Ian Svenonius interviews Ian Mackaye: In Soft Focus

Soft Focus, Ian Svenonius' fascinating online chat show on Vice TV, finds the leftist provocateur inhabiting the role of rock's Charlie Rose. Earnest and po-faced, with a slight lisp and an aura of refined abstraction, he poses questions so specific and self-reflexive as to nearly answer themselves; alternately, he offers up learned koans so broad as to flummox all but the quickest of subjects. It's a bit of a high-wire act and, like Rose, his self absorption can lead to the occasional bout of tone deafness, as per his exchange with Will Oldham regarding the latter's trips to Cuba:

Svenonius: I'm a big fan of Fidel Castro, as you might know.

Oldham: You know they call him that (Oldham mimes the stroking of an imaginary long beard). In private discussion, in houses, if they want to talk about him it's a habit to go like (strokes chin).

Svenonius: Oh, that's great.

Oldham: In case they're being bugged.

Svenonius: Oh, that's great.

While his ideology and erudition shouldn't be doubted his pretensions are a little more complicated. The title of the show is explained, with half a wink, as "The world looks better in Soft Focus." Svenonius has a long history as a musician in bands such as Nation of Ulysses and Weird War, where he's cultivated a simultaneously tweedy (even in his punkiest days he was immaculately tailored), subversive and deliberately self-parodic aesthetic. In Soft Focus he seems to be sending up his persona as an effete, be-suited intellectual poseur as a means to enter areas of discussion less pompous interviewers would fear to broach. Consequently there's little show biz badinage, logrolling or name dropping; the focus instead is on musicians, their motives and methods, and especially their thoughts on art and its position in a hyper-capitalist American culture.

It's easy for his guests to become trapped in Svenonius' more elaborate constructs, so the best interviews are the ones where the guest feels challenged to break from the question-answer format and engage in a real discussion with a sympathetic mind. His greatest strength as an interviewer is his ability to provoke these exchanges. His session with Ian Mackaye begins with Mackaye's friendly assertion, "You are incredibly full of shit" and takes it from there, with Mackaye periodically skewering and turning the tables on his interlocutor.

I've never been a rabid devotee of Mackaye's bands Fugazi and Minor Threat (though I do like them well enough) but in his position as co-owner of Dischord - one of the original, and still thriving, independent labels - he has shown tremendous integrity and intelligence in his relationship with the corporate culture of the music biz. Here, in part two of his interview, he dissects the failings of the major label system, the rise of digital culture and makes some predictions about the much lamented (at least in certain imposing steel and glass skyscrapers) End Of The Record Business As We Know It.




Even if you're not interested in Ian Mackaye it's well worth watching all four parts of the interview if you're at all dismayed by the state of music and popular culture.

Finally, if my analogy holds up wouldn't that make Henry Rollins the James Lipton to Ian Svenonius' Charlie Rose? Discuss amongst yourselves, but don't mention it to Henry; he has veins that are larger than me.