Are Godspeed You! Black Emperor Political? You Bet!

They're the most inclusionary socio-politico indie-rockist cult act since the Nation of Ulysses, but apocalyptic orchestral urban-decay soundtrackists Godspeed You! Black Emperor — a band so bizarrely artistic that they recently underwent an exclamation-mark-shifting name change, from Godspeed You Black Emperor! — wouldn't think of themselves as any of those things. Efrim Munuck, the guitarist at the center of Godspeed, and the mouthpiece out front of the instrumental combo, is often painted as angry, didactic, and fiercely political, but, in conversation, he turns out to be more affable than affronting, his genial demeanor and dorky French-Canadian accent rendering the GY!BE juggernaut in friendlier shades.

After spending his teens in "little go-nowhere pot-headed punk-rock bands," Munuck made a final fuck-you gesture to the process of music-making. Frustrated and fed up, he cut a cassette under the name Godspeed You Black Emperor!, with the mindset that it would be the last musical stuff he ever did. Three years later, however, with Munuck having long given up music, he was invited to open a show on the strength of such a tape. A couple carefully placed phone calls to longtime friends Moro and Moya later, Godspeed were born. Again.

"When we started up again, really the only founding idea that we had was that we didn't want to waste our time trying to learn songs that were verse/chorus/verse; we wanted to avoid all the things that frustrated us about playing in other bands," he offers, as explanation to their early ideals. "We were really committed to the idea of this being instinctive, and just doing stuff that makes sense to us, and not trying to, y'know, self-justify, or justify to anyone else why we do what we do. But, at the same time, we're not interested in being self-indulgent, so we try to self-edit, and we try to think a bit about what we're trying to say to people."

He continues: "Other than the most recent record, we've always been super-instinctive. Our second EP was called Slow Riot for New Zero Kanada, and people ask us all the time what that means. And I couldn't tell you. I just know it makes sense to us."

It's only with their most recent record, Yanqui U.X.O., he reckons, that they've thought ahead of time of how to address certain issues. Said disc strips away the dense, collagist, field-recording-draped soundtracks that the band wove on previous records like their debut F#A#(infinity) and their epic double album Lift Yr. Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven!. Recorded by famous, famously austere engineer Steve Albini, Yanqui U.X.O. shows Godspeed at their most direct, sharing a similarity in spirit to the blown-out frenzy of Slow Riot for New Zero Kanada. With an opening piece, "09-15-00," that's a two-part 22-minute soundtrack to "Ariel Sharon surrounded by 1,000 Israeli soldiers marching on Al-Haram Ash-Sharif and provoking another intifada," it's also an explicitly political gesture, even though Munuck blanches at such a word.

"It felt like some sort of gesture was called for, and, so, we recorded the record in America, right after Sept. 11th, with all the crazy flag-waving and the rest of it," he explains. "From the very beginning, we were already talking about the idea that this record should be like a hunk of meat under a fluorescent light; it should be bare. We weren't going to use field recordings, and somehow we were gonna try to contextualize these three chunks of music in a way that would address what's going on in the world around us."

As instrumental combo, GY!BE often turn to an album's artwork as a means of expressing explicit ideals, this being part of a process of trying to create a context for their instrumental music to be understood in. Which, Munuck adds, is why they do interviews, "because obviously we don't verbalize making instrumental music."

As far as being politically outspoken in either their record jackets or in interview, he says: "We never considered ourselves political when we started making music, but from the very beginning this has been an adjective that people use to describe us. We've never really understood that. There are people in the band that are politically active and are involved in certain kinds of grassroots political agitations and activities, but there are people in the band who aren't. This word 'political' gets thrown around a bit easily. It's very easy for people to get labeled political in the year 2003; all you have to do is open your mouth a bit, and all of a sudden you're political.

"What's been rewarded for a lot of years now is irony," he continues, "and I'm a smart-ass, and I appreciate irony, but I don't think it should be the gold standard that everything is weighed by. I think people are more comfortable taking a stance like that in the face of the obscenity of the world around us. I think it's easier to be distant and ironic and removed from it. It's maybe a bit harder to struggle to find the words to articulate what's going on around you. I definitely think irony always gets rewarded, but opening your mouth and having an opinion is a contentious thing, which is sad."

Still, it's hard to see Yanqui U.X.O. as anything less than a political gesture at a time in which most artists are afraid of taking much of a stand on anything, given that the disc comes with artwork featuring a chart connecting the world's four major record labels to arms manufacturers, and features an exhortation within to shop at independent record stores, even though Godspeed themselves are guilty of profiting from chain-store sales.

"We put the diagram on the back cover, and we spent a lot of time trying military-industrial complex, but we would've had to have done about 12 degrees of separation to put ourselves into that chart," Efrim offers.

"So, what we could come clean about is [chain stores]. We've had this debate quite a few times now about whether to sell in chain stores or not. And, y'know, we always end up kind of waffling about it, and there are our records, still in chain stores. We hate chain stores, we hate them, we hate them, we hate them, they're destroying so many things that we love about music. Independent record stores are the best place in the world for us, they're the best place in the world for anyone who actually genuinely loves music, and chain stores are killing that." — Anthony Carew [Wednesday, Feb. 26, 2003]