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An Interview with Jack Dangers of Meat Beat Manifesto
Posted: Sunday, May 21, 2006
By: Jonathan Prusik

Though his music is not the thing of commercial success or overt underground club play, Jack Dangers has cultivated a back catalog of impressive feats of disregard for boundaries. Since the late '80s he's blurred the lines between EBM, drum and bass, trip-hop, techno, dub and others in his journey to the center. On an early evening in late February 2006 in the city of New York, Jack took the time to discuss topics ranging from the absence of lyrics on his past few albums, to Grammy nominations, to his discouraging experience with Hollywood. Although sidestepping the implication that his lyrics have had a prophetic Orwellian chill, the man was not afraid to speak candidly on what's stirring the Kool-Aid for him these days as the man behind the beats.

How did it feel to be a Grammy nominee?

Dangers: Well, seeing as I wasn't before, I wasn't nominated, it was a pleasant surprise. But there's good choices of remixes in that. So I think that one sort of got out there, because it was on Warner Brothers. It was 'Tower of Power,' so I don't know if it'll ever come up again, but I didn't expect to win it. I think the things which win those type of events are the most popular or the biggest selling thing so that one wasn't. It was a pleasant surprise, but it didn't change my life.

Do you feel like your lyrics written back in the early '90s are prophetic, like the gospel of Orwell, when talking about the government's tactics to oppress us and diminish our freedoms?

Dangers: They've got some relevance to now; "Edge of No Control" seems pretty apt right now. Sort of like "God O.D." I remember doing a show five years ago, like in 2000, I actually did "God O.D." and I remember it was basically sort of a rave we were playing at, and everyone was sort of sitting down on the floor on whatever they were on. I remember feeling that the lyrics were not hitting the mark so much. Five or six years later they seem to be even more relevant then they were when I first wrote them in '88, what with the whole creationist intelligent design thing doing the rounds. Yes, sometimes lyrics can sometimes mean something more later on. Those lyrics were written from the heart in an open-ended sort of stream of consciousness. So you know, people can read into anything really whatever they want. I just like to get a point across by using spoken word samples, and we do that live with the visuals. I think sometimes you can get across points stronger if you're using visuals than if you're using lyrics. There's a track called 'Nuclear Bomb' that we do live, and we use a bunch of different visuals to get across the whole point. It's not tongue in cheek, but there's a sense of humor to the placement as well that can sometimes have more of an impact than if you're preaching to the converted. So we superimpose the banjo scene from Deliverance with the George Bush speech, with Slim Pickens sitting on top of the atomic bomb at the end of Dr. Strangelove. Some of those things can have more of an impact than a vocalist.

What was the turning point between Actual Sounds and Voices and RUOK? that made you decide to omit vocals from most of your current works? Do you think your fan base is missing some things you could be saying about the current state of affairs in this nation?

Dangers: The next album I'm working on I'm putting vocals all over it, because I haven't done that in a while. After Satyricon I wanted to give it a bit of a rest. You can say the same thing with the use of spoken word samples. I've always been using that since the very start. With this tour we were lucky to sort of go back and find the actual visuals, because a lot of that stuff was from even television or film. So you actually get to see where a lot of that stuff is sourced from. That to me is sort of more (or just as) creative as sitting down and writing lyrics. The last album was basically for a jazz label, Thirsty Ear, so I wasn't going to put lyrics all over that, but there are a couple cuts on there where I used a lot of short-wave Russian radio propaganda and sort of cut and paste it to things more relevant. You know, the whole scary side of it is at the same time humorous if it's confusing gobbledygook, and I like that. But I think you can space it against some background and make it equally scary. So it's just the sort of way I like to handle things, like a collage.

Have you experienced any kind of elder statesmen clout amongst other electronic musicians when you cross paths with them? Or do you feel under-appreciated when you see other acts obtain more substantial measures of success?

Dangers: It's cool that these things happen to someone at some point and sort of being acknowledged. I'm never down on anyone for what they're doing. Those comparisons are always coming up, but we're doing our thing and they're doing their own thing and sometimes they might cross over. But you know, the first record came out like twenty years ago now, in 1986. After the tour I'm actually pressing together a double-CD of demos and tracks between 1980 and 1986, so you'll be able to hear all this other stuff I did 26 years ago, like the very first recording I ever did. I was an engineer in a studio in the '80s and I was able to do a lot of recording in the downtime in the evening. So it should interest some people.

Have you considered putting out reissues for the early albums?

Dangers: Not really; I don't have the rights to most of the records. The record people actually own them. The very first Sweatbox release, we might be able to do something with that. But I think there would be more interest in stuff that never came out, like the original demos of Storm the Studio. I actually tracked them down and put them together for a CD before we went on tour, and they're actually better to me than the versions that made it to the album. And they were like eight-track demo versions, as opposed to twenty-four track professional studio versions. They sort of have a life to them, which the original record label heard and saw and liked and so put them in the studio. But the original demos to me sound like they've got a life all to their own, and people never heard them. So I think that would be more interesting than reissuing something that you already had.

What attracted you to the work of Dalek and prompted you to have them open for you on this tour?

Dangers: To me they are like the future of hip-hop. They're like what I wanted hip-hop to be when I heard it in the '80s when I was mashing beats and distorting the hell out of things, but doing it with a real rapper. I never considered me as completely bona-fide from the hood. [Laughs.]

Will is an amazing vocalist. So I've been waiting for this music for a long time. What the industry wants hip-hop as sucks, if you ask me. It was about all about sampling, it was all about copyright infringement, it was all about what Negativeland was doing. That was the punk rock element of it, and now it's gone, and punk rock is all horrible insidious commercialized bullshit. I wouldn't even call it punk rock, so the music industry fucking sucks.

Did you receive flack early on when you were one of the few white people using rap as a vocal style?

Dangers: I didn't over here, but in Britain in like '87 and '88 if you were white and even attempted to do some kind of rapping it was definitely looked down upon. There wasn't a lot of bands doing it, like Stereo MCs and Renegade Soundwave; that was about it.

Who do you currently listen to and/or find as a great source of inspiration if not material for samples in your work?

Dangers: I've been listening to The Bug; that's been pretty inspirational. I listen to a lot of old material which hasn't gotten anything to do with what I might be writing, so I listen to a lot of soundtrack music. I like Dudley Moore as a composer; not a lot of people know that he was a composer. He was an amazing piano player. Hermato Pascoal, he's a multi-instrumentalist from Brazil. He's probably my greatest inspiration at the moment. I saw him play recently and he blew me away.

Would you like the chance to score a film and do something like the Dust Brothers did for Fight Club?

Dangers: I would definitely consider doing something like that, but I've never been asked to do a whole score. I've been asked to do incidental bits of music, but never a whole score. I have bits of music in a lot of the computer games. Like Playstation, X-Box games...now they're almost treated as film scores. I think there's even more money to be made in that area than actually doing a film score, but I've never been asked to do a whole score for anything. Probably not as commercial as some people would like, so they don't approach it. In The Matrix I would've had six songs in there. They were making the film using six songs from Actual Sounds and Voices, but it got whittled down because of the politics of the music industry, because the label that put out the soundtrack, which was Maverick, which at that point was owned by Madonna, had to slide all their bands on there, which sort of meant that all my tracks had to come off, which just left the one. And I think the film would've been much better if they left it as it was. [Laughs.]

That's because it was the first one, and no one knew what this film was going to be, no one knew what it was going to do, or anything like that. So yeah, they let Meat Beat have a track in there, and then the two films after that were just like politically ridiculously stupid, how they were handled and commercialized and watered down into what it was. They weren't that bad, but musically it could've been so much better, all three films. I don't like the scoring on any of the films. I don't like that guy's work at all, the composer. I think it sucks; it's horribly commercial. Skinny Puppy could've done the bloody music and it would've been better. You need someone in there with angst. You need someone in there with who's perturbed. You don't want to work with some guy who's juggling six films at the same time and he's got all these engineers and helpers, minions who're running around doing all the work for him, because that's what happens.

It seems to be very few and far between when you even see someone like the Dust Brothers do a score.

Dangers: You'd have to be in LA and do breakfast with these people if you're going to get to do a whole film like they would've. They must've jumped through a lot of hoops to have got that, and then everyone seems to forget that they produced Hanson. How could you go and do that? How could you do shite and then go and do something good and expect no one to point you out at it. It's amazing, but I could never live in LA, close enough to be asked.

What would you consider your greatest accomplishment in the world of music?

Dangers: Inspiring people to make music themselves. That was the thing that Kraftwerk first did, Trans-Europe Express in 1978 and then The Voice of America by Cabaret Voltaire a couple years later. Those two albums inspired me to want to do music or even attempt to do it. I was good at art at school and English and that was it. And I have attention deficit disorder and I'm dyslexic, so I'm no good at business. I'm good at looking at things and turning them upside down and presenting them in a different way. If I've been able to inspire people to do that, well then that's my greatest accomplishment.

It's good to hear things like that keep you going if you were even questioning things, though in one post on MySpace you mentioned the lack of label support in promoting your tour. Why is that still a struggle for you after fifteen years?

Dangers: Time has a way of erasing people's memories [laughs].

We'll have to see what's in store. I can't imagine doing anything else, so I'm not going to disappear. I'm always going be doing this. I think you're going see the change in the live show from the last time you saw us in the summer to tonight. I'm enjoying this tour more than any other I've ever done. From show to show it takes three hours to set up, three hours to break down, and we haven't got a team of people doing it. It's me, Ben and one other tech guy, so we're quite committed to what we're doing, and we're quite mad.