Fat White Family’s Lias Saoudi hits out at IDLES for “grandstanding on that woke ticket”

nme.com:

Fat White Family frontman Lias Saoudi has laid into IDLES, accusing them of “grandstanding on that woke ticket”.The band have previously criticised the Bristol outfit, siding with Sleaford Mods when frontman Jason Williamson accused IDLES of “appropriating a working class voice” and said their take on politics is “cliched, patronising, insulting and mediocre”, adding that he doesn’t “like them at all”.At the time, Saoudi said they were 100 per cent with Williamson, and added that “the last thing our increasingly puritanical culture needs right now is a bunch of self neutering middle class boobs telling us to be nice to immigrants; you might call that art, I call it sententious pedantry.”Now, he has taken a further pop at the Bristol band yet again.Saoudi told The Independent: “I don’t mind bands being dull or whatever, fair enough, but when you’re grandstanding on that woke ticket I just find that anathema to what rock n’ roll really is, which is the reprobates.

This is freak country. We don’t bring that kind of thing in here.”He continued: “We’re at the end of the band era. Everything is a rehash of a rehash of a rehash.

It is the vapour in the tank. People have become, essentially, like the internet… just nodes in a machine and it’s essential for the efficiency of that machine’s functionality that there’s as little friction between these nodes as possible.“It’s everything turns into everything else and the result is nothingness.

People have become streams of interchangeable code and I think the one bright side about that, if you’re a musician, is you have this ridiculous access to all of these other genres and periods.