Have you seen the cult classic film Kids? What?? No? Well, that might be because some of you were born after it came out! But surely you know the famous actresses Rosario Dawson and Chloë Sevigny. This film launched their careers. It also introduced us to the incredible (and addictive) sounds of Folk Implosion. John Davis and Lou Barlow, the band’s masterminds, created what are now legendary indie rock tracks for the Kids soundtrack. We caught up with John to see if he still believes "nothing’s gonna stop the flow." Let's dive in!

Oh man, we feel like the whole country is about to implode! There's even a movie called Civil War, and the right is armed and furious. If things get crazy, what’s the left’s secret weapon—besides lattes?

Social orders are frequently if not constantly imploding to various degrees. That’s why I love the name Folk Implosion. Folk music is usually assumed to express harmony, togetherness, revered traditions - I love our band name because it suggests the subversion and collapse of such ideas. I think it’s a good thing that narratives about America as an exceptional beacon of freedom based on democracy and the rule of law are collapsing. It makes sense that we are encountering backlash from people that don’t want to acknowledge the racism, genocide, class exploitation and imperialism this country has always been based on. The left’s secret weapon in response to this is the same as it always has been - strategic organizing that is based on the study of current and evolving conditions. It’s going to be tough because the constitution is not in our favor. We have the oldest Constitution in the world, and it is the hardest one to change. Our constitution was written by and for exclusively white, male and wealthy elites in the late 1700’s. Many of them were slaveholders. Yet it is still seen as a source of protection by folks on both sides of the aisle.

You’re a public school teacher in NC. What are your other two gigs?

I work as a building organizer with the Durham Association of Educators on a volunteer basis. I spent 8 years as treasurer of the DAE and still advise the board on such matters - taxes, budgets, state license compliance, all the things no one else wants to do. I value the people I know through doing that work highly and learn a lot from them.

Is writing songs part of your teaching magic, your therapy, or something else entirely?

Being active as a musician helps me avoid burning out as a teacher. Public school teachers have been treated harshly in this country since No Child Left Behind passed in 2001. North Carolina is one of the worst states in the US for public education now, since the tea party took over the state legislature in 2010. As a result, many of my valued colleagues have quit the profession, or moved to private schools or to other states where they can make a little more money. That it isn’t hard to do - you can even get a pay bump by moving to neighboring states here in the south, where labor gets screwed even more than it does up north. I channel a lot of my anger about the way we’re treated into music, and that helps me handle it and stay in the profession over the long haul, emotionally and financially. I think it’s important to stay in the public schools here in NC because it’s a swing state in the South. The North Carolina Association of Educators is doing a lot of good work around the state since we in the progressive caucus took over the state leadership in 2020. I believe in our vision of using the Red for Ed public school organizing movement as a vehicle to bring progressive politics into every county in this state, and do our part to help #organizethesouth.

Why did you peace out from Folk Implosion back in 2000?

I burned out for different reasons that it took me years to untangle. The burnout took the form of an anxiety disorder that forced me to cancel the tour we were going to go on when One Part Lullaby came out, and that’s when we split. Some of the disorder came from my family dynamics and history, but not all of it. I remember reading an interview with Veruca Salt when they first came out in ‘94 that talked about how some of their songs dealt with their angst about their parents divorce. At the time I was dismissive of that way of looking at music - “That’s just something white upper-middle class people say so they can get attention and feel sorry for themselves.” Circa 2000, I had to admit some of my reaction to what they said came from bravado and denial. I had to admit that I had used music from a young age to channel and contain a lot of pent up emotions and parts of myself that I didn’t know how to deal with in reality. My parents split up when I was 2 years old, I had a complicated relationship with my dad and my sexuality, yada yada yada. When more people started paying attention to what we were doing in the public eye, music started to push psychic wounds up to the surface that is used to keep under wraps. So that was one reason. Another part of it had to do with my relationship with Lou, which wasn’t in great shape at the time. When we started off it was kind of a mentor protege relationship - he was older and had been in a couple of other successful bands, I was fresh out of school etc. A lot of mentor protege relationships get strained when the protege grows up and ours was no exception. The cover art of One Part Lullaby was kind of an oblique reference to the distance that was growing between us at that time. There’s a picture of me with my back turned to the camera in a wool overcoat standing in front of a palm tree outside his house in Silver Lake. He’s on the back cover shot through the glass door of his back porch, looking preoccupied and obscured by reflections. When we considered different album layouts, Lou liked the idea of us not being pictured together, and I could see why, (though the label couldn’t.) We were leading very different lives that weren’t that compatible at the time. We’re getting along much better these days, after time healed some of our wounds. Today I’m more interested in a third group of reasons that have to do with the economics and cultural politics of the music industry. The whole prospect of us “crossing over” after we had a Top 40 hit was based on the way people in the mainstream music business reacted to material we did that brought hip hop production techniques into dialogue with post punk art rock traditions. When we started doing that stuff, we wanted to challenge the parochialism of Steve Albini influenced indie rock puritans, who looked at a lot of pop and rap with a “Disco sucks” mindset that seemed really macho and racist to us. But once Natural One became a hit, the prospect of following up on that as a repeated formula on a major label raised questions of racial appropriation and minstrel show derived power dynamics that would have changed what that material meant if we just keep repeating it. When major labels came courting, they talked to us a lot more about black musicians they worked with than they would have if we had been a grunge band, and that was an eye opener for me. It taught me a lot about how racism works in popular culture and how it functions as a tool of corporate power. That sounds abstract, but you feel it physically and neuropsychically when you’re working in those corridors of cultural power. Today, I follow media scholars like Dr. Jared Ball, who describes a lot of what goes on there as psychological warfare. I see how it impacts my students today in my day job as a teacher. Our band also took a hit because of fallout from the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which made it easier for big media mergers to go down. When we signed to Interscope in 1997, they were a relatively self-directed major label that had space for some freaks in the basement who didn’t want to do a lot of touring. They lost that space when their parent company Seagrams merged them with Geffen and A&M in early ‘98 - a merger that would have been illegal a few years earlier. They became a huge clearing house for people like Sting who we now had to compete with for promotional budgets. The people who signed us there apologized and told us they weren’t happy about the merger, but that they wouldn’t have the same capacity to support us as a studio band that only played sporadic shows anymore.

Your new album, Love in the Time of Capital, is coming out soon. What does love mean to you, and can it be bought?

As a Buddhist, I tend to look at love as unconditional attention and awareness that supports others but is vulnerable enough to receive support and learn from them in return. As a Marxist, I am interested in how love is warped by commodity culture. The attention and support becomes conditional and transactional based on an outcome related to accumulation - of pleasure, of wealth, of status, of social media followers, of guitar pedals, whatever. Song titles like Mannequin or lines like “You’re such a shady hedge fund” come out of watching this process unfold in my daily life.

What would you do if you were invisible for a day?

When I studied with Thich Nhat Hanh at Plum Village in 1991, he was teaching about the Diamond Sutra and said that nirvana - (not the band lol) - was X, the unknown. You can’t say anything about it because it escapes representation. If I were invisible for a day, I would like to rest in that experience and come back ready to get back to the grind.

Left photo by Jackson Keys

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