It’s my fifth time at a Wheatus soundcheck. Between tests, frontman Brendan Brown spits casual vitriol about the local government. Anyone surprised by this doesn’t know the real man, or follow him on X. From loitering in a bar they were playing, I first met this New Yorker in 2014, for whom calling out injustice and power abuses is second nature. At 52, Brown is still that kid from school who won’t respect authority but will get your nan a seat in a crowded pub, unprompted.
According to the Teenage Dirtbag singer, he is ‘always tweeting political stuff’ and never shies away from confronting high-profile figures. So, when we met in Oxford, I asked if he wouldn’t mind answering a few questions for Shout Out UK, and he was only too happy to oblige.
The Magic of Music
Music means many things to people. What does music mean to you? What is its purpose, if any?
BB: Spooky action at a distance, like Einstein said. I was just watching a Brian Cox video about how the interaction of …, I can’t get into the physics of it. But basically, the gravity, what gravity does in a black hole, what it eventually does to space-time, which generates a question, ‘What is time?’ but music has this sort of … magic to it. We’re at a distance beyond language or culture. It can communicate almost like a particle of matter and antimatter separated from one another. And that magic power is very difficult to harness, especially when you’re trying to craft something that will be effective in communication. There’s one chance, right, to reach people, so you have to get it, and it’s really tricky. However, once and if you do, it has that spooky action forever and ever without requiring any energy source, which also makes it very strange.
‘Teenage Dirtbag,’ your 2000 hit, is very popular with Gen Z. The ‘Teenage Dirtbag photos’ trend on TikTok gained a huge celebrity following, with the hashtag getting over 2 billion views. ‘Teenage Dirtbag’ also re-entered the top 40 in the music charts in 2023. What universal themes do you think the song raises that resonate with people today?
BB: Maybe it is the underdog, the story of the underdog. Maybe it’s just one [theme] of the quest for a personal identity that you can feel comfortable in, right? The original competition is with yourself, with your own insecurity and so on, right? So underdogs have to go out into the world and face the others. When you’re searching for your identity early on, it’s an inner battle. You don’t know who you are. Trying to figure it out. And I think it can be a struggle between letting the outside world dictate how you should make that decision and letting your inner passions and thoughts be the governance of that decision.
It’s very, very satisfying and interesting and purposeful to conjure something out of nothing.
You have a song or a lyric about going out to find or buy a new identity, if memory serves.
BB: I think maybe you might be talking about a shirt I wore for a long time. My then partner had worked for pharmaceutical companies and had a shirt from some sort of identity drug [branding]. It said, ‘I’m looking for a new identity‘.
Wheatus formed in 1995. How was the music industry different then, and what has motivated you to keep making music? I remember asking you about how the music industry has changed, and you said then that you didn’t care.
BB: Well, we’re in a strange position that way. Our Industry is small and based on very few special relationships that have gone on for a very long time. And I wouldn’t know the first thing about how to do something else in the music industry, reaching out, having bigger partnerships and so on, and I don’t really care too much, because I don’t have that sort of ambition to dominate every space, climb to the top of the charts, be there every year, fill every hall. I have a desire to have very special shows, performing music that we’ve worked hard to prepare, and I do bend towards it being a little chaotic, which is why we hand over the set list picks to the crowd. But as far as the big, organised business plan that brings you to stadiums and all that stuff. No thanks. I’m absolutely always writing something. I can’t help that. It’s very, very satisfying and interesting and purposeful to conjure something out of nothing. A song didn’t exist before, and people will argue that the notes in the arrangements do exist in mathematics. But not really, if that were true, then all the mathematicians would be having pop singles off the top of the charts, right? And that’s not happening. So there’s something else to it. There’s something sort of mysterious about making something from nothing. I’ve heard a lot of people discuss AI in this context, and the problem with AI is that it can only interpolate; it cannot extrapolate. This is a fact — it has no isotopic memory, so cannot conjure something from nothing. It can re-collage lots of things humans have made from scratch, but it cannot actually create one.
One notable way the industry has changed is the introduction of downloads and streaming. You saw this coming, and the guys at SONY (your old bosses) told you, ‘It’ll never catch on.’
BB: Yeah! There was a bit of that. They thought CDs would come back. (He laughs.)
Can you tell us a little about some of your past musical influences and whether any young artists have recently captured your attention?
BB: Yeah, 100 per cent. Ecca Vandal. Amyl and the Sniffers. Boygenius. Panic Shack. Lots and lots of really fun, heavy progressive rock is being done by females and LGBTQ people. I’m constantly impressed by that wave that’s happening. It’s way more vital a rock wave than we’ve had previously. It’s really cool, very exciting. Lots to listen to and research. (Brown is very Rush-influenced as well, and he loves Fishbone.)
Boredom is the greatest creative energy source, 100%
‘The Canon Chooses Itself’
Advanced AI technologies are reshaping society and hitting the creative industries when it comes to job security. What are your thoughts on this? Are you threatened, challenged, or excited by the fact that a machine can help write and compose music, mimicking humans and sometimes even doing a better job?
BB: It can’t write a better song than you could do on your own if you got bored. Boredom is the greatest creative energy source, 100%. But I’m a troll as well. So, I’m content to watch executives and fools try for a few decades and then fall on their faces. Because it won’t sell. People will be like, ‘Meh. I dunno what’s wrong with this, but I don’t like it.’ And that’s the way music is, even the most musically ignorant people do understand what they like and dislike on a visceral level that can’t be put into words, and you don’t have to be an expert. And that’s why music is incredible: you are an expert whether you think you are or not. No matter who is programming radio stations or signing bands to record labels, it’s in your skin, it’s in your blood to determine what is good music and what isn’t.
What significant challenges do you see teenagers facing today, and do you think they have it harder than Generation X and Millennials?
BB: Interesting. We had more boredom, but they have more confusion. And if I had to choose, I would have chosen my own generation to grow up in, because this one seems profoundly dangerous to me. Um, as bad as mine was, I don’t think it was as bad as it is now. I think it’s probably tougher now. Because first of all, it seems to me like adults have declared open season on young people for victimisation and swindling. They’re after young people for credit card debt on a level never seen before. They seem to be content, creating a new surf class: people who never can get out of their debt hole. When I first went to college in the early ’90s, credit cards for young people weren’t a thing. And by the time I graduated, there was a credit card kiosk in the centre of campus taking information from people who wanted to apply for credit cards. And these people didn’t have a job, and credit card companies knew that. So that should be illegal, I think, but it isn’t. And they’ve extended their claws into the higher education markets, as well, especially in the United States. It’s nearly impossible to get a higher education without going immensely into debt — irrevocably, in most cases — and they know this. So young people are being targeted for wealth extraction on a level I never thought would be possible.
There will be an illegal market for the truth that will take over.
It’s this mistreatment of the youth that really irks Brendan. A constant supply of young fans keeps him updated on the challenges young people face, and he fights their corner. He knows how it feels to be exploited. His early song ‘Hey, Mr. Brown’ relays his experience of trying to get a ‘sleazy music executive’ to pay his fee. SONY also told a much younger Brendan that Wheatus didn’t have any fans,’ before allegedly losing the band’s original masters. This proved to be the perfect training ground for becoming a mouthpiece for young people who today are regularly exploited through ultra-cheap labour and attacked for ‘spending too much on Netflix and coffee.’ The song ‘Fourteen’ confronts the abuse of minors, and not just the sexual kind. The lyric ‘You will hear that survival is some glorious endeavour’ addresses how the powerful deliberately exploit the naivety and eagerness of youth. ‘At every facet, Boomers are eating the young,’ growls Brendan, introducing ‘Fourteen’ on stage. ‘When you vote, vote angry! And release the Epstein files!’ If you spend some time listening to it, the world certainly seems a darker place since that first album.
Truth Trading & Bullshit
Do you think music can still play a role in truth-telling in the age of mass misinformation and toxic echo chambers?
BB: Yes, I do, because just like I said, with your ability to know what you like and don’t like, you kind of feel it on your skin. Even if you’re not an expert, we do know the truth. We’ve been programmed a bit to be biased towards one side or the other, but we do know the truth still, and the closer we get to having to commit ourselves to primal survival — what these credit card companies are trying to do to everybody currently — the more the truth will matter. There will be an illegal market for the truth that will take over. Now, absolutely, it has to be. Every lie incurs a debt to the truth. Eventually, it will snap, and you can’t, you can’t build society on bullshit, which is what they’re desperately trying to do right now. Be it crypto or the sheer amount of misleading political information that’s in adverts. They’ve taken over the press. I mean, I couldn’t believe what I saw on the BBC last night. A whole segment about how your electrical costs are about to go up, and that it’s a good thing.
Once again, America is dominating the political conversation. The election of Donald Trump was, in many ways, a predictable outcome given the ongoing social and economic frustrations that helped revive extreme right-wing populist thinking. How does it make you feel to be an American today?
BB: First of all, I think the notion that people have economic anxiety, and that’s why they vote Right-wing is bunk (‘nonsense’). What that really means is coded language for racism. Economic anxiety is really, ‘I might lose my job to a black person or immigrant or some such,’ and they’re (people) being fed that by their news channels, so that they will be divisible. The working class needing to be divided is part of the plan. Get together with your immigrant brothers and sisters, friends, it’s the only chance you have. They want your money, too. White people, working-class white people — don’t buy it. And they’re not political. You must remember that the most successful upper-class people are not inherently political. They adapt to politics because it’s a good way to control the masses and get what they want. But they’re sort of nihilistic at their core. They’ve done a hell of a job, assigning all the morals to themselves (making us think): ‘It must be how they’ve done so well. They’re ethical people.’ Bullshit!
Denmark and Australia have been adamant about protecting young people from online harms by banning social media for those who are under 15 and 16, respectively. Do you think these bans are an effective way of protecting young people from online dangers such as radicalism, gooning communities, misogyny and other toxic trends?
BB: The bans are probably a good idea. I don’t think that they’re effective, but I think that they will conjure up a discussion about why we would need to protect children from these multinational media corporations that are peddling and controlling the internet. Why is it very easy for me to find raw footage of soldiers being killed in real-time online? Because one side or the other wants it to be available. It’s not policed at the top — you don’t have police, you have interests, and they claim to police themselves. So, anything that washes down to us, you have to consider as being somebody else’s decision further up the chain to get what they want. And what we have to ask is: What did they want? Then, when you try and institute a ban to protect children, perhaps you’ll have to have a look at who doesn’t want it, because that’s the discussion — Who’s fighting it? Which entities? Who do they represent? That will give us a clue as to who’s been feeding us certain information, because if you think it’s not curated already, you’re wrong. It is curated by interests.
So, why do you think misogyny and other toxic trends are allowed to thrive on the internet?
BB: Because there are misogynistic interests at play — religious, especially in the American South. People who are honestly dedicated to removing women’s right to vote, and now they feel brave enough saying it out loud. Don’t pee on my leg and tell me it’s raining.
What advice, if any, do you have for young people, especially those struggling with body image and identity issues?
BB: Ah, fuck everybody. Nobody gets it [that] everybody else is insecure. If they’re saying something to you about how you look, you don’t want to have anything to do with them for the rest of your life. Cut them out.
The challenges facing young people will inevitably change, but this musical activist will always have their back. No wonder Brendan wasn’t a love match for the bigwigs at SONY. His conscience is too strong. He uses his platform to tackle inequality, so much so that the music is just one side of that magical Wheatus ‘energy.’
Brendan Brown could never be moulded into an industry puppet, and that’s become his greatest asset. Little wonder Ed Sheeran, Good Charlotte and Fishbone all want to work with him. A person that genuine cuts through all the bullshit, and that’s exactly what we need.
Images by Jane Greenwood
Further listening, watching:
Listen to my 2014 interview with Brendan from Wheatus here.
Brendan on Daily Politics:
His Irish roots entitle him to an EU passport. Brendan has been vocal on how Brexit could leave UK graduates ‘staring down the barrel of a closed island,’ their work options restricted.
Listen to the full programme here.
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