The Guest List | Thou

The Guest List is a regular book column that surveys the reading habits of our favorite musicians. In this edition, Jimmy Cajoleas talks with Bryan Funck, the vocalist for the metal band Thou and co-owner of the New Orleans record store Sisters in Christ. The band’s latest album, Umbilical, was released earlier this year by Sacred Bones Records.

Jimmy Cajoleas: What are you reading right now?

Bryan Funck: Right now, I’m rereading Barry Windsor-Smith’s Monsters graphic novel that he released three years ago. It’s a 400-page magnum opus. He’s the guy who wrote the Wolverine origin story, Wolverine: Weapon X, in the ‘80s. A few years later he pitched a Hulk origin story that would have been in the same vein. Hulk’s dad was an abusive alcoholic, and that’s essentially what created the psychology that put the monster in his brain, and the gamma stuff released that. I think he pitched it to Marvel twice over a ten-year period, and they rejected it both times because he had a minimal amount of profanity in it. From what I remember, they disliked that he said “goddamn” in it. He’d been working on that story off and on for thirty or forty years, retooling it into this standalone thing. He did that with another graphic novel that Marvel rejected because there was a suicide in it, so he swapped out the Marvel character for a character of his own making. That’s me doing a disservice to the scope of the work, but that’s the hook I guess.

JC: It’s so strange what Marvel will allow and what they won’t.

BF: I think it’s just whoever the editor in chief is at the time. I don’t know the backstory. I lost interest in the bigger comic book companies a long time ago. So far as I can tell, it’s just what they’ll get on board with or not, what they can pitch to the higher-ups. Especially with their new business model, they care less about comics than they do about farming for new IP for movies. If that’s the case, just let the comic people go HAM, no restraints. Also, get more talented creative people touching the properties. I’ve always looked at Marvel and DC and don’t understand why they don’t have their standard titles that kids can get and buy, and for the rest of the stuff they could just let artists go nuts and make really good comics. Whenever they let people put out good comics, those turn into the perennials. That’s how you get Watchmen, or The Dark Knight Returns, or Weapon X. If you let an actual creative person do what they want to do with the property, that’s when the good stuff happens. Not everything has to be this ongoing history, it doesn’t have to be canon. And that stuff sucks anyway.

JC: Do you like Ed Brubaker at all?

BF: I like him okay. I’ve read a bunch of the crime stuff. He did Fatale, which I liked. It was a fun read, but it oversimplified the Lovecraftian stuff for me. I love that kind of thing, but I don’t want everything explained. I don’t want it clean. I want it messy and ambiguous. I don’t want to see the horror—I want it to be hinted at. I feel like they gave away too much in Fatale, and you lose a lot when you take the ambiguity out.

JC: Are there any books that inspired your new record?

BF: I’m always pulling from all kinds of stuff, so it’s hard to say. Our new record Umbilical, in terms of the lyrics and textual thematics, is about reassessing our band and ourselves through my core ideological sense. There’s a collection of Individualists Tending to the Wild manifestos, which was this terrorist organization that was anti-technology and anti-civilization. Kind of Ted Kaczynski–style bombing people and stuff. Which I’m not into, just to be clear. But some of the ideological rhetoric is interesting, in terms of “We have this problem that we have to deal with. We have an ideology that we want to uphold. We know that it’s going to be unsuccessful, but we’re going to do it anyway.” Sort of bordering on anarcho-nihilism, which is really interesting. That and this other book, Blessed Is the Flame: An Introduction to Concentration Camp Resistance and Anarcho-Nihilism, by Serafinski. This was another one that was in the same wheelhouse but from a better, or less controversial, perspective.

When we’re doing records, the way I work when I’m writing the lyrics or the way I’m coming up with ideas, I’m always jotting stuff down. If I read or hear or find something interesting or there’s a spark to, I write it down and keep an ongoing list. I might take a lyric from another band, like a Pearl Jam lyric or something, and write around it. I’m constantly pulling in stuff. But then, inevitably, whatever I’m reading or listening to starts working its way in. For this record, I was searching for more ways to articulate the feelings I was trying to put in the record. But then at the same time, I was listening to the first Sinéad O’Connor album on repeat too. That’s just the way it goes.

JC: Any other books in particular?

BF: Here’s another person I’m probably going to get in trouble for talking about. Do you know Ryan Holiday? I love all the Ryan Holiday stuff. I know that Stoicism or whatever is really popular with these tech-bro incel types, who I do not want to be associated with, but I love his stuff. It’s a very easy, applicable approach to the basic ideas of Stoicism, which I find helpful in my old age, especially having to deal with people in a band situation.

JC: People are always trying to co-opt a tried-and-true method for dealing with suffering in the world for their own nefarious purposes, but it doesn’t negate the goodness of the original thing.

BF: I can’t remember if The Obstacle Is the Way was the first book of his I read, but his whole main trilogy is really good. He has a blog called the Daily Stoic, which I don’t follow but probably should. It’s very applicable to dealing with the chaos of a band relationship.

JC: You guys have been in a band for quite a long time. I was in a band for a few years, and I remember well the grueling three-month tours where you just sit in silence, trying not to piss anybody off.

BF: Part of what’s key to our longevity is not doing tours like that. When I first joined, we did a six-week tour, and we were all like, this is too long. Three weeks is about our limit for how long we can be around each other. We try to do two-to-three-week tours max. We’ll do a big drive to get far away from home and then hit an area and just go home. I have a record shop, Sisters in Christ, so when I go on tour, as fast as we sell records, I’m filling the empty boxes back up with records and books and comics so I can bring them back to the shop. I’m always shopping for the shop.

JC: Do you have any all-time favorite books you return to?

BF: Evasion by Mack Evasion, or Peter Young. It’s a classic CrimethInc. road memoir of being a homeless person, basically. Watership Down by Richard Adams. I love that book. When I try to sell it to people at the shop, I always tell them that it’s the only book in high school that I tried to cram for the test, and I didn’t finish it the night before, but I finished it after the test because I liked it so much. I’ve read it a good handful of times over the years. The Chocolate War, by Robert Cormier, I really like too. I went to a Catholic school, and it was one step away from a boarding school. You wear a uniform, it’s all boys, etc. It’s a good novel for a person going through life at an all-boys school. It’s really brutal.

JC: What about music books?

BF: I don’t read a ton of music books. Dance of Days: Two Decades of Punk in the Nation’s Capital, about all the DC bands, was one I used to go back to every few years. It always felt like it pinched all the right nerves, in terms of optimism and the community spirit stuff that I was always chasing down as a young man. I haven’t read it in a handful of years now, so I should read it again. I’d be curious as to how I’d read it now. I put on punk shows in New Orleans for twenty years, with a very harsh ideological stance forced into how I was doing things. Which was probably why I was so unsuccessful for so long. But that book always reinvigorated me to chase that dream of community and that wellspring of creativity that could come from a good supportive community.

JC: Community is tough, especially in the music world. In my life, I feel like there have been these little Edens of community that kind of fall apart, but they’re the perfect place for about two years.

BF: That’s how it definitely is in New Orleans, where I’m from. The rest of the guys in Thou are from Baton Rouge, and I have some limited experience there—I put on shows in Baton Rouge for a while because there were a lot of house spaces for a period of time where we could have shows. Back in the day, Thou used to play Baton Rouge a ton. Baton Rouge and New Orleans always move in spurts, an up and a down, an up and a down. In New Orleans, the crowd of people is so transient. It’s really pushed by the college kids, who pick something up and go to town with it for that four-year period. People are always moving down here, for two weeks, two months, two years, and then they’re gone. It’s always interesting down here, and there’s always cool stuff happening, but it’s always very ephemeral. Musically speaking, the bands that last are the ones that don’t care about “making it in New Orleans,” that aren’t worried about their impact on the city. They’re doing what they’re doing and they have a life out of the city as well. There’s something else driving them.

JC: Any other books you’d like to mention?

BF: I’ve been mostly reading comics lately. I’m forty-four, so I came up on a lot of late ’80s, early ’90s garbage stuff, which I think is pretty much unreadable for a grown person. Of course I like the art, but it’s got to have both great art and great writing to keep me coming back. A lot of the stuff I’m actively looking at now is stuff I missed as a kid, building up a collection of ’70s and ’80s Heavy Metal magazine and Epic Illustrated anthology stuff. I’ll find somebody I like from that and hunt down all their work. Philippe Druillet I like a lot, more for the pictures than the writing. Richard Corben I’ve been real into, who I guess is tangentially famous for the Bat Out of Hell Meat Loaf cover. I think he did some Hellboy too at some point. He’s got a lush career in underground comics, kind of pulpy stuff. That new Daniel Clowes graphic novel Monica is amazing. I’m not a big Daniel Clowes fan—I’ve probably read Ghost World, Pussey!, parts of Eightball, maybe one or two others—but Monica is awesome. Part of this is a post-Katrina thing, but I don’t keep a ton of stuff anymore. Not compared to what I had as a young man, anyway. I basically just hold on to the things I’m going to keep coming back to, and Monica is the only Clowes I’ve kept.

I’ve also been reading a ton of manga lately. I went through all the Katsuhiro Otomo that was translated into English, like Akira, and some other stuff. There’s one left that I’m going to be on the hunt for when I go to Australia. There’s some Lovecraft adaptation manga by Gou Tanabe—I’m not, like, a Lovecraft guy, I don’t know why I keep coming back to him—that’s real good. Hate by Peter Bagge. He’s doing Hate again. I’m reading that. I read all of Peter Bagge’s stuff when I was a kid, because of Nirvana and all that. My friends knew about it and we thought it was hilarious. And then Barry Windsor-Smith. I mean, he’s my top comic book guy. I just love that stuff.

Jimmy Cajoleas was born in Jackson, Mississippi. He lives in New York.

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