Deerhunter’s Bradford Cox Has a Perfectly Good Reason Why He Played ‘My Sharona’ for an Hour in Minneapolis

And now, some horror stories from the indie-rock circuit. Last Friday, Atlas Sound — the noise-pop solo project from Deerhunter’s Bradford Cox — played Minneapolis, and things did not go according to plan. After an audience member cheekily requested The Knack’s “My Sharona,” Cox began to play The Knack’s “My Sharona” — only, he did a jagged nightmare version of the song, and he played it for an hour. As MN Daily‘s report explains, “Above all the noise and feedback, he contemplated the death of folk music, the passing of time, and the ends of our lives in a frantic, spoken-word beat-poetry style that he himself compared to Patti Smith.”

But Bradford Cox isn’t about to let other people explain his art. Yesterday, he got on the phone with Pitchfork and calmly, rationally laid out his reasoning for the epic “My Sharona.” No, just kidding, he ranted for a while. It’s a super-entertaining read! Some choice cuts:

• “[T]he only person I asked to strip was the person who commandeered my stage [by requesting ‘My Sharona’] and made the show about his self-interest. I tried to emasculate somebody whose ego was super potent. He asked me to strip when he called out the name of the song. It was a joke; he’s basically throwing a dollar bill at the foot of the stripper. And I’m just saying hey, let’s reverse the roles. Come onstage. Do something entertaining. Entertain me.”

• “Section three: I am a terrorist. As a homosexual, my job is simply to sodomize mediocrity. I am terrified and horrified and shocked that anyone would mention Phish in any article related to me.”

• “I’m a good-time kind of guy. I’m like Sly from the Family Stone. I’m all about smiling and good times and white teeth. It was a very natural show and the people that didn’t like it can suck my dick. They got the full fucking set of emotional fucking sincere whiny white people music. And then they got fucking ‘My Sharona’ as interpreted by Faust. It was like a death trance.”

• “It’s not like fucking Lana Del Rey carved an upside down cross on her cheek and defecated all over herself onstage at fucking Bonnaroo.”

The Atlas Sound tour, unfortunately, wraps up in Boston tonight. You should maybe think about getting yourself a bus ticket there?

Filed Under: Music

Amos Barshad has written for New York Magazine, Spin, GQ, XXL, and the Arkansas Times. He is a staff writer for Grantland.

Archive @ AmosBarshad