Interview with Ezra Furman: "Again and again, the rich are trying to kill the poor ruins"

I"It's a shy person whose very presence has become a confrontation," says Ezra Furman, absently pulling the skin of his Adam's apple. "I think this is true for many queer people."

It's a sweltering day in London, and the Chicago musician – not very dressed of the time that he does with a flower shirt, a skirt, black tights and a stained lipstick – is hidden in the living room of his manager to promote his eighth album, Twelve naked, leave on Friday. Is not it hot, I say when I arrive. "I think every time we complain about the heat, it should be natural to complain about billionaires and multinationals," he says. Small discussion on.

There is a lot of confrontation about Furman. The music of 32 years is provocative, even animal, its voice both soft and heavy, a tremulous fog giving way to guttural cries. Blending the 1950's doo-wop, 60s garage rock, 70s glam and 90s grunge, he sings about depression, fluidity between the bades and the fact that he's Jewish, often reacting against the increasingly desperate state of the world.

In person, however, Furman is of a disarming sweetness. He speaks slowly and calmly – cracking his fingers and motives in a pool of spilled water, so he often starts answering before retiring midway. "I started to realize …", he says at one point, before a 10-second silence. "Let me stop. I do not have that thought in mind yet. Will we come back? "Perhaps."

But when Furman has his thoughts together, he is articulate and pbadionate. He speaks eloquently, for example, of what it feels like to travel the world as a weird person. After starting in 2006 as the leader of independent rock band Ezra Furman and The Harpoons, Furman launches solo in 2012 with The year of no return, which was followed a year later by the beloved critic Dog's day. In 2015, around the time of the brilliant bruises Perpetual motionAt liberation, he started wearing dresses and lipstick on stage and came out as a bibadual and badual fluid in an editorial for The Guardian. "My body was made that way," he shouted in "Body was Made," "there's really nothing that an old patrician / you, the social police, can do.

"I am visibly different most of the time," he says now. "The simple fact of being gender non-conforming exposes you to the problems of strangers. And violence. Visibility creates a problem in my life. A real problem. Or a bunch of 'em. But at the end of the day, I do not really have a choice. It is more of a danger to my well being than not to be openly nonconformist about gender than to be. "

He sighs. "Sometimes I wonder what to say about it. Or maybe I'm tired of being obsessed with the issue, worrying about how I said it, worrying about people's reactions, and so on. My dream has always been that it could be a non-problem, or at least as much a problem as any other darling part of myself. But I mean, the fact that I'm Jewish does not come that often. Furman, whose grandparents survived the Holocaust "because they were paranoid enough to leave their homes," is a practicing Jew who never performs on the Sabbath. recently considered leaving the music to become a rabbi.

But this is not the case. He instead recorded another album. "Oh yes, we made one, is not it?" He said smiling. A good example, even if it's not easy to listen. Hastily registered in the summer of 2018, Twelve naked is an urgent and anxious record – louder, busier and more acerbic than its high-concept predecessor Transangelic Exodus. Furman says it's "a controlled forest fire of negativity," a call to hard-hitting weapons crossed by a note of panic and despair. "It's not what I want to be and it's not what I am," he says. "I am at peace, I carry this world at peace with me wherever I go. I imagine that what it really is, is to admit that things are going badly. For me, there is actually something very encouraging. It might be useful to express a deep negativity. "

Take "Trauma", on which he denounces the vast gap that separates the rich and the poor, the powerful and the powerless: "The spirit collapses and the economies collapse / when the one who works the hardest gets the most little reward, "he sings bruising over the shaking electric guitars. "The big scam is that nobody cares what the penthouse suite depends on the top three floors." It is a kind of battle cry without conviction, both fierce and downcast. "The rich trying to kill the poor ruins of my day, again and again," Furman says. "There are not, like the royals, beheading peasants as before, but they have just found a different way of dressing them up. Workers kill themselves to survive and work for billionaires. "

Furman wrote the chorus of "Trauma" – "The years go by and we still have not treated our trauma" – shortly after the worms. "I took the word 'trauma', and it was like throwing it in the air like a handful of ashes and seeing where they all go. It's a word that carries so much with him. It's an unpredictable word, so loaded, it's like a flash. I thought, "How can I pronounce that word?", But it's a song about the brutality of people in search of power and the trauma it causes to almost everyone else. And I think that causes a real traumatism. It's traumatic to grow in our world. And I was … I do not know. The summer of 2018, dude. He shakes his head. "I was under the influence of stories of prominent rapists not punished for their crimes. People who have been injured see this, and we say to ourselves: "No justice has been done for me, and I will be hurt again, people like me will be hurt and the perpetrators will suffer no consequences". It's more brutal according to your personal experience with aggression. "

Individuals who have suffered personal aggression abound depressingly, Furman says, as do people who have committed aggression. "The real blind spot is when you do not realize that these are the people you talk to every day," he says of the latter. "Many of those who have been exposed as rapists are people with whom it would be extremely interesting to talk. Like, you'd like to be their friend. And then you start to understand, "Oh, could this happen to me? That could be a lot of people I know? I probably have friends who have done things in this category. "So, how can a seemingly cool person do something horrible?"

For Furman, "it's because they do not look for him. They do not swim against the current. There is a tide that only attracts people who do not seek it. That's why, to be anti-badist, you can not just not be badist – you must actually be anti-badist. You have to be anti-racist not to be racist. Because it's just a cultural tide that will attract you if you do not swim against it. "

Twelve Nudes also helped Furman process his own personal damage. “I have my own trauma of living under certain oppressive systems,” he says. “And I think the feeling of the whole record is: years are going by, and we haven’t dealt with how bad it feels to live under patriarchy, to let the rich get away with almost anything, and to let the poor get away with nothing and be blamed for things they didn’t do. Somehow, it started to all seem like one thing, one system – patriarchy and hyper-capitalism sort of meld into this status quo that continues to damage me and my friends and other people.”

Then again, Furman is experiencing “increasing stability and happiness in my personal life”. He won’t go into detail, though. “I’m telling less than I used to about my personal life to folks like you,” he says. “It’s a good feeling to not tell people what’s going on. And I know I’d be judged, you know? Relationship status or whatever it is.” By straight people or queer people? “You never caaaan tell,” he sings. “You never can tell who’s gonna say what. My old thought was, ‘I don’t care what people say, I don’t even know these people.’ But I have to admit it affects me. On a bad day, that s**t can be devastating. It can be destabilising in a deeper way than I even realised.”

There’s another long silence. “But the heart of the matter? What’s going on in my spirit? I don’t hold back on that.”

Twelve Nudes is out on Friday