Adebimpe with fancy, big-time horn section,

September 2008

TV ON THE RADIO

tion, but even the limp-dicked response of nonviolent protest—it’s not even an option in this scenario.”

For “Lover’s Day,” a galvanized Malone wanted to write “a non-oppres-sive, gender-neutral, orientation-neutral, pro-sex song,” he says. “I don’t want to sound like a total square, because I’ve been a slut, but there’s definitely a toxic intersection between consumerism and sexuality. It’s a great sensation, but if it’s just become sensation devoid of any kind of sacred-ness or spirituality or love—for want of a less problematic word—it’s just become the rat pressing the button to get the endorphins running.”

Malone’s comments are partitioned by long pauses, especially when discussing the band’s ever-ascendant status. “I actually believe in music as a religion, but I don’t believe there needs to be a priest,” he says. “I feel like I’m losing perspective and believing the bullshit that people throw up my ass. I’m proud of the work we’ve done, and I’m a very competitive person… but I also feel like a lot of that phone book’s worth of positive reviews that our publicist hands us is more a result of people being lazy and reading what they saw someone else write and rewriting it and rewriting it.”

Cash registers beep and blip around him. “I feel a little cynical today,” he says. “I feel more generous toward what we’re doing some days than I feel today. I’m a little tired of loud music right now.”

T V ON THE RADIO were born in 2001 in Williamsburg, a neighborhood that’s long served as a refuge for artists, musicians, and actors—and those who are all of the above. The band started when Adebimpe, a film student who’d starred in a 2001 indie called Jump Tomorrow, met with Sitek, a recent New York transplant and aspiring producer. Adebimpe and Sitek began goofing around with Pro Tools, yielding their first EP, the self-released OK Calculator. After recruiting Malone, Smith, and Bunton, TVOTR expanded their sound into a chaotic whirlpool of punk, doo-wop, and soul, prompting Touch and Go to release 2004’s debut, Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes. A deal with Interscope followed soon afterward. “It’s awesome that the band has an audience, because there’s no logical reason why that should be the case,” says Adebimpe, “especially considering that we started as an elaborate joke.”

After finishing a lengthy tour for Cookie Mountain, the band members undertook numerous side projects: Sitek worked at Stay Gold, and produced such albums as Scarlett Johansson’s Anywhere I Lay My Head and Foals’ Antidotes. Malone collaborated with singer-songwriter Miles Benjamin Anthony Robinson and cofounded the psych-folk outfit Iran. But the most visible detour—and certainly the most unexpected—was Adebimpe’s appearance in Jonathan Demme’s well-received drama Rachel Getting Married, as a supportive husband-to-be. “As soon as we got off the tour last time, I told our manager, ‘If anyone needs a video director or a part I’d be good for, I’m just gonna be at home, working on my own stuff,’”

says Adebimpe, sitting in a coffee shop as the Memphis rain grows more assaultive; much like his Rachel character, he’s looming yet gently empathetic. “It’s awesome, all of this stuff happening at once.”

Rachel finished filming in November 2007; a few months later, Adebimpe was confronted with a pair of back-to-back tragedies. In a three-day span in January, his older brother, who suffered from bipolar disorder, died after a routine hospital visit, and one of his best friends committed suicide. “There was so much real-world stuff going on that making that record was the most productive use of my time,” he says. “When things like that happen, I have a tendency to shut myself off from people; I didn’t want to do that this time.”

A former lead animator for Celebrity Deathmatch, Adebimpe carries a sketchbook with him for ideas and drawings. (He animated the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ “Pin” video and is well versed in the current Adult Swim lineup.) While working on Dear Science, he read beat poets such as Bob

Kaufman and Gregory Corso—“well-written documents that are really clear portals into what this person is feeling about the world around them,” he says. “I was looking to see how other people processed their times and their lives.”

One standout was Corso’s 1958 poem “Bomb,” which assembles a series of detached verses into the shape of a mushroom cloud. It’s an approach that surfaces in Adebimpe’s rat-a-tat lyrics for “Dancing Choose,” a frantic dressing-down of our instant-gratification, low-comprehension culture. It’s “a nightmare condition,” Adebimpe says, one that has afflicted him. “It’s stuff I’ve observed in myself. It’s not condemning at all.”

“Dancing Choose” includes a line about a “foam-injected Axl Rose,” a dig at the singer’s increasingly artificial-looking visage. Considering that TV on the Radio’s roots are in Brooklyn’s self-sustaining music scene, it’s not surprising that they’d poke fun at a pop-culture paragon of excess. What is a bit strange is that Axl and Adebimpe are technically employed by the same record label. It’s a scenario emblematic of the band’s odd stature within the music industry: While retaining the goodwill from their initial indie-rock core, they’ve used their major-label backing to release consecutive astral masterworks, tour arenas with Nine Inch Nails, record an album with an A-list starlet, and promote an album about plastic culture with an appearance on The Tonight Show. In 2008, such a feat is considered nothing less than a statistical aberration.

Which is why it only seems prudent to ask: When and how do you expect the backlash to begin?

SI TEK: In this day and age, if you have time to hate on a band, your priorities are a little fucked-up.

ADEBIMPE: I’d like to dedicate 2009 to giving people something to really hate on. I’m going to start hating myself, and it’s going to spawn out and tag everyone. Like Reba McEntire said, “Give ’em something to talk about.” MALONE: That wasn’t Reba McEntire. That was Bonnie Raitt.

ADEBIMPE: Touché. Bonnie Raitt’s awesome. She’s a strutter.

AFEW WEEKS AFTER their Memphis rest stop, the members of TV on the Radio are in a Los Angeles photo studio posing for the cover of this very issue. They’re having difficulty focusing on the task at hand, and with good reason: Tonight is November 4, and election results are trickling in from a nearby flat-screen tuned to CNN. Around 8 P.M., the five bandmates rush into a break room to watch the victor declared. (FYI, it was Barack Obama.)

“That’s the shit,” Sitek says, his hands on his head in disbelief.

Blue plastic cups of Irish whiskey are raised in the air, and it’s hard not to think of what Adebimpe said earlier—that even the most hardening times will yield something joyful and enormous.

“Okay,” Sitek says. “Now I can handle that tour of Europe.”

ANDREW JORGENSEN