Cevin Soling: Sinking the Pinks
love kills theory, Cargo Cult...
In an era when modern life is bereft of imagination, like the walls of a Las Vegas hotel room adorned with watercolor floral prints and listless monarch butterflies; pop culture is just as meaningless. Let's face it; if trash was recycled as endlessly as ideas, this planet would be a far greener place. Far from rehashing however, the love kills theory is an example of what happens when lead is turned into gold, as the edifice of the sixties decadence smashes against hardcore twenty-first century deconstruction. Cevin Soling takes his band to where few dare to tread, contouring the controlled sloppiness of The Velvet Underground, edging it with a heady dose of Postmodern Punk. The lyrics themselves read like a concept album, the theme, believe it or not, is bringing the ideas of contemporary philosophy into a brainless society. The ideas may sail over the head of the average breeding, meatloaf feeding, television believing, and 8th grade level reading Joe.
Such a feat seems fairly easy considering that the man is obtaining his master's degree in the subject at Harvard. He pulls it off nicely and, the final product is entirely too catchy. I, and everyone else in the office for that matter, had brutally overplayed the debut album, Happy Suicide, Jim even before it was released to the general public. When the time came to interview the bandleader Cevin Soling, my interest was inevitably renewed. However, research proved to be a daunting task, wading through page after page online, digging up his accomplishments. The list was impressive to say the least. It became clear, that he wasn't just a man with a band. Not only does he head up his own record label, Xemu Records, he's also the president of Spectacle Films and World Watch Productions. He is the writer/producer/director of numerous indie films. To top that off, he's also a South Sea God, as you will see below. He is arguably the most interesting college student in America .
JH: I've been doing some research and you're like a super renaissance man. Writer, producer, director, musician, you're president of various companies, and you're a South Sea god.
CS: Yeah, among other things, that kind of sums it up.
JH: That's quite a resumé.
CS: I'm also in school right now and I've got paper due right when I get back. So that's the other thing I'm kind of dreading because I have a book to read and paper to write on it and I'm going to have to do that on the plane.
JH: So how's the master's degree in philosophy treating you?
CS: Okay except I'm looking to transfer to apply for the Ph.D. program. So after this semester I'm going to submit my application, so I'm trying to keep my 4.0 going.
JH: With the band heating up, is that demanding a lot of your time, too?
CS: Kind of, but I don't really think about it that way because I enjoy it so much that it never feels like work. I'm planning on getting some kind of pretty decent tour together in the late winter, early spring. That will coincide with our various breaks. So I'm waiting to see, booking is supposed to put us together with some various high-profile bands. They promised at least one date, if not more, opening for The Zombies, because I like The Zombies a lot. Not that we really have the same audience or anything like that, but what a thrill to open for The Zombies. I guess The Sex Pistols are doing some kind of tour. It would be fun to play that, but I don't think that will happen. It would be cool.
JH: Yes it would.
CS: Actually, I don't know if I should say this yet because it's in the early stages and I don't want to blow it for them, but some friends of mine have really good potential for opening for Led Zeppelin and they're pretty thrilled about that. They both have the same booking agent and they've booked for Robert Plant before so it's just a really natural fit if it works out for them.
JH: Who is opening for Led Zeppelin?
CS: Some friends of mine, Dead Meadow, they might be opening for Led Zeppelin, but that's not confirmed yet. But they have a good shot at it, and it would be a perfect fit to open for them. I'm not sure if you're familiar with Dead Meadow.
JH: Kind of.
JH: And your sound has a lot of retro elements, but souped up. What attracts you to a sound?
CS: Basically, when I set about working on the album, I wanted to do something that was kind of distinct, because I felt that there was no point in throwing anything out there that's already been out there. I spent a lot of time trying to come up with distinctive elements that were also contributing and moving the art form forward in some way. I think I sort of gravitated toward the ear candy of the different sound effect noises. And also use them in a way that compliments the content of the song. As far as the other elements of the song, I like things that are melodic and catchy and pop-based in that way, but also still kind of a harder edge. And there are also various instrumentations that I like. I love the monophonic keyboard sound, and I like strings, and I think it's really just an amalgam of noises that I happen to like. I also try to weave into a storytelling tapestry with the sound effects and also to create something that complements that content.
JH: The message is something else entirely, too.
CS: After the music was written I spent at least two years or more working on the lyrics and developing some sort of consistent philosophy. Devo has done something to that effect when they started out, as far as developing philosophy is concerned. But combined with my other pursuits, I really wanted something that was self-consistent and truly heartfelt that I believed in and in that way, it would be a concept album in the sense that all the songs would tie in to the philosophy. The album The Hurting by Tears for Fears did something to that end, although the philosophy in that was Arthur Janov's that they were reflecting, and intermingling my own with elements of a lot of other people that came before us. An amalgam of different works. I wanted to show how these elements apply in different aspects of life.
JH: I read something a while back about trying to put art back into pop culture.
CS: That's sort of the situation. The movement in itself was sort the art of everyday life. I think it's sort of trying to give meaning to existence and not just being a cog in the machine and living without questioning. I don't know if there is more questioning going on or less, it seems like in the 60's there was this whole raise in consciousness and that sort of led into the 70's where there were all sorts of anxiety about that. Even though his films are humorous, Woody Allen I think utilized a sort of questioning of why we're here in a humorous existential sort of anxiety. And than after that those questions sort of went away and there seems to be a lot less of any of that going; it just got harder and harder to get by. There wasn't time for the luxury of any type of that thought. We're sort of reintroducing that and trying to make it accessible.
JH: That's quite a task.
CS: The hardest thing is trying not to make it either preachy or too heavy and to try to be serious but still have a sense of humor about things. I'm sort of walking that line. I think that was the hardest and that was what made things so challenging lyrically was trying to walk that balance.
JH: I was listening to it earlier today and for some reason it was sort of reminiscent of “Bob” Dobbs.
CS: Yeah, I can see that. I was actually hoping to sort of, as far as on the video element of it, I've been trying to work on the video for each song and so far two of the songs have videos, so I've still got a ways to go.
JH: That's what I was watching.
CS: But certainly, in the video, I was going for that sort of “Bob” Dobbs thing. I guess a little less humor than “Bob” Dobbs, but still certainly that element. But that was one of the influences there. That was definitely on the forefront of my mind when I was working on that.
JH: And which one was that one you were working on?
CS: For The Love Kills Theory, for that particular song. Nice that you picked up on that.
JH: Thanks.
CS: In a way Lee Harvey Oswald is used in that “Bob” Dobbs sort of way. It's like anti-“Bob” Dobbs, but it's actually more like iconography.
JH: Your film work also has an Indy feel, but a lot of heavy hitters are giving it some attention.
CS: Yeah, things only changed recently. I've kind of been avoiding even doing interviews and doing the whole marketing push. Just because in the past it really slowed me down in terms of creative output. It takes a lot of work and a lot of time to actually promote things. Then also, I worked in so much of a vacuum. I have virtually no industry connections in film or music and everything I've done has been very insulated. It's been good and bad, I think mostly when you get involved in a larger community you get people who tell you all the things you can't do and the reasons why certain things can't be done. There's a lot of other negativity in other layers and it makes the process of creating that much harder. Yeah, I mean it's nice and useful to get attention because it enables you to do other things, mostly in terms of access to capital, but there's always a price to be paid when that's involved.
JH: Yeah, without actually whoring yourself out to the other marketing aspect of your work.
CS: I've managed to successfully avoid that for this long. I think at this point I can have a little more security in terms of reaching out now. Now I'm sort of engaged in the marketing push and getting some exposure. I can do things on a little bigger scale.
JH: Did The War on the War on Drugs make you any enemies in high places?
CS: It's funny I was expecting it to. It's funny as far as critical review; it fell very hardcore along party lines. In some cases I thought was kind of amusing, there were people who simply attacked it because they failed to understand the whole concept of irony. There's just no way to respond to that. If you just take something as literal that was never meant to be literal then of course you can quote it and when you see things in print, they only read literally, especially if you take only small sections. It's kind of frustrating to see that although, what are you going to do? No one had a middle-of-the-road opinion on it. I was actually concerned, there were a number of people who worked on the project who used pseudonyms, but there was a case where one journalist named Daniel Forbes who I'd spoken to in the process of doing the research. He had exposed the government's policy of paying TV programs. The financing wasn't straightforward. They got credits in return for the public service announcement dollars if they had TV programs that had anti-drug themes. Shows like Beverly Hills 90210, things like that, would have episodes that were anti-drug propaganda. The same thing would happen in articles and print and different places and they would all get government money under the table. He ended up getting seriously harassed by the feds for writing this article. The article was followed and all sorts of pressure was placed on him. I was sort of gearing up for the worst, and to the best of my knowledge there hasn't been any impact on that end. Which is fine, I have no desire to have my life complicated that way.
JH: So you weren't the least bit disappointed?
CS: No, quite the opposite. The last thing I want was that kind of hassle. If anything it was more of a relief and more reassuring that one can make statements like that and some of us can be left alone even if we are making statements against policy.
JH: The concept of irony seemed completely lost on some of these people?
CS: To some of the critics, I mean the right-wing papers like The Post and The Daily News in New York . If they want to criticize that the movie wasn't funny or was poorly made or something like that then what can I say, you know? That's a criticism. But when you're criticizing it for the wrong reasons and holding that up because you didn't understand that things weren't meant to be taken literally. You just wonder how these people got jobs in writing.
JH: Tell me about your adventure as a South Sea God.
CS: Oh gosh. I've actually made several trips to off-the-beaten-path places. The first one was actually in Borneo where, before I was even in film, this was immediately after I got out of college; I went to Borneo just for the sake of doing something different. I ended up staying with a tribe of headhunters there. That sort of got me hooked on wanted to go to these remote places. I then had done a film in Uganda , which I'm still editing. There's this tribe called the Ik that this anthropologist Colin Turnbull had written about. It's a required reading in Intro to Anthro in most colleges. The book is called The Mountain People and he writes about the three years that he spent with this tribe that in the mountains of northeastern Uganda near the border of Kenya and Sudan . What made his trip kind of remarkable was how he came to thoroughly detest these people and openly recommended that the tribe be dispersed among Africa and be broken up with no remnant that they even existed because the tribe so depraved. And they were at the time he was there, each person was completely self-interested and they would starve the elderly and starve their children and each person was kind of out for themselves. The treatment was worse than simply that. But that was kind of the last that anyone had ever heard of them, so I decided to set up and expedition to try to track them down and find them and also see what they were like. That was a really intense journey. There pretty much wasn't a single day that I wasn't in fear of my life when I was there, and for good reason. We got shot at, got ambushed by gunmen, lions surrounded our tents one night, all sorts of bad things, but we did eventually find the tribe. The following year was when I went to Vanuatu where there is, they're called the Cargo Cult, which I've since talked to anthropologists about and they sort of question the whole description of what a Cargo Cult is. It's hard to even define that anymore. But the more you know, the less it is to use words unfortunately. But this movement began as result of extreme oppression due to missionaries. This group of people took waiting for the return of this spirit named John Frum. Around that time also they came to hear about America . This was right before World War II and they'd been having just beginnings of America coming into that area and eventually the Americans had set up their head operations on one of the islands of Vanuatu, Vanuatu consists of eighty-three islands, and on the island of Santo was the main operations for fighting Japan. The experience that the natives had had with Europeans was predominately either the people being used for indentured servants in work around Australia or had been these horribly oppressive situations where missionaries had come and they'd be forced to convert or have their huts burned down or people killed. So when the Americans arrived it was the first time they had seen white men and black men working together. To some degree there was segregation at that time in the regiments but soldiers were still soldiers, and the natives were treated very well. They were paid well for their work, they were given free medical care, and clothes and food, and the scope of the operations was beyond anything they had ever seen before that the Europeans ever had. So when the war ended America just kind of took off and left. This also happened at the time of the rise of this John Frum movement and it got tied in with the worshiping of America . So they've been waiting for America to come, as well as the return of John Frum, and there's supposed to be this gift of tremendous amount of good brought to the island and that's sort of Cargo Cult aspect of it. But there's a Millianism aspect where it's sort of the return of this messiah as well. So when I came to the island I got a number of corporate sponsors to donate a tremendous amount of goods for of humanitarian reasons as well as product placement for the film. All the goods that I got were thoroughly consistent with the lifestyles of the people which would be cooking utensils and cooking pots and fishing tackle and gear, nothing that the people hadn't had some contact or exposure with. Not necessarily things that they had, but things that wouldn't alter their lifestyle, it would complement it.
JH: So, no TV's or anything like that?
CS: No, no TV's. You know, lighters, coolers, stoves, generators, solar panels; I mean globalization is taking effect so there is the arrival of a number of things there already. So as a result of me bringing all these things, it resulted in a sort of elevated stature. There was a lot of resistance on the part of the government; the government is in cahoots with the missionaries. There's one central government of all eighty-three islands. They have a small presence on each island. The government wants to see the movement extinguished to a certain degree, except that because there is curiosity it brings some attention to the region, but they really want to see them become Christianized. They saw my presence there as reaffirming their traditional customs and beliefs which is this historic struggle that goes back hundreds of years and persists today. They are still trying to extinguish the traditional customs and culture and have them all convert. So they were deathly afraid that my presence was going to make it that much harder to convert them. So there's a lot of pressure and resistance from the government and a lot of effort to basically impede me from seeing the people and that led to a big conflict with the people and the government. They had threatened to burn down the government presence on the island if I wasn't permitted free access. So the basic conflict over me kind of magnified my stature there. So the following year I was asked by the government to return because there was so much demand from the people for me the come back. They had a huge ceremony for me. All the chiefs of the island were there. They gave me land on the island. They adopted me into the tribe and announced that the whole island was essentially mine even though they were legally giving me one chunk of land. And the legend has sort of grown, and continues to grow.
JH: Sounds like fun.
CS: I respect the people greatly and I'm not trying to exploit them in any way, it's walking that fine line between having a presence while respecting their ways and traditions.
JH: Is there anything else you're working on?
CS: Yeah. There's the most recent film project that I just sent out to Sundance. The tentative title is The War on Kids. I'm going to change the title, but I've already sent it off that way. It's a two part documentary, I've just finished with part one, which is problems with public education in America . It's not simply just showing how bad public education is or the education system itself as being this autocratic, fascist institution. It's basically an indictment that people will voluntarily send their children to places like that. That's essentially what the film is about, although it looks predominately like it's just an indictment of the public education system as well as the amount of pharmacological abuse through the drugging of kids with Ritalin and Adderall.
Then part two will deal with society, things like curfews and the rise of boarding and reform schools, and hotels and villages and all sorts of different places where kids are not allowed at all. It's just this overall societal attempt to marginalize kids and keep them out of public fear. One thing I'm working is also a series of books. They're written kind of like children's books but they're for all ages. There sort of more for a college audience.
JH: The Rumpleville Chronicles?
CS: The Rumpleville Chronicles, yeah. Book number three just got back from the press, although I guess it won't come out until January. There's a series of ten. I'm in pre-pre-production on a documentary on the phenomena of enlightenment.
JH: Really?
CS: Yeah. It's in it its very early stages right now; I'm just sort of reaching out to people who have contacts and access with a number of people. Things unfortunately take on a life of their own much faster than I ever like and I get sucked into situations before I'm really ready. I ran into someone who has pretty good access to the Dali Llama and I know I only have a narrow window of opportunity to talk to him. So I'll probably get sucked into making that before I really want to.
JH: Is there anything else I haven't covered?
CS: Probably, but that's a bunch of it.
JH: I suppose I should let you go back to your vacation.
CS: This is the last day of it anyway. I should be home today. I have to work on that paper for class.
JH: That doesn't seem as adventurous as lions or battles or anything like that.
CS: No, this is a vacation that was anything but. I remember it was just day after day in Uganda of some kind of real present threat. We'd be in a village and people would have anthrax. It was just a constant, every day thing. Each day you'd think you'd have whatever you were confronted with the previous day under control. Although being in a war zone with a large resistance army as a clear and present persistent danger was never easy. We were driving through these abandoned refugee camps because the LRA was in the area. And always having to worry about that was intense. But there was a point when a threshold was exceeded. That was when we were hiking and came across some elephants. African elephants are not like Asian elephants, African elephants are not trainable and they're not friendly. Allegedly, the Natives insist that they have a collective memory of all the poaching and if an elephant wants to kill you, it will. There's not much you can do about it. It can outrun you and there's just not much you can do. So we came upon these elephants and they started expressing their unhappiness at our being there and started trumpeting and kicking up dirt and threatening us. It was at that point that I really lost it. I was staring one of the elephants in the eyes and saying, "you'd better just fucking kill me and get this over with, or just shut up." I kind of really lost it at that point. And then after that everything was a lot easier because I had just reached my threshold. Nothing really mattered too much after that, after the elephants didn't kill us for whatever reason.
JH: Wow.
CS: Then we were ambushed later that day. There were these three gunmen. We had this vehicle we had driven just a certain distance to a missionary outpost, and then hiked the rest of the way. Then after we hiked and retrieved our vehicle there were these three gunmen blocking the road. There isn't really a road there, just a dry riverbed, so there wasn't any place to turn around. We had to jump out of our vehicle when we saw the gunmen. They'd shoot the driver, or everyone, and rob whoever's there. So we saw them about a hundred yards ahead and jumped out of the vehicle and ended up walking up to them with our cameras and started filming them. Somehow we managed to engage them. I had taken a Polaroid camera with me and we showed them a photo of them I had on the Polaroid. They saw themselves and they were just kind of amused. We got out of a lot very unfortunate situations like that; where they for whatever reason let us go. So no, my homework isn't like that.
