Living Things

A conversation with Lillian Berlin

(February 2006)

Interview by Daniel Brody

St. Louis-based alternative rockers Living Things have made a splash recently with their catchy single “Bom Bom Bom,” an anti-war song about the US army occupying foreign cities.  Brothers Lillian (vocals), Eve (guitar) and Bosh (drums) Berlin were raised by open-minded, liberal parents; their mother spent time in the sixties radical group the Weathermen.  Inspired by the writings of authors such as Jack Kerouac and Sylvia Plath, the band got into music almost as an accident, and openly admit to using music as a way to get their anti-authority political ideas to as many people as possible.

With St. Louis being smack dab in the middle of the Bush-lovin’ Midwest, the brothers Berlin fled to the welcoming arms of Los Angeles, building a name for themselves through stunts like burning effigies of Dubya onstage.  Their brash politics and messy concert performances got them dropped from two major labels and banned from the Viper Room for life.  But now the band is having the last laugh, with their Steve Albini-produced album Ahead of the Lions climbing the charts and garnering rave reviews from people clearly hungry for more political indie rock.

Well, let’s dig right in.  I want to start with why you are in the band in the first place.  I know politics is one of the main driving forces in your mind, and it didn’t seem like you were always interested in music—you were more of a writer.

Yeah, I think for me, basically, going the musical route has become sort of my soapbox forum.  It’s been a way for me to take my ideas and almost make them into nursery rhymes so that it can reach more people than if I was going the straight-up social propaganda route.  My mother had a big involvement in the late sixties and seventies in a lot of different groups that were anti-war and anti-establishment.  She had a lot of opportunity and toured a lot talking to people, and throwing big forums where like-minded people would all gather and they would have speakers and music.  Her methods reached—in her time of doing it for three or four years—maybe 20,000 people, whereas through pop culture you can reach 20 million people.

I don’t look at myself as a musician or anything like that.  If you put me in a room with Chuck Berry and Keith Richards, they’d fucking kick me out.  I think that with a lot of modern-day music, as charming as it is, the musicianship isn’t like how those guys were in the sixties and seventies; all those bands were serious, serious players and really knew what they were doing, where I think that punk rock made it so that anybody could walk into Guitar Center and have a band.

I had a hard time at first trying to figure it out.  I like to write a lot of essays—I’ll get ‘em posted on some websites and I’ve been in some zines—and I’ve written a lot of stuff that’s a lot more complex.  It’s like, “How the fuck do you sing that in a song?”  I had to sit down and go, okay, I need to make the message as simple and nursery rhyme as possible so that everybody from a 12-year-old to a 32-year-old can get what we’re saying instantly.  We’re trying to rally people up to do something, regardless of whether they believe what we want them to.  We just want people to form an opinion, and have a voice amongst the many voices that here in America aren’t really getting listened to.

Last night at Spaceland, you had a picture of President Bush, and you lit him on fire.  If you already agree with that sentiment, that’s pretty easy to rally around.  But how do you convince the guy that likes Bush that there’s another way?

Look, the thing is with George Bush…he’s Harrison Ford playing Han Solo in a script written by George Lucas.  He’s a complete actor, placed to be the face of this entity that has nothing to do with him, so when I’m burning his picture—or a picture of Bill Clinton or of Richard Nixon, or any of those guys—it’s a representation of the idea that the men who run America, the White House…you don’t even see, [they] aren’t on the TV.  Those guys are running our great country into the ground.

And they’re running the Republican Party into the ground.  If you look at the history of the Republican Party, and somebody like Abraham Lincoln—who I think was genuinely a righteous character—and regardless if you believe in some of his ideas or not, he still made a difference in a positive way.  If you read about him, it sounds like he had an exact sense of mission, and accomplished it.  And there’s a humanity factor to it.  And I would say that since John F. Kennedy, politicians have become a strictly businessman-oriented thing, and it’s not a patriotic office anymore.

That, to me, is the first of ten frustrating things...you’ve got businessmen running our country and turning governmental parties into another big corporation to make money, and there’s nothing wrong with making money, but just like there’s a big difference between having a religion and having a political party, there should be a difference between having big business and a political party.  Politicians have to be looking after the well-being of the people, not the well-being of their rich friends.  And so then you’ve got innocent people fighting on the front lines in Iraq for a war and they actually are being told words that aren’t even true [about] why they’re their fighting.  They’re dying, and their families are suffering, and it’s all a big fat put-on. 

You’ve called our generation the “Blackout Generation,” you’ve raised some big issues—the increase in big business over our lives, an unfair war—and yet people don’t seem that up in arms about anything.  I would venture to say that most people’s lives haven’t changed that much since 9/11.  How do you say to these kids, “Stop watching TV, get mad about something.”?

Look at the sixties, look at the Vietnam War, kids my age and younger got pissed off because their friends were getting a ticket to the jungle to die, basically.  And it was reality.  You had a friend, he went, and he’s dead, or he came back with one arm.  The war was on TV.  In the Iraq war, they’ve done a great job of hiding the shit out of it.  You don’t see it on the news, you don’t read about the horrific things that are going on as detailed as you did in Vietnam.  It’s not affecting a lot of young people directly because they’re disconnected from it; it doesn’t hit them in their everyday life.

That’s a big problem and, of course you don’t want a draft to happen, to make the youth of our country wake up, but something’s gotta happen where the youth of our country do something.  The young people are our future leaders, and if they don’t have any balls, if they don’t have any passion to clean up the country, it could be an even scarier place thirty years from now.

For me, I want to be one amongst twenty, thirty, forty, fifty, a hundred artists from all walks of life from visual arts to music can inject that into mainstream culture again, because kids are most influenced by what they watch in TV, what they listen to on their iPod, and what they read about in their magazines.  If artists and anyone in pop culture who has taken on the role model position could just get off their high horse for five seconds and stop kissing themselves in the mirror and go, “Hey, you know, I have a responsibility here,” then we could probably start to see a difference in the entire country.  If kids really woke up to what’s going on and got out in the streets and did something about it, it could change things. 

It’s interesting that you mention what kids are listening to on their iPods, and what magazines they’re reading, since your band has been dropped by two major labels.  It’s as if there is a mechanism in place blocking a message like yours from infiltrating iPods and magazines.

They don’t want it, man.  I always make sure I get a healthy dose of pop culture as part of my science experiment that I’m basically doing, and I always look out to see who is doing something about it, and there’s Sean Penn, George Clooney, Green Day supposedly, and George Clooney was the guy who impressed me the most.  He’s smart in the way he talks about his feelings about Iraq, his feelings about 9/11, and the movies he’s starting to make.  But when he started talking out about the Republican Party and how they’re running the country, he got massive backlash.  I think politicians don’t want the entertainment industry touting their incompetence because they sure as hell fucking know that everybody’s influenced by the entertainment business.  Everybody that escapes into the movie theaters, and has their iPods on in their free time—if they were saying, “The government’s incompetent, learn your Bill of Rights, and in the Bill of Rights it says once the government stops working, the people can reinstate new government…”  If that was broadcast to the people every fucking day, with a checklist every day of all the fuckups the government makes, people could say, “You know what?  It’s time to reinstate a new government.”

If the entertainment industry could stop having Beyonce shaking her ass on the TV screen and replace it with Beyonce shaking her ass with the Bill of Rights written on it or something, people would start fucking doing something.  Every day is just heartbreaking, it’s further and further away from happening.  I feel like every time an artist starts to do it, they get shot down.  In our experience, the first record label we had, DreamWorks, was supportive of the ideas we had, but they went out of business—and when that happens, you get shuffled onto another record company, and we got shuffled onto Geffen, and they were completely against everything we were talking about.  It was during election time last fall when we got onto that label, and they were having none of that.

It seems, though, like most music business folk are pretty left-wing, and pretty anti-Republican.  What issue did they have?  Was it just interfering with marketing?

People in general want to say they’re pretty left-wing.  That’s really the cool thing to say you are.  You definitely don’t want to be uncool; what’s uncool right now is to say you’re a Republican and you like George Bush, and everyone in entertainment wants to look cool.  But, at the end of the day, these record companies are owned by big, big corporations, and if you go down the food chain they’re all linked together to bigger corporations.  You start to see this picture painted of X record company pisses off the big alcohol company that owns them, everybody who runs that company could probably get fired, and at the end of the day everyone bows down to the bigger companies that run the record companies.  At the end of the day, it’s job security. 

Besides the warfare state and capitalism, you also seem pretty anti-religious on this album.  On songs like “God Made Hate” you seem very ambivalent about the positive effects of religion.  Does that come from a certain place?

No, I think that’s a misinterpretation.  My father’s Jewish, my mother’s Catholic, and I was raised with both religions.  I had a bar mitzvah, and my mom used to take me to church.  I experienced both religions to the fullest.  I learned Hebrew, and I would go to Sunday Mass.  For me it was a great experience because I got to see how angry Catholicism was towards Judaism, and I got to see how angry Judaism was towards Catholicism and Christianity.  It made me start to develop this idea of at a young age of “Wow, a lot of the hate in the world is the result of religious hatred.”

I think everybody is entitled to their beliefs, and if you believe in God, or you believe in Satan, or you believe in Buddha, that’s your prerogative, if that gives you peace of mind when you wake up and go to sleep everyday.  [But] here we are in the 21st century and we still have these massive religious wars.  It seems primitive.  You would think people would be evolved enough at this point to accept somebody else’s belief, nationality or color.  Nature keeps repeating itself, so for me I feel the idea of God was invented into the fold of humans, and that same day hate came right along with it.  So when I write about a religion, I write about that dichotomy and that struggle.  I definitely don’t condemn it because that’s exactly against what I’m about.

You’ve got a book coming out. 

Yeah, when I was 12 years old, I was diagnosed with ADD, which is Attention Deficit Disorder, and from the ages of 12 to 18 I kept this diary mostly as a result of being put into a special learning class that was called the “resource room” at my school.  In the resource room, one of the things you had to do was keep a daily diary.  I went back a couple years ago and read it again, and I thought it was a pretty interesting real life account of being a kid growing up in Middle America and the struggles that come right along with that.  I felt it sort of gave an insight of why there would be a sort of Columbine event, an insight into a kid—me—who was on Ritalin and Prozac and how that affected my life at a young age.

I passed it on to some friends who knew publishers and people started reading it and really feeling that it represented a whole sort of generation of kids growing up in the late nineties that hasn’t really been talked about a lot.  So this friend of mine who’s a publisher said, “Let’s just put it out as it is, untouched, we don’t need a spell checker.”  I didn’t reorganize it other than editing it down from about 800 pages and putting together highlights from each year.  It turned out pretty interesting, and as a result I’ve gotten some interest to do a television style documentary where I’m invading 12 high schools and I’m gonna have like ten topics and it will be a sort of real life “What Goes on in High School Today.”

Trying to use what you’ve learned and help the kids going through the same thing?

Yeah, the news culture is not exposing and talking to kids and what they’re going through today in junior high and high school.  And there’s a lot.  And the only time the news ever talks about it is when there’s a Columbine event, but do they ever talk about it when there’s not?  If they would talk about it when there’s not a massive bloody event, then maybe they would better understand why something like that happens. 

Do you find the drugs more to blame or that the drugs are one part of a whole messed up culture in the late nineties?

I think the generation today can think about it as a spider with eight legs.  Each leg of the spider has a different makeup that allows the spider to walk.  When I was 13, it’s in the counselor’s notes:  I have to take Ritalin, I have to go to resource room, I have to do this, I have to do that.  There are so many rules and if I didn’t do that, then I wasn’t healthy, and I had no legs, and I couldn’t walk.  And they ingrain it so hardcore into you that you buy it. 

A couple years ago, I was starting to think about it all again.  When you break it down, ADD is just a glorified way to say “kids daydreaming.”  Every kid is entitled to daydream—or else you’re not a fucking kid.  I remember part of my diagnosis was to take me to a library and see if I could sit in a library and read a book.  And it’s like, of course, you bring a 13 year old to the library and they don’t want to fucking be there.  It’s not about reading a book, it’s just I had no interest of sitting in a fucking library.

You can go into all these conspiracy theories about it being a way for pharmaceutical companies to make money, and a big part of me believes that because a lot of those drugs started out for kids, now they’re saying that adults have ADD.  You’re gonna tell me a forty year old who’s been walking the earth for forty years suddenly has a mental disorder called ADD because they can’t pay attention?  It’s silly.

Well, I guess I should ask you some token music questions.  Steve Albini produced your album, and you sought him out specifically.  What drew you to him? 

I’m not a huge music aficionado.  I don’t have a huge record collection.  I just remembered a few records over the years that popped up over the years, and I would go, “Oh, that’s cool,” and check to see who did it and it had Steve’s name on it.  When it came time to make an album, I figured I might as well get someone who impresses me.  He’s not that hard to get a hold of, and he isn’t that picky about what he works on, so it was pretty simple to get in the studio and record with him.

The part that impressed me—that I didn’t think would happen—is he likes to get records done in a week, two weeks top, and I wanted to have the opportunity to spend more time on our album so that we could do more songs and experiment more with sounds.  He dedicated himself to do the entire thing, so I thought that was pretty cool.

“Bom Bom Bom” seems to be taking off—you must be on some sort of promotional kick doing TV, with radio playing your song as well.  How are you finding the whole mainstream media thing now that you’re on the inside of it?

It’s exactly as I thought.  You gotta be the little doggie that goes along with the pack.  You have to be a good boy, and being a good boy allows you to get in there and maybe fuck shit up a little bit.