
Greg: Right, we all do.
Amirtha: And it does make a difference to see you guys do it. It’s like, “You know what? It’s not that hard. I’m not making any money off of it. Why am I still on there?” How do you come to these decisions over the years?
Greg: It’s a privilege. The members of Deerhoof have not had it beaten out of us by, quote-unquote, “experts.” I mean, there have been a couple of times where we’ve hired publicity companies and stuff who advise us to do this and not to do that, and blah, blah, blah. We just never believed them, and then we were like, “This campaign was silly. We’re not hiring them next time.” I really think that music does have something to do with it. And it’s what you were saying — it’s not disconnected from the music genre. And if your music genre has free improvisation in it, that’s not irrelevant because the improvisation is all about trusting your gut.
Amirtha: And the other people around you.
Greg: Exactly. And so when this headline hit this week, we’ve been on tour so we’re in the car together, and I just brought it up like, “Oh, man, do we even still want to be on this?” And then my band was like, “Yeah, let’s just get off.” I mean, it took us five minutes to decide. Of course, then it took us days and hours of meetings with the other people whose finances would be affected.
Amirtha: Like the label. Are they pretty supportive?
Greg: Yes, they were. Joyful Noise is the label we’re currently on, and have been for almost 10 years. I mean, there were a lot of factors to discuss and it was complicated. A lot of reasons were given why Spotify is actually important to our career, and every new reason they gave was like, “That’s even more reason we don’t want to be on it.”
Amirtha: What are some of the reasons that were given?
Greg: Well, just because that’s how people are discovering it.
Amirtha: Except there’s all these algorithms that are actually…
Greg: I know, but they were starting to feel that they were getting a handle on it, they would be able to play the game, they were figuring out how to get more numbers, for us or any of their bands. It feels a little like a slot machine. There is something addictive to feeling like you’ve almost figured out the secret code that will grant you a victory on some digital platform, whether it’s streaming, or whether it’s just search engines where you appear in a search result. You always feel like you’ve almost cracked the code, you know?
Amirtha: Yeah. But then the finish line moves.
Greg: It’s always a moving goalpost. And that’s literally the business model, to keep everybody trying to figure it out like it’s a game and keep them engaged in it. And when you’re literally in the middle of a tour and people are clapping for you every night, and they’re singing along with your songs and coming up to the merch table and telling you that they like your music, I’m like… My ego’s like in a pretty good place. I don’t care what the numbers are.
Amirtha: You don’t need to win. [Laughs.]
Greg: We’re fine. We’ll just do some more tours, and if we have to play slightly small venues, it’s fine. We’ll do what we can. But I know that there have been connections between the rich, the powerful, and the military and the police since—
Amirtha: Always. [Laughs.]
Greg: I mean, certainly during the history of capitalism. And, really, the history of empires, that’s always been the case.
Amirtha: Capitalism and imperialism, they’ve had a relationship from the beginning. They can’t really exist without each other.
Greg: Capitalism is just a newer revision of imperialism. It’s a version that started, you know, in Venice or something. And then it became the Spanish and Portuguese empires, and then it became the Dutch empire, and then it became the British empire, and then it became the American empire. And each of them collapsed, and we’re watching ours collapse now. They all follow a similar trajectory, and one of the ways that collapse is brought about is that, while there always has been this connection between the rich, the powerful, and weapons, in these late stages of empires it becomes exaggerated. And so the economy becomes overly financialized — in our case, it’s called Wall Street — where it all becomes about financial speculation, and that empire’s no longer producing actual goods and services that anyone wants or that have any value. It’s all just about an imaginary numbers game. So that’s where our economy is. And then the other thing is propping the economy up on an overextended empire that can only be maintained with weapons. That was the downfall of every empire, and that’s what we’re seeing. And there does come a point where the inhabitants of that empire—
Amirtha: I.e., you and I.
Greg: Exactly — become sort of forced. It’s like, “How far are you willing to let this go?” And for us, we could deal with the fact that we aren’t paid well on Spotify. It’s still a net win for us. But as soon as you sit there and watch for over a year, Biden and Netanyahu teaming up to slaughter a people, to exterminate a people, using AI battle tech. Then your guy over in Sweden is like, “Oh, guess what he’s investing in?” And it’s literally like, we just saw what that does to human life. We just saw what that does to a culture. It erases it. You just saw what it does to hospitals, what it does to schools, what it does to journalists, what it does to aid workers, what it does to communities, what it does to histories. Its intention is the utter removal of a people in order for it to be replaced by a different people who are richer and who need the poorer one out of the way.
Amirtha: And that is Western imperialism. And, for me, it feels almost like the last stand of it in some way — why it feels so utterly violent on such a horrific scale. And the more we learn about, “OK, this is how tech is being used in Palestine,” and we also know more and more about what is fueling the war in the Congo and the civil war in the Sudan and the extraction of minerals — so much of it is tied to tech, because this is the production of our time.
So, you and I are citizens of this empire. And I know when I was first listening to Apple O’ in 2003, I remember that there was anti-Iraq War messaging. To talk about opacity for a second — I’m glad that you brought up Glissant, because he’s just one of these consciousness-raising theorists for me too, where it’s like I read it and it was things that I had inklings of deep somewhere in my soul, and then it’s like, Oh, that’s it.
Greg: [Laughs.] I know.
Amirtha: It’s consciousness expanding stuff. And I think music is also one of those things that has been consciousness expanding stuff. I remember seeing the Apple O’ album cover, and it looks like an atom bomb, but it also looks like a bit of an apple. But is opacity part of how you think about — I hate to say “political music,” because I’ve read you say this in an interview, “What does that mean? All music is political. Everything you do is political.” But it almost reminds me of in tropicalia music in Brazil during the dictatorship. They were like, “How do we get these subversive messages to the people?” Is that part of the way of Deerhoof—?
Greg: Yes. It’s not that we invented it; we are participating in a long human tradition of… You know, just think of fairy tales or something. They mean one thing to a child and they mean another thing to a teenager, they mean mean another thing to a grown adult, and they might mean something else to a person at the end of their life. The same tale has many possible readings and interpretations, and the story is different every time you hear it or read it. And of course some kind of artistic holy grail is to have it mean multiple things you could map different things onto.
I mean, speaking of AI — I think that it would be cool to make music that would be difficult for AI to imitate, because maybe your songs are too different from each other or there’s too many different styles happening within one song, and it would be hard to train AI. Another advantage we’ve had is we’ve never had a hit song, so we aren’t associated with one song, we aren’t associated with one sound. And so that’s a way of being like mercury, every time you try to put your finger on it, it slips away. And I think that for people who like Deerhoof — which doesn’t need to be everybody on Earth. We’re not Daniel Ek, we’re not Mark Zuckerberg, and we’re not Biden or Trump or whatever. We don’t need millions of people to agree. We just need enough, like Chaya. We just need enough so that we can make a living, hand-to-mouth, which we are doing. So, it’s OK to speak in code. It’s OK to speak with double meanings. It’s OK if some people don’t understand, if some people don’t get it, and some people just think it’s a bunch of noise. That’s fine. I don’t care. [Laughs.]
