It was nowhere near show time, and it was readily apparent that trouble was brewing. An Instagram post made by Harley Flanagan, founder of Cro-Mags, inarguably the forefathers of American hardcore, suggested that he had just entered the stinky ole brown eye of cultural division in the United States of America, landing smack dab in a gas station where chicken livers and confederate flags are such hot pieces of redneck commerce that they often receive top billing. It’s not every day that New Yorkers get slapped in the face with racism at the retail level, one as unapologetic and greasy as the fowl organ fare these joints are frying up in the back. Most of us lingering anywhere near the hemorrhoidal itch of the South are, at times, callused to these passive-aggressive tokens of imbecility, but not this multi-racial band from the East coast. If there was an underlying sentiment oozing from Flanagan’s fingertips it was, “We’re not in Kansas anymore.”

Sheeeeiiiit! Conflict was in the air. I could smell it. One wrong move from the chaw-spitting locals and Flannagan, a black belt in Brazilian jiu-jitsu, would surely snap one of their limbs—a leg perhaps—and have them crying for their mommy in a puddle of urine and axle grease. I just knew by the time they got to Evansville, Indiana to play their show at StageTwo, that bald bastard would be carrying around some hillbilly’s foot on a keychain. The only possible redemption surging from this southern cesspool serving up chitlins to the average fowl-eating fascist, at least judging from the photos Flanagan included in the post, was a Ramones and Led Zeppelin flag flying next to a couple of dreamcatchers near the cash register. Perhaps it was a sign that America’s divisiveness was beginning to narrow, and Flanagan and crew would arrive to their show without incident. It was maybe even just about as promising an omen this nation has seen in a while suggesting that we, as a collective people, might just get along in the end. Sure, the specter of unlicensed band merch wasn’t exactly the hallmark of equality, but it was a start. 

Cro-Mags, I was certain, could handle themselves. I, on the other hand, had problems of my own. At the same time Flanagan was staring down a line of ethnocentric wares in one of Tennessee’s seediest pump and dumps, I was in the middle of a pre-show meeting with my photographer and partner, Holly, making sure that she had everything she needed to properly shoot the band’s performance later that night. The conversation, as many of them tend to happen, entailed one of my incessant, borderline lunatic ramblings of logistics and how we needed to enter a transcendental mindset where hack jobs be damned! Meanwhile, Netflix was passively playing in the background. I have a theory that Holly likes to keep some form of noise on at all times just to tune me out during the paranoid madness that rendezvouses at the 11th hour. It’s when I’m most inclined to rag anyone’s nerves—even those who love me. Running interference this time around was YOU—the series about an obsessive bookselling serial killer doing his best to carve out, and quite literally, some semblance of an American family. I wouldn’t even mention such an unimportant detail of what happens in the hours prior to attending a show for the purpose of penning a few words, if not for looking up at one point during our discussion and seeing the lengthy member of a corpse dangling on the goddamned TV.  

“What the fu…”

The dead dick quickly caught my attention, not because of the sheer size of it under morgue-frigid conditions, but because it wasn’t at all realistic. “That’s not what a dead dick looks like,” I declared. My spontaneous revelation about the continuity of the corpse cock was welcomed with utter disregard. Holly didn’t bat an eye. It seems not even my dark knowledge of human anatomy could detour her focus of the business at hand. What would, however, I would later find out, is her pre-teen and his borderline criminal aversion to doing homework. Although we were scheduled to meet at 7 p.m. to ride to the venue together—after I, of course, got myself into the appropriate mindset to mingle with a few IPAs and a pull or two of Blue Dream—a missing science assignment would test the permanence of our professionalism. “You’re going to have to go without me,” she texted at 7:30, knowing damn well that such a short notice change of plans, one quite possibly leaving me without a photographer, could cause me to suffer an aneurysm and leave me for dead. “I’ll meet you there, later, though,” read a second text, giving me at least some reassurance that I wouldn’t have to resort to shooting the damn thing with my iPhone. 

Having no other choice but to suck it up and go it alone, for a while anyway, I summoned an Uber and made my way, ever-so-anxiously, to the venue without a lensman. No way I was risking the chance of missing a second of the Cro-Mags. This show, for me, was an important one.

Scan the archives of punk rock history and Harley Flanagan, now 56, is there. He’s fucking everywhere. 

From the time he was barely old enough to wipe his own ass, Flanagan was rubbing elbows with the elite of New York’s wild and weird. Look, there he is with Andy Warhol and Joe Strummer. Wait, there he is now with Debbie Harry. Flanagan almost ensured his place in the well-chronicled narrative of New York punk, a scene many of us only got to witness thanks to shutterbug documentarians like Bob Gruen, just by refusing to leave. In a lot of ways, his story of hanging out in popular NYC haunts from CBGB’s to Max’s Kansas City at 12-years-old playing drums for his band The Stimulators reads like the script for Forrest Gump. As outsiders, we’re all just that sweet, old lady sitting on the park bench, listening intently, yet skeptical of whether he actually shook hands with President Kennedy or if he’s just making that shit up. 

Yet, in Flanagan’s case, it’s all real, every last tale. He was fucking there. Although he’ll be the first to tell you that it all seems like a dream. Albeit one where some of his heroes were there to guide the way. “Not only did [The Clash] play some of the best live shows I ever saw but it’s the reason why I always try to give a moment to every fan I meet,” Flanagan told High Times. “Because I know how much it means to be a young fan and to meet somebody that matters to you. And that is the difference between them treating you with respect, like a human or them being a total rockstar asshole and fucking you off. [The Clash] were so good to me, and I always try to pay that forward. It meant a lot, they were really cool guys, and I will always respect them.”

Yep, there from the days when the first generation of New York punk was captured in black and white, making the transition to the color snapshots of the 80s and 90s, showing up alongside legends such as Henry Rollins, Jeff Hanneman, and halle-fucking-lujah, God himself—Lemmy Kilmister from Motörhead. Perhaps part of Flanagan’s longevity over the course of rock ‘n roll history can be credited, at least in part, to his ability to concede to the trumpets when they start to roar. “One time I asked Lemmy how he keeps going with the amount of bullshit you have to eat in this business,” Flanagan recalls. “His response was ‘would you rather be slicing bacon for a living?’ which I remember all the time when I’m not feeling it. The kicker is that he knew I was a vegetarian as well, so it was like ‘would you rather be doing something you really hate to survive?’”

Forgive me if I remember this wrong.

The first time I saw anything about Flanagan and Cro-Mags I think I had just hit puberty. As a young turd growing up in one of those diminutive chicken liver-slinging towns of Southern Indiana, I, like most snot-nose adolescents just learning to jerk off, was still listening to stuff like AC-DC, Hank Williams Jr. and Quiet Riot. Wait, Hank? Yep, even us young metalheads had a little shitkicker in us! We didn’t have any real record stores nearby, so if K-Mart didn’t carry an album in their limited music department, I didn’t have it in my collection. I did, however, regularly loiter in the magazine aisle at my local grocery store, flipping through the latest issues of Hit Parader, Circus, and every other now-defunct music publication trying to find new, up-and-coming bands to devour. In the back pages of one, amidst the typical features on the Motley’s and Ozzie’s, that’s where I first spotted Flanagan. I’d never seen anything like him. Branded with a massive tattoo of a gnarly, fire-breathing Devil across the whole of his chest, his head shaved, scowling like a methed-out madman in front of his less-intimidating bandmates, Flanagan looked like Charles Manson’s younger, meaner brother who had just killed 40 people busting out of a mental institution to start a band. He wasn’t the typical malnourished rockstar that regularly appeared in those pages—scrawny with no muscle definition whatsoever, yet posing like they could whup some serious ass. This dude seemed fit and legitimately unhinged enough to back it up. While the rest of those spandex-wearing wusses were busy cleaning out their parent’s retirement savings trying to make it with their shitty band, Flanagan’s attitude resonated a certain gutter authenticity—starving yet always wired up enough to take it on—whatever that may be. “Holy shit,” I said to a friend of mine who was with me at the time. “Look at this dude.” 

The band’s inclusion, if memory serves me correctly, was more or less a blurb about the rise of New York hardcore, and there was no more fitting of a poster child for the movement than Flanagan, I was sure of it. I had no idea what hardcore was at the time. I’d never even heard of Cro-Mags or any other band for that matter, where the buzz-cut, military-style coiffure was part of the official garb. I’m not saying they started bald club, but Cro-Mags was the first band in my purview where they skinned it on back. All the dudes in Metallica, the heaviest, angriest band I had found (and unapologetically worshiped), had unkempt pompadours nearly down to their ass, and to me, a pastoral pipsqueak from Indiana with maybe three pubes swinging from his nuts, they seemed like the kind of guys you’d want in your corner if the shit hit the fan. But the hyperbole of their winces and clenched fisted posture paled in comparison to the probity of Flanagan’s grit and machismo. 

He was the real deal.

My best assessment of all this hardcore business was that it meant actually having the cojones to back up whatever piss and vinegar was being sprayed from the stage. Don’t write a check your lyrics can’t cash. Are you going to bark all day little doggy or are you going to dive headfirst into the pit and take an elbow to the jaw? Not just anyone could take the plunge from passivity to pandemonium and make it out alive. Perhaps it was a metaphor for the life that manifested this genre. Maybe that’s how this seemingly deranged skinhead managed to slip through the editorial gatekeepers of a music rag typically catering to glam and hard rock, and his mug, all intense, gnashing teeth, a man who’d inevitably eat your grandmother if she got too close—soul, colostomy bag and all—came to be burned into my impressionable, idiot brain. The Bon Jovi’s and whatever other ineffectual cock rock crooners of the time were forever doomed, in my opinion, and their pouty-lip regime was about to die. It was good riddance as far as I was concerned.

In the following weeks, I made every attempt to get The Age of Quarrel, the band’s debut record, but, as you might have guessed, it was not to be found among K-Mart’s stock. None of my friends owned it either or even knew who the fuck Cro-Mags were, so getting my hands on a shoddy reproduction proved a daunting task. I even tried to convince my mom, who had totally bought in to the scripture according to the PMRC’s satanic panic suicidal revival, to drive me to the nearest city to see if it could be procured from a real record store, but she was hellbent on offering no further contributions to my life of degeneracy. It wasn’t until a few years later (yes, years) that I ran into this guy, all decked out in black wearing a leather jacket with Ed Gein painted on one sleeve and Joey Ramone on the other, who happened to have a copy in his extensive tape collection. “Play this one, play this one,” I demanded. “Oh man, Cro-Mags is a scary band,” he replied. 

That’s precisely what I wanted to hear. 

From note one, Cro-Mags was the antithesis of what I had come to know as rock ‘n roll, far different than what those heavy drinking, down-picking, chunk-chunkers from the Bay Area were putting out. And the lyrics were more personal, too, like an intimate warning scrawled on the shithouse walls of a sleazy dive bar, letting all of those with piss on their zippers know that they’d better not fuck around. “What does it take to prove you were a fake. I thought so anyway. Won’t show you no mercy today!” Coming from a podunk town where I never fit in, made to feel, oftentimes, as though there was something wrong with me for not subscribing to the livestock-porking life of small-town America, this was deliverance. Not only was the band staffed with an apparent ruffian, a dude who looked a hell of a lot like I felt, but the overall message, in my eyes at least, was one of strength, not taking shit from the feeble hierarchy of imperialistic pecker weeds, never bowing down, and always fighting back, win or lose. Show no mercy at all! 

Flannagan, long ago, infiltrated the systemics of a drug-addled rock ‘n roll lineage—one that often claimed to be influenced by punk—respectfully punching his idols in the throat, if for no other reason than to prove it wasn’t enough to get mad for the sake of politics, but you also needed to pick up a tire iron on occasion to get your point across. Cro-Mags was one of the first bands, alongside maybe Black Flag, to inspire a cult of young born-losers to cut their hair, get off the couch and fight—for something, anything that wasn’t complacence. Those who bought in became dangerous to the sheep-lapping from the societal trough. Anyone who didn’t show the kid any respect back in the day would meet the ire of the man—and they’d lose, real fucking bad. 

Fast forward to now and all the pseudo tough guys to emerge from Flanagan’s influence in the realm of hardcore and heavy music, many now with beer guts, all bloated relics of a philosophy they were never strong enough to uphold, got squishy. But Flanagan is still hard as nails. He just keeps getting better with age. If you’ve ever found yourself asking why this man is still around, duking it out onstage night after night, it’s because the true primogenitor remains the steeple of his church. And while Flanagan may have partaken in the same narco-lunacy that downed many hags of heavy metal in his formative years, all this iconic monstrosity leans on now for levity is the casual beer and cannabis. 

“I don’t drink it every day,” he told me, when asked how he can still enjoy brew and maintain his chiseled physique. “But [cannabis] helps me medicinally and also helps me a little with my head, but I find that smoking fucks my lungs up, so I do take breaks,” he added. “I think the plant itself is amazing. It has so many benefits and can be used in so many ways. I’m glad it is being explored more and more. And I’m glad that people are starting to recognize its value as more than just some stoner hippie drug. I do think too much of anything is not a good thing. But I am definitely a fan. I used to grow. It’s a beautiful plant. It should be respected not demonized.”

At the show… 

“Look out!” I shouted, as some scrawny dude came flying at us from the mosh pit over to where we were standing on an upper tier of the venue, knocking Holly, who was too busy adjusting the settings on her camera to see it coming, right to the floor. I saw the impending collision just seconds before impact but there wasn’t anything I could do about it. Given the modest task of holding Holly’s beer (so she could fool with the camera) and two of my own, well, my hands were too full to shield her much from the body hurtling at full speed. Not without the two of us wearing enough beer to end up hyperthermal before the end of the night. Not that it mattered in the end. Smaaaaack! As the three soft boys in front of us went down on top of her like a sack of potatoes, so did their beer. Although my photographer had finally arrived it appeared that more trouble was in the wings. The camera was now covered in brew, the lens smudged, maybe even scratched and Cro-Mags were up next. A weaker journalist would have packed it up, sent a scathing message to his editor telling him to ‘fuck the fuck off’ and never spoke of this night again. However, what’s that they say? The show must go on. Shit, and we needed more beer too! 

By the time Cro-Mags came out, it appeared as though the stars of rock journalism had finally aligned—if you believe in all that hippie-dippy, cosmotheistic crap. All I know is the man-made camera was finally in working order and my photographer, the trooper that she is, presumably sans concussion yet reeking of overpriced beer, was in the thick of the performance and on a quest to document whatever hairy hell may come. I couldn’t be bothered with logistics anymore, my job would come later. It was out of my hands now—I’d already given it up to whatever snaggletoothed goblin was haunting me from within the ether. Let that bastard sort it out. 

The rebellion of my teen years, however, had been unleashed, left to swim in a nostalgic sea of testosterone with that new brute smell. Although I’d been steeped in societal contempt from a young age, Flanagan’s presence suggested that I hadn’t throttled the system hard enough in a long time and, well, that was something that needed to change. I thought about that as I watched him from the sidelines owning the stage, belting out with more conviction than any howling stripling twice his junior. Fuck the new heavy, the glam, modern hardcore and every other genre moving in the direction of the American pussification. It was nights like these, those reminiscent of a day less sensitive, when we on occasion got our noses broken by our friends and laughed about it, that we must ask ourselves: Why can’t we take it back to when we frothed at the mouth like animals? Or was it too late for such sentimentalities? Was this gritting state of ruminatiation everyone’s swan song at this point in time, no matter how heavy the cross they bear?

Cro-Mags mowed through their hour-long set, complete with fan favorites “Hard Times” and “Apocalypse Now”, as though their pre-show ritual included gnawing on an electric fence before bitch slapping it with their wieners. As an official representative of an aging punk culture, one left with only a series of faded tattoos and a certain look in our eyes that tells the tale of the so-called born-losers, those who’ve seen some shit and resolved a long time ago to taking no more, this show was perhaps one of the most monumental I had witnessed in many years. My generation, some fallen to the sag as the decades wane while others discover a rebirth in the second act, is one consisting of diehard fans, and its devotion is worn on our sleeves. We had come up when music was the presence of power, and now we, the same as Flanagan, were proof that not only was old man strength real, but we were going to need it too. Sure, it’s like Flanagan said from the stage in the middle of the show that night, perhaps getting honest with the crowd as penance for a young life gone, at times, unpleasantly awry. We can’t change the past, the violence, our despicable acts, but we can lead today better than the last, and do it with kindness and love. “Life is amazing. It’s absolutely great. I would’ve never guessed I would be alive this long, never mind that I would be living my best life, married to an amazing woman, two grown sons, a killer band, and I’m feeling great,” Flanagan told me. “What else can I possibly want? Life is great. I’m living the dream and enjoying the ride. And whether I’m playing in front of a few hundred people, 50 people or 100,000 or I’m training or whatever else it is I’m doing, I’m loving every minute of it and giving it my all every single time. That’s how I live my life.”

The post Cro-Mags Show No Mercy! appeared first on High Times.

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Until about a year and a half ago, I always said that I didn’t like “loud” music. I didn’t mind if the volume was turned up, but too much noise made me uneasy; I preferred lullaby baby music at all times of the day, or songs about fuckin’ bitches and getting money because who doesn’t like being brainwashed? And then I heard Soul Glo.

I’m not entirely sure what it was about them that made me change my mind—perhaps the fact that they’re Black, but then again, the drummer TJ is white, so that couldn’t be it. Maybe it was because they allow the listener enough time to breathe before another auditory flogging. (I’m listening to Diaspora Problems now, and no, that can’t be it either; the entire album scares me.) More likely, it’s just because they’re really talented, and I feel fortunate to have had the opportunity to chat with them.

Before we get to the good stuff, let me introduce the band: There’s TJ, whom you already met. GG, the guitarist, and Pierce on vocals.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

High Times: How’d you guys meet?

TJ: I met GG a while ago. I met GG, like, over a decade ago.

GG: I met TJ at a show in New York City at 538 Johnson. And I met Pierce through band stuff. Pierce actually booked my old band’s old show in Philadelphia.

Pierce: People had been coming in, coming out. And essentially, both TJ’s time and GG’s time just came to be in the band. I’ve been in this band from the beginning, but everybody else has joined.

HT: So how does a song start for you guys? What’s that look like, going into the studio?

Pierce: It really depends. Somebody usually comes with an idea. The idea might be a full song already ready to go. Or it might just require a few little flavorings from each of us. Or one of us will only have a couple riffs, and then we kinda just play things, play the ideas over and over, talk about how we want them to sound. Or, sometimes for the digital shit, GG’ll just be making beats and sometimes I’m there and I have ideas that GG will then translate into songs.

HT: Do you go in with a theme?

GG: Musically, nah. I don’t think so.

TJ: Kinda just happens a lot of the time.

Pierce: There was times where we’d ask each other, What do we want this next shit to sound like? One album I was like, I want this shit to sound like pain. And I feel like it did.

HT: I feel like there’s some comedy to the music videos. How do you feel that plays into the music itself?

TJ: I was just the subject of the music video. The music video was really a Pierce idea. I mean it is all sort of playing up minor themes in the existence of this band. Was my experience of joining the band as the drummer literally being flagellated on a rope? No. But it was painful. I got a call and it was like, do you want to play this fest with us in a week, and I was like sure. And then we practiced the set every day for a week, and I was like, I feel like I could sort of play this. And then I just had to do it. It beat me into shape, in a sense.

HT: What role does cannabis play in your music?

GG: Jesus Christ. 

(Laughter)

TJ: Well I mean, you heard the beginning of the album, right? I’ve been smoking weed every day for, like, over a decade so it has a role to play in virtually everything I do.

Pierce: The way other people drink coffee, I think, is how I smoke weed. The way other people smoke cigarettes is how I smoke weed. It really has helped me manage my anxiety and depression in a way that I needed for many years before I really discovered it. Smoking weed as a teen for the first time, I just didn’t know I could feel, like, good. I didn’t know I could not have a constant monologue that’s totally driven by anxiety. And that’s just really underrated for somebody like me. Obviously, I want to be a more well-rounded person, so I have to find other things in life that do that for me as well; and also weed helped me to realize that. They’re all, as GZA said, planets revolving around the same sun. The music, weed, and everything else that I love are the things that keep me tethered to this mortal coil.

GG: I was smoking weed as a baby.

HT: As a baby?!

GG: To join this band, one of the requirements, well not a requirement, but I was asked before I joined this band: Do you smoke weed? And I said, every day. Now I don’t do that every day anymore, because of a certain situation that I was a part of, but I did smoke weed last night and that shit was crazy.

HT: Do you smoke together, like in the studio?

Pierce: We used to a lot, like a lot a lot.

HT: What caused the change?

GG: For me, I got arrested. So it just fucked me up a little bit and I can’t do it all the time, because I get super anxious now.

HT: How do you feel about mass incarceration in relation to cannabis?

GG: It’s bullshit, off top.

TJ: Especially when you have places that are rolling out legalization. That’s ridiculous. How can you get locked up for some shit that’s not even illegal anymore?

Pierce: It’s like the emancipation proclamation came out and niggas was still slaves because no one told them. It’s like niggas will really just steal your life away, and not tell you.

HT: Why do you make music?

Pierce: I don’t really feel like I’m that good at too much other shit, for real. So when this stuck for me as a kid, it stuck. I mean, the easy answer is because I can’t skate.

GG: My dad is a percussionist and he gave me some drums because he thought it was a good idea and ha ha. He probably kicked himself in the ass several times for doing that because of how I developed as an individual. It’s just something that I stuck with. Somebody left a guitar at my crib and I just picked it up, and I taught myself how to play it as a bass, then I was like, Yo bro, there’s two more strings on it. Then I started teaching myself guitar shortly afterward. I don’t know, I just felt like I should keep doing it because it made me feel good as I progressed with the instrument. And over time I just kept meeting cooler and cooler people, which made me feel a sense of belonging.

TJ: My dad got me into punk. It’s just something I’ve always been interested in and it’s something people have been encouraging me to do.

HT: Hmm. Do you come from a wealthy family? Punk music seems like something only wealthy parents would introduce to their kids. I don’t know why I feel like that.

TJ: Not broke, but not wealthy particularly. I think it’s just because my dad’s young, comparatively, to other people my age. [He’s] still in [his] mid-50s now and I’m going to be 30 next month. He was just into cool shit and it helped me. He just had this giant pile of CDs. It was either that or go to the library. I would just take shit from the library and burn it. My mom worked at a library.

Pierce: I was also burning a lot of CDs, for sure. I was just talking last night to somebody about how I listened to Metallica for the first time on a burned CD that they made for me. It was Metallica’s Ride the Lightning on one side, then Arch Enemy’s Doomsday [Machine] on the other side. I was already listening to a lot of rock music during that time… I was in middle school, so I was probably like 12, 13. My dad was really into music also, but he was into jazz fusion mostly, and a lot of weird pop. He doesn’t really listen to metal or anything at all; that was more so my own personality. But I feel like he definitely got me on the path of listening to very, very energetic and busy music. He worked for the Census Bureau; my mom was in the military, so we were, like, middle class. We could go on vacation, not every year. And it was always through timeshares.

HT: How would you say class influences music and the bands that come out? Do you think if they come from wealthy parents, they have a better shot at success?

Pierce: Yeah, I think it can definitely make a difference. Like, my parents paid for me to have lessons for a good seven years. And that honestly led to me having a mentor who changed my life and the way I look at music and everything. And GG very decidedly did not have that experience. So I feel like it doesn’t matter, but it also can just help when it’s there.

GG: I feel like it’s dependent on your interests. The resources can definitely help, but if you fuck with what you’re doing, then you’re gonna do it well.

HT: How do you feel about the categorization of Black art? Like Afropunk, for example. Or going to a bookstore and seeing the African American section.

Pierce: Well, Afropunk is a damn-near meaningless term. I feel like the conversation that we would need to have about Afropunk, and just that term, and the festival around it, is longer than ten minutes will allow. [That term] doesn’t really represent anything that it originally was meant to. I don’t know, that’s just what I have to say.

HT: Afterlife. Does it exist?

TJ: I feel like when you die, you’re done. I think this is all we got.

Pierce: I feel like the afterlife could exist, like energy is never destroyed, it’s only transferred type-beat. Heaven to me is kind of a selfish idea. We’re already given the chance of heaven here, and we’re fucking it up. But I do think hell is real.

TJ: Damn.

(Uncomfortable laughter)

Pierce: I think reincarnation is real. It could be real. You go back into the soil, come out a whole new nigga.

HT: If I like you guys, who else should I listen to?

GG: You ever listen to :3lon?

Pierce: That shit will change your life. Spellling. Meshuggah. Cloud Rat. El Alfa. Tokischa. Tupac. Dance With the Devil by Immortal Technique. I was by myself in the middle of the night when I heard that song for the first time. I heard that shit and I just looked at the computer screen and stared in silence after that shit played. Like what the fuck did I just hear?!

HT: What do you think the future of music looks like?

GG: Spotify.

TJ: They’re just gonna start running software to generate jingles and shit. It’s gonna be an AI world.

GG: We’re gonna be able to Airdrop with our minds.

Pierce: I think everything will be… Like, genres will become much more merged together, and I think Black music will simply be a single genre that artists just do different traditions simultaneously within the same song.

HT: Will white people be able to make Black music?

Pierce: They already are.

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The post Fuck Transcendental Meditation, Listen to Soul Glo Instead appeared first on High Times.

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