‘You have to realize this is 2017 . . . and people will get upset about literally anything. It seems like we live in a world with smart phones and dumb people.”
The quote is from Doris Melton, in a charming online interview with her husband Matthew. They lead a band called Dream Machine, and the interview was meant to promote their new album on Castle Face Records.
When the label’s owners read the interview, however, one of them immediately ran to Facebook to declare that Castle Face was sickened by the Meltons’ “ugly opinions” and would terminate the label’s relationship with the band. Boycotts are underway, thus proving Doris’s assertion.
How ugly are the Meltons’ opinions? Doris, who’s from Bosnia, had the nerve to say something nice about ICE, Immigration and Customs Enforcement:
As Marlon Brando so eloquently put it: The Horror! (Or was that Joseph Conrad?) The interviewer asked Doris what annoyed her most about the music business. You may want to send the kids outside.
“[G]irls have mostly become lazy jellyfish and are starting these horrible feminist bands just to try and ‘show men what they got.’ The safe space mentality has made them weak. They don’t even know how to play their instruments! They’ll make songs about being ‘sexually assaulted’ or about how ‘empowering’ abortions are,” she said. “They’re embarrassing themselves.”
The Scrapbook may be showing its age, but we can remember when the point of rock and roll was rebellion, a nose-thumbing at a sclerotic status quo. How refreshing to find that, at least in one small corner of the music world, that spirit lives on—and how unsurprising that the music business has itself become an establishment even more reactionary than the one it replaced.
As it happens, the Meltons said in the same interview that they were moving to Amsterdam for the foreseeable future. Even so, said Matthew, “I will always consider myself a red-blooded American.” He added wryly: “And just like the waves of refugees pouring into Europe I will also not be learning any new languages or culturally assimilating.”
But the move, for now, seems necessary. Said Doris: “American musicians (hopefully not Europe too) are getting increasingly politically correct and it started getting on our nerves.”
With admiration for their plainspokenness and their willingness to think for themselves, we wish the Meltons bon voyage—and hope they hurry back.
