Noise Annoys
The purification of Boyd Rice
By Skylaire Alfvegren - LA Weekly: Wednesday, April 29, 1998 - 12:00 am
With NON it's not a question of listen-ing to the music, but of being assaulted by it. Instead of ambient purification, these soundscapes offer complete environmental (and occasionally mental) obliteration. It's fitting that Rice in person is unnervingly tall and black-clad, imposing even before he opens his mouth. Once he does, though, you'd be hard-pressed to find a better-mannered, more humorous individual. Those familiar with Rice's recorded output as NON, or with his admittedly vitriolic spoken-word albums, accept his penchant for fascist imagery and his fascination with scabrous philosophies, extreme politics and the darkest recesses of human nature.
"I don't feel any sense of moral obligation to most people," says Rice, "which allows me to be honest and frank and say things that a lot of people think, whether they want to admit it or not. Certain individuals get angry if you state a fundamental truth like 'Some people are weak and some people are strong.'" It was a solitary protester that kept Rice from performing on a recent stop in L.A. supporting Australian goth pagans Death in June. "I think at this point I'd be a lot further along in my career," he says, "if people weren't reacting to negative ideas of what they imagine I am, instead of just reacting to the music I produce."
For Rice it's an obligation to be skeptical about the realities we're force-fed daily, and he makes no excuses for himself or his work. "When a 60-year-old man says something bitter and misanthropic, he's a lovable old curmudgeon," he says. "When someone my age expresses the same sentiment, he's a Nazi.
"I'm not a Nazi, and certainly not a communist, but if I had to choose between totalitarianism and democracy, I'd opt for the former. Why? Simple: the lesser of two evils. Sure, the abject poverty synonymous with communism can be soul-destroying, but is rampant consumerism and overabundance any less so? People demand oppression, whether in the form of a fascist regime or the demagoguery of the oppressed that is democracy. I doubt that people will ever change, and until they do, the State and its inherent oppression will remain the same."
Over the years, Rice has amused himself with numerous extracurricular activities, including film projects, fatherhood and his own record label, Hierarchy. The label's inaugural release, Hatesville, a misanthropic parody of Rod McKuen's hippie-happy Beatsville LP, laid the foundation for what was to come. Jim Goad (of Answer Me! magazine fame) interprets a semi's worth of classic trucker tunes on the just-released Big Red Goad, while Musical Pussycats, a compilation of obscure '60s girl groups, and a career retrospective of demented rockabilly artist-polygamist-counterfeiter Ralph Gean (songs include "Homicidal Me" and "Dang, It's Hard To Be a Killer") are next up.
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