Cultural Consumers: Bodega Interviewed
I figure the best way to open a conversation with the sharp-witted Bodega is with a joke. Vocalist Nikki Belfiglo is first on the Zoom call. She calls Bodega vocalist/guitarist (and her partner) Ben Hozie to the screen and he appears wearing a furry hat twice the size of his head. “I like your Jamiroquai hat”, I tell him. Nikki laughs. Ben smirks and says “well, Jamiroquai hasn’t been in the spotlight for about 20 years, so I’m hoping I can reclaim the look for a new generation”.
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This is the tone that our conversation, over the course of a fast, funny forty minutes, will take. Ben and Nikki are a pair of whip-smart and culturally-literate Brooklynites with a ton of opinions that bleed into Bodega’s similarly-intelligent music. Their band’s latest album ‘Our Brand Could Be Your Life’ takes direct aim at the brandification of contemporary underground music; a rampant corporate influence that has led to a world where countercultures feel increasingly like a thing of the past.
“I would say that cultures that run counter to the status quo are rare,” explains Ben. “Some still exist, but they’re way more niche than they’ve ever been. You’d have to be so unconcerned with playing the corporate game to be in one now.” As a quick thought experiment; try thinking of any subculture today that hasn’t been subsumed by the oozing tentacles of late capitalism. Rave, skating, punk: all once existed beyond corporate influence, but are now rife with big-money sponsorship, branding and ‘mainstream’ appeal.
“I think the difference is that where once there was a monoculture, now we’re all the mono,” Nikki adds. “We’re all islands, I don’t feel like we’re connected.” Nikki goes on to explain that even in their locality in Brooklyn, the band have to spend so much time promoting themselves that they don’t always have time to work with local artists. Any creative who has had to deal with relentless social media promotion, constantly fighting to make himself heard amidst the crowd, will understand what she means.
Things, of course, weren’t always this way. The title of Bodega’s new album is a reference to a seminal text on a very different era of alternative music. For the uninitiated, Michael Azerrad’s Our Band Could Be Your Life is a brilliant book that profiles twelve bands from the 1980s, including Black Flag, Fugazi, Dinosaur Jr. and various other American alternative rock pioneers. When you compare that underground music landscape to today’s, reading Azzerad’s tome is like receiving a transmission from another planet.
I ask Ben and Nikki if the title is meant to highlight the differences between today’s culture and yesteryear’s. “It is, but it’s also meant to highlight the failure of that dream,” explains Ben. “In that time, you had a legit counterculture; hardcore punk was not for the straight people or the establishment, to use that corny term.” He follows this up with a great observation. “It wasn’t even anti-capitalist,” he says, in reference to the underground cultural ecosystem these bands helped build. “It was grassroots capitalism. They wanted to sell records, but by being only five dollars and not in big record stores.”
This feels jolting. How can a band as progressive and moral as Fugazi be seen as capitalists? However, when you compare them to, for example; the commune-dwelling UK anarcho punks of the same era, bands like the hard-grafting, world-weary Black Flag could easily be viewed as grassroots capitalists. “Some of those bands cut through because they had great songs, but also because of the integrity of their brand,” Ben continues. “If nothing else, Black Flag are an incredible brand. Think of how many people have that logo tattooed on them.”
At this point, I raise my hand, eliciting howls of laughter from Ben and Nilkki. They insist I show them my bars, which I do, somewhat sheepishly. We collect ourselves and return to Bodega’s thesis. The central contrast the album’s title is making is that bands from this long-gone era were rigidly in control of their own identity, whereas musicians of today are increasingly shaped by omnipresent corporate-speak. “It’s infiltrated not just music, but every aspect of our lives,” says Nikki. “When people post something on Instagram, even if it’s just about a gig in a coffee shop, they approach it like an Oscar acceptance speech.”
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It won’t be revelatory to Bodega fans, but if this conversation has revealed anything so far, it’s that Ben and Nikki are acute cultural observers. One look at the reference-laden titles on their new album, such as ‘Tarkovski’ and ‘Set the Controls for the Heart of the Drum’, are evidence of their extensive cultural appreciation. Their subject matter has long been centered around this keen and sometimes scathing awareness, the best-known example being the merciless takedown of aloof liberals on ‘How Did This Happen?’. Bodega’s music, meanwhile, veers from post-punk to art rock to dance-punk and is clearly in love with the rock tradition it exists within. It celebrates the culture it’s influenced by, while also mocking it.
I posit that, rather than being deconstructive postmodernists, Bodega are more optimistic meta-modernists. Ben agrees, though stresses it hasn’t always been this way: “When we started Bodega as Bodega Bay, we’d play these games that were meant to be destructive. We’d try to ruin the gig by playing the same song 15 times.” Nikki jumps in: “every time we started the next song we’d say ‘OK, here’s a new one’.” “So we were kind of tricksters,” Ben continues. “But we have this other side of our brain that’s obsessed with pop formalism, we want to create the perfect pop song. This new album feels like the embodiment of that tension.”
Although Bodega have now moved away from these sorts of postmodern games, at the heart of ‘Our Brand Could Be Your Life’ is an intriguing and playful conceit. These fifteen tracks are essentially a remake of an early album recorded by the band as Bodega Bay. “That record was all recorded into a Macbook mic,” Ben recounts. “The whole concept of it was ‘this is the sound of digital malaise’. We left in loads of glitches and filled it with weird edits, with the intention of making people really aware of the mixing process.”
At this point, Nikki stands up and reaches out of frame. “Ah, you’re showing him the book,” Ben laughs. Nikki holds up a small book to the camera, which resembles one of the 33 1⁄3 books; a series of short texts, each about a well-known album. “Speaking of the trickster vibe,” Nikki says, “for that original album, instead of pressing vinyl, we made a load of these books that looked like they’re about our record and filled them with lyrics and different bits of writing.” “We snuck a few of them into bookstores,” laughs Ben.
During the construction of this new album, the band had to revisit and research their original music. “I listened to some of the few recordings we have of it, Ben explains. “I had to ask friends for bootlegs because some of the songs were playing differently live.” The band then found the “most interesting” parts of the original material and treated them “as demos” of ‘Our Brand Could Be Your Life’. Songs deemed too short were expanded upon, others got new lyrics and/or riffs. Some of the songs are completely new, but “in the spirit of the original.”
Ben and Nikki explain that they view this album as an “adaptation” of the original. This term is taken from the cinematic lexicon, which makes sense in the context of Ben’s other creative pursuits. He’s an established filmmaker, best known for his 2020 erotic mystery film PVT Chat, starring Julia Fox. I ask him and Nikki what film remakes would they compare ‘Our Brand Could Be Your Life’ to. “The best one would be Hitchcock’s remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much,” Ben says. “It’s not a great movie, but the strategy of it; taking the original’s vague premise and feeling and doing with it what we’re now interested in, that feels apropos.”
He pauses. “Maybe the better answer is what George Lucas did with Star Wars, going back and adding CGI to the original”. This contrast in answers sums up the many faces of Bodega. They’re as funny as they are serious, as mocking of themselves as they are the world. This dichotomy is best surmised by ‘Our Brand Could Be Your Life’s three-part track ‘Cultural Consumer’. Its lyrics target a recurring character in the Bodega-verse that has an “obsessive relationship with culture.” Ben initially explains that “the goals of those songs are to get people to question their relationship to culture. I want art to have meaning again. Tech companies have made it so art has to have a utility.”
He then catches himself. “We’re not shaking the shoulders of the audience,” he clarifies. “I think people misunderstand that about Bodega. It’s a self-critique, we’re shaking ourselves!”
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‘Our Brand Could Be Your Life’ is out now.
Catch Bodega at the following shows:
October
15 Nottingham Rescue Rooms
16 Leeds Brudenell Social Club
17 Glasgow Room 2
18 Newcastle The Cluny
19 Birmingham Future Days at The Crossing
21 Cambridge Junction 2
22 Sheffield Crookes Social Club
23 Bristol The Lantern
24 London EartH Hall
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Words: Tom Morgan
Photo Credit: Ebru Yildiz + Pooneh Ghana
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