Pretty Rude Wake Up and Smell Their Dreams Coming True
There’s a default word that society uses when it deems someone to be neither pretty nor rude: mediocre. Unlike the gnarly way that the badass villains in Fury Road employ the term as a cutting insult, in real life, the term is—in the common parlance of our times boring. So, while the guys in the band at issue in this feature story might not exactly make hearts go a-twitter when they saunter down sidewalks or even grace stages at music venues, they seemed far more polite than rude when The Bad Penny caught up with them a month ago. “Mediocre” was the one of the last words we’d reach for to describe them.
A far better descriptor for Pretty Rude would be “ballsy.” Brooklynites James Palko and Matt Cook connected less than a year ago to form Pretty Rude, signed with revered, 30-year-old punk label SideOneDummy Records in February. Just a few days later, they introduced themselves and showed their sweet side by presenting their first release—a self-titled EP—on Valentine’s Day. A pretty rude gesture that most certainly was not.
But, going back to Palko’s and Cook’s for a minute, they also wasted almost no time in braggadociously dubbing themselves “Real Mf Rock N Roll.” They’re not “Rude Boys” in the throwback sense of the term, and have no designs on dominating reggae culture, as funny as it would be to those already familiar with Pretty Rude’s sound. It appears Palko and Cook haven’t written a nasty, mean or depressing song yet, but it would be hella gutsy for them to trot onstage in classic Rude Boy garb—the tight-fitting suits, the pork-pie hats, etc. The massive size of their testicles would be impossible to mask in such attire.
(On a side note, while pointlessly researching Rude Boy get-ups in preparation for what you’re reading right now, this writer stumbled across a website that brings new meaning to the term “self-own.” There doesn’t appear to be a single shred of irony or self-awareness on the site named “Sartorial Scholars” and uses the motto “fierce faculty(ish) fashion.” But best of all, here’s how Sartorial Scholars—again, run by people who think they’re providing a community service by condescending to the public in a way that even Mike Johnson couldn’t pull off—instructs people who want to dress like a Rude Boy because a wild hair got lodged up in their butthole or something:
“For white guys: Proceed with caution. You can nod toward the rudeboy fashion by playing with slim cuts, bright or all black & white colors, or accessorizing the hell out of your look, but you should not fully co-opt the style and swagger, unless you are Jerry Dammers.”
It takes balls of a whole different sort to post something like that online. And a deep breath. And then a 10-second stare at the ceiling, followed by the realization that yet another ounce of hope for humanity has been drained and can never be retrieved.
Alright, so where were we? Deep into a discussion about balls. No, wait … trying to actually start a discussion about a new band called Pretty Rude. So, without further digression—seriously, could we have gone on any longer of a tangent?—here’s part of a genial chat we had with Pretty Rude’s Palko and Cook not long after their debut album, Ripe, came out in mid-May. They chatted with us before playing a set at The Racket in Manhattan for the first time in their still-nascent career.
What is your favorite type of audience participation while you’re playing?
It varies from show to show. I don’t love to talk too much when I play, but as long as I get a little bit of polite laughter back, that’s usually fine with me. The shows that we’re playing have had a pretty low-key vibe. Just seeing people move along is pretty cool.
Despite your reluctance to banter onstage, do you ever feel compelled to address, let’s say, what’s going on in the country right now?
You can over-prepare your banter, and then it sounds a little bit forced, so we usually just go off the cuff. Depending on the day, there’ll be things I’ll want to say, or something that happened that day, or little things that pop up. But I don’t really feel too compelled to say anything, unless it’s like something that happened right then and there [at the show].
Do you avoid banter because you take your art seriously?
I’ve always been someone who would prefer that the music speak for me, so that I don’t have to. But I don’t know that I take it too seriously, where I wouldn’t say a single thing. There are some bands that do that, and it’s pretty cool.
How are you feeling, two days out from the release of Ripe?
I feel good. The record’s been done for a while now, so we kind of got a little anxious to get it out there. I’ve heard from a lot of people who are really enjoying the previews that we’ve given.
Has one of your personal music heroes, who maybe didn’t know that you were a fan of theirs, come up to you and said what a great set you put on?
I was a fan of Pet Symmetry before I met [lead vocalist/bassist] Evan [Weiss] through mutual friends, and then we started playing some shows together, and when he expressed interest in putting out my solo project, I was just like, “That’s crazy.” If I could have told 16-year-old me that that would have happened, I think it would have really blown my mind.
In a sense, you need to like your own work in order to get someone else’s approval, right?
Approval does have to come from liking your own stuff, or you’re not going to survive in that constant yearning for something. Sometimes when you focus on the three or four people you really want to tell you that what you’re doing is great, you have your blinders on, so you don’t always notice when other people are complimenting you.
When I was starting to play music, it was a lot of trying to impress my friends, who I thought were better musicians than I. But it’s going to come down to how much you like your own stuff.
Did it take a while for you guys as a band to arrive at a place where each of you liked the same qualities in your music?
Not too much. The guys that I play with for Pretty Rude are guys that I’ve been playing with for the better half of the last decade, if not maybe even closer to a full decade now. These are tunes that I wrote and stuff that I already pretty much felt pretty confident in. If you try to over-coach people, it usually ends up with more problems than anything else.
What did you want to bring to this record in a specifically lyrical sense?
With Ripe, I was coming off the tail end of a few bands ending, and reaching my 30s. A lot of things were coming to a head. How much longer do I have in this world? How much more can I put on the back burner in pursuit of a music career? Every musician experiences these feelings of dejection and feeling like people are glossing over you, or not appreciating what you’re doing, or feeling like what you’re doing is for nothing. It’s very easy to fall down a cyclical thought web where you’re really hyper-fixated on things that are going wrong. Through this record, I was trying to process a lot of emotions that I was having.
I feel dejected, but I know it’s not people against me. I feel unlucky, but I know that this is the case for so many people. Trying to be real about these very particular feelings that you get without it being like, “Why isn’t this working?” “Why aren’t all the doors opening for me?” I think I had enough scope to understand the reality of being a career musician, or trying to be, and my place in the world of music.
Some Ripe songs I wrote back in 2020 and then slowly chipped away at. When something like that happens, I usually expect to get to the end and be like, “Ah, the songs I was writing at the end of the process are better than the songs I was writing in the beginning”
Coming from a workaholic standpoint, I always want to be working. I want to be doing these things. If I’m given the option, I’m not going to just sit down and take it lying down. I’m going to keep working at it. Even if these bands are ending, or even if this project is not going as far as I want it to be, if I had a choice in the matter, I would have stopped years ago. It’s very clear that I’m going to be making music for a very long time.
The Bad Penny (beta) 
Leave a comment