Power Trip’s Riley Gale on Trump: “He’s Just a Big Steaming Turd on Top of the Cake.”
Power Trip are sure on the up-and-up right now, eh? It seems like everywhere I turn someone’s raving about the band and their new album Nightmare Logic. A show of theirs I attended earlier this month in NYC was PACKED with an absolutely bananas mosh pit.
At that very same show, Metal Insider spoke with Power Trip frontman Riley Gale about their new album, their career trajectory and, of course, politics. Here’s a particularly poignant quote in which Gale talks about the reaction to Trump’s shenanigans from within the metal and hardcore communities, and then goes on a bit of a tangent about the role of religion in today’s society:
A lot of people said when Trump won at least there’s going to be a lot of really good hardcore and punk and protest-y rap like Public Enemy. Do you think there might be some great protest music made from his presidency?
I think that’s fucking stupid. If a band is really that inspired, good for them, but to me that just shows they haven’t been paying attention. Like I said, I wrote these lyrics before Trump was a viable candidate. There’s plenty to be pissed off about. He’s just a big steaming turd on top of the cake. I think there should always be protest music. There are always things that need to be fixed. There’s no perfect form of government that’s going to work everywhere. We need to constantly be reassessing things and we can’t get stuck because we think some 250-year-old document is perfect law. It’s a frustrating thing that people lack perspective and lack the understanding to perceive certain people’s lives and how they view the world. I did a lot of research trying to understand where people from the alt-right come from. I see their logic but I still see the fallacy in it. I can see how that would brainwash somebody and how they could say that and believe that their sense of truth is reality, but I disagree so this band kind of exists to break down those misconceived notions that forcing a religion on anybody is okay.
I think religion, and communion is completely acceptable. I think spirituality and religion is a very personal journey but to me it’s never something that should be forced on somebody else. I think that’s where a lot of it goes wrong. A lot of it is driven by liars and crooks and cheats and con men. Look at the evangelicals. They’re so fucking full of shit. They have a fucking compound with a football field and an arcade in their mega-church and a fleet of vehicles and all this shit. Jesus said, “The meek shall inherit the earth.” You think that’s meek? I grew up going to Catholic school from kindergarten through 12th grade. From a young age the whole “I am the body of Christ thing” never stuck well with me, but Jesus has a moral foundation. Good guy, good set of beliefs, but people don’t get it. It’s completely ass-backwards. He would never want anyone to die in his name, ever. We had the crusades where we were slaughtering people for that. In a way, that’s what we’re doing now with the Muslims. People are scared, Christians are scared that Muslims are becoming a dominant religion in the world and I think we have to look at the dangers of Islamic conservatism, and we need to start propping up more moderate leaders and showing people that Islam is just like any other religion; it can be violent, it can be peaceful. It’s all in the practitioner. That got pretty off base but it deals with some of the things I talk about on the album and they’re masked in allegory and metaphor but for the people who want to look deeper, it’s there. If anybody ever wants to know what I was thinking, I love telling people what the song’s really about. People think it’s one thing but it might be completely different.
Check out the full interview at Metal Insider. It’s full of good stuff, and it’s a quick read.
