Make America Hate Again: Filter Frontman Richard Patrick Talks Trump And More
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- There's been something menacing and authentic about Filter since the bassline of "Hey Man, Nice Shot" first emerged from murky feedback in 1995. It's a tradition that continues more ferocious than ever this week when the band releases their seventh studio album Crazy Eyes on April 8th.
"I've always been extremely honest," explains Filter frontman and founder Richard Patrick via phone a couple weeks before the release. "The great mysteries of life are amazing things to talk about in music. I'm gonna leave Taylor Swift and her lovesick stuff with Bieber and Adele - I know she's twenty-one and she's learned a lot in her life, she wants to talk about relationships, great. But there's so much more to think about in the world. I feel like industrial music gives me a platform to reflect."
The new album features Patrick exploring everything from heaven and the passing of his father, to the racial and political climate of America. These are all things that Patrick thinks about with great concern, and over the course of a twenty minute talk he expands on all of it in such a curious and thoughtful manner that it's amazing he manages to pare down such ideas into song-sized slices.
Next week, Filter will hit the road to support Crazy Eyes on what they've dubbed the "Make America Hate Again" tour. It's a nod to something else Patrick has a lot to say about, as he calls it "absolutely a joke on the Republican front-runner Donald Trump."
"He is a crazy dude," Patrick proclaims.
"It's amazing how much like Fox News played into this, because Rush Limbaugh and Fox News have been wailing on the President for so long that they've gotten everybody all revved up," he continues. "It's like the Frankenstein's Monster that just broke free from the table, and I think that it's incredibly scary. I think that a lot of his stuff sounds like Hitler. I mean he quotes Mussolini for god's sake."
After ticking off a list of Donald Trump's platforms that trouble him and labeling him a con man for such ventures as Trump University and Trump Vodka, Patrick crests to his reasoning for the candidate's popularity. "We know who he's playing to. He's playing to the lowest common denominator of people that are so angry, and they don't even know why they're angry, and they're mad at immigrants, and they're mad at brown people, and they're mad at Muslims, and they're angry and they want their guns," explains an exasperated Patrick. "This is the far right wing extremism that this country does not need, and that's all I'll say about that."
Richard Patrick considered himself "kind of conservative" after 9/11, but his experience since and his immersion in the issues has moved him much more left. "I've been voting all my life, but for the past 10 years the Democrats have kind of sounded like the inside of my head sometimes. They have aligned themselves to my thinking and so I've been backing Democrats ever since."
You'll hear much more of Richard Patrick's thinking against an aggressive wall of sound when Filter releases Crazy Eyes on April 8th. The "Make America Hate Again" tour stops in Philadelphia at The TLA on April 26th.
To hear much more from Filter's Richard Patrick - including the story behind their single "Take Me To Heaven" and the role R Budd Dwyer played in the writing of "Hey Man, Nice Shot" - check out the full interview below.
