Interview: OXYMORRONS

Interview

10 Nov

Last week we had the time and honour to sit down with Oxymorrons guitarist and wholesome anarchist Jafe Paulino. White hot off the release of Melanin Punk, Oxymorrons are about to head out on their second run this year with rock icon Corey Taylor, a man who famously doesn’t make a habit of repeating his support acts. This time heading for the UK and EU, we spoke to Jafe about the new record, genre splicing music and world domination for the New York outfit.

On a personal note, this interview felt huge for me as a fan of the band, and having missed previous chances to see Oxymorrons in concert on their previous UK run. We’d like to extend an extra and very heartfelt thank you to Jafe and Oxy for their energy in making this interview what it was.

Oxymorrons! Thank you very much for taking time with us. Oxymorrons, that's two R's, not one; representing the silenced voices and the social outcasts! I’m a big fan; was meant to see you with Bad Omens in March, but just missed the set. And coming up, you're out with Corey Taylor. How are we feeling?

Jafe: Yeah, we're back with the bros! Super excited. Especially the ending the year on such a high note. The fact that we even got this opportunity after doing the US run with Corey Taylor and Wargasm as well. The day of our last show, we had a big huddle and shared that we had such a good time with Corey Taylor and the team. He expressed that he wished we could've been on the whole run and then invited us out to Europe! So for a band like us, still building where we're at, to go to Europe and have the red carpet pulled out twice in one year is such a huge accomplishment. We're super grateful and…proud. And just really excited to get back over there.

Obviously Corey Taylor is a household name. But when OXYMORRONS was announced as the support, my jaw dropped.

Jafe: It's pretty unexpected. Corey mentioned he doesn't really take bands back out on tour like that, especially that close together. So this is definitely unprecedented and unexpected. But I think it makes all the sense and we're so excited.

You were on a podcast a couple of months ago and said you were going to try and get Corey to try ghetto pasta. Has he tried it?

Jafe: Not yet! Because you know them boys get some pretty good catering. Ghetto pasta is a means of survival. It only comes out when when we're in the trenches. It's just boiled pasta and ketchup! I think maybe in the UK run we'll have some fun, make them a delicious bowl of some ghetto pasta!

So coming back to the UK, I read that you once said you “have the best pen pal relationship with people in the UK". Your last tour here with Bad Omens drew a big crowd, how does it feel having that kind of reception?

Jafe: It's absolutely incredible. There's a bit yin and yang quality to it. We know we've earned it and worked really hard. We're super proud of ourselves, you know? We also have a sportsman-like, competitive edge too. We're here to take over the fucking world!

But on the real, ego aside, we're super grateful and it's good to see. BBC and BBC Radio One has been supporting us since before we toured over there. Ever since we dropped “Justice” and “Green Vision”. They were really the first, constantly playing us. BBC really just been out the gate supporting us and showing us so much love. Lots of people call it “the Jimi Hendrix effect” for American bands. They hear you in the states, you start blowing up in the UK, and then you come back to the states and everyone's like, "We knew about them first!"

We wanted to see what the relationship would be to radio and building a natural fan base, especially out of your home country. It's amazing to see that still works and people will still respond to it. I feel like relationships between radio and audiences actually committing to what their DJ's giving them isn't as strong sometimes. A lot of people in the UK really commit to an entire evening; people watch an entire bill. The supporting act and opening acts; like hey, the headliner is cosigning these acts, they must be sick!

**You’ve just released Melanin Punk. In terms of the creative process, and this album as a statement, what made Melanin Punk necessary for 2023?**

Jafe: It's funny; the alignment of what our art and message and mission is versus when we drop stuff. There's never too much of a conscious intention. It just happens when it needs to and aligns. “Justice” as an example: George Floyd and Black Lives Matters started around May/June, but we’d written and recorded that track in February. If felt like the right thing to put out at the time, but there was discussion for us around if it’s even an appropriate time to be trying to promote music.

For Melanin Punk, we started writing those songs during the pandemic. It was the first time the four of us really sat in a room and, for better or for worse, just wrote. Multiple times a week. We took a lot more control back in terms of how we create; fewer producers, fewer people overall involved. More just us as the core. Then we began collaborating with Jason Aalon of Fever 333 on Mohawks and Durags. And Zack Jones, of course to this day, one of our favourites. That's kind of it when it comes to our music team.

For this record, that story needs a light shone on it. It's an experience that a lot of people of colour in the alternative scenes experience - anything that's not Hip Hop or R&B, it can be hard to find your people and your community. You do feel outcasted. And it does lead to mental health struggles at times. Because everybody wants to be included; especially in music, it's about community. "If you love this band, I love this band" - we already share a common love together. Not just interest, but love. To share that with someone in the crowd is a beautiful thing. So to feel sometimes not welcomed…the gatekeeping mentality can be really hurtful. And we want people experiencing that to know that we've gone through the same thing. We're here for you, and we want to keep building out this community.

And then there’s a resurgence of 90s grunge and nu-metal making a really strong comeback. We've always felt that nu metal is a glass ceiling to fusion. Especially blending rap and rock, not just sounds but culturally. I think that's what was missing of nu-metal. There was only the success of the sonics, and not the culture coming together. There's a lot of code switching sometimes for people of colour to fit into the space. And predominantly male, white MC's rapping over metal. With no disrespect to them! They've influenced us we love them all; Korn, Limp Bizkit, you name it. We love them to death. But we knew we'd never heard some real New York rappers team up with an actual capable band. Together it makes something that honours both sides authentically, and actually creates something new. I feel like nu metal can be very like binary. ‘Here's your rap. Here's your metal, put them together.’ We know there's more of a spectrum.

Melanin Punk, the name of the album, we call it “our genre of music” as well at this point. It just came out of necessity; we never know how to explain ourselves. We hear media outlets, or just fans or people on the street trying to explain it. They don't know either, so let's just make our own house for this. I just feel like the album and everything that it has in its messages, we just need it right now. It lined up perfectly, just like a lot of other things we do. You know, we move usually with intent and we move with God a lot.

It seemed for awhile there’s been this belief that you were ‘too rock for hip hop, too hip hop for rock’. Is Melanin Punk essentially your ‘fuck you’ to that? Going out there and making the product what it is, regardless of if it's too much of one and not enough of the other?

Jafe: Exactly, you hit it on the head. There's a lot of like old angry white guys on Facebook. You know, keyboard warriors talking. And I find it beautifully entertaining. But people can be very hung up on ‘punk is punk’ and they're only talking about the sounds of the music.

For us, punk is the ethos and the culture and the rebelliousness of it. It's the nonconformity what it's supposed to trigger in terms of the conversations we have as a society. That's what punk is about. And I definitely have always leaned into that.

I was really big into the underground Brooklyn punk scene, both during the 2000s, and 2010s. So in order to get something new, you’ve got to destroy that mindset. Destroy and rebuild. It's being destroyed, with the younger generation of music consumers, everyone's listening to everything now. We already feel like those contracts are being destroyed and something new is being rebuilt.

In regards to rap and rock coming together, we just still didn't hear what we felt was a true way of honouring those two cultures. And so we decided that, "fuck it, let's just do it ourselves".

On a personal level, I really connected with that; it's one community. It reminds me about when I saw Fever 333 in 2019, before they played “Burn It”, Jason gave a speech about the same ideas. It was like being struck by lightning. The community, that's what it's supposed to be. I'd been going to gigs for nearly 10 years at that point, and was just like, this is what’s missing.

Jafe: I think the four of us come from an understanding of music being spiritual. Not necessarily religious or anything. But we feel like we're just conduits; these ideas are floating through the air on frequencies, and we're just lucky enough to grab them. So we have this respect and honour for the power of music. We're influenced by the likes of people like Fela Kuti, Bob Marley, The Clash, Joe Strummer; people that use music as a vehicle to literally change the landscape of their people and of the world. We're not just here for the "sex, drugs, rock and roll". Sure, it's all good times, but we want to impact our cultures and society.

The cover art features a person looking at a gallery of art, one of which is the OXYMORRON band. I’m guessing that has a story or statement behind it, what can you tell us about the art?

Jafe: The perspective of that image is from "Mel, the melanin punk rocker". If you look back at the cover art since the “Enemy” single was released, we've told this story of the person of colours experience in the scene. From the outcasts trying to introduce themselves into the scene, to drowning your sorrows in loneliness and feeling outcasted, the conversation of the power of words and graveyard words, and then “Look Alive” claiming that you're here. So Mel goes on the journey and finally shows up and sees himself in a band.

The surrounding frames was initially created to include album covers all different types of bands that we love - rock bands, metal bands, Emo bands, hip hop and punk bands, reggae bands, you name it. There are question marks in the frames now because we can't licence the images. In an ideal world, we’d have created a comic book to tell the full story of Mel. And you know, that could still happen.

You've talked about how collaborative the creative process is, how does that influence when you approach a new album? Do you create as you go and have a backlog built up?

Jafe: That's a really good question. Some songs have a lifespan of two to five years from idea to album. And then there's a lot of songs that we've written start to finish in three to four hours. We don't really have a rhyme or reason, or find a formula to what we do.

I think that's a bit different than curating an album. We had an idea of the story, a loose concept around Mel and his journey that we wanted to tell. There's a bunch of songs that work well together, and more that were recorded. We could have easily just made ten tracks that sound the same and called it a day. Maybe everyone would have just gotten exactly what they were expecting. But we make sure, within the album frame, that we get to tell an experience and a journey.

I think it boils down to whatever's best for the song. So in terms of creating everyone's parts - I remember when we were writing “Head for the Hills”, after the first hook it was obvious Deee needed to just keep going and then KI had that other half. I thought we might have to extend the beat and it’s would get award. But KI was like, "No, I'm just gonna drop in right here". That's what sounds good. I don't need a whole 16 here, that's not my part. It’s not like there’s some sort of contractual obligation on every song that everyone gets an amount. It’s just down to what’s best for the song.

And it’s the same for the album. We'll usually brainstorm about what our intentions are, and that'll help give a vision to what we feel we need for an album. We're always ready to write and ready to get back in the studio. So we have an album cycle for Melanin Punk, but I'd be lying if I didn't say I had some ideas in the old hard drive over there.

You mentioned “Head for the Hills”, it’s one of my favourites on the album. Was having features on as many tracks as possible part of the plan for the album or did you that happen naturally over time?

Jafe: That's a band favourite. We feel like it's one of our most dynamic songs. It's got so many different things going on throughout its run. It's fun one. “Head for the Hills” was taken on like a song by song basis. Before Kid Bookie was involved, we had this other bridge for Deee that was awesome but didn’t offer the song anything. We knew we could do something cooler. Then it was planned to be split between Kid Bookie and another awesome UK artist. But Kid Bookie just ended up going crazy and delivered huge.

We had some other feature ideas; some don't pan out. It's just timing. Like “Mike Shinoda Flow” was a song that we had for awhile with Hyro the Hero and it became a last minute addition to the album. Which we're all very glad about, it's turning out to be a pretty common favourite.

I was very excited to see Hyro's name on the tracklist, and Kid Bookie is just an amazing person. What was it like working with Kid Bookie on that track?

Jafe: That track was done digitally back and forth. We did get to meet and play together at the end of the Bad Omens tour in March in Bristol. He ended up opening up and we were direct support as Ghost Kid couldn't make the rescheduled show. Funnily enough that same night was the night we got the call that we were confirmed for the Corey Taylor tour. Kid Bookie and Corey Taylor have worked together as well, so it just all felt we were supposed to be in this room together. It was definitely supposed to work together. A lot of those things kept lining up and it was a no brainer to work with him.

In terms of the writing process, do you have any kind of rules? Anything you do as a group in terms of balancing a track - what's rock, what's hip hop, can we expect a full on deathcore track one day?

Jafe: Absolutely! And we'll definitely be leaning into some more pop stuff as well. I think eventually we'll create stuff that some of our biggest fans might not like, might not be their favourite, and that's completely fine.

This band is an experiment in exploration. There’s no final form you know, it's about the journey. We're big on that and I think musically that's always what we're going to be doing. We welcome a challenge, that's even more exciting to me.

I saw an interview, at the time you were on tour with Grandson, and you said "2022 will continue the rise of Oxy". How does that journey feel now, on two legs of a tour with Corey Taylor and everything you’ve done in 2023?

Jafe: Wow, you know what, thank you for that. Sometimes it's hard to find the appropriate time to look back and reflect, and give grace and gratitude for being where you are now. I mean, it feels incredible. It feels like we're in the right time, the right place. We're doing this the way we want to do it at the end of the day. Labels didn't have any creative control on us, on the album or what we wanted to put out and the way we put it out. It's hard for bands like us to even get this far with that kind of freedom. We will always recognise that we earn it. We work really hard to earn it. We don't give credit to luck or anything like that. But we are grateful to the higher powers that we're doing it and it just keeps elevating. That's all that matters to us, even if it's just baby steps. We just kind of feel like we're growing constantly, this will never stop.

**If there was one song on Melanin Punk that you would give someone to listen to for the first time, which one would you pick?**

Jafe: Ah that's such a hard question. I think “Look Alive”, in terms of this specific job. Not what my personal preference of song is, but to answer your question to its best capabilities, it would have to be that song. I think a lot of the other songs point to different kinds of things but that song really is an amalgamation of all of it.

I'd give the same kind of answer. “Insomnia” is my personal favourite but if I was giving the record to someone for the first time? Probably either “Look Alive” or “Graveyard Words”. I love the story that you were kind of people texting each other at 3am about it.

Jafe: It was "You're awake? Sick, work on this, send it back". We really created from an honest place. Those those types of moments, there's millions of stories.

And in terms of your personal favourite music, if you could hear any particular song for the first time again, what would it be?

Jafe: “Concrete Jungle” by Bob Marley and the Wailers. It was one of the first songs I was ever obsessed with as a kid. I used to have really long dreadlocks when I was growing up and every morning before school I would play a VHS of Bob Marley and the Wailers. Like every morning, singing word for word. It was just one of the first artists that had such a huge impact on me. So surprise, it'll be a reggae song.

It was the first time that reggae had been mixed with American rock guitars and blues guitars. Chris Blackwell, the producer, was one of the heads of Island, saw the reggae band and knew it had to be shared. That sound specifically, if you have time, just out of curiosity and just for educational purposes, put that album on. Knowing that there's so much rock and blues rock guitar work all over that stuff with the rhythms, that was the first time that kind of hybrid ever happened. It maybe subconsciously opened the door for a lot of fusion sounds.

**So as kind of a sign off, you’ve got Melanin Punk out now and the upcoming Corey Taylor tour; anything else we can expect for 2023?**

Jafe: A lot more visuals for other albums songs. We definitely plan on filming with some some special guests while we're out there in Europe. Then just a lot more touring. I think we'll be heading back out your way a couple times next year, another big festival that happens in your parts that we may or may not be coming out for to play.

We're going to also be really, really digging into pop up events, like a tattoo pop up. Just another way of expressing ourselves, finding our community and celebrating the people that we love and that love us. So we'll definitely be doing a lot more stuff like that here. In the States and out in UK for sure. We're already starting to brainstorm what those ideas are and how to make them possible.

I will be keeping an eye for festival announcements! Any signing off words Jafe?

Jafe: WE LOVE YOU! We'll see you soon out there and nothing but love. Thanks for a great interview. Listen to Melanin Punk. Love it. Hate it. Share it. All the things. Put your your emotions into it.

Melanin Punk from Oxymorrons is out now via Mascot Records. With all members hailing from New York, Oxymorrons is composed of vocalists Demi "Deee" and Kami “KI,” drummer Matty Mayz, and vocalist, guitarist, bassist Jafe Paulino.

Catch Oxymorrons on tour this November with Corey Taylor: