photo by Jodi Leib
Whip It Good
with The Whips
photo by Jodi Leib
The Whips
Arika, James, Trip and Matt
Talk It Out with Jodi Leib
9:30 Club in Washington D.C.
April 25, 2005
Published November 2004
Jodi: I'm Talking It Out at the 9:30 Club with The Whips, a
fantastic Washington D.C. eclectic, rock-punk band. How would you
describe yourselves?
Matt: We like to describe ourselves as Hot Rock.
Jodi: Hot Rock, right on! Tell me, what's the D.C. Hot Rock
music scene like right now?
Matt: Well, actually the D.C. scene is really cool right now.
There's a lot of really good bands. There's us,
The
Whips, Thee
Snuff Project, Wooly Mammoth, People
Chasing People, The
Frequency. There's a lot of really good rock bands and they're
very eclectic. A lot of really good rock bands in D.C. right now,
almost as good as it was in the early 90's.
Jodi: Where do you get the music from?
Matt: From the heart...and the soul...I mean, where else?
Jodi: Well, it certainly moves you. Your moves are very swanky
cool.
Matt: Oh, well thank you very much. Thank you.
Jodi: You've got to see The Whips! The Whips are....my favorite new
word is FAST. Sometimes I start my own words, not that I
started the word fast by any stretch, but I wanted to say, you guys are
really fast! Like, fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants fast.
Matt: We're definitely fly-by-the-seat-of-our-pants. That's a
very good phrase to describe us. Fly-by-the-seat-of-our-pants.
Trip: I just want to say, like, your favorite LP, that one part that
you really, really love in the song, that's like all of our songs are
built on those really amazing parts. When you're going crazy in your
home and in your stereo, and you're rockin out to your favorite albums,
we're trying to capsulize that energy with all of our hot rock songs.
Arika: All of us are in our 30s, and we've all been in lots of bands
before, and done lots of touring. We all genuinely really love each
other and play together extremely well. That's why it works so well.
We're not trying to do anything except rock. All of take it back to
our teens, like sitting in our bedrooms listening to Van Halen and Led
Zepplin, and....
Matt: And the Bad Brains!
Arika: And the Bad Brains, all through our lives. All the
great songs that we've listened to, we're not at a point in our lives
where we want to play that joy that we have.
Trip: You know how they call cigarettes a nicotine delivery
system. We are a rock delivery system!
Jodi: This is going to be a strange question, and I've never asked
anyone this question before, but aside from yourselves, when you look in
the mirror, who do you remind yourselves of?
Matt: Oh, that's a hard one to answer.
Jodi: When you look at your soul, who do you feel like? Who's
coming out?
Matt: All I can say is that the guy who made me want to be a
vocalist was Pete Stahl from Scream.
Jodi: I have Janis Joplin so within me, not that I can sing like her, but
at some moments I find myself just raging like Janis Joplin.
Arika: Oh my God.
Jodi: Janis?
Arika: Oh my God! It's a really interesting a good
question. I really don't know. I think I'd just be me.
Jodi: That's good.
Trip: I would be Pete Townsend channeled through an 80's
I-hate-Reagan-punk-rock-attitude.
Jodi: I have a friend who reminds me of Marilyn Monroe but with jet black
hair. Same red lips, but she came back as a jet black pop sultry
rock singer. Like if Marilyn could have her way in this world, she'd
be in the rock scene. I felt like I saw Abraham Lincoln as this tall
half-black lawyer, as if that is what he came back as...you know? So
The Whips were a political party back in the day, correct?
Matt: Yes, in the early days of the American political system.
Whips were a very big party.
Jodi: What did they stand for?
Matt: I believe it was Alexander Hamilton's party.
Trip: They were part of the original pro soccer league, they became
the Washington Whips.
Arika: It wasn't the criteria by how we picked our name at all.
Jodi: How did you pick it?
Arika: We always had these names floating in our heads, like you do
when you're in a band. Everything is like, "This would be a
good name for a band." I guess I was watching a PBS news thing
getting really angry and I was thinking about the significance of the
Majority Whips and the Minority Whips in the House. The Majority
Whips? That sounds kind of weird. Minority Whips, even
worse. How about The Whips?
Jodi: For my friends in LA who probably don't know what that
is...because we in LA forget life goes on outside of LA, can you explain
what these Whips in the House do?
Arika: The entity that can make things go one way or
another.
Matt: The Majority Whip works for the majority party and the
Minority Whip works for the minority party in Congress and they try and
whip the troops together to vote so a certain bill goes one way or
another.
Jodi: So they're, like, on the sidelines in the cheering section?
Trip: They're the behind-the-scenes managers.
Arika: In the way that it was originally orchestrated, they were
standing right on the border and can make things go one way or
another. And that's why they were called Whips.
Jodi: Are you the pro-choice Whips, since you're at the Planned
Parenthood event?
Arika: I think we can all categorically say that we're
pro-choice. I'm definitely extremely committed to a woman's right to
choose. It terrifies me that the possibility could
disappear.
Jodi: We need to Whip George Bush's ass in to shape!
Arika: Alright.
Matt: That's the damn truth!
Arika: Done and done!
Matt: We have crazy fundamentalist people who don't even believe in
reason running our government right now. They don't even believe in
evolution. Our government doesn't believe in evolution right
now. So we need to do something about that!
(we all laugh)
Jodi: So, what do we have to do about it? Whip the vote?
Matt: Yes!
We can still do that by signing online petitions to the President and to our Representatives and Senators to make our voices known. Even though the status quo remains in effect, we can still declare what we have to say and work everyday to protect the freedoms that we know are American in value and spirit. Freedom of Choice is still a priority, even though most people don't like to talk about it in public. Talk It Out - Speak your Mind, Let them Hear You! Whip It Real Good!
You can listen to their music here....I love their song called Three...that's my favorite...check it out!
Jodi and The Whips lead singer Matt, photo by Harry Costner
Back to www.jodileib.com
Jodi Leib's Talk It Out Interview with The Whips was taped on
April 25, 2004.
Talk It Out (c) Jodi Leib, 2004. Reprint by Permission at talkitout@jodileib.com.