FIVE QUESTIONS: Malcolm Sosa (Rademacher)

Here's the first of the CGT Five Questions Series. I've gotten a handful already; I'll space them to two or three a week.

I invite you to participate, here are the guidelines. (And hey, bloggers / labels / publicists can play, too!)


Malcolm Sosa
singer, guitarist / bassist
Rademacher (JAXART Records)

1. Background:

"The band I play in is called Rademacher. I know you (Mouse) know the band, and I am sure some of your readers know the band. But some people who know all of the background stuff about me and Rademacher may not realize that we (Rademacher) are playing in Los Angeles this Friday with several great acts that I personally admire. Those acts would be Radars to the Sky and One Trick Pony. I'll be joining Radars to the Sky onstage for some songs. I believe both the songs I'll be performing with them are going to be on their unreleased new record.

They sound great.

I will not be playing in One Trick Pony. Not that I wouldn't if those guys invited me to play with them. I believe Randy from One Trick Pony is one of Los Angeles's best songwriters. He can also be a jerk. He'll drink your beer. He'll challenge your artistic integrity. But that's ok. Mostly I think of him as an awesome songwriter.

I started Rademacher because no one in my home town of Fresno wanted to let me play in their bands. So I started my own. We have had over 30 members in the band and I am the only original band member. I started off playing guitar, but right now I play bass in the band, but next month I'll be back on guitar and we will have a new lineup and be recording a new record. I am certain it will be the best record I have ever done. It will for sure contain some of the best songs I've ever written.

Describing the sound of the band is tough for me to do. I can tell you that we try to sound like our biggest influences! Those influences include Television, Joy Division and Admiral Radley. I hope that Admiral Radley plays that "I Heart California" song at their show in March at the Bootleg Theater. It is one of my faves."


2. Name one album you feel is critically under-rated and one album that is critically over-rated. Defend your case.

"Describing any one album as "over" or "under" rated seems a bit silly to me. If you listen to what people tell you about music, you might actually begin to believe what people write about music and than you aren't really listening to music anymore. If you listen to what people write about music, that's great. I read about sound and music, but I rarely listen to the music I read about. I prefer to discover new music with my ears as opposed to being sold an idea by a magazine or a fancy blog like pitchfork.

Most importantly, I feel like if you love music, you should be going to shows, listening to songs, and buying records (or even putting on shows and MAKING records) without being prompted. The way you write in CGT, it is more like you are trying to document your explorations in the world of music versus rehashing a press release from Matador or whoever. I enjoy the way you document shows and the trajectory of the LA music scene. Which seems less opressive than the way Pitchfork writes about music. But despite the fact that I "trust" you more than many other music blogs, I still have never listened to Spider Problem.

I digress. In short, I think that Funkadelic's record Maggot Brain is one of the finest ever produced. There is very little compression on the recording and it begins with a 10 minute guitar solo. It contains positive social messages as well as well as warnings to listeners about the fate of our planet if we continue down our current path of self destruction. The themes, the style and the purpose of the music is eternal. Is that the same as underrrated?

Overrrated? Everything else you hear on the radio."


3. What about today's music climate dissatisfies you? What do you long for in the music past or hope for in the future of music? Think about the big picture.

"I think today's music scene is great in a number of respects. Most importantly the internet and music recording, distribution and everything are in the palm (literally) of just about everybody's hand. That's fucking insane. You and I pretty much have every tool that every label, promoter and company has at their disposal. Twitter, ProTools, and iTunes. There is no advantage to having a "record label" except that *hopefully* your label people know some people with lots of money that you don't know. The few threads holding the record industry together are the few threads that probably helped to bond it together in the first place. Money and friendship. The wealthier you are and the more connected friends you have, the better you will do in a monetary and airplay sense.

Most people start liking a song because they hear it. And then they hear it again. And then they hear it over and over again. You like music because it has been reinforced on your psyche from the very minute you were born. I don't really believe that musical "taste" is something an individual has control over. It is a cultural construct that's built through sheer repitition.

If you are well connected and have the money and you can get your song on MTV, Grey's Anatomy, and all that stuff and people everywhere hear it over and over again, in a sense, you are staking a claim on the musical psyche of this generation as well as future generations. Once we hear a song enough it becomes part of our collective conciousness. These are the sort of songs the advertisers, music placement folks and record labels love becuase they can easily be leveraged into creating more money for their products even if that wasn't the original intention of the artist. Hits tend snowball beyond the ability of the artist to control.

Woops. Maybe this line of thought is a little beyond the scope of the question. Hmmm ... I think the music scene is great because people now, more than ever, have theability to stake their own claim and create their own sound and sell it and change the patterns of the industry as well as the human psyche to create something different and hopefully positive."

4. Is it important for culture-at-large to always have new bands and new songs? Why or why not?

"Of course it is important to have new songs! It is also important to have old songs and to take care of them!

If you don't have new songs and music, and let's face it, most new songs and music are absolute crap, then all the old stuff that is really, really good, wouldn't sound as good anymore. Also, every once in a great while someone manages to put together a new song that is absolutely amazing. Which is just the coolest thing in the universe.

Besides all the fun artistic songs that we listen to, there need to be new songs that actually have a function, like to teach kids skills (like the alphabet song, I personally am working on a QWERTY song), jingles to help people sell products and national anthems to help brainwash and patriotize populations.

Does this make sense? I am very big on music having a purpose. If music has a purpose it is good music regardlessly of what I think of it artistically or whether I like the way it sounds, becuase like I mentioned earlier I believe taste is a learned and reinforced behavior. to really dig music you have to use your head and logic and ultimately you to respect and appreciate the purpose of a song -- otherwise you can't really dig it. The same way I can't really dig Leni Riefenstahl movies."


5. Who wins in a fight between a gorilla and a walrus? Assume they are both healthy, adult specimens. The fight takes place on the beach with no trees (advantage: walrus) but there is one natural bludgeoning weapon, a piece of driftwood (advantage: gorilla). Defend your case.

"Walrus wins. I mean, the thing has tusks."