Interview with Hollywood Undead: Common Misconceptions

With six members, who does what in the band?

Well, when we make music there’s only really four people in the group who do it and the other two guys are certainly important, vital factors of the group, but they come along more to contribute to the live shows. The one thing we really didn’t want to do in the type of music we’re doing is, if you’ve ever been to a hip-hop show, it’s typically an iPod or some kind of music player playing with someone just rapping over the whole thing. We have two drummers, a keyboard, a guitar and we wanted to recreate it as best we can and we want to bring across more of a rock show when we play live.

I haven’t seen you guys live yet, so I don’t know how shows go down.

They’re pretty good, well actually they’re the best. You won’t be disappointed.

It feels you are mainly associated with your ‘party, girls and booze’ attitude in your lyrics, but you have some heavier ones as well. Do you find difficulty in people taking them seriously?

No, I mean I think in my opinion we’re far more relevant than any other band around for that reason period. Life has a lot of facets to it and I don’t want to go ‘Okay, can’t write a song about this factor in my life, but I can about another.’ That just makes absolutely no sense to me.

You say what you write is what you live, but on a serious note, you served a short jail sentence before the European tour. Your band mates even encouraged fans to send letters. Now, you owned up and did the time, but on some level do you feel weary about saying things now with a large fan base, many younger kids, who look up to you guys?

Yea, you know I thought about that, because you have to draw the line somewhere, certainly. Especially if there are 15-year-old kids who are like, ‘This is cool because these guys do it.’ There’s a responsibility that in the beginning it’s easier to ignore because at the time you’re just making music to make music. You do shoulder some kind of burden. I’ll talk to kids at shows who are like, ‘I got super drunk before I came here because I knew that’s what you guys do.’ And they’re little kids and I was like, ‘Dude you don’t have to get drunk to come see us.’ We talk about it, but it doesn’t make it okay or right.

That’s one of the reasons we write songs like ‘Young’ or ‘Black Dahlia’ because we know that there’s other aspects to people. You can help to inspire kids and I don’t want the inspiration to end with, ‘I got drunk and high because I went to one of your shows.’ We didn’t really accomplish much then did we?

On a similar topic, the delay of your first album was in part due to conflict with censorship from your first label. Do you feel music in general there should be some level of censorship?

I absolutely don’t agree with that. If you talk to the average teenager, they know plenty more than what we’re saying on our record or what their parents will say to them or what they’ll hear through media. Kids aren’t dumb, kids are very bright people. They know exactly what’s going on probably more than adults do. I think censorship in general is more for adults than it is for kids.