Five minutes without talking with The Whitest Boy Alive
The Whitest Boy Alive creates spacious music.
While there’s plenty of energy in the band’s funk-inflected pop, the arrangements are kept simple, leaving room for vocalist Erlend Øye to speak his muted mantras. According to bass player Marcin Oz, all that space is a good thing because “it leaves something for the imagination of the listener.”
By many accounts, interviews with The Whitest Boy Alive (TWBA) are similar: their minimalist responses sometimes leave lots to the imagination.
Oz had no comment on whether the band’s song “Dead End” sounds suspiciously like the theme music from “Flight of the Conchords,” and he wouldn’t answer questions about their well stocked merch site or how Internet-era bands earn an income.
“Let’s not talk about money,” he said.
He was willing to discuss Geoff Mcfetridge, though, who has a near monopoly on the production of the band’s T-shirt, album and website artwork.
“[Mcfetridge] has been with us from the start,” Oz says. “He designed the visual art for The Whitest Boy Alive alongside us making the music. It's great to find Erlend's lyrics in Geoff's art. We are very proud of it.”
Strangely, Øye’s lyrics themselves aren’t all that open to discussion.
Many of the The Whitest Boy Alive's songs seem grounded in disappointment or finding a way to reconcile oneself. When asked if rock 'n' roll hysteria and euphoria are a bit passé these days, Oz just says, “Maybe Erlend's voice is at its best when dealing with those issues.”
The Whitest Boy Alive is a character our music is about. We never said it’s one of us. It has nothing to do with race, skin color or origin. Everybody knows a whitest boy alive.— Marcin Oz, The Whitest Boy Alive, bass player
One question that elevates Oz’s pulse, even though he doesn’t directly address it, is just how white he and his Northern European band mates are.
“The Whitest Boy Alive is a character our music is about,” he says. “We never said it’s one of us. It has nothing to do with race, skin color or origin. Everybody knows a whitest boy alive.”
The Whitest Boy Alive in Shanghai
One local candidate for the whitest boy alive is music blogger Jake Newby, who says, “I'm pretty white. I like indie rock and I like hip-hop, which makes me even whiter, plus I can't dance. I'm not sure I'm the whitest boy alive, but yeah, I'm pretty white. I haven't met the Chinesest boy alive yet I don't think, but hopefully I'll know him when I see him.”
Newby says the question of whether The Whitest Boy Alive’s music would resonate with the "Chinesest" boy alive, or other local Chinese for that matter, is “a tricky one."
"Like any band, I think they resonate with people who are into that kind of music,” he says.
While there’s an element of shoe gaze to The Whitest Boy Alive’s music, their Shanghai performance should appeal to people who want to cut a rug, or whatever’s on the floor of Zhijiang Dream Factory these days.
“Erlend Øye has described their live shows as being like DJ sets where they thread the songs together, and I think the band is aiming for a sound that people can dance to when they play live,” Newby says.
“I saw Erlend play with [his other band] Kings of Convenience a few years ago and that was very much a show where you stayed perfectly still and appreciated the delicate beauty of the music, or something like that,” continues Newby. “Right at the end of their set they played ‘I'd Rather Dance With You’ and got every one up on the stage to dance around and have a party. I see the TWBA show in Shanghai as being more like that.”
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There’s not much more to say about how the show might go because even the musicians themselves don’t know.
With characteristic concision, Marcin Oz says Shanghai audiences will see “real people playing real music with real instruments, not having planned anything beforehand. Exciting, no?"
