Suicideboys Don’t Care for the Music Biz. They Got Its Attention Anyway.

[Pelican Press 0]

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

Suicideboys Don’t Care for the Music Biz. They Got Its Attention Anyway.

Now that both have embraced sobriety, the group is cautious not to proselytize to an audience that comes to them for a release from their own personal pain. “A lot of our fans haven’t gotten to that point yet,“ Petrou said. He called their Suicideboys personas “the Tyler Durdens of our real selves,” a reference to the anarchic alter ego in “****** Club.” “We don’t want them to necessarily feel abandoned — like, ‘We saw the light, good luck on your own.’ We still try to ***** back into what we felt years ago. We were **********, and we didn’t realize the drugs were a big part of what was making us **********.”

Throughout their ups and downs, Suicideboys have focused on retaining control over how their music is made and distributed, which has been essential to staying true to themselves. “Everything that we can do as independently as we can, we do it,” Petrou said, noting that they do still have to play ball with touring behemoths AEG and Live Nation when it comes to booking events like Grey Day. Otherwise, “Labels don’t see a share of our profits, and we don’t really work with other artists. You’re not going to see us at the V.M.A.s. Scott and I just keep to ourselves.”

When they have crossed paths with the conventional music industry, they’ve rankled the powers that be. Offered a chance to fly a flag of their choice atop Los Angeles’s famous Capitol Records tower, the group requested an unprintable song title referencing their distaste for the music industry itself. The offer was quickly rescinded.

Arceneaux regards the music business — artists, labels, awards committees, the whole lot — as “a little too narcissistic for our taste.” “We never wanted to rely on anybody for anything,” he explained. “We’ve had enough experience to know that was no good.” Petrou said he wouldn’t name any names, but when it comes to the current pop landscape and the machine that keeps it moving, “a lot of them seem a little too full of themselves.” He added, “At the end of the day, you have a lot of people that make you ask yourself, ‘Why am I doing this?’”

One answer is the fans that have supported them throughout the years, becoming a core part of the group’s life in the process. In a constantly changing speech that Arceneaux has made during every Suicideboys concert since getting sober, he recounts his struggles and emphasizes that even when awash in life’s lowest points, “There’s hope that life can get better.”

“I never had no one that I looked up to who were like, ‘Actually, bro, it doesn’t have to be like that,’” he said. Petrou added, “I get told literally by everyone that we meet that as a fan, 10 times out of 10, that we saved their life.” He reflected on the clearly unmeasurable impact Suicideboys have on their listeners: “It’s such a heavy statement, and we get told it so often that both of us completely deflect it. We say, ‘Well, thank you, because you saved our lives too.’”

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

#Suicideboys #Dont #Care #Music #Biz #Attention

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up