#107: Vish Khanna: 'Are you shooting yourself in the foot, or are you drawing people in?'
Talking 1,000 episodes of band names with the host of Kreative Kontrol.
Even within the ever-shrinking world of media, it’s especially difficult to try to make a living talking about music these days. I witnessed it firsthand at The A.V. Club, where by the mid-2010s, music reviews and interviews drew few readers, even for prominent artists and releases. When all music is freely available at all times, listeners can easily listen and form their own opinions, so who needs critics? It also didn’t help that, within the A.V. Club world at least, musicians tended to give the least-interesting interviews.
Yet Vish Khanna has made it work for his podcast, Kreative Kontrol, which released its 1,000th episode today. When it seems like everyone and their brother has a podcast (or, uh, a newsletter), to reach that milestone is quite an accomplishment. And to make 1,000 episodes focusing only on things you like or that interest you—without cravenly chasing downloads—is a laurel wreath atop that accomplishment.
Not long before Kreative Kontrol turned over the odometer, Band Name Bureau spoke to Khanna from his home base in Canada.
Band Name Bureau: How did you come to be a music fan? Can you give me a little overview of your musical journey?
Vish Khanna: I was 5 or 6 years old and my cousin Anand—it was the early ’80s—would play Love and Rockets and the Police and whatever was going on. Depeche Mode. U2 in particular, I remember. But he had this Beatles tape, a compilation called Rock ’n’ Roll Music Vol 1. I was particularly smitten with that. I liked the other stuff because I was already, at that time, starting to see music videos on Canadian television here on MuchMusic. And I was big into the radio, but the Beatles thing really stuck to me. If I recall correctly, that tape has them doing “Twist and Shout,” maybe “Long Tall Sally”—just them screaming, the way they sounded, really spoke to me.
I got so into them that I would read books and get magazines and watch documentaries. There was a documentary that I recorded off of PBS called The Compleat Beatles. The more I read about them, the more I'd encounter things like, oh, Ringo Starr couldn't do a tour because he was sick, and so they had to get a different drummer. And I'd be like, “What? The Beatles got sick? They’re humans?” It didn't occur to me that these people, who were quite iconic, were humans. The more I read about artists and musicians and people I liked, the more it humanized them.
So I was really interested in music journalism because it felt like every time I read or watched something about an artist or someone I liked, I got to know them a bit more, and they felt more relatable. If I really think on it, that's what led me to where I am now.
BNB: It sounds like you were set on a path to what would be called “alternative music” pretty early. Love and Rockets, of course, but even U2 wasn’t mainstream in the ’80s.
VK: I was very fixated on them for a good chunk of time. But then, when the year punk broke in ’91, [I was] becoming interested in Nirvana. Punk music generally made me feel a little resentful of bands like U2. I still followed them, but because they were platformed so much by mass media that, when I discovered punk and underground music… I would've just turned 14 that December of ’91. That's a pretty formative age to be like, “Wait a minute, I think you guys were holding back on me! There's a whole other cultural universe that you didn't tell me about! What's that about?”
I was just at an age where hormonally, I was getting a little angsty, and then to feel like I hadn't been told the full story. I was just endlessly consuming all sorts of media. There's something about really wanting to be informed, even at that age, and be in the know, I guess. I don’t know why or what exactly. I mean, my son has it too. He just wants to be like, “Yeah, I know about that. I read about that. I found out about that.”1
The first bands I saw live were because they were opening for U2 on the Zoo TV tour, the Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy and Primus. Those were the bands on the bill, and I didn't know who they were. On some level, in retrospect, those were good choices to make curatorially, to be like, “Okay, we have this audience. Let's show them something.” I mean, who knows if they were big fans of either. I could see them liking Michael Franti and Disposable Heroes at the time—they had a Public Enemy vibe.
BNB: Television, the drug of a nation.
VK: Yeah! [U2] certainly could not be less cool now, but there was something about it that seemed both cool, but also why is this band so successful when all this other amazing music is not?
BNB: This is a good time to ask this question, because Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy is such a mouthful of a name. Do you remember when you first noticed a name, good or bad?
VK: So growing up at that time, in the ’80s in particular, I don't know if they ever really particularly resonated with me. What does Crowded House mean? Or INXS was an interesting one. Or REM. I think a lot of bands picked names because of how they sounded, but also what they looked like.
In high school, when we started to be old enough to drive to shows, Sonic Youth, for example, spoke to me. But I remember in high school being into them and my English teacher being, “Sonic Youth, aren't they all in their 40s?” I'm like, “Yeah, they're older, I think.” And he was like, “Yeah, so maybe they should be called Sonic Old.”
BNB: They've never heard that!
VK: We started to go see shows, particularly at a club called the Volcano in Kitchener, Ontario, and that's when I started to notice names like Dayglo Abortions.
BNB: That's a good one.
VK: I think they started to hit me as, you can have fun with them, punk bands. I mean, I was probably slightly scandalized by the Sex Pistols or the Buzzcocks—just seeing someone in high school wear a shirt that said Buzzcocks, which was something that occurred. NoMeansNo was a big band for me, and that is an interesting band name, because I thought of it as a parent saying to a child, “No means no.” But of course it became a term used in the context of sexual assault.
Fugazi was a name that did stand out for me because, when you first heard it, it was almost like a secret. No one really that I knew had heard the music. You just kept hearing [about them]. If we started to go to record stores or we’d read magazines and fanzines, it was just this word, and I didn't know what it meant, but everyone said it, like, "Yeah, that's the band."
When I finally heard [the music], I didn't really think about their name that much, but it was an unusual-looking word, and ultimately, I think a kind of a beautiful word. Then over the years, you are watching Donnie Brasco or The Wolf of Wall Street, and you're hearing people use “fugazi,” like the sort of Italian connotation, and it's jarring. It was jarring to me to watch The Wolf of Wall Street and watch Leonardo DiCaprio and Matthew McConaughey wrestle with how to pronounce the word. I was like, “It's so weird that that word means so much to me, and that band means so much to me, but it also has this other meaning.”
Fugazi is really an interesting term because it's an acronym. They got it from “fucked up, got ambushed, zipped in,” Vietnam slang, yet there's this Italian word. That's a fascinating aspect of that band's name.
I liked puns a lot when I would write songs, even in post-hardcore bands. I think it's the John Lennon fan in me. I just liked silly puns in these angry songs that were full of puns.
BNB: What were some of the names of bands you were in?
VK: I didn't really name too many of them, but one of the bands in high school was called Dioctave, like Divided Octave. I don't know why. I grew up primarily playing music with a couple of different clusters of people, but the most prominent one is likely Dallas Wehrle and Steve Lambke, who went on to be in the Constantines. We grew up playing music together, learning how to play music together.
After that dissolved, we went off to school, university and stuff like that. Initially, Dallas went to a different school in Toronto. I went to the University of Guelph, and Steve was a year behind us. We all convened at the University of Guelph, and we had a band called Captain Copilot. Our friend Rob Pal mumbled it, I believe. I don’t know what we were talking about, but it clicked with Steve, I think, who's like, “Captain Copilot. That's our name.”
The one band that I remember naming was this folk-country community collective idea I had, which was that I would write some songs, but also we would play lots of other people's songs. The premise was that anyone in the community who wanted to could join the band and sing along. So our practices could be like 30 people. The shows could be like that too. I wanted it to be really inclusive at the time. I named it the Crying Out Loud Choir, which I feel like my friend Nancy Ogilvie said at some point.
That band started because someone was putting together a benefit compilation called 60-Second Songs. He would ask everyone to write a 60-second song. I decided to write a song for it in kind of a country-folk realm. We did a recording session in my friend's living room, pretty makeshift—might've been a four track or something, an eight track of some kind. I feel like [Nancy] just said it in that space, "Oh for crying out loud, Vish," or something like that. I was like, “Okay, it's going to be called the Crying Out Loud Choir.”
I don't know if it's a good name or not, but it seemed to work. If I think about it, other than my kids, I name things kind of impulsively.
BNB: Was the naming of your podcast impulsive?
VK: The naming of my podcast, in retrospect, came about because I was working for a media company, and it had gone super well for three and a half years. And then by what ended up being the end of my time there, I was feeling a bit stifled. I was being asked to do things I didn't quite want to do. I was being told I couldn't do things that I normally could do in the older version of the position, meaning stop freelancing for The A.V. Club2 and Exclaim!
I started at that company as a radio host and as a producer, and that part of the job ended, and I just missed it. I liked sharing music. One of the things I most like about what I do is that I'm sharing something I found with whoever is out there. “I like this band. I like this record. I like this book. You might like it too.” I like to spread the word about something that I think is good, and so I felt kind of stifled.
I started back on the community radio station at the University of Guelph. I started a music mix radio show called Kreative Kontrol, and I named it after the Hot Snakes song, meaning I named it with the two Ks that the Hot Snakes song has instead of Cs.
That band really spoke to me. That sentiment really spoke to me. If you look at the lyrics of that song, they spoke to me too. I just was feeling a little hemmed in, and I wanted to say something. And the fact that it was Ks and my last name was Khanna. It's not alliteration exactly, but I liked the way it looked and sounded to have those hard K sounds. It was a little more purposeful.
Then I realized quickly that my interview style tends to get into people's creative motivations, why they do what they do. I'm often drawn to people who do things on their own terms and do things differently. I don't know that I had all of these thoughts at the time, but I certainly have a sense memory of feeling like I need to be proud and take ownership over what I do.
BNB: Episode titles of Kreative Kontrol are always the guest's name, and you never censor provocative names, like put a dash or an asterisk in Tropical Fuck Storm or Pissed Jeans or Fucked Up or whatever. I don’t think the podcast platforms censor them, do they?
VK: Apple does it. Not every time. I don't think they did it with Tropical Fuck Storm, but they will. They have asterisked Fucked Up's name in their feed.
BNB: Podcast analytics are notoriously limited, but have you noticed, if you have one of those names, is there a difference in the reach or how many plays it gets?
VK: I think it only impacts engagement on more censorious social media platforms. Facebook will limit your reach if you've got certain… I mean as we're speaking, it's like if you have the word “genocide” in your show description or “Gaza” or whatever, you will be like, “Normally my posts get 50 likes, easy, on Instagram, and it's doing nothing.” Sometimes the algorithm gets you. They definitely are doing something. I don't know that it translates that much into pod download/stream statistical issues, but in terms of social media reach or website reach, yeah.
But I think the people who follow your show or follow the artists that you're profiling, like Tropical Fuck Storm... That episode, they really got behind it as a band on their socials. So their fans found it and then their fans found me. That is always the sweet spot in terms of community-building and audience-building. I like this band, and I'm going to talk about them. The band seems appreciative or the artist seems appreciative of the conversation. They share it with their audience. Then members of my audience are like, “I didn't know who Tropical Fuck Storm was. This sounds great. The guy sounded really cool. I liked the music.” Those are my favorite messages, frankly, from my listeners. It suggests that they trust me, so they feel like if I'm taking the time to talk to someone, it might be worth their time to check out their work.
Subsequently, Tropical Fuck Storm fans ideally would be like, “Hey, that interview was cool. Who is this guy? I haven’t heard of his show before.” Those are the other great messages. I love that part. It's a roller coaster ride, of course, of will that stuff happen, but when it does, when the worlds collide, if you will, it's the best.
But yeah, sorry, to answer your original question: If you like a band called Tropical Fuck Storm or Fucked Up, then you are potentially more open-minded, and you're going to find the thing despite many obstacles on the internet.
I do think that the bands who put curses in their name probably don't care about the stuff we're talking about. If you give yourself a name that is going to niche yourself, then you're probably in a way not as concerned. If that's your name from day one, you're probably like, “Well, we're going to have limited resonance in the mainstream. Our name has curses in it.” But then Fucked Up or Tropical Fuck Storm routinely sell out venues that are pretty mid-sized to huge, and when they do stuff, it's always in the news. They're not ignorable.
BNB: You're also playing with people's expectations. Fartbarf talks about how if your band name is Fartbarf, people's expectations are very low when they see you. Then it’s like, “Hey, they're pretty good for a band called Fartbarf.” Or you have the situation with Gay for Johnny Depp, which was a way for a band that plays aggressive music to keep out the meatheads.
VK: I mean, potentially you might also draw the meatheads in to find out what the situation is. That's a complicated one.
I don't know why I didn't even think of this, but as a kid encountering the name Dead Kennedys. There are shocking and provocative names and you don't really understand. I mean, yeah, what's the point of that, exactly? Is that going to distract from the music you make? Then you listen to Dead Kennedys, or when I did anyway, I was like, “What the hell? This is so incredible.” But there would be people who may not even push play because of the name. So are you shooting yourself in the foot, or are you drawing people in?
BNB: Have you skipped checking out a band because of a name?
VK: I don't think so. I mean, it's just not how I operate. There's a band out of Canada called the Inbreds. Do you know them?
BNB: No.
VK: So the Inbreds, that's a silly sort of name. And yet the music that Mike O'Neill wrote and sings in that band is super-sophisticated pop music. He is one of the greatest pop songwriters of our time.
They were an underground band here in Canada and then in the major-label feeding frenzy, I think they signed a thing with a subsidiary of Atlantic. Like a lot of smaller bands, it didn't really go the way they wanted it to, but they were called the Inbreds. I just wonder if someone in their A&R department or whatever was like, “Okay, you've got this great album and we want to market it, but you're called the Inbreds.” I wonder if it ever gave them pause.
There's all sorts of ways where you can create confusion, but I do think sometimes thinking five seconds longer about whether or not you're going to call your band the Inbreds might have some impact on your trajectory.
I just want to be clear: I have no problem with that name. But at that time in the ’90s, if you're the fifth, sixth, seventh coming of Paul McCartney, but your band is called the Inbreds, there's probably something to that in terms of your reach. Even if you make a pop masterpiece that could be played on mainstream radio, it's unlikely that some morning-zoo crew is going to be like, "And that was the Inbreds!"
BNB: When I interviewed Ombigiizi, Adam Sturgeon said that bands from Canada have a reputation for boring names. Do you agree?
VK: I don't think we have a reputation for that. Did he give you examples?
BNB: No, he just said it’s common for Canadian bands to have names that are kind of a shrug. He used the word “milquetoast.”
VK: I've cited a few already, like Dayglo Abortions, NoMeansNo...
BNB: Fucked Up.
VK: Yeah, Fucked Up. Here's one that I didn't know what to make of: Propagandhi. So Propagandhi, if you think of where they went, [they’re a] pretty serious band dealing with real-world issues, getting into sociocultural and political unrest. But they started out as a Fat Wreck Chords band called Propagandhi. I'm an Indian guy first of all, and I'm like, “So their pun on propaganda is to call their band Propagandhi? What are you doing, exactly? What is the point of that?” Then as I say, they evolved into this very politically outspoken and politically conscious band.
BNB: They were that way from the jump, though. That very first record is full of it.
VK: Yes, you're exactly correct. That's a good point to raise, but my point is, is that not completely a joke name?
BNB: Oh, absolutely.
VK: I don't think that's milquetoast at all. It's silly, but it was in the vein of silly, nihilistic punk bands. Nihilistic, I mean, in terms of career nihilism, careerism. You pick a band name sometimes, I think, because it sounds cool to you and your friends. It's some sort of inside joke or reference, but some people pick them ’cause they think it'll look cool on a record sleeve or they're thinking about how it's going to be perceived externally, which is interesting.
Every person who's going to enter the public sphere will be viewed externally, but I think some people are more deliberate about their choices in terms of what's palatable. But yeah, Propagandhi is a weird band name for what they do. Or maybe it's perfect.
BNB: Well, I'll close out by asking you the thing I always ask everybody: Is it better to have an anodyne name that seeps into the background or a bad name that is memorable?
VK: A bad name that is memorable? I mean, I guess as long as you're not offending anyone maybe or purposely trying to troll people. Because that's a lot of what we're living through right now, is just constantly being like, “Is this person fucking with us, or is this how they really feel?” I mean, it's almost like a comedy issue at this point. “Is your name meant to just be playful and funny provocative, or is it because I'm not familiar with these terms? Are you saying something else?” Because language itself is so fractured and people speak in their own codes in their communities that sometimes you're like, “I don't even know what these terms are.”
I think the vernacular changes. I said this on some other thing I was on recently. I do think we're living in a bizarre time for language comprehension, and that subtlety and nuance and satire is missed by more people than I can recall. Everything's got to be blunt. Or the other side of it is some people take everything so literally that they miss the subtlety and the nuance.
POST-SCRIPTS
I know I said I’d have a regular issue this month, in addition to two interviews (check out Winona Fighter if you missed it), but I didn’t have time to pull it off, alas. The usual nonsense will resume in August.
Check out Vish and his son’s recent “All Things Konsidered” episode about Clipse to see just how close the apple has fallen from the tree.
Vish wrote for the AVC while I was there, but I wasn’t part of the site’s day-to-day operations at the time, so we never met.
…excellent interview - great job all…
I always assumed that Fugazi got the name from the Italian word. Is there an interview to cite that they got it from the Vietnam war slang?