VOX: So, I hear Matt Good is a real asshole.
Matt Good: [Laughs] I love proliferating my own legend. The reason I had those shirts made was, well, the press here [in Canada] love to vilify me, and I love fucking with them. I mean, the idea of controversy here is someone falling asleep at a fucking awards dinner, so anything beyond that is just not seen as good by the press. They've done a good job of creating the opinions of me, too. People meet me, and after spending a little time with me, they're like, "Hey, you're not such a bad guy." I think it's funny, so I had the shirts made, and they sell like hotcakes at the shows. I'll keep making them and changing the colors.
VOX: You can change the font…
MG: Yeah, I may do some different fonts, but I want to do a 70's style shirt - yellow with bad green lettering.

VOX: Let's talk about Black Market Surgery. What does it say about me that I really liked reading it?
MG: The bit about journalists?
VOX: All of it.
MG: You know, that all really came about by accident. It's funny, because the first thing management tells a new band is "Get a website." At the time I didn't know a fucking thing about the web. Most of the sites I had seen were pretty boring, but management is like, "Write something for the web." So I did, starting in the second month of 1997, and pretty soon I was getting like 650 e-mails a month. I was writing anything, whatever, at first, and it progressed to short fiction and so on. Right around the beginning if each month there would be this huge surge in hits from people coming in for the latest edition. I've stopped, now that I've finalized a book deal - you can buy it in the fall.

It was really interesting how different people reacted to it. I had these right-wing assholes writing in and making death threats and shit like that. There were bomb threats when we would play the Commodore here in town [Vancouver], and Stockwell Day was pissed off. I mean, here's a guy who thinks Catcher In The Rye shouldn't be in libraries. Then I wrote a bit on the Budwiser girls, and I got a bunch of e-mails telling me I was a sexist pig…it went on from there.

What was really tough, though, was while there was this great silent majority who seemed to really appreciate the stuff I was writing and took it for what it was, these other people would get pissed off and I'm like, "Fuck you." Here it is the 25^th of the month and I'm up for like 3 fucking nights straight reediting so that I can get the shit together on time. That's why some of it just seems to end for no reason, because I was reediting up the last minute and finally it's like, fuck it, its deadline.

But, anyway, now that's done and the book form will be out in the fall.
VOX: Coming soon to a "Chapters" near you…
MG: I don't know where it'll be, and I have no idea if you'll be able to get it in the States, but it'll be somewhere.

VOX: Is it the same need to share your ideas that gets you to publish your diatribes as well as write lyrics?
MG: It comes from the need inside of me to make fun of people. And my need to make fun of myself.

I like writing things that are both intelligent and subversive. There's so much for me to write about - society has become so absolutely ridiculous. Any country or society that can be compared to Rome in terms of the economic and media control of things is fucking scary. I mean, look at how many Hispanic and Black kids got murdered in the Bronx last year, and see if any of that stuff got mentioned in the news, but if a kid goes in and shoots at people in his school it becomes fucking front-page news for weeks. I'm not saying that it's not important, but the other kids are just as important. But, you know the media has its way of putting it out there and controlling things. It fucking frightens me.

God help all of you. You get a new president, and his first fucking law he signs into existence is one stripping aid to countries that have legalized abortions. But, I bet if you look at that list of nations, America is still selling arms to many, if not most, of them. So what's worse?

VOX: Will you start doing like Moby and fill your liner notes with personal ideas?
MG: No. He's a tweaker. He uses big words together to make himself sound intelligent. I can't do that.

VOX: You write on the topic of death quite a bit. Why the fascination?
MG: It's one of those eventualities. It's inevitable.
VOX: I like the concept of being dead longer that you're alive.
MG: Well, it's the truth. You can spend your life pondering meaningless shit or get it through your head that death is eventual and feel much better about things. All I know is I hope heaven isn't some place you spend eternity with a bunch of over-exposed Presbyterians. That would be my idea of hell. I bet there'll be no fucking orgies there. It'll all be with the lights off. I want none of that.

VOX: Obviously, you write plenty. What's the last thing you read or are currently reading?
MG: I kinda have two things going; a collection of poems and a commentary on Dante's Inferno. In terms of proper novels, I recently finished Manufacturing Consent by Chomsky and others, and I read the Orwell book, Animal Farm, while I was up in Whistler on vacation. The trick for me now is finding books I haven't read that will interest me.

VOX: Are you addicted to anything?
MG: Hmmm…Twins.

VOX: Why has it taken so damn long for you to release a record in the US?
MG: Cuz I enjoy being able to walk around Disneyland without being recognized. I already have that problem in one country. It's cool to be famous here, but there are so many great vacation spots in the States that I can go and enjoy and not worry about getting spotted.

Really, I guess a lot of it has to with the fact that we live in a time when the record companies are the fucking celebrities. They control the trends and put out what they want to. I'm about 30 now, so I guess it's not as big of a deal to me. Maybe if I was 22 I would be going nuts trying to break in the US, but not now. If it happens, great.

VOX: What are the differences between American fans and Canadian fans?
MG: They live further south.

VOX: You don't see any difference between the crowds?
MG: There is a certain amount of devotedness that occurs with American fans when they really fucking get into a band that maybe doesn't happen here. We have this guy Andrew from Phoenix that we call the Superfan. This guy is really committed to us. He's seen us in New York, all over Canada and in Europe, too. He works for an airline, so I guess it might be easier for him, but we'll be playing a show somewhere and there's Andrew at sound check hanging out. He's the Superfan. The guy has seen us on 3 fucking continents! I don't know if Canadian fans would go that far. Americans are more fanatic.

VOX: Lets talk about the music now. Was there something you wanted to get across on Beautiful Midnight? Was there a central theme?
MG: The record is really all about my past. It's me exorcising my demons. There are the three songs off of Underdogs, so it's a bit watered down, and in retrospect I shouldn't have done it and I probably wouldn't do it again, but it's really just dealing with the past and getting some stuff out.

Every song I write and each record is about something, I think. I'm old enough now that I didn't want to come off sounding rash like some 23-year-old. Age makes a big difference in how you write.

VOX: "Hello Time Bomb" is really a great song - tell me about it.
MG: Like that will ever get played in fucking LA. You really live in a Catch-22 area there in LA - KROQ is way too fucking important, and you need KROQ to play you to get hot and they only play what's hot to them. How it works is that if KROQ fucking plays you and your not hot after three weeks then they drop you and you'll never get played anywhere else. Three weeks is all you get. That is one station with more power than the bands. It's fucking dangerous.

People think that payola doesn't exist in America any more but it does. Why do you think bands play radio shows for free and do in-stores for nothing? Why would Kid Rock play a fucking free radio show for 60,000 people when he could be getting paid a $100,000 to play his own concert? It's because he knows that the fucking radio station will spin him bigger for doing it. So, while there may not be payola in the old sense, they've just changed how it's done and found a way around it.

That's why I think the CanComm thing is fine. The stations are required to play 20% Canadian content. The independent bands get their due and the stations are forced to play them. It works. It's too bad that the states, I mean the individual states, don't offer something like that. With all the really good bands in California that never get played, it would force radio to give them a chance…
VOX: Yeah, California would do fine, but a state like Iowa might get fucked…
MG: [Laughs] Yeah, Iowa stations might be forced to play some bad shit, but that would then get kids motivated to make some better music because they know it would get played.

VOX: What's the last day job you had?
MG: What the fuck was the last day job I had? I think it was undercover store security. Yeah, I was working in shipping in receiving from 5 am 'til noon, then undercover security in the same store from noon 'til 9.
VOX: That's a long day.
MG: Six days a week at that. That's what you have to do when you're a kid and you think it's cool to move out with your girlfriend. They you come home six months later and she's leaving with all the good shit and you're stuck with a fucking thousand dollar Ikea bill. That's the kind of shit you do when you're young.

VOX: What do you think you would be doing if you weren't in a band?
MG: Well, this wasn't what I initially wanted to do anyway. I would be teaching history at the university level, or probably high school. Maybe I would go and get my MBA…

VOX: Are you into the Internet - do you see it as an important medium for the band?
MG: I used to be. I fucking got rid of it. It lacks accountability. I hate things that lack accountability. Look, I think it's, the Internet is, the fucking greatest encyclopedia and research tool, but I could go out there and start an entire fucking religion and make millions. I could scam all sorts of people or plant a news story and probably get it picked up by fucking CNN and have be on the headline for twelve hours or so before someone figured it out. That's what happens with free access. No society with free access to all the knowledge and communication hasn't found a way to not fuck it up. Society can't govern itself. There is a reason why the Europeans smoke too much, drink all the time and fucking siesta every day - they've been to the top of the pyramid and have had enough. Now they sit back and watch America fuck it up. They've already done it. And once we're done and have had enough, maybe it'll be China's time or some other nation.