The Pains of Being Pure at Heart interview
HUCK talks to Peggy and Kip from The Pains of Being Pure at Heart about coming-of-age, reverse rebellion and indie-pop.
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‘My teenage angst has a body count’ writes Veronica in her diary. Although the famous quote from seminal high school movie Heathers is meant to be satirical, it reflects a genuine tendency in art and media to present teenagers as dark, dispossessed and totally bad-ass. But for a lot of teens, it’s complete hyperbole. Luckily four misfits from New York called The Pains of Being Pure at Heart are reinventing the cliché one riff at a time.
When front man Kip worked up the courage to ask ‘way cooler’ Peggy to join the band a couple of years ago, the band went from bedroom catharsis to popular indie mainstream in no time at all. Their music takes the punkish outsider aesthetic and gives it a suburban twist with soaring melodies in the vein of My Bloody Valentine and The Pastels.
HUCK: You get a sense of rebellion or ‘the pains of being pure at heart’ in the record but it’s also inclusive and not just for kids who are really bad-ass. Is that something you wanted to get across?
Kip: I wrote things from my own experiences of not being totally socially accepted in high school but having best friends that I could just obsess over music with. I had one really bad-ass friend who would get in real trouble but we’d get in kind of detention-type trouble. We were getting detention but we weren’t getting thrown out of school. We still did our homework and had our responsibilities and weren’t destructive for destructiveness sake. It’s sort of that inbetween phase where you feel in some ways rebellious against the environment you’re in but a responsibility to not be a total head-fuck to your parents. You’re not saying, “Fuck you mum. I’m going to smoke crack,” or anything like that.
Peggy: Yeah, we were still kind of good kids. I rebelled by joining the young socialist club. I would wear a band t-shirt to school and I didn’t know if we were allowed to. That was my idea of rebellion.
I understand that you grew up listening to punk and going to hardcore shows?
Kip: We used to go to a lot of local punk shows but we weren’t as punk as the real punks who were kinda dicks, but we also weren’t the type of kids who wanted to go to a Dave Matthews Band concert either. We liked the music and the community but we weren’t bad-ass. We also listened to a lot of pop-punk and post-hardcore stuff in the 90s and we liked bands like Weezer, The Smashing Pumpkins and Nirvana. We weren’t like, “we only listen to punk’. My friend had a Pavement CD and I was like ‘ah this is cool.’ At that age you’re not set in what’s cool and what isn’t cool so I’d listen to Pavement and pop-punk and I didn’t feel like that was contradictory.
Did all of these things influence the music you make now?
Kip: The music we make now is a sum of all our experiences. It’s that sense of growing up at a time when the biggest threat to the world was SUVs. In the 90s, there was a sense that history would just perpetually, incrementally improve and in many ways it was just about continuing on and resolving problems and getting better and it wasn’t like a cut and dry ‘the world is going to end’ or ‘we need to change everything right now’. So we’d just be like, ‘lets keep trying to get better over time’. It’s an optimistic view - there was this idea that like eventually nations would start to work together and everyone will recycle and everything will just get gradually better. I think that’s the outlook we grew up with, the sense that things could be improved with hard work. I don’t know if that makes any sense but I was thinking about it in the shower today.
It’s interesting you have that attitude towards the nineties because many people saw that period in music as negatively post-modern with artists beginning to re-hash the past. Do you think there’s any original music being made nowadays?
Kip: I don’t really believe that everything’s been done because I still get excited about new music. There are consistently new bands coming out with records I wanna buy. We went on tour with this band called Girls on the West Coast and that was really fun. They’re just one example of a band I get as excited about as when I heard Pavement for the first time or Sonic Youth. So in a sense we don’t feel this declining narrative in history and if we did we probably wouldn’t do what we do.
Do you ever get criticised for your music being mainstream indie-pop?
Kip: Not to our face! The surprising thing is the Indie-pop community here - nights like Spiral Scratch and Twee as Fuck and back home too - are really excited that a band like us are getting people more excited about this kind of music. We always try to tell people the bands we love, that were inspirational to us. I think it’s really important. Like when Nirvana said, ‘this music is important. Go and listen to The Vaselines,’ we would go and listen to The Vaselines. It was something that would never have happened in suburban America in 1994 were it not for Kurt Cobain, a decent human being trying to be like, ‘hey Beat Happening’s cool too.’ And it must be perplexing for people who like Nirvana and think ‘I’m gonna hear this band that is just like Nirvana,’ and they put Beat Happening on and are like… silent. Thinking, maybe it’s track two?
The Pains of Being Pure at Heart's new single Come Saturday is out August 24 on Fortuna Pop! Records. Check their MySpace for a sneak preview and updates.
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The Pains of Being Pure at Heart interview (text) by Shelley Jones is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
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