Our Lady Peace Helps Pussy Riot on Brave New Song
Putin’s got his hands full enough without having to worry about some Russian feminist protest band raising hell.
After years of persecution, arrests, and even prison for their outspoken views, Nadezhda (Nadya) Tolokonnikova and the band Pussy Riot are currently and relatively safe in Los Angeles, USA, making a living in the music business, on tour, in the limelight – thanks in no small part to Canadian rockers Our Lady Peace, who recruited Pussy Riot for a terrific new hit song called Stop Making Stupid People Famous.
A sentiment for our times if there ever was one.
Our Lady Peace – with state-of-the-art Pussy Riot holograms – performs Monday, June 13, at the Winspear Centre. In a recent zoom interview, singer Raine Maida says the idea for the song had been kicking around long before the pandemic struck, “waiting for the right kind of place to put it, the right collaboration,” he says. “Nadya gives that necessary equity to the voice of the message in terms of talking about someone like Putin, and talking about making stupid people famous. She’s such an advocate for not giving these people a platform, for ridding the world of people like that.”
OLP bandmates Duncan Coutts (bass) and Jason Pierce (drums) came up with the breezy riff, and the song flowed from there – “I wanted it to be tongue in cheek,” Maida says, “not so serious and heavy, and something that was a little uptempo felt right.”
Nadya rewrote the entire second verse: “I’ve got the feeling I was dreaming when I woke up in jail,” she sings, “And we keep making stupid people famous, now we’re living in hell.”
This brave artist is perfectly clear on her target, in the song and elsewhere. “Fuck Putin. I hope he dies soon,” she said at a recent concert in New York, where Pussy Riot helped raise $3 million at a crypto fundraiser in support of Ukraine.
Maida says, “They’re safe. I think everyone who is affiliated with the band is not in prison currently, but I think that changes week to week.”
Lest you think this will be some political protest event where a rock concert ought to be, Our Lady Peace has a hopeful outlook for the show, the tour, the future – like the band’s mentor, inventor Ray Kurzweil. Keyboard geeks should remember the great phat analogue synths that bear his name. Our Lady Peace has revisited Kurzweil’s ideas on their latest album, a sequel if you will: Spiritual Machines II.
Maida explains, “The great thing about Ray is that his outlook for the future is very positive, at a time where it’s much easier to sell a dystopian future, scorched Earth, machines take over and humans are replaceable. A positive outlook doesn’t sell, it doesn’t get the juice in the press that it should. People want to know that everything’s going to shit. But Ray thinks simple things like technology as opposed to anything humans can do right now will stop climate change. That’s never been talked about, the idea that computers are going to be able to handle it so much better than we could. They’re just so much smarter, so much more powerful. Same with poverty, food scarcity, all these things are going to be helped by technology; Ray’s outlook is very positive, and so is ours, and we want this tour to feel like that. We want people to walk away feeling inspired, not scared.”
