Gym Class Heroes
“We usually just have robots write it for us,” divulges Gym Class Heroes drummer Matt McGinley of the secret to the success of the beguilingly enigmatic quartet’s last two full-length records. Chris Driver catches up with the barely serious New Yorker ahead of their first ever Australian tour set in support of iconic pop diva Gwen Stefani.
Late last millennium, amid the emotional turmoil that is high school gym class, two kids with barely anything in common, except a mutual distain for tired formula, forged a musical relationship around the idea of writing songs that bridged the gap between electronically-driven hip-hop and rock & roll. Ten years, three records, a guitarist and a bassist later, Gym Class Heroes can rest easy in the knowledge that they’ve carved themselves a nice little niche in the spirit of that fateful PE conversation. Led by accomplished MC Travis McCoy, the lads from upstate New York have firmly cemented themselves in the international hip-hop and alternative scenes, something McGinley describes as “a really big challenge at first because we had to prove we could win an audience over”.
“When we first came out of the gate and got signed and started touring we were like the black sheep at all the shows,” he says. “I think that musically, what we do is routed in hip-hop but I don’t think it’s restricted to hip-hop. We can play at a punk show and we’re going to be this oddball, sore thumb but, we can play at a hip-hop show and we’re still this weird oddball, sore thumb kind of thing.”
Known mostly in Australia for the hit single Cupid’s Chokehold, a track originally from their breakthrough record, The Papercut Chronicles, which features Fall Out Boy front man Patrick Stump’s melodic vocals which McGinley declares have “got as much soul as *Stevie Wonder*”, Gym Class Heroes have found themselves on bills that very nearly cover the entire commercial music spectrum, including a slot opening for Gwen Stefani during her Australian tour scheduled for late July, though the amiable drummer admits he was “surprised” to get that gig.
“I think it’ll be nostalgic for us to be out on tour with an artist that we look up to like that,” he says as he emphasises an absence of sarcasm, explaining he learned to play drums listening to early No Doubt records. “I think, even now, it’s not music that I listen to day in and day out, but I can still see the relevance in an artist like her.”
Having signed to their current label, Fueled by Ramon because they “had a sick track record for taking bands and putting them out on tour”, the band are another feather in the cap of emo-prince and label founder Pete Wentz, booking headlining gigs in Melbourne and Sydney that are expected to be wall-to-wall sell-outs come show time, when McGinley assures Gym Class Heroes will be at their best.
“I think the energy on stage is a lot different when you’re playing to kids that are six inches away from your face compared to kids that are pushed back by a twenty foot barrier,” he says.
While writing and playing the music for an entire hip-hop record might sound daunting to the uninspired, McGinley explains the process is not as insurmountable as it first seems. With music and lyrics duties completely delegated to respective members of the band, the process of writing music, says the 24 year-old drummer is very much a collaborative effort.
“It’s a democracy. We generally sit in a room and bounce ideas off each other and mould and shape songs until they’re done,” explains McGinley, though relinquishing all lyrical credit to the vocal styling of McCoy, whose song concepts cover everything from myspace.com friend request politics to teacher-student affairs. “I think the cool thing about the way that Travis writes is that he has a very focused and concentrated style when it comes to conceptualizing the song.”
“Like for Taxi Driver [a song with lyrics constructed almost exclusively from the names of punk and indie bands], I remember he called me at two in the morning and spit me the Death Cab line and said he wanted to keep throwing out bands but work it into the storyline of the song,” he continues. “He finished it that night, after calling me every ten minutes with the next few lines of the song and when he spit it all together I was like, ‘Dude, I’ve got the perfect music for that’.”The music McGinley speaks of (supporting his claims that the writing process is never quite the same for any two songs) was originally written for the archapella-style drunken ballad Sloppy Love Jingle which appears in three instalments throughout the latest record, As Cruel As School Children, he explains.
“The lyrics for Sloppy Love Jingle had been floating around for a while and it kept going through all these weird musical transformations,” tells McGinley. “Then, once we did a live show and Travis just spit Sloppy Love Jingle archapella, and it just kind of worked.”
