TYPE O NEGATIVE Keyboardist Talks About The 'Death' Of The Music Industry

Metal Israel recently conducted an interview with TYPE O NEGATIVE keyboardist Josh Silver. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow:

Metal Israel: With all that in mind, do you think that Americans have a good sense about what is going on in Iraq?

Josh: I don't think they have good sense about anything. They do the right thing sometimes, and they do the wrong thing sometimes. And half the time they do the right thing they do it for the wrong reasons, and half the time they do the wrong thing they do it for the right reason. We've grown up in a place, especially this last generation, that really has very little clue of how lucky we are to have what we have. It's a place where you're relatively free and there can be things like giant Jewish neighborhoods and really, no one is fucking with us that bad at all.

Metal Israel: Not yet.

Josh: That's right. And my last complaint about the Jews is that American Jews have delved so deeply into intellectual pursuits that they have completely lost their mechanical ability. And they really better get back to learning how to fire a gun, learning how to drive a car, learning how to fix a car, learning how to do things that are basic to survival. It's OK to learn Torah and spend all your time in school…Israeli Jews are very physical. They can take an American-made machine and make it three times better. I think that's something that in America is a really, really big issue. Too much time with your head in a book. I'm not saying that you shouldn't be educated and that you shouldn't study. I'm very glad the Jews tend to be a race that values education. But there's more to life than education. There's living. You have to get out there and get your hands dirty.

Metal Israel: OK, now as a Jew, how do you feel, in the metal world, when you see iron crosses and swastikas as trendy, as normal?

Josh: I don't think it's trendy, because the minute anybody uses a swastika two things happen: the public can't really display anything they do and they get a little hardcore following of children that just think it's cool to be angry and anti-PC. I'm anti-PC, but I'm not toting swastikas around. I don't worry about it. There's always going to be a group of real Nazis, and there's always going to be a group of angry little kids that don't know shit and think they're Nazis, and think it's cool because it aggravates the rest of the world. I don't think it's super trendy. I mean, there's always been a number of bands that claim to be skinheads or anti-Jews or anti-Semitic or whatever, but I don't see it as super trendy.

Metal Israel: You guys never had a lot of Top 40 acknowledgement but you really stayed the course and you've influenced so many people. Underdog. What do you think of that?

Josh: I think there was a point that when "Bloody Kisses" came out, it was a very different type of music for the time. I think we did something very original and very interesting for that time period. Even though it never really saw an incredible amount of commercial success, I think it was artistically successful. That's what I care about. I could certainly use some money to survive, but it is what it is. You don't get to go back and re-do it. Most bands never do it. So I'm pretty happy to have been part of something that had that kind of longevity. We did influence a lot of musicians and a big chunk of music and it's an honor to have been involved in something like that.

Metal Israel: You're talking like it's dead already.

Josh: No, I'm just talking like it's not likely that we're going to be that influential. Not many people are influential over a two-decade period. So the reality is that it's not likely that we are going to put out something groundbreaking that's gonna influence 7000 bands. We have done what we do, we do what we do, and we do at least have our own identity. And that's something that I fail to see in almost any band that is coming out today. It all sounds the same, it's all fucking double bass and screaming, BLACK SABBATH rip-off and it all sounds the same. You give me 20 songs on SOU and I can't even fuckin' tell who's who.

Metal Israel: What do you think about the music industry now? The downfall.

Josh: It's fallen! It's over! There is no music industry anymore. Everybody's firing their record company staff…producer Bob Ezrin, of small bands like PINK FLOYD, KISS… gigantic, gigantic… very talented man- he said that if you're waiting for the funeral of the music industry, don't bother waiting, it's already happened. People aren't buying downloads…

Metal Israel: They're swiping it.

Josh: So there's no outlets left, at least temporarily, until someone comes up with a better idea, but I don't think they're going to, is touring and t-shirts. And then on top of it people start bitching that your t-shirts cost too much. So I think that people want us to send them a t-shirt every time they download our stuff for free. And then an iron-on patch, so they can iron it onto their t-shirt thing every time they download. It's just making it very hard to be an artist and to support yourself. In my opinion you're going to see less and less quality music because the people that are going to be doing it are people that are willing to do it as a hobby which means you can't put as much time into it. You know, if I could sit there and support my family and worry about making a TYPE O record every three years in a row which is what I've been doing for the past twenty years and really put in 1 billion percent into every single thing we do and sit there for thousands of hours, to me, you get a much better product than a bunch of people that are going to do it for free and live in their mother's basement and go have to work jobs in between to support their families. They just won't have enough time. But it is what it is. We're here. People have heard me complain endlessly about downloading. It's not gonna change. I know that. And that's it. And mp3s sound like shit.

Read the entire interview at www.metalisrael.com.