Larry Tee coined electroclash as a genre of music. One of the first of his electroclash discoveries was the beloved mullet-having, potty-mouthed, dirty-diva, Peaches. He also wrote Supermodel by RuPaul and has his own version available for your listening pleasure on Larry Tee's Electroclash Mix CD. His first solo album will be released this spring.
In October, Larry Tee deejayed at the Doug Fir in Portland, Oregon. Instead of spinning electroclash, he introduced hot tracks from new bands that he really digs. Larry started the night with Inaya Day's remix of Nasty Girl, originally by Vanity 6.
Most deejays look bored to death, whereas Larry Tee rocks the house with his presence as well as with his sounds. The place was poppin', yo. Larry had a lot of kids moving. It was funny, throughout the night a lesbian break-dancer, a dreaded gothic-hippie and a short tattooed gay guy, busted a move on the stage, in front of the turntables. They were up there all night long. All kinds of kids were on the dance floorgoths, gays, hip hoppers, hippieswhich is exactly what Larry Tee says he is going for.
Buy Larry Tee's Electroclash Mix CD: www.electroclash.com
Check out his magazine: www.uselessmagazine.com
Jamie: Before I asked you to do an interview for SG, had you already heard of it?
Larry Tee: Absolutely. I think I read about it somewhere. I have a magazine of my own called Useless and I've read about new things and websites and stuff like that, that I think are cool, and it showed up on my radar when I was coming up with stuff.
J: What is your general take on Suicide Girls?
LT: All I got from it was that it's an alternative website for people that don't feel part of the mainstream public, that are cool and fun. To me, it seems like a great website for people to communicate that don't always relate to mainstream channels. I think it's awesome.
J: You're doing your Useless magazine with your boyfriend, right?
LT: Yes. We try to get as much nudity in there as we can.
J: That's excellent.
LT: Nudity should be celebrated.
J: Oh, certainly.
LT: Especially if you have a fresh look, you need to get it on camera before it starts to sag.
J: Absolutely. You're only young for so long.
LT: Yeah. So, you need to exploit that window of opportunity while you can. Otherwise, you look backI always say that it's better to regret something you did than it is to regret something you didn't do. A nude is a fabulous thing to have done and possibly regret. Not that Suicide Girls regret a thing and that's why I like them; they're really bold.
J: We're bold, but we don't have to shove shit up our holes.
LT: Yeah. You do it for yourselves, not exactly just for the audience. There is a bit of an exhibitionistic streak.
J: There's that and there are girls that needed rent, or like the fact that they're able to write about their obsessions and themselves.
LT: I used to do a hot body contest in Atlanta and for just a chance to win fifty bucks people would get totally butt naked every week, which I thought was really inspiring because people wanna get off, get up and show it off.
J: What do you consider to be your roots?
LT: My roots? I was raised in Georgia, so I have white trash, funk roots. It's a really strong R&B culture down there. The hip-hop deejays were rocking; it was the start of hip-hop. Then some of the color of the white trash, Lynyrd Skynyrd kind of bad, trashy aesthetic seeped into my general aesthetic, too. Things like the B-52's from Athens, they were very influential to me. Like a do it yourself kind of culture. You could make something up from scratch, pieces of trash, and rearrange it in a new way that would be fresh. I was in a band that produced the B-52's first single, before they were signed to Warner Brothers. So that was such a big influence because they were very art rock.
J: Their first album was released in 1979, right?
LT: Yeah.
J: That album was so good. It totally had its own sound.
LT: Nobody's been able to rip their sound off, really.
J: No, not that I have heard. It's totally original stuff.
LT: You look a little like a young Cindy Wilson.
J: Really? Nobody has ever said that. Everyone always says I look like Drew Barrymore.
LT: I could see that but you have Cindy Wilson eyes.
J: Really? Thanks.
LT: Oh, I loved Cindy Wilson when she was youngunbelievably interesting to look at. She was the star when I was younger.
J: Do you have any particular obsessions?
LT: Goshsome obsessions? Well, yes. I'm obsessed with music, art and culture and trying to make a difference. When I did the Electroclash Festival it was really about trying to change the way people heard music because everything had gotten into the dance clubs and it was just this boring, generic crap.
J: Douche, douche, douche.
LT: Yeah: douche, douche, douche. Techno had no real opinion and house was a:[Larry's vocal pitch ascending] higher, higher, higher, ah.
J: I knowbad R&B female vocals.
LT: Yeah. And so, to me, that is one of the things I like to do. I try to subvert things and change things up a bit. I push culture in a new direction with something more creative. It's a new combination, 'cause nothing is really entirely new. Even the electro stuff was reminiscent of eighties stuff. There was more distortion and it filtered through a new language.
J: That's why I like electroclash so much, because it's influenced by all forms of old school whether it's industrial, rap, goth, punk or new wave. You know what I mean?
LT: Yeah, they take everything. The thing that is also great about it is the individualness of it. None of the groups really sound alike. They're distinctly different. It's not uniform or a uniform sound. That's what I liked about it. The fact that it was so political, very viscous. I mean, Peaches, some people say that she's just an electro slut but I see it as a very strong female voice talking about sexuality in a way that hasn't been taught before. The Chicks on Speed, where it's about politics and selling out. Miss Kittin, Casey Spooner, Fischer Spooner, they referenced Pop culture and things that were kind of familiar and they subverted them.
J: They made it palatable.
LT: Or just added something new to it. There wasn't any rehash. Even though I'm not an electroclash deejay now. I play whatever I find new and exciting. I do think that it opened the doors for another generation, like the generational change, kind of where the hipsters and rockers connect. You hear a bit of it in Interpol and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, in rock. Then you hear it in the pop songs like Toxic and Hey Ya. You start hearing those kinds of aesthetics filtered in a new way.
J: Do you think that electroclash is a reaction to monoculture?
LT: Monoculture, meaning?
J: Meaning rehashed, boring, ordinary. You know, monoculture. The same thing over and over again.
LT: Totally. That's what inspired me about it. It was a real slap in the face because I thought that dance music needed to be slapped around a bit, somebody had to give it a bloody nose because it had gotten so boring and unimaginative. And you know it was just like when disco got bad, punk showed up to kind of give it a kick in the ass. And I think that electroclash came along at a time when dance music needed a kick in the ass, it needed some star power. Who on earth wanted to do a dance song that was glamorous and rock 'n roll? Nobody wanted to go there because it wasn't a format that encouraged individuality. It was generic, especially the vocals. It was the same song over and over again. It was the same song for six years.
J: Absolutely for six years!
LT: Right. It was hot, in the early nineties.
J: It certainly was hot then.
LT: Sexy Women, Wiggle It, Pump Up The Jam, Real Love, Supermodel.
J: Oh yeah, I loved all of that stuff. I grew up in South FloridaI was born in '81and by the time I was eight, I was really into Gucci Crew, Debbie Deb, Technotronic and stuff like that.
LT: To me, I love how they can take inspiration from that and turn it totally on its head. Something as corny as, let's say high energy or freestyle, twenty years later they can take a riff from it, throw some distortion on it and it sounds booming hot on the dance floor.
J: Yup, yup. Another thing about electroclash is that it sounds so primal, it's futuristic.
LT: It's totally futuristic. I think it's the first really modern music forms of the naughties, which is what I call this decade because naught means nothing. It's the nothings because it's 01, 02, it's nothings. I think it's one of the first forms of modern music, though there is some expression in emo and screamo and new metal that I'm sure needs to be listened to, but I'm not listening to that.
J: Me neither.
LT: With that there wasn't anything, to me. So, to me, electroclash was the first expression. Now there's a lot of good new dance, rock and there's funky rap stuff over up-tempo beats. Like mash ups and people fucking with treating music like a bitch again, because if you treat it too respectfully you need to put it in a museum.
J: What's your favorite gear to work with?
LT: Well, I really like to work off of Logic and I love Moog because you can really make some distorted sounds. To me, it's all about distortion disco, disco that you can really dance to but it goes there and it has some sharp edges and it gets a little out of hand. To me, that sounds fresh right now.
J: What goes on at your Disgraceland parties, hosted every Thursday night at the Crowbar in New York City?
LT: We try to mix people up. We bring in deejays like Tegan, Trevor Jackson, Keith Swartz and Chicken Lips on the hip side. And then we bring in Grand Master Flash and Dmitri Paris on other times. We have live acts every night. We're really trying to mix everybody back up again because I think the tendency with every city I've been to is that everyone has gotten into their own corner and they don't party on the same dance floor. The straight club has a certain crowd, the gay crowd, the freaks go somewhere else and rockers go somewhere else and to me, I think the fun is when you put everybody together because then everyone can look at each other and go: Oh, she's hot. Dude, what is he thinking? You know? So, that is what Disgraceland is about. It is really hard in New York, as it is anywhere, to really get away with that.
I just did my Outsider Electronic Music Festival with Whitney, Glimmer Twins, Dead Combo, RadioSlave, all new bands that I think are cool. The point of doing a festival is trying new sounds. At the end we had Junior Vasquez doing a kind of new wave house set. So, at the end of the night, everybody got into a big, warm disco dance party. It was very gay at the end, straight at the beginning. So, it was all European hipsters in the back and then, in the middle of the night, it was a total car wreck of everybody. Everyone got to hear a little something new that they weren't coming to hear. I also have a new album coming out.
J: In the spring, right?
LT: In the spring.
J: It's your first solo album, right?
LT: It is my first solo album. The whole idea with that, also, is mixing things up again, bringing awareness to new artists, the ones I think are hotthey should be stars, let's do something. There are a couple of names like Andy Bell from Erasure; Bjork's producer is doing a couple of tracks; Princess Superstar; Tigra from L'Trimm, The Cars That Go Boom.
J: I love L'Trimm!
LT: Yeah, Tigra is doing a song called Supersize.
J: Rad.
LT: It's basically a whole collection of what's going on now, technology and things going on. There is even a five-year-old girl on there. Some of it's deep. There's a song called Dude, Where's My Country? It sounds like a joke but it's a very serious song. Then there is a song called Matthew, about Matthew Shepard, the gay boy in the Midwest that was killed. Andy Bell from Erasure sang that. It's huge! All the biggest remixers in the world are doing mixes right now. At least when it comes out, it can make a difference. That is what my passion is, making a difference, making a mark , like the song I wrote in the nineties about supermodels for RuPaul, which put a tranny on the top 40.
J: That was an awesome song, by the way.
LT: A tranny on the top 40 in '92? That's rad.
J: When I first heard of RuPaul, I was young but I knew that it was shocking.
LT: Wasn't that glamorous?
J: I loved it!
LT: It snuck in through the use of supermodels. So, that's my passion, subverting culture and giving them something they don't expect by giving them something they can't resist, so that they don't even have a choice.
J: It's like bringing the subculture to the mainstream and people loving it.
LT: And doing it cleverly so they can't say no. Like SG, they make it sexy, they get a little porn and they get a point of view. Okay, it's not porn.
J: Well, it's pin-up.
LT: You're not going to commit suicide are you?
J: Oh, no. Everyone always says that. It's more like fashion suicide. Anything else? You have to go on soon.
LT: I think that covers it.
SG Jaime
In October, Larry Tee deejayed at the Doug Fir in Portland, Oregon. Instead of spinning electroclash, he introduced hot tracks from new bands that he really digs. Larry started the night with Inaya Day's remix of Nasty Girl, originally by Vanity 6.
Most deejays look bored to death, whereas Larry Tee rocks the house with his presence as well as with his sounds. The place was poppin', yo. Larry had a lot of kids moving. It was funny, throughout the night a lesbian break-dancer, a dreaded gothic-hippie and a short tattooed gay guy, busted a move on the stage, in front of the turntables. They were up there all night long. All kinds of kids were on the dance floorgoths, gays, hip hoppers, hippieswhich is exactly what Larry Tee says he is going for.
Buy Larry Tee's Electroclash Mix CD: www.electroclash.com
Check out his magazine: www.uselessmagazine.com
Jamie: Before I asked you to do an interview for SG, had you already heard of it?
Larry Tee: Absolutely. I think I read about it somewhere. I have a magazine of my own called Useless and I've read about new things and websites and stuff like that, that I think are cool, and it showed up on my radar when I was coming up with stuff.
J: What is your general take on Suicide Girls?
LT: All I got from it was that it's an alternative website for people that don't feel part of the mainstream public, that are cool and fun. To me, it seems like a great website for people to communicate that don't always relate to mainstream channels. I think it's awesome.
J: You're doing your Useless magazine with your boyfriend, right?
LT: Yes. We try to get as much nudity in there as we can.
J: That's excellent.
LT: Nudity should be celebrated.
J: Oh, certainly.
LT: Especially if you have a fresh look, you need to get it on camera before it starts to sag.
J: Absolutely. You're only young for so long.
LT: Yeah. So, you need to exploit that window of opportunity while you can. Otherwise, you look backI always say that it's better to regret something you did than it is to regret something you didn't do. A nude is a fabulous thing to have done and possibly regret. Not that Suicide Girls regret a thing and that's why I like them; they're really bold.
J: We're bold, but we don't have to shove shit up our holes.
LT: Yeah. You do it for yourselves, not exactly just for the audience. There is a bit of an exhibitionistic streak.
J: There's that and there are girls that needed rent, or like the fact that they're able to write about their obsessions and themselves.
LT: I used to do a hot body contest in Atlanta and for just a chance to win fifty bucks people would get totally butt naked every week, which I thought was really inspiring because people wanna get off, get up and show it off.
J: What do you consider to be your roots?
LT: My roots? I was raised in Georgia, so I have white trash, funk roots. It's a really strong R&B culture down there. The hip-hop deejays were rocking; it was the start of hip-hop. Then some of the color of the white trash, Lynyrd Skynyrd kind of bad, trashy aesthetic seeped into my general aesthetic, too. Things like the B-52's from Athens, they were very influential to me. Like a do it yourself kind of culture. You could make something up from scratch, pieces of trash, and rearrange it in a new way that would be fresh. I was in a band that produced the B-52's first single, before they were signed to Warner Brothers. So that was such a big influence because they were very art rock.
J: Their first album was released in 1979, right?
LT: Yeah.
J: That album was so good. It totally had its own sound.
LT: Nobody's been able to rip their sound off, really.
J: No, not that I have heard. It's totally original stuff.
LT: You look a little like a young Cindy Wilson.
J: Really? Nobody has ever said that. Everyone always says I look like Drew Barrymore.
LT: I could see that but you have Cindy Wilson eyes.
J: Really? Thanks.
LT: Oh, I loved Cindy Wilson when she was youngunbelievably interesting to look at. She was the star when I was younger.
J: Do you have any particular obsessions?
LT: Goshsome obsessions? Well, yes. I'm obsessed with music, art and culture and trying to make a difference. When I did the Electroclash Festival it was really about trying to change the way people heard music because everything had gotten into the dance clubs and it was just this boring, generic crap.
J: Douche, douche, douche.
LT: Yeah: douche, douche, douche. Techno had no real opinion and house was a:[Larry's vocal pitch ascending] higher, higher, higher, ah.
J: I knowbad R&B female vocals.
LT: Yeah. And so, to me, that is one of the things I like to do. I try to subvert things and change things up a bit. I push culture in a new direction with something more creative. It's a new combination, 'cause nothing is really entirely new. Even the electro stuff was reminiscent of eighties stuff. There was more distortion and it filtered through a new language.
J: That's why I like electroclash so much, because it's influenced by all forms of old school whether it's industrial, rap, goth, punk or new wave. You know what I mean?
LT: Yeah, they take everything. The thing that is also great about it is the individualness of it. None of the groups really sound alike. They're distinctly different. It's not uniform or a uniform sound. That's what I liked about it. The fact that it was so political, very viscous. I mean, Peaches, some people say that she's just an electro slut but I see it as a very strong female voice talking about sexuality in a way that hasn't been taught before. The Chicks on Speed, where it's about politics and selling out. Miss Kittin, Casey Spooner, Fischer Spooner, they referenced Pop culture and things that were kind of familiar and they subverted them.
J: They made it palatable.
LT: Or just added something new to it. There wasn't any rehash. Even though I'm not an electroclash deejay now. I play whatever I find new and exciting. I do think that it opened the doors for another generation, like the generational change, kind of where the hipsters and rockers connect. You hear a bit of it in Interpol and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, in rock. Then you hear it in the pop songs like Toxic and Hey Ya. You start hearing those kinds of aesthetics filtered in a new way.
J: Do you think that electroclash is a reaction to monoculture?
LT: Monoculture, meaning?
J: Meaning rehashed, boring, ordinary. You know, monoculture. The same thing over and over again.
LT: Totally. That's what inspired me about it. It was a real slap in the face because I thought that dance music needed to be slapped around a bit, somebody had to give it a bloody nose because it had gotten so boring and unimaginative. And you know it was just like when disco got bad, punk showed up to kind of give it a kick in the ass. And I think that electroclash came along at a time when dance music needed a kick in the ass, it needed some star power. Who on earth wanted to do a dance song that was glamorous and rock 'n roll? Nobody wanted to go there because it wasn't a format that encouraged individuality. It was generic, especially the vocals. It was the same song over and over again. It was the same song for six years.
J: Absolutely for six years!
LT: Right. It was hot, in the early nineties.
J: It certainly was hot then.
LT: Sexy Women, Wiggle It, Pump Up The Jam, Real Love, Supermodel.
J: Oh yeah, I loved all of that stuff. I grew up in South FloridaI was born in '81and by the time I was eight, I was really into Gucci Crew, Debbie Deb, Technotronic and stuff like that.
LT: To me, I love how they can take inspiration from that and turn it totally on its head. Something as corny as, let's say high energy or freestyle, twenty years later they can take a riff from it, throw some distortion on it and it sounds booming hot on the dance floor.
J: Yup, yup. Another thing about electroclash is that it sounds so primal, it's futuristic.
LT: It's totally futuristic. I think it's the first really modern music forms of the naughties, which is what I call this decade because naught means nothing. It's the nothings because it's 01, 02, it's nothings. I think it's one of the first forms of modern music, though there is some expression in emo and screamo and new metal that I'm sure needs to be listened to, but I'm not listening to that.
J: Me neither.
LT: With that there wasn't anything, to me. So, to me, electroclash was the first expression. Now there's a lot of good new dance, rock and there's funky rap stuff over up-tempo beats. Like mash ups and people fucking with treating music like a bitch again, because if you treat it too respectfully you need to put it in a museum.
J: What's your favorite gear to work with?
LT: Well, I really like to work off of Logic and I love Moog because you can really make some distorted sounds. To me, it's all about distortion disco, disco that you can really dance to but it goes there and it has some sharp edges and it gets a little out of hand. To me, that sounds fresh right now.
J: What goes on at your Disgraceland parties, hosted every Thursday night at the Crowbar in New York City?
LT: We try to mix people up. We bring in deejays like Tegan, Trevor Jackson, Keith Swartz and Chicken Lips on the hip side. And then we bring in Grand Master Flash and Dmitri Paris on other times. We have live acts every night. We're really trying to mix everybody back up again because I think the tendency with every city I've been to is that everyone has gotten into their own corner and they don't party on the same dance floor. The straight club has a certain crowd, the gay crowd, the freaks go somewhere else and rockers go somewhere else and to me, I think the fun is when you put everybody together because then everyone can look at each other and go: Oh, she's hot. Dude, what is he thinking? You know? So, that is what Disgraceland is about. It is really hard in New York, as it is anywhere, to really get away with that.
I just did my Outsider Electronic Music Festival with Whitney, Glimmer Twins, Dead Combo, RadioSlave, all new bands that I think are cool. The point of doing a festival is trying new sounds. At the end we had Junior Vasquez doing a kind of new wave house set. So, at the end of the night, everybody got into a big, warm disco dance party. It was very gay at the end, straight at the beginning. So, it was all European hipsters in the back and then, in the middle of the night, it was a total car wreck of everybody. Everyone got to hear a little something new that they weren't coming to hear. I also have a new album coming out.
J: In the spring, right?
LT: In the spring.
J: It's your first solo album, right?
LT: It is my first solo album. The whole idea with that, also, is mixing things up again, bringing awareness to new artists, the ones I think are hotthey should be stars, let's do something. There are a couple of names like Andy Bell from Erasure; Bjork's producer is doing a couple of tracks; Princess Superstar; Tigra from L'Trimm, The Cars That Go Boom.
J: I love L'Trimm!
LT: Yeah, Tigra is doing a song called Supersize.
J: Rad.
LT: It's basically a whole collection of what's going on now, technology and things going on. There is even a five-year-old girl on there. Some of it's deep. There's a song called Dude, Where's My Country? It sounds like a joke but it's a very serious song. Then there is a song called Matthew, about Matthew Shepard, the gay boy in the Midwest that was killed. Andy Bell from Erasure sang that. It's huge! All the biggest remixers in the world are doing mixes right now. At least when it comes out, it can make a difference. That is what my passion is, making a difference, making a mark , like the song I wrote in the nineties about supermodels for RuPaul, which put a tranny on the top 40.
J: That was an awesome song, by the way.
LT: A tranny on the top 40 in '92? That's rad.
J: When I first heard of RuPaul, I was young but I knew that it was shocking.
LT: Wasn't that glamorous?
J: I loved it!
LT: It snuck in through the use of supermodels. So, that's my passion, subverting culture and giving them something they don't expect by giving them something they can't resist, so that they don't even have a choice.
J: It's like bringing the subculture to the mainstream and people loving it.
LT: And doing it cleverly so they can't say no. Like SG, they make it sexy, they get a little porn and they get a point of view. Okay, it's not porn.
J: Well, it's pin-up.
LT: You're not going to commit suicide are you?
J: Oh, no. Everyone always says that. It's more like fashion suicide. Anything else? You have to go on soon.
LT: I think that covers it.
SG Jaime
VIEW 10 of 10 COMMENTS
jena:
I think the best part is he was a fellow clubber with Michael Alig and had a hand in the Party Monster soundtrack. Interesting survival-revival! Go Larry. 
sadfaceclown:
Larry Tee is teh RAD.