On Tyranny: Meatwound’s Mantra Is ‘Fuck the Cops – and the Government Too’
Acerbic. Snotty. Sarcastic. Ruthless. Hard-hitting. There are a lot of adjectives that could be applied more gently to the ear than the name of the band in question, Meatwound. Spawned 10 years ago ago in one of the crappiest cities in the country, Tampa, Florida, The Bad Penny has wanted to catch up with this band since the release of their 2015 debut, Addio.
The skronky, snarky, snarly – have we exhausted our cache of descriptors yet? – crew immediately drew comparisons to a lot of our favorite bands. But we’re gonna show Meatwound some respect by saying they are a uniquely awesome slab of protein-rich noise-rock and encourage you to listen to the many songs of theirs embedded in this post. Most are housed on their latest record, Macho, which they coughed up in mid-July.
The Bad Penny talked with Meatwound vocalist Daniel Wallace in mid-May, just two months after the detention of Kilmar Abrego Garcia and before shit got even crazier – you know, the deployment of the U.S. Marines to the streets of L.A., Trump bombing Iran, Mahmoud Khalil was finally freed, the U.S. blocked global agreements for a ceasefire between Israel and Palestine, all that good stuff.
And yet, Wallace’s remarks, stances and predictions all still, terrifyingly, hold up as true for the most part.
(Meatwound also features guitarist Ari Barros, bassist/programmer Mariano Iglesias and drummer Dimitri Stoyanov.)
One of the qualities I deeply respect and find your music and band persona to be so appealing, is that Meatwound formed only 10 years ago, but similar to a ’90s band like Local H, you’re sarcastic and snarky, speak what’s on your mind, don’t give or take bullshit from anyone, and keep it real. Always. What do you “source” that to, to use the parlance of our times?
I went to school for history, and it interests me in terms of the context of the hows and whys of [how the world is]. Philosophically, I don’t necessarily care.
Was there a certain period of history or a certain country that you were most interested in?
As far as U.S. history goes, most of what I studied was the civil rights era and ’60s radicals, the anti-Vietnam protesters and Black Panthers especially. And also that era in Southeast Asia and Latin America as well. If you dig into any of that history, you start [discovering] the U.S. involvement in those countries. I’m still reading books about that stuff and listening to audiobooks of it on long drives. It seeps into [Meatwound’s] songs in a certain way.
Meatwound’s not necessarily an apolitical band; it’s not a political punk band on paper, so I don’t approach the lyrics that way. I try to write things in a way that’s kind of, like … well, we’ll write about the cops. Everybody hates the cops. If you don’t, if you like the cops, fuck off. If anybody wants to be in the band … if you don’t have a problem with the cops, I have a problem with you, and you get out of the band.
There’s certain things that are just a baseline, [and one of them is] fuck the cops. And, also, fuck the government. Who makes our life shittier? The cops and the government. So I should be able to shit-talk them. That being said, you also don’t want to just lay everything out on a plate. I make people work [to understand the lyrics].
Everybody talks shit about the cops anyway. So I try to find a funny way or a different angle to write about it, or use a metaphor and figure out a way to make it more interesting and not just, yeah, you know, like some middle schoolers, you know, folder scribbles, you know, just mad at their parents or whatever. It’s the same thing. It can be too easy sometimes to say [things plainly]. But sometimes the songs [don’t] really [have] a deeper meaning, or it’s like a fragment of something that could be kind of not cryptic enough, but vague and detached enough that it could mean different things to different people.
The lyrics from “Mount Vermin,” people seem to have latched onto those lyrics as something that’s a little more personal or something than maybe what we would normally write, or that they would expect to hear, in a Meatwound song. But, then “Frank Stallone,” they know I’m just lying to their face. [“Lifelong aberration/ I pass as man/ I pass on lies/ I pass as man/ On calculation.”] “Europa” deals with colonizers, conquistadors, imperialism [“An entire hemisphere/ Never allowed to thrive.”] “Exodus MF” is about leaving Florida. It’s too hot. [“I fled too late/ The heat and rank sweat of that cursed state/ Mercury streams too high/ The pain of just staying alive/ Exodus.”]
Gotcha. As somebody who studied the civil rights era, is it breaking your heart to see what’s going on right now? I actually wrote an article earlier today … I studied in Chile for about a half-year, and this shit that’s going on with people getting disappeared is just, like, “Oh my God.”
Yeah. We’ve seen it before in other countries, but it’s been a while since it happened in the U.S. The Japanese internment camps really was the last time that they were doing that kind of shit. There’s the McCarthy era, but it didn’t necessarily have the ethnic angle to it that this does.
Right. Wasn’t Father Coughlin the biggest radio personality during the McCarthy era? And wasn’t he Catholic too?
I gotta bone up on that. I have a general knowledge of the McCarthy era, but I was more focused on the ’60s and the era after that. But yeah, man, I don’t know. Maybe the U.S. has been on this trajectory for a long time. It seems like Donald Trump is only accelerating it. It seems [bigger than] just him. He was the product of the far right becoming more of the establishment in Republican politics.
Alex Jones, Rush Limbaugh and all those guys, they used to be the far right. And then the Tea Party came in and hijacked part of the Republican party. But [while] they could obstruct things, they couldn’t necessarily pass things. They were just a very loud minority in the Republican Party back in the Obama era, Obama years. Then Donald Trump took that and ran with it. You know, he doesn’t have any real ideology. He’s a goofball. But he’s [also] a strange mix of things. Like, he’s not a political operator in the way that [Senator] Mitch McConnell is or was. He’ll be dead soon, hopefully.
[Trump is] not a political animal. He’s got charisma, and he’s a celebrity. And on paper, he’s a businessman – but he’s not a good one. He just came from money. You only have to be so good of a businessman if you come from money. He got money from his father to start his business. And he lost a lot of it. He’s not a very good businessman. But he’s a good celebrity. And he knows how to talk to people. But he’s also an idiot. You can see people manipulating him as well. You just flatter him, and he’ll keep you around.
As someone who studied history, it’s unheard of that politicians go up there and talk with no notes. They just get up there, and there’s no speech writer. He does give speeches that are written for him, but he’ll just go up there for an hour or two at rallies and say whatever comes to mind. Nobody, nobody, has done that before. I’d have to dig into that more, but I think it’s unheard of.
It’s funny that the Democrats’ response was to just go more to the center and “When they go low, we go high.” Like, that’s not really working out for you. You’re like 10 years in on that whole plan, but then you decide, “No, we’re just gonna go further right and try to become like the old Republican party. You’re like, “Dog, conservatives already have a party to vote for. They’re not going to vote for you.” Plus it’s also shortsighted. You’re not building toward anything in the future.
Democrats don’t strategize at all. They just spin their wheels and maintain a status quo. “We’ll just chill. And when the Republicans make everybody mad enough, then our voters will come back and they’ll vote blue. Which means we don’t really have to do anything for them. We just have to have the ‘D’ next to our name. We don’t have to actually do anything once we get in office.” They just wring their hands and send fundraising emails.
Like, “Dog, you guys aren’t even trying to shut the government down or anything. You’re not trying to obstruct anything or block anything. You’re not doing any of the stuff that [the GOP] did to derail all of your policies.”
They did more when they were in the minority. Like, in the Senate with Obama, they used more tactics.
I was thinking the same thing. Like, “Well, surely you got to shut down the government in February.” But hey kept saying, “All options are on the table.” And it was, like, “Well, then show what the options are. I mean, Cory Booker gives a 26-hour speech. That’s great, to filibuster or whatever. But it didn’t block anything. And then he went straight back to voting to send billions of dollars to Israel.
They all vote for bigger military budgets, which is also amusing because Donald Trump’s voters – I mean, Americans in general – have no attention span and no memory, even if they have any interest in knowing anything in the first place. So it’s like, “Y’all don’t remember that he was like, ‘Oh, I’m the anti-war president. Biden’s got us into all these wars.’ Blah, blah, blah. All of a sudden there was that whole narrative that Trump was going to be the anti-war president. And then he gets in office, and now we’re going to start bombing more shit.
He saw it as a source of pride to be the first one to have a trillion-dollar annual defense budget. And it’s like, “Dude, that’s your guy.” Watching conservatives twist themselves in knots based on responding to whatever Donald Trump says one day to the next … all those memes are for real. Like, “Yeah, no, the tariffs are good.” No, the tariffs are bad. It’s the “art of the deal,” right? He’s playing Chess, not checkers.
“My dude, this is straight-up clown shit. If this is who y’all want to vote for, and you brought him back, you fucking deserve it, man. I mean, to be fair, when he was in office the first time I was thinking back then, like, yo, this is the most American president you could possibly have. This dude is the Doritos and Mountain Dew of humans.
I’ve thought for a long time that it’s gotta get worse before it gets better, but it seems like it’s going to keep getting worse. When you get to a point where you’re the most influential country on Earth in a variety of ways – culturally, like financially, blah, blah, blah. Politically, you have a long way to fall. The British Empire, Ottoman Empire, Roman Empire … there’s a long way to fall when you become that big.
Then it becomes a test of like, “OK, what happens at the end, when you’re done falling? What’s going to come out of that?” It’ll be interesting because we have a whole lot of guns in this country. Which is amusing because all the people that are like, “We’re going to resist, don’t tread on me. Like, y’all getting tread all the fuck over. You have no rights.”
It’s going to take a while before people realize that we’re not the best country in the world. That’s going to take some time. What happened in Korea, the president declared martial law and was like, “Oh, shit.” That wasn’t uncommon in South Korea because of all those years they were under a dictatorship. They were under more than one military dictatorship all the way up until the late ’80s, even while the U.S. had troops stationed there continuously since the Korean war. And they still do.
But there was a long stretch of time to where the U.S. was in charge of the Korean military. And I think that’s over now. There was some kind of agreement up to a certain year, a joint thing. Now, officially, the U.S. doesn’t have operational control of the Korean military anymore. That still doesn’t mean the Korean government could never ask the U.S. to leave. Which is weird kind of thing. Same thing with Japan.
Is that not an occupation? Like, if you wanted to ask them to leave, but they wouldn’t, that means you’re occupied. You know, like those African countries that were telling France to get out. It’s like, “Yo, I don’t care what agreement you had with the old government. This is the new government. We want you to leave.” And if you don’t, then that’s a declaration of war. You’re basically an occupying force.
But do you think the Koreans and the Japanese don’t want the U.S. there? What happens if China turns on them? I’m like, “Yo, China hasn’t tried to drop bombs on them in the last four years?”
People still protest the Americans being in those countries. It doesn’t get reported a lot in our media, and I don’t necessarily know how big those protests are, but there are protests somewhat regularly. Sometimes you see them in the media and stuff, and they show how the American base is expanding and taking people’s lands to make a bigger golf course for American soldiers.
Well, I appreciate you sharing your views so openly and thoroughly. I read The Guardian to get my news, and when you have to look to another country to get informed about what’s happening in your own homeland, that’s a bad sign. So, you know.
Yeah. The older I get, I just slide to the left.
No kidding. A Bernie rally in Idaho recently drew 13,000 people, which is like a lot for out here. I was talking to my mom about it, and she’s a registered Republican. She’s like, “Keep going to those Bernie rallies.” It’s so surreal, living in this point in time.
Bernie appeals to a broader base. He has ideas that are both different and populist. He and Trump were kind of two sides of the same coin. But the Republican establishment didn’t want Donald Trump. There were millions and millions of dollars behind Jeb Bush in that election. And he just didn’t get the votes. So they couldn’t have tried to manipulate that if they wanted to. Donald Trump had such a high lead.
Bernie, on the other hand, didn’t. He had won some states and he was doing well. He had the grassroots support. But the Democrats are very good at maintaining the status quo. They formed like Voltron to just get the most milquetoast, middle-of-the-road, non-controversial, trash candidate they could. Obama came out the gate and he had that one speech, at the DNC I think, that really raised his profile. He appealed to people so much more than Hillary did in those primaries. And he was willing to play ball.
I think Obama got momentum because Iowa was first, if I’m not mistaken, and now South Carolina’s first, which is more of an establishment base state for the Democratic Party. [Rep. James] Clyburn (D, S.C.) struck that deal with Biden. So that’s sort of like, “OK, we learned our lesson from when the people have their voice first. So now we’ll have South Carolina go first and lock in the establishment votes. It’s a fait accompli.
Yeah, you see them, and they’re already not even talking like they’re going to do anything different. They’re just talking like they didn’t go far enough to the center. Uh, I think you did. You ran Hillary and Biden and Kamala. Those are not leftists by any means. Those are not “woke” candidates, regardless of what Fox News says. You’ve been trying this and you’re losing. They’re just not serious enough about it.
Well, they’re serious about the status quo.
You’re right. Yeah. They’re more afraid of the left than they are of Republicans. The Republicans, what they’re most afraid of is the far right.
Learn more about Meatwound and buy their music and merch on their website and Bandcamp.
For more on The Bad Penny’s On Tyranny series, go to our hub for the feature series, or read these individual stories:
• Kuwaiti Metal Artist Abzy Calls Hate ‘A Black Hole’
• Built to Spill Bassist on ‘Solidarity’ at ‘Fighting Oligarchy’ Rally with Bernie Sanders, AOC
• Cellista: ‘Creating and Existing Under Trump’s America Is My Act of Radical Resistance’
• Dusk Sees Hope for Metal in Homeland of Saudi Arabia
• Steve Earle: ‘It’s Very Dangerous To Be Ignorant Of Islam’
• Haggus Frontman Blasts Punk Bands’ Silence on Gaza, ICE
• ‘People in America Have Blinders On,’ Lamb of God’s Randy Blythe Says
• ‘You’re Telling My Kids They Can’t Read This Book?’ Author Andrew Laties Rails Against Book Bans
• John Lennon and Yoko Ono Were Wrong; Karma Does Not Exist
• Moscow Metal Band Malist Voices Opposition to Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine
• Malist Creator ‘Exhausted’ By Russia’s Invasion Of Ukraine
• Mark Mallman Says ‘Suffering Artists’ Are a Myth, Making Art Isn’t a ‘Job’
• As US Citizens Get Disappeared and Terrorized, Chile’s Mawiza Reflects
• Poll: Are You Afraid of Attending Concerts as the Military Patrols US Cities?
• Musicians Living Under Authoritarian Rule Speak Out
• Necrofier Frontman Wonders ‘Is It Going to Be Like ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’?’
• Faith In Metal: Orphaned Land Push For Peace In The Middle East
• Hungarian Black-Metallers Sear Bliss Lost ‘Freedom’ In Orbán’s Autocracy
• Thy Catafalque Mastermind Talks About Meaning of Life, Living Under Dictator Viktor Orbán
• Punk Legends UK Subs Denied Entry Into US Due to Alleged Trump Criticism
The Bad Penny (beta) 
Leave a comment