Pick up a copy of Best of Manbestfriend Vinyl here.
Stream it here.
2021, this is the perfect time to drop this video for .ix aka “I don’t want your bloody throne,” as this song and unfinished video are both a crystallization of my former insurgent life in so called Denver and a statement of intent for where my political development would lead me.
Lets start with the technical aspect; this video was shot in 2014 with my good friend Man Mantis. We filmed it on shitty 8mm tapes and he further distorted the footage by running it through a projector, and filming it again off a wall. He has gone on to do amazing video editing work in LA. We did this right before he moved and never got to finish it. When the song ended up on the ”best of mansbestfriend” vinyl compilation it was the perfect opportunity to give this song a second chance, because for a lot of reasons its one of my favorite songs I’ve made.
This song was written in the wake of the occupy and movement for black lives. I wrote it after hanging with my niece, and we had such a sweet time with her I knew that I wanted to have kids of my own, soon. Ideas about food forests and permaculture had been rattling around in my brain after reading Toby Heminway’s book Gaia’s Garden. It was written after digging into crimethinc’s critique of democracy, and me having an “aha” moment while reading the Invisible Committee’s seminal work To Our Friends. Somewhere in the book they talk about when people in Greece stormed the capital and took it over, they realized that the building was just an empty shell, that true power lied elsewhere…
“You stormed the capital halls,
nobody was home, power lies elsewhere…”
Putting the phrase “I don’t want your bloody throne,” in a song applies to everyone; activists, musicians, labels, mayors, presidents. The harder any person tries to yield power, the more that power corrupts… we’ve all seen lord of the rings, and we’ve all seen how this stuff plays out in our communities. Recalling crimethinc’s critique of democracy, I’m also reminded of how “horizontal democratic processes” can also have unchecked power dynamics cooked into them, and how at the end of the day democracy alone will not save us either. We must go deeper, to think about not only the organizations we build and the struggles we partake in, but also take into account how our daily lives are actually lived.
Prior to writing this song I had spent some time visiting communities in France that inspired me. While there I saw amazing libraries, endless gardens, fields of thyme, herb gardens, greenhouses, milling equipment to build houses and halls and more. I met people from all over the world, everyday they harvested vegetables from their farm and fed everyone in their town, they were building houses for refugees, the list goes on and on. To answer the question of how do we live and fight? Is the ground we are standing on, in fact solid? How do we build in a way that meets human needs, beyond charity and ideology? And if power lies elsewhere, not with politicians… where does it lie?
Experiencing rural resistance communities with an international bent, seeing their farms, and the way they lived their daily lives… compared to what my daily stimulus was… cop cars, cranes building more condos, concrete… Would I rather wake up to the sound of birds or the sound of sirens?
7 years later, its cool to see a song that is not a self fulfilling prophecy, but a wish… and here on our little farm in Maine, that daydream is slowly coming to fruition… All I had to do was start walking in the direction I wanted to go…
