Innerpartysystem to play The Blue Note Wednesday
The band got their start on MySpace.
Published Sept. 22, 2008
Ever since Blink 182 ran around naked in their "All the Small Things" video, made some fart jokes onstage and released DVDs of their crazy tour antics, there's been an unspoken rule for success in alternative music: Be as entertaining in your personal life as you are onstage.
Jared Piccone rejects that.
"I don't want to get famous because I took a shit onstage," Piccone said. "I want it to be because I'm in a band that writes great songs."
As the drummer for Reading, Pa., based industrial-dance-rock group Innerpartysystem, Piccone would know. The band, which takes its name from the ruling elite in George Orwell's "1984," found success with "Don't Stop," a track featuring language like "selfish blood" and "platinum soul."
"I am the closest thing to God/So worship me and never stop," is just one sample.
"It bashes the obsession with celebrity culture," Piccone said. Which isn't to say that he finds fame inherently evil: "I'm never going to be like, 'I hate Trent Reznor because he's really popular.' He does great work. But you never see him on 'MTV Cribs.' We want to be a big band, we want to make a living out of this - but we want to do it the right way."
These days, though, it's tricky to say which is the right way. Through the steady decline of record sales, and the equally steady rise of the Internet as a tastemaker, bands are getting exposure more rapidly than ever. SPIN magazine put Vampire Weekend on its cover before they'd released an album. An Apple advertisement transformed Yael Naim from unpronounceable name to household name overnight. Another telling example: Innerpartysystem.
Piccone and singer Patrick Nissley started Innerpartysystem (then called 'the Takeover') in 2002 as a "MySpace project." Around 2006, the popularity of the band's MySpace began to attract attention.
"Before we had even played shows, we were getting calls from labels," Piccone said.
Rather than run with those opportunities, the band took its time and turned down those offers to, Piccone said, "keep some longevity and not just be a little blip in the scene. We just played with a band that (had) 15,000 plays a day on MySpace. They're playing their first show in front of a thousand people. There's almost that old-school hard work rock mentality that's lost, which is kind of a bummer."
Despite his wariness of the new media's pitfalls, Piccone is most excited when talking about its advantages.
"The idea of being a nameless person from the middle of nowhere and being able to do stuff, to a worldwide scale - you can get anybody," Piccone said. "We're about to do it with the stems of our songs. We're going to have people remix it."
Piccone is referring to the Radiohead-pioneered practice of releasing the instrumental and vocal tracks that make up a recording.
"I mean, we only have so many options, but if you just put your stuff up, there could be a 15-year-old kid from nowhere who absolutely destroys your remix," Piccone said.
The other topic that piques Piccone's excitement is his ambition for the group's live show, which will come to The Blue Note on Wednesday, and referenced groups known for their onstage productions: The Faint and Daft Punk.
"To be at that level one day is definitely a goal of ours," Piccone said. "It's not just a band playing songs, it's like a multimedia production. Even if you don't like the group, you could go see it. It's like a movie."
