Interview - Marathon

Marathon are a really good band from New York state somewheres, and vocalist Aaron Scott is a really good guy also from New York state somewheres. They're here in Ottawa 'bout once a year on average, wrecking stage and gaining converts to intelligent hardcore everywhere. This is a Feature Interview conducted a couple months ago, and as such it's pretty long, but in the name of openmindedness, you should read the entire thing. Have at it.

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sd: Why Marathon? Are you equating your life to the 'rat race' or what?
Aaron: Well, a lot of bands get a lot of publicity, and they're really young bands or it's their first band or what have you, and it's not like any of us are really old geezers or something, but I'm twenty-five and I've been listening to and playing punk rock for around a decade now, and I've seen a lot of changes. And I definitely feel like there was a time when it was magical to me to get into 'the scene' and stuff, and I feel more distance and perspective now, and some loss at the things that don't exist anymore. I think back in the mid-'90s punk was in a very exciting time, kinda like it is now, because some bands were eking their way into the mainstream, which helped me get into it, but...I don't know. I feel like there was more emphasis on politics back then, which really turned me onto music. I feel like those bands are fewer and far between now, and I could be totally wrong, but...

sd: No, I think you're right. There's been such a thorough homogenization of punk by the big money, and the example that comes to my mind every time is New Found Glory, for whatever reason. I like them, don't get me wrong, but to me they're the face of the New Punk Rock. It's not even punk anymore, it's pop. There's no punk element to it; there's no attitude, Lord knows there's no politics...
Aaron: Right, and it was weird when Green Day were called punk. It wasn't weird to me at the time, because I wasn't even turned onto what punk was or what its roots were - so Dookie comes out, and it's got all this alienation going on in the lyrics, and no rock band was talking about masturbation back then. *laughter* The only other pop music that I can think of that even used the word was Billy Joel, like twenty years prior...anyway, the name Marathon. *laughter* I feel like there's an element of endurance as I see my peers - people my age - saying, "Okay, all the answers are there; do I take them, or do I make things really hard for myself and choose a completely open-ended path?" And that's a really difficult question that I deal with every day. It'd be very easy for me to take a given career path or whatever. I went to college, and did some weird, self-guided major in community development that really left me in about the same place I was in high school, just four years older and slightly more well-read. Do I get a job that will convince me that the rent will be available every month, or do I try to create something a little more interesting, more harrowing?

sd: Is Marathon full-time? If I had my guess I'd say no.
Aaron: No. If full-time means do we make any money, then no.

sd: So you guys do not make your living off this band.
Aaron: Absolutely not.

sd: What's your day job?
Aaron: I split my time between working in a vegetarian restaurant as a cook, and I work as a substitute teacher in elementary schools...to wrap up the name thing, I liked the feel of endurance, and seeing the scene change as well, but I think especially for activism and political activism, it's really hard to care, every day. It's so much easier to say, "You know, I'm comfortable right now, in my own personal life, so let's just let it go, and let other peoples' lives be miserable." It's so much easier on my life not to address that stuff, and obviously that's not the response I want from myself, any day, so I choose the harder response as many days as I can.

sd: Do your find yourself lapsing sometimes and thinking, "Okay, the last couple days I haven't..."
Aaron: I don't spend the end of every day going, "Oh, have I been vigilant in all my purchases?" and all that, but there's times when I'm reading the news online or I catch a Bush speech or something, and it's just downright depressing...he's an animal, but I think the one thing he has that a lot of American presidents haven't had is just utter conviction to do exactly what he thinks is right, and I think that's admirable in a person, as an actual value, but what he's trying to do is completely without regard for anyone else's opinions or needs.

sd: Do you think weapons of mass destruction will ever be found?
Aaron: Well, I think a lot of them were dropped on Iraq. I don't think any U.S. citizen, or any citizen of the world, will ever be privy to that kind of intelligence. We don't receive news reports that tell us any content as far as that goes, and if they're found, will we be convinced that they were originally there? I mean, like, we gave Iraq resources; the U.S. gave them weapons in the '80s.

sd: I heard a report a while ago that the Bush family was linked commercially with the bin Ladens twenty years ago.
Aaron: I think U.S. foreign policy is largely built around what works right at that moment. Obviously, current events are important to consider, but why would we support a dictator at one point and then only eleven years later say, "Okay, this guy's gotta go," and then twelve years later say again, "Okay, he's really gotta go this time." I mean, what is it that makes him okay at one point and not okay at another point? You think all those dead bodies that have turned up in Iraq showed up just since 1991? I think the point of convenience goes for most administrations. Convenience in the Bush administration's eyes is, "What will get us the most money for our friends and for us?" I mean, there's only one person in Bush's cabinet who isn't a millionaire - I learned that in Al Franken's new book.

sd: I love that guy. Every time I see him on Conan O'Brien, I'm like, "Oooooh, Al Franken is on!"
Aaron: He's funny, but my problem with that book was that the guy was just a total apologist for Clinton, as if Clinton did not do a single nothing wrong. *laughter*

sd: That bastion of light and principle.
Aaron: Well, I think that in eight years there's a lot of scrutiny that could be placed on any president no matter how glamorous you think their legacy is. So obviously, Bush is atrocious compared to Clinton, and hopefully any Democrat alive would be even a hair better than Bush.

sd: Who would your vote be if New York went to the primaries right now?
Aaron: Well, I'm not registered as a Democrat. I don't like to give allegiance to a party platform, but I also sacrifice my ability to say anything about it beforehand. *laughter*

sd: Which is what things like this interview are for. Because a whole thirty people might read this. *laughter* Transform as many minds as you can!
Aaron: I liked Dean a lot, [but] I won't necessarily say he would have been my first choice no matter what. I was really disappointed with how the media crucified him just because he was shouting over a crowd...I was talking to a friend about how the existence of cable news channels now has made it so that there are stations that are competing with each other enough to create news - twenty-four hours a day. It used to be just, you know, an hour at five o'clock, a half hour at eleven and a couple news magazines in the evening to do special-interest stuff. Now, it's like they keep recycling stories and then it becomes the story with all the spin and before you know it, if I wanted to see that clip, I could probably still see it, weeks later, if I just watched one of the stations for a few hours.

sd: Let's switch gears; you were in a band called De La Hoya - what happened to them?
Aaron: De La Hoya was a band for about four years, based out of New York City where I was going to school, and it was primarily with my friend Oscar Rodriguez, who plays bass in Nakatomi Plaza. I met him in college, and we played with a bunch of different people in the rhythm section, and eventually we just got tired of trying to find new people to play with. The founding members all stayed together for about a year and a half, we did one national tour and a handful of tours up and down the east coast. We actually put out a full-length and two EPs on Red Leader. Marathon started when I was going with Nakatomi Plaza to Standfast's last show - [Marathon alumni] Brian, Jeff and Nate were all in Standfast.

sd: Marathon reminds me of Strike Anywhere, but what else over the years has worked itself out in Marathon? Musically or otherwise?
Aaron: If I can give you a quick progression...Bad Religion, for taking punk and making it about more than just alienation, and making it intelligent and analytical. For them to be that melodic and challenge the intellect that much was great. Propagandhi are a great band. [Their] first couple records were so explicit about what they were talking about; they made no bones about it and didn't hide anything in obscure metaphors. For me, lyrically, those are the two bands.

sd: You're not gonna go back and reference Rancid or the Clash or Joe Strummer?
Aaron: Those bands are great, but they didn't seem relevant to me at the time that I started listening to them. I could dig into other bands, but those are the two biggest.

sd: How's the scene back home? Is Rochester your hometown?
Aaron: No, Ithaca is my hometown. Emmett is from Syracuse, Nate and Jeff live in Rochester and Brian and I live in Ithaca. All the towns are in a kind of triangle. The scene's always changing; it would be really tough for me to pick certain bands out, so I think I'm gonna pass. I mean, there's a lot of good bands who I love who drop off real fast.

sd: Are you committed to this band like you were to De La Hoya?
Aaron: I would say more so. I can't put and end-date on it, but I would say we have a couple more years in us, if not more. I think if we continue to gain fans, it'll be easier to continue longer. If not, if we continue at the level we're at, I think we can do it casually for several years.

sd: Would you be fine with that, or would you prefer to ditch your day job and go full-blown on Marathon?
Aaron: I don't think anyone in the band prefers their jobs to touring.

sd: Is Marathon a melodic hardcore band? Or is it just a tag for retailers to put something under?
Aaron: Labels have a very mild purpose, and if you need to describe what a record you just heard sounds like-

sd: If someone says, "What's Marathon?" what do you say?
Aaron: *laughs* I stumble through a really shoulder-shrugging explanation that it's hardcore with singing and some important ideas.

sd: How's touring going? The profile of hardcore is rising, with a lot of bands jumping into the mainstream and signing with big labels and selling a lot of records; is it getting easier to book tours, or harder?
Aaron: It's getting harder, because the more popularity there is in the mainstream, the more small-time bands there are, and the more bands think, "Oh, okay, I can do this and make it." Touring on the DIY circuit becomes harder, because there's such a saturation of bands. That said, this tour's gone extremely well. Every tour goes slightly better than the last.

sd: With all these bands playing the same cities, on the same circuit, almost identically, what sets your band apart?
Aaron: I think the fact that we're individuals that genuinely care about what we're doing. Occasionally we'll play with a band that look more bored than the crowd does. And maybe that's how they show passion, I don't know, but what makes us worth seeing and being in a musical space with is that we really wanna be there, and we put our all into it when we show up. We mean it, and I think anyone who comes to see us will see that on stage. Or in their living room, or wherever.

sd: Back to politics: do you follow Canadian politics at all? Do you have any reason to?
Aaron: American media is atrocious at informing its citizens in general, but as far as international politics goes, if the U.S. doesn't have its hands in it, we don't hear about it. That's not to be making excuses; I definitely could be reading Canadian papers, so no, I don't follow it that much. All I really have seen is the gay marriage issue, or the mad cow thing.

sd: Are our two nations comparable at all?
Aaron: I think the U.S. could [learn] a lot from just visiting and seeing what it's like, what's different. People seem a lot more chill and a lot more friendly [in Canada], and a lot more willing to talk and just show a little bit of their personality upon first meeting them. That's just my sense of it. I think it's really tempting for Americans to reduce Canadians to a handful of stereotypes that are really shallow, at that. A lot of the Conan O'Brien shows [filmed in Toronto in February] seemed to be for American audiences. It's funny to me to see Mike Myers on there making fun of Canadians because he has an insider picture, but then we're all like, "Ooooh, Canada's all about Mounties and moose and hockey and 'eh'!"

sd: It's funny to hear an American saying this, because some of my best friends who are American don't take any crap about America. And these are fifteen-year-olds.
Aaron: The reason I take nationalized stereotypes so seriously was actually on a Canadian message board, some kid talking about Americans and the government and how all Americans are ignorant and uneducated, which isn't the case. I mean, we definitely have a problem with large sections of the population being ignorant, but in three hundred million people there's gonna be a large percentage of people who just don't care or don't choose to inform themselves, but just because someone doesn't agree with me, I don't consider them ignorant. But at the same time I don't want anyone in another country to say, "Oh, Americans are ruining the world."

sd: Do you think over the years America has done more good than bad?
Aaron: That would be utterly impossible to gauge. I have a tendency to lean towards the negative side, because there's so much pro-America propaganda.

sd: What's with the 'terror alert' on CNN? I mean, what is that? The fear blitzkrieg is SO obvious. How do people not revolt?
Aaron: Right, and at the same time they're saying, "But everything's safe." That is obnoxious. Imagine doing that to a child in your house? "Well, it's the summer, so everything's very dry, so the fire alert is very high, so the house might burn down - but it won't. Don't worry about it." *wild laughter* Your kid would be screwed up for life!

sd: That's a really good metaphor. I like that one.
Aaron: I feel like that's what's happening to the population. So that's why I feel the tendency to highlight negative things. But America's positive legacies are kinda being torn down. I mean, the United Nations - oh, we just said that wasn't relevant anymore. *laughter*

sd: What was it Bush said? "No one needs to give us a permission slip" or something?
Aaron: ...even though we keep asking the United Nations for help now. That's what a lot of the positivity turns into; we do something positive because the general population feels like we should be benevolent out in the world, in moderation. So we take the United Nations, everyone thinks the UN is a good idea, and then we totally take a crap on the UN and say that without the U.S.'s signature on the Kyoto Protocol, or without them following the Geneva Convention with the prisoners from Guantanamo Bay, or the World Court or military tribunals of international figures, all these things are mainly powerless without the U.S. signing on, because if they're the superpower, they grant legitimacy. The U.S. is the superpower that grants legitimacy to any act; therefore, we can start a war that's against all kinds of treaties that our signature's on, and it's okay at least in our eyes, and people will say, "Okay, we don't agree with it in the UN, but the UN is irrelevant now because the U.S. hasn't signed on," and now it's back to us going back on all the positive things we've done. Let's say liberating Iraq is a positive thing, let's say democracy ensues and everyone there generally develops a high standard of living and all that - are we going to give them arms to invade Iran again, ten years down the line? Are we gonna give Israel the go-ahead to nuke every Arab nation just because all of a sudden the new Iraq has rallied everyone? It benefits the U.S. for the world not to know exactly what we wanna do. I think the positivity we do enact just gets all confused.

sd: It sounds cliche, but let's say you're President Aaron Scott. Without getting too intricate about the details, what has to be changed?
Aaron: Without indulging in any radical restructuring of a three-hundred-million-person nation into some sort of socialized democracy or something like that, under the current situation the U.S. needs to lead in every major international issue. Environmentalism, human rights, disarmament. We shouldn't be asking Congress for more money to check out how we can build smaller nuclear weapons. That is the stupidest thing I've ever heard. A nuke is a nuke, you know? And don't drop one, ever, again. Truman did it, which showed that we should never, ever do it again. And the fact that we need research to do it is just absurd.

sd: It's economic, you know. Research takes researchers and scientists, and they all get paid.
Aaron: We need to reduce the need for industry to keep producing weapons. The U.S. will have plenty of weapons if we scale down, and plenty of army if we scale down military budget.

sd: My last question: your president is a professing Christian, a fundamental Christian. A lot of people I've talked to who think he's a religious zealot - I'm not saying he is or isn't...what are your thoughts? Do you believe in God?
Aaron: I was brought up in the Presbyterian church. I left when I was eighteen, and I don't consider myself a Christian. I'm not without spirituality; I wouldn't call myself an atheist, but I don't believe in a particular god right now, one that's very defined in my mind. I do have a lot of thoughts about how energy works between people and about goodness, and I feel that a lot of my personal spirituality comes from those lessons that I did learn while I was in the church.

sd: Do you think people could unite better under a spiritual banner than under the banner of an administration? Say someone's in office and says, "Okay, I'm a Christian, but I'm not a raging zealot", because a lot of people think Bush is no better for being a Christian than Saddam Hussein is for being a Muslim. Do you think it could be used for good? Where do you think religion's purpose is?
Aaron: I think each person finds what works for them spiritually. Say you take an industrialized country, and instead of separation of church and state, it's a theocracy. Obviously, if everyone in the country was on board, and thought and believed the same things and believed in the absolute authority of one spirit or one God, obviously it would be a lot easier to govern and move the country in a certain direction.

sd: But on the flip side of the same coin, that hasn't worked.
Aaron: Well, it's worked in social movements. Like, the civil rights movement in the U.S. largely coalesced around the fact that the black people in the southern states already had plenty in common in that they were dealing with oppression because of what they were, not who they were as individuals, but what they looked liked and who their parents were. But they had the preachers in place, the great speakers, they had the churches, which were the places to go to meet, and they had the belief that "not only are we gonna get redemption when we die, we're gonna have redemption now". That moved the movement forward in a way that I don't know would have happened any other way, but I personally don't think a belief system has a place in the governing of a people, because I think that could be oppressive in the same way that the U.S. has been oppressively racially in the past - or present.

sd: So you don't think the U.S. is 'one nation under God'. My last question is this: how do you want Marathon to be remembered? You're five guys out of so many.
Aaron: One thing that excites me about recording is contributing our music to the existing catalog of great songs that may or may not move people. And our legacy, if anything, is the kids who've come up to me and said, "Thank you for your music." Then I know that it's better that it was there than if it wasn't. To me, performing is the most spiritual thing. I tap into...something, and I have not yet put a framework on it, and I'm not saying that's eventual or not, but that's the moment where I feel things that I don't feel anywhere else.

[Marathon]

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