The following is an excerpted feature from the new CREEM Magazine coming Sept. 15. Subscribe now to reserve your copy.
In the 1979 thriller The Warriors, based on Sol Yurick’s 1965 novel of the same name, a New York City street gang must travel nearly 30 miles from the north end of the Bronx to their home turf in south Brooklyn, Coney Island, after being framed for murdering a rival gang’s leader. (No spoilers.) In the decades since, the film has become a cult classic, fetishized by upwardly mobile, middle-class suburbanites desperate to identify with systemic inequality, the same systems that benefited their mommies and daddies, a mentality that exists with each generation, like a Sex Pistols “God Save the Queen” shirt purchased at Walmart and passed down, brother to brother. Naturally, re-creating and referencing the film for a photo shoot with Special Interest, the NOLA no-wave-industrial-art-punk-disco band that is equal parts nihilistic and future-seeking, doesn’t really resonate with them. But they’re into amusement park treats, there’s a lot of bullshit to eat at Coney Island, and they’re down for the adventure.
“We made our tummies hurt because we kept eating candy for the shots,” Special Interest singer Alli Logout says of this photo shoot. “Conspicuous consumption,” synth savant Ruth Mascelli jokes, accidentally (or much more likely absolutely purposefully) naming sociologist and anti-capitalist hunk Thorstein Veblen’s economic theory that investigates the impulse behind purchasing luxury goods to display power and wealth. In two words, they’ve confirmed fears that I am too dumb to be talking to this band, and God help the rest of the idiots tasked with doing the same. (More on that later.)
