Turbonegro

Thrasher Magazine, August, 2003

He sold it because people were calling from all over the world to see if it was really Pal Pot Pamparius' Pizza Parlor. It was a real hassle. They didn't order anything, they just sang Turbonegro songs on the phone. The parlor still exists--a Pakistani man owns it and he's very grateful for the business. The black metal band Mayhem called Turbonegro the most evil band in the world. Coming from them, that's pretty heavy. Did you take that as a compliment?

Well, we were kind of scared of black metal, because in the early '90s they were burning churches and killing each other and stuff like that. And we thought, "How can we outdo that? How can we scare those guys? And dressing up as homos was the most scary thing we could think of, And it really scared those guys, they were really intimidated. We really challenged their worlds. We interact a lot with the black metal boys. Some of us have grown up with really big black metal stars. They think the most evil thing is our niceness, that we're really nice guys.

It seems like Turbonegro really make an effort to confuse people, or never quite fully explain the sexuality of the band.

Yeah. I don't think it would be fair of us to really answer or explain all our messages. We are appealing to people's intelligence and if they get it wrong, we are just proving points about people's stupidity, prejudice and homophobia. For us to explain it all would be killing the jokes we have. We don't look at ourselves as a provocative band. We're just trying to tell our stories and our points of view and some people are intimidated by it and are provoked by it. We realize that, but that proves more about them than us.

So you don't intentionally try to make people aware of their own hypocrisies and hatreds?

We just want people who are into rock to be aware that some really key aesthetics of rock come from the homosexual scene. Wearing make-up, long halr, it's typical gay aesthetics. Acting really homophobic and really aggroheterosexual is very lame. If you're into rock and looking like a faggot, you might as well boast and admit that you look like a faggot. It's just faggot aesthetics, and if they're scared by it, they shouldn't dress up like homos then.

You have lots of celebrity fans, are you ever surprised to find out certain people are Turbonegro fans?

When Don Johnson of Miami Wce told me we are a huge band, then I realized we were into something good... That was a joke. I don't know, I see that our fans are so very diverse. We have Mongoloids, we have college professors, we have contemporary music composers, we have filmmakers. lots of people from all branches of Western society are friends of ours and nothing surprises me any more about that.

A lot of people are very surprised when they read Turbonegro interviews to find out how intelligent and articulate you all are.

We all went to university. But we all dropped out as well because of the band and because we got cool jobs and stuff like that. But we have the highest average IQ of any rock and roll band. Our average is like 150. We got invited to become members of the MENSA Society, that club for people with high IQ's. We said no. We are too intelligent for them. I mean yeah, sure they read a lot and are good at math, but at the same time they seemed to be really stupid and easily fooled. We played mind games with them, stuff like that.