Words by Andrew Ryan Fetter
There are so many memes that reference a Blockbuster card as an age status symbol or the signal of a crumbling empire. Shopping malls that used to be the premiere place to hang now look like post-apocalyptic wastelands. Indie rappers Open Mike Eagle, Video Dave, and Still Rift have taken all of the complicated feelings associated with things that no longer exist and used them to form the trio Previous Industries. The song “Circuit City” from Mike Eagle’s 2022 album, A Tape Called Component System With The Auto Reverse, was the first officially recorded song by the trio, even if their origins date back much further.
Off Shelf: So, I’d like to start by talking about how this project came to be. I know it kind of started with collaborating on a song on Mike’s most recent record, but how did it go from that to being a fully realized project like it is now?
Open Mike Eagle: All of that sort of happened parallel. We just rolled it out in a way to kind of breadcrumb it, but we have been hunkered down making music together since like mid-2020, and some of it went on my couple of projects. Some of it went on Dave’s. But we were cooking the entire time. We’re blazing the trail while we walk it.
Video Dave: Yeah, the start doesn’t start where people started hearing it. I mean, I guess it’s been three and a half years at this point, that we’ve been making these songs.
OS: The video for “Pliers” was a pretty cool concept, the combination of live action and animation, plus the homage to Jaws. How did that idea come about?
VD: I was just listening to the song thinking about what would make a good video and it reminded me of that scene from Jaws. So I looked it up and thought that was a good direction to go. And taking the advice of Jaws and not going to shoot on the ocean, I thought ‘let’s shoot this on a green screen’. And I’ve worked with that animator [Crankbunny] before. I’ve always wanted to mix animation and live action. It was so reminiscent of Roger Rabbit, Bedknobs and Broomsticks, and Mary Poppins. It seemed like it would be a good fit. And the guys were down with it. It felt good for that song and for everything else we’re doing. You know, we’re talking about these old – like we’re coming with that feel of the old malls and the old stuff. So it’s like, “Okay, how about the first old blockbuster movie” incorporate that too?
OS: Turning to the album as a whole and the concept behind a lot of the songs, the phrase I saw in some of the press info was “orbiting the dead mall as a spiritual concept”. Can any of you guys kind of elaborate on that a little bit?
VD: It’s kind of like just – well, I don’t know if I can summarize the whole thing – but it has something to do with just remembering different ways of consumption and how we got into things and what we liked at the time. You know, a lot of that stuff has been shut down. Physical spaces, the buildings, the companies, the brands, the logos, the jingles, all that stuff’s gone, but we’re just kind of still playing in that world, being influenced by it, being drawn to it. Some of you guys could say that better than me?
OME: I feel like that quote you just read was somebody saying it better than any of us could. It actually means a bunch because it is about the consumption. It’s also about all of us being middle-aged and doing this art form that in a lot of ways is publicly tied to consumption. The “dead mall” or the outdated retail establishment ordering things via catalog or dialing 1-800 numbers, they’re considered old modalities, but they just have a lot of meaning for us. I think a lot of where we come from, where we aim at, kind of goes along with those ideas.
Still Rift: I kind of let go of age a long time ago…
OME: Must be nice!
SR: Yeah, it’s great! [laughs] If something, if you can do it, I would encourage doing it, but I understand that a lot of people can’t. They’re not as adept at divorcing themselves from a dimension as I am. When it comes down to it, there’s a lot of dead concepts, a lot of dead consumption, a lot of old things that still have meaning that don’t have to be dead. I won’t call them zombies, but there’s a lot of communal headspace that is taken up by a lot of things that we reference either directly or are influenced by. It’s just kind of paying homage to it or being more aware of that than anything else.
VD: Yeah, it was more of an idea. There’s only one song that’s anywhere close to being about shopping. Just one song is about the physical catalog, but the rest of it is just… it was just kind of a space to play in, like the mall was. I didn’t buy that much from the mall. It was just a place to be and a place to experience things and see things.
SR: I stole a lot of things from the mall.
VD: Oh, I didn’t! I wasn’t on that.
OME: Yeah, Dave didn’t start stealing until well into adulthood. [laughs]
VD: I mean – I stole, but not from the mall. I would steal like candy bars and stuff like that as a kid, but from the mall, that’s way too much. I didn’t have the moral high ground back then.
OS: Well, it’s interesting because malls still exist, but not in the same way that any of us would remember them.
VD: I mean, there’s still some malls and they got the food court and all. I don’t know if it’s still the place to be. I don’t know. It’s not my scene anymore. I know if I go to the mall, I don’t get the same vibe I used to have.
SR: I’ll say that airports are more malls than malls are nowadays.
OS: Still high-end retail food and things like that, but just in a different context.
SR: Especially the international terminals. Those are always set up properly. The domestic ones, yeah, those are like dead malls. You walk from gate to gate, there’s maybe like two restaurants that you probably would never eat at. But international terminals, they got a lot of high-end stuff. You can go to a Tumi store. You can go to a Best Buy kiosk. You can get a massage. You can do a lot of things in a mall, but that’s completely tangential.
OME: I think we should all just keep talking until we admit to some crime. I think that’s the way to get the best out of this conversation. [laughs]
OS: Rift, you kind of differentiate it from the feeling of nostalgia. You say that this is really not so much that, because that has a totally different feeling than remembering, “Oh yeah, this used to exist and it doesn’t anymore.” Did you have a conscious effort to sort of separate from that feeling?
SR: Well, I think nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake is kind of lame. I think trying to rebuild something or trying to make something that was an old thing new again, like a remake, I don’t like those. Let dead things be dead, but dead things have children and that’s different. They have their genes and they have their influence, but they should be of the now. They should be modern because this is where we are. I don’t think any of us made it a point to try to write rhymes that sounded like they could be old rhymes. It’s a bunch of people that heard a bunch of old rhymes and are writing rhymes that sound like they should be made now, but just under that particular umbrella, if that makes sense.
OME: I just want to clarify that the dead things that have children had those children before they were dead, just because any impregnation after death, that’s another crime. So I just want to make sure that that was clear. [laughs]
SR: …so when it comes to nostalgia, I don’t think anything that we do should be perceived as this backward looking thing, or wistful and wishing. I don’t think anything we ever, any of us wrote is like, “I wish we could do this again”. You know? There’s a difference between remembering something and then wanting to relive said memory. And I feel like it’s very important for people to understand that we’re not trying to relive anything. We just happen to not be able to let go of things because of trauma.
OS: That’s an important distinction and it kind of gets into the personal feel that a lot of your guys’ lyrics have. It’s almost like, are we the dead malls?
OME: I mean, I am. I’m a dead mall. I am many, many dead malls in fact.
SR: So in Transformers terms, not only are you like one of the Transformer cities, you’re like a Transformer city made out of Transformers.
OME: Yes exactly. I’m a dead mall made of dead malls.
OS: I don’t know if any of you have ever looked at Used to be a Pizza Hut.
OME: Oh, I need to look at it right now.
SR: Oh dude. There’s mad things that used to be Pizza Hut!
OS: t’s basically all of these repurposed sit down Pizza Hut restaurants that have been turned into other businesses. There’s one of them that is a Domino’s which is like the biggest “fuck you” you can ever give.
OME: Wow. Yeah, that’s a real betrayal.
OS: But that reminded me of this feeling we’re talking about. Because you see it, you know what the architecture looks like. You recognize the building, but it’s when it’s clearly something else, you know that’s not what it used to be at all.
OME: I think this website used to be a Pizza Hut. Yeah, it’s bad.
SR: I didn’t even know that was a thing. Everybody’s slow realization that they too used to be a Pizza Hut.
OS: I don’t know if all of this is necessarily meant as a critique of late stage capitalism, but there is certainly that angle of it where you’re like, again, we’re the dead malls.
SR: Well, we’re children of late stage capitalism. I don’t know what early stage capitalism look like.
OME: I think it was slavery, actually.
SR: True, yeah. We are the descendants of early stage capitalism.