In a recent Q&A session before W.A.S.P.’s December 13 concert, the frontman Blackie Lawless shared his thoughts about the digital revolution and how it ‘ruined’ the experience of actually enjoying purchasing music.
“So, fast forward to where we are now. The digital revolution destroyed music as we know it,” the rocker said. “Because most people, and I would assume it’s the same where you were when you grew up, but everybody in this room here pretty much experienced the same thing. If you wanted a record when you were a kid, you had to save your lunch money or go cut somebody’s grass, you had to do whatever to get enough money to go to a record store and buy that record you wanted. But the problem is, once you got there, there were 10 records you wanted, but you could only afford one.”
He continued with what happens today: “Now, today, for 10 dollars, a kid can get an unlimited supply of music. It’s like going to a water faucet and turning the water on. There’s no end to it. There’s no inherent value to the music to them anymore. For us, when we were doing it growing up, we traded our sweat equity for the artist’s sweat equity. That doesn’t exist now.”
“So they’re never gonna understand the joy. You get that record for the first time, you take it home and you put it on. You study every word, every photo while you’re listening to it. They don’t do that now. They’ve been robbed of that. And I feel really sorry for them. Because they’re never going to get to experience what everybody in this room knows what I’m talking about right now. So that’s a really, really sad thing,” Lawless added.
Speaking of music, the frontman has been working on some new music, but the back surgery he had back in August last year delayed things a little.
“I’ve had a long time to go through that. Those early demos of what we have been working on, listening to it with fresh ears,” the rocker explained during a chat with 101 WRIF‘s Meltdown podcast. “Some of it’s good, but there’s not enough of it yet where I would be comfortable saying, okay, this is finished, and let’s go with it. I want to, I’d like to like to go back and visit the drawing board, so to speak, and see what else is there, because even from two years of when we started working on that before to where we are right now, you’re going to gain so much, you’re going to grow so much.”
He added, “I don’t make records that are spread out over a two or 3-year period. Because the guy you are when you first start making it is not the guy you are when you finish making it, get in, try to six months top to bottom, get that thing cranked up, because like I said, if you don’t, you end up running the risk of it being a schizophrenic type of record. Where you’ve got one type of one thing and then some. The other half is something else and has no real cohesiveness.”
W.A.S.P. started the North American leg of their ‘Album ONE Alive’ tour on October 26 at Fremont Theater in San Luis Obispo, California. The 39-city tour stopped in cities like Vancouver, Toronto, Minneapolis, Dallas, New York City, and Orlando, ending on December 14 at the Hollywood Palladium in Los Angeles, California.
The band’s 2023 U.S. tour was canceled due to back injuries Lawless suffered during the European leg of W.A.S.P.’s 40th-anniversary tour.
