“People are looking for something to find hope in … because so much of music and movies and television spits in their face—for lack of a better term—insults them for having very simple, fundamental values, for having children, for caring about your family, for wanting to make decisions about your own body.”
In this episode, I sit down with Matt Azrieli and Brad Skistimas, the latter of whom is also known as Five Times August. Mr. Azrieli co-founded The Post Millennial and is now CEO of Baste Records—a new music label for artists who refuse to conform to political and cultural orthodoxies. Baste just released Five Times August’s new single:
“‘Ain't No Rock and Roll’ was sort-of my response to all of my musical heroes that didn't show up over the last three years. With COVID, and just worldwide tyranny, there was never a better time to speak up against 'the Man,' and very, very, very few of my heroes showed up to the fight,” says Mr. Skistimas.
Watch the clip:
“You look at what Rolling Stone did, and how they lionized the Boston bomber: People don't forget, and people understand now," says Mr. Azrieli. "Rolling Stone Magazine—it’s certainly not a countercultural magazine anymore, right? It's another tentacle of power,” says Mr. Azrieli.
🔴 WATCH the full episode (50 minutes) on Epoch Times: https://ept.ms/S1024MatAzrieliBradSkistima
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Jan Jekielek: Brad Skistimas, Matt Azrieli, such a pleasure to have you both on American Thought Leaders.
Matt Azrieli: Thanks for having us.
Brad Skistimas: It's great to be here.
Mr. Jekielek: Brad, you are better known as Five Times August. You’re now signed with Baste Records, which is incredible. You've got a really wonderful, thoughtful music video out. Let’s start with a quick clip of Ain't No Rock and Roll. Where did this come from?
Mr. Skistimas: This song, “Ain't No Rock and Roll,” was my response to all of my musical heroes that didn't show up over the last three years. With Covid and worldwide tyranny, there was never a better time to speak up against the man, and very few of my heroes showed up for the fight. This was my musical response to those guys.
Mr. Jekielek: It is shocking that people that made their names by essentially speaking truth to power were suddenly absent.
Mr. Skistimas: It is amazing because when you think about the counter-cultural movement of the '60s and the energy that was behind it, now it seems like so much of it was a sham.
Mr. Jekielek: Was it really a sham or did people change their minds? I've heard both theories.
Mr. Skistimas: In my opinion, a lot of it is demographic. There were many younger people around the time of the '60s, and as a result you had certain economic and social considerations, just the result of an old regime being replaced by a younger regime. Unfortunately, the children of the '60s are still an extremely significant demographic in the United States. They do not under any circumstances want to surrender power economically or politically, and this is symbolic of that.
Mr. Jekielek: You've done a bunch of songs now. This new one that you've just launched is one of the tamer ones of your recent set. How did you end up doing these songs?
Mr. Skistimas: I spent a lot of 2020 examining what was happening in the world and thinking about the future that was being made for my kids. I felt like I had a platform as a musical artist. I was looking around and wondering why my heroes weren't speaking up. I decided to step forward and start releasing these songs and say something musically, not just as an artist, but also for the sake of my kids' future. I didn't want them to look back on this time and wonder why dad didn't say anything about what was happening in the world.
Mr. Jekielek: The song, “Fight For You,” makes me think of that.
Mr. Skistimas: Yes, exactly. That one was for my kids, and it was for parents in this movement. Children are actually at the forefront of this fight.
Mr. Jekielek: You have not been treated very well by the music industry, aside from a few outliers here, Brad.
Mr. Skistimas: Yes. You really learn who your friends are the moment you dip your toe into this water and start speaking out about what's important to you. I lost a lot of friends in the music industry, but also gained a lot of new musical friends, and that's really exciting to see. It let me know that I wasn't alone.
Mr. Jekielek: How did you come across Five Times August, Matt?
Mr. Azrieli: Brad's a phenomenal talent. He's not only a phenomenal songwriter, he puts together the music videos for his songs. He's the artist behind the videos. My first exposure to Brad was through the music video for, “Sad Little Man,” and I thought it was phenomenal. The team loves Brad. With Baste Records, it's not a matter of partisan politics or Left or Right, it's a matter of creating a new culture. That's what a guy like Brad does, he's a creator. Rather than somebody who's just going out there being acrimonious, he's actually trying to say something.
Mr. Jekielek: How did you guys meet?
Mr. Azrieli: Brad, we first met in person in Austin, correct?
Mr. Skistimas: Yes, that's true. I was introduced to Baste through Chad Prather who told me about you. Then you guys invited me down to Austin for the Minds Fest conference. We all hung out that night and I got to know the guys pretty well.
Mr. Jekielek: Wait, you're saying that I was there too?
Mr. Skistimas: You were there too with your producer Karys, a wonderful lady, not too far off camera. It was a great event. Brad was there, along with Winston Marshall of Mumford & Sons who played a couple of songs. We had Jeffrey Steele and Ira Dean, two very big songwriters out of Nashville who played their big hit song for Aaron Lewis, “Am I the Only One?” It was a lot of fun.
Mr. Jekielek: Matt, tell me about the different artists that you've signed or that you are looking at. Have you reached out to Oliver Anthony?
Mr. Azrieli: He wrote that great song, “North of Richmond,” a really incredible, amazing song, especially that first verse. That really hit a lot of people right between the eyes. We reached out to congratulate him. Obviously, if he ever approached us, we'd love to work with him too.
In terms of the artists I'm trying to work with, it's about the aesthetic and the quality of the music, but it's also about finding people who are easy to work with and receptive. We're working with Brad at Five Times August. We're working with Chad Prather who also has a show on The Blaze. He has a real Will Rogers-type, humorous quality to him.
We have Chris Wallin, a fantastic songwriter in Nashville who is working with songwriting talent all over town. We found one incredible song called, “I'd Be Jolly Too.” Chad has cut it and it's going to be a wonderful Christmas song. It's raunchy, fun, and full of energy. We're also working with Hi-Rez who recently put out his Trump the Don series. I'm sure that you heard, “First Day Out.” He did an AI Trump parody rap. We're going to put out his incredible song this November about our need to protect the Second Amendment and his personal experiences with it, which have been heart-wrenching.
We're in talks with Afroman to do a parody of, “Because I Got High,” called, “Because Hunter Got High.” The point is you have to have fun.
Mr. Skistimas: The new single, “Ain't No Rock and Roll,” is a group of superstars from Nashville, as well as Pete Parada from The Offspring, who was unfortunately kicked out of his band for not getting his shot, but he plays drums on it. Ira Dean is on bass who's a mega star. Chris, who we mentioned a few times, produced the track, is a mega superstar. Tom Bukovac is on guitars, who is a great Nashville guitar player, along with Jim Moose Brown who played with Steve Miller's band. It is all like-minded, freedom-loving musicians who are on the track.
Mr. Azrieli: That's the other important thing about Nashville, by the way. Nashville is the one place where you can find like-minded, talented people who are just incredible musicians. A lot of them aren't being given their due because of their opinions. Actually, that is we started the office in Nashville, specifically to find those people and work with them.
Mr. Jekielek: In these times, it's hard to imagine how it could be profitable to do what you're doing.
Mr. Azrieli: You make a great point. I ran a big conservative news website called The Post Millennial. Right around the time that Covid hit, and then during Summer of Love, we had a really fantastic journalist who still works there, Andy Ngo, who covered Antifa and what Antifa was doing in Portland. We had another wonderful guy, Harry Hoffman, in Seattle. We had the Pacific Northwest covered, and as a result, we had tons and tons of boycotts.
The thing that I learned about conservative media is that people are looking for something to find hope in. They're looking for art and culture because so much of music and movies and television spits in their face, for lack of a better term. It insults them for having very simple, fundamental values, for having children, for caring about your family, and for wanting to make decisions about your own body.
You're right, no business is guaranteed to be profitable. However, I believe, at least in terms of the mission, that we have to exist, and this kind of art has to exist. The success of this kind of art is inevitable. God willing, there will be proper stewardship and I won't do anything stupid. God willing, it will succeed.
Mr. Jekielek: The Post Millennial has been a very important media property in the ecosystem, which of course we look at very often. People are absolutely looking for something approximating straight up news.
Mr. Azrieli: Yes, absolutely. For example, Tim Pool is an extremely talented guy and he reads The Post Millennial. Other than Timcast, if he's reading something, it's often The Post Millennial. You mentioned that people at Epoch Times are reading us too.
When I founded The Post Millennial, that was the entire idea. I looked at conservative media and I saw that everybody was reacting to the New York Times, or in my case to CBC [Canadian Broadcasting Corporation]. But there was very little on-the-ground reporting, and very little simple relaying of the facts was being done.
We can't always be on the back foot. We have to be creating art. By the same token, we have to be reporting the news and doing it well. You saw what happened during Covid and how the bias was reflected in terms of the stories they wouldn't share and wouldn't report on. Reporting the news is what Epoch Times does very well, by the way.
Mr. Jekielek: Brad, I first heard you at the DC Defeat the Mandates march. It was one of those moments where a whole lot of people got together to talk about many of the things that you write about in your songs and construct into your videos, which are remarkably creative. How did you come to this from doing kids' music? Please share your journey as a musician.
Mr. Skistimas: I started Five Times August right after high school. For a good decade, I was touring colleges singing pop love songs. I had a lot of songs licensed to MTV shows and different indie films and commercials. That's what I was doing for a really long time.
Then I took a break from that and started a whole new kids project called The Juicebox Jukebox. I was making the most pure music I could put out there about kindness and being thankful, but doing it in a hip way. My entire intention behind it was to create music that was fun for parents and teachers, so they could enjoy it just as much as the kids.
Throughout that time I was making videos to go along with those songs.
Then 2020 hits and I stop everything I'm doing musically. I was examining the world around me. I took that new skillset of making videos and turned them into what I am doing now with protest music. It was an interesting arc to go from starting Five Times August to becoming a dad. My headspace was focused on my kids and putting out that music, and then I pivoted into being a protest artist, of all things. I never would have thought that up myself, but that's where the road led me.
Mr. Jekielek: Did you think to yourself, "I need to make protest music now. No one else is doing it, so I have to do it." Was that your thought process?
Mr. Skistimas: Not necessarily, because they were speaking out a little bit. Tom MacDonald is a great example of somebody who really practices freedom of speech in his music, and he's been around doing it for a while. That let me know it was okay to start saying things that might be considered taboo.
As a songwriter, I felt like I just had to vent. I released a song called, “God Help Us All, which was the first song that I put out in this trajectory. I thought that would be the one song, my one say on what was happening in the world. I started getting all this new feedback on that song which thanked me for saying what needed to be said. That let me know I wasn't alone. It also let me know that I needed to write more songs like that to let others know they weren't alone.
Mr. Jekielek: You imagine protest movements to be bottom up and very grassroots like the truckers convoy in Canada. People who tracked it from the inside found it to be very grassroots. On the other hand, you also have protest movements like BLM [Black Lives Matter] which are very top down with huge amounts of money being pumped in from the top. Are they both protest movements? What do you think about that, Matt?
Mr. Azrieli: In the United States there's one part of the political system that is very much in favor of certain kinds of protests, even violent protests. For example, in the United States, everybody was told, "You have to be inside. We're under lockdown." In Canada, we had a curfew.
Then the Summer of Love came and suddenly you are told that you can go out and protest for racial justice, that looting is peaceful, and that you don't even need to be contact-traced if you're at these events. But regular people weren't allowed to go to the park. We gave up so many of our freedoms; freedom of speech, and freedom of assembly, all in the name of a medical emergency.
The reality is that we have to cherish our freedoms. Regardless of the reason, we can't surrender these fundamental freedoms, whatever they are, because they are what make us American or Canadian or part of the Western world.
Mr. Skistimas: There is a clear system in place. There is one side of the aisle that has controlled the narrative where it’s okay to speak up for this one group of things, but if you speak up for this other group of things, it's not okay. This one group of things happens to have the megaphone, so you see a lot more of it in mainstream media, and that is what is pushed through the mainstream mass narrative. Then on the other side of things, there are these simple, fundamental values that are being attacked, and that is not okay.
Mr. Azrieli: When I was running The Post Millennial, if you tried to post anything at all about Covid, even just a completely milk toast news story, algorithmically, you were getting annihilated, almost immediately. It was a problem for a non-mainstream publication to even talk about Covid at all. That's why it's so critical that we have Twitter now and that Musk has democratized it. For example, we would have had no idea about Israel and Gaza and what's really going on. It's extremely important that we have some semblance of reality that isn't just the New York Times.
Mr. Jekielek: Absolutely. Please tell me about your journey from Post Millennial to Baste Records.
Mr. Azrieli: The Post Millennial started out as a small blog about Canadian politics. I met Ali Taghva, a Persian Canadian journalist and entrepreneur, and still a wonderful friend of mine. We went out for Korean barbecue and that was the start of it. Admittedly, we had a more partisan approach than other news sources do. We had a far more classically partisan approach than The Epoch Times, for example.
Over time, we found that simply reporting the facts was so difficult to come across in Canada, and we became one of the largest news sources in the country. There was a point where we were hitting between 3 and 4 million unique Canadian readers every single month. In terms of equivalent numbers in the United States, that's roughly 30 to 40 million people in terms of the size of the population.
That was because in Canada, predating COVID, we had a very out-of-touch mainstream media. It's gotten to the point where you can't share news on social media anymore or on Facebook, because the government honestly believes that people are on Facebook to read the CBC, which is absurd. I don't think any of the three of us have ever gone on Facebook just to find a CBC article. I could be wrong.
But the point is that these people live in a very narrow bubble of opinion. When you actually try to democratize media and share things with people, whether it's news or whether it's music, you're going to reach an audience, because there are people who are desperate to be represented in the media that they see.
I had some success with Post Millennial, and I was blessed to have a wonderful team. We have a fantastic team at Baste Records as well. We have Chris Wallin who worked with Brad on this single. Chris is a number one hit songwriter who had a number one hit with Toby Keith, “Love Me If You Can,” which got replaced by another number one hit by Kenny Chesney, “Don't Blink,” which is a phenomenal song if you haven't heard it. We also have incredible people in operations and marketing.
What we can achieve with Baste is a platform to start a real cultural movement. In the '60s, there were some incredibly talented filmmakers, songwriters, and poets who changed society. God willing, that's what we're going to have here at Baste, too.
Mr. Jekielek: Please tell me about your vision for your writing and your music.
Mr. Skistimas: What I try to bring back with the music I'm writing now is something with meaning, something with substance, and something that sounds like you haven't heard it in a while that's a little familiar, but also unfamiliar, like, “Where has that been?” That's the goal. It's what I love about music.
It's what I grew up listening to, that music from the '50s and '60s and those artists that I admire. That's what I hope to bring back to music, because a lot of music right now in the mainstream is fluff and doesn't mean very much. It's really just marketing.
For a really long time in Hollywood, we admired these people because they made a movie or because they made a song that we connect to. Then they win an award and they use that moment to pretty much tell us how to live or what we need to support. The average person is tired of that. What's going to be important moving forward is who's making the entertainment that we are all absorbing.
Mr. Jekielek: When you're getting involved in culture, that is also telling people how they should live, isn't it?
Mr. Skistimas: Culture matters. The stories that we tell each other matter, and the music we listen to matters, but it's not a command. I don't want to tell anybody that they have to do anything, but just give the suggestion that maybe you could be a nice person, maybe you should give people the freedom to make their own decisions, and maybe you should allow people to assemble freely. Those are the things we value.
Mr. Jekielek: Brad, I want to go back to talking about the music that you made for kids. Today, it has become morally acceptable to manipulate people, but I doubt any of your songs are like that.
Mr. Skistimas: Right, especially with the kids' music. That was the most pure, honest music I could put out into the world that had absolutely no agenda to it. It was a gift to other families to say, "When you need a break from the agenda stuff or you don't want to question what it is that your kids are watching, just listen to this music."
Mr. Jekielek: There's a really excellent book titled, Cynical Theories, that explains the birth of woke culture and how it works. Specifically, it says that people who believe in this woke ideology have a very cynical view of humanity. They view every interaction, like ours right now for instance, to be a power play. It's just my attempt to exert power over you, and your attempt to exert power over me. That's how things work. When you say that kindness is incredibly important, that's actually a subversive thing in this day and age. What do you think, Matt?
Mr. Azrieli: Yes, to be earnestly kind is a little controversial. Is it worth the risk?
Mr. Skistimas: As far as what's happening in culture right now, it's the fact that there are values that are being lost within the culture. What's happening in the mainstream is that there is a constant push to be more and more controversial. We're seeing rappers now doing lap dances with the devil. We're seeing music videos where it pretty much just looks like you're in a strip club for the entire three-and-a-half minutes. People are just getting tired of that. These simple messages are reminders that there is innocence out there to be celebrated as well.
Mr. Azrieli: Absolutely. The thing to remember is that throughout this entire cultural revolution from the '60s onwards, the Satanic imagery has been used in abundance. We've always decried it. At the end of the day, we shouldn't be shocked, and we shouldn't even be horrified anymore. We should just laugh at it because it's so clearly absurd. At the end of the day, the best revenge is to live well. You just have to laugh about it, because if you don't laugh, you're going to cry.
Mr. Jekielek: Why do you think that imagery is so popular? Specifically I'm thinking about the Grammy awards that happened recently where it was a hyper-version of this.
Mr. Skistimas: It's part of the demoralization of America. When you're pushing it further and further along as a way to sell records, make money, and drive an agenda home, it's going to keep getting worse and worse and worse, until it eventually does come back around to those more simple values. You can only push it so far before people start saying, "We've seen that. What else is there out there?"
Mr. Jekielek: One of your songs, if I recall correctly, got to number five on iTunes. Do I have that right?
Mr. Azrieli: The most recent one got to number three on the singer/songwriter chart. God willing, we're going to get up there on the total chart.
Mr. Skistimas: Absolutely. Yes, “Sad Little Man” got pretty far up there. Actually, the entire album that I put out last year was all protest music. That album, “Silent War,” got up to number five on the iTunes charts. Hopefully, we'll do even better with the new single.
Mr. Jekielek: What was the general reaction from the music industry?
Mr. Skistimas: When they see success, their idea is to either ignore you or take you out of certain things. Along the way, in my journey of releasing these songs, it's been a stair step to the realization that there is very much an agenda to silence you. I've had my Wikipedia page deleted.
Mr. Jekielek: Completely deleted ?
Mr. Skistimas: Completely. The Five Times August Wikipedia page was up for 10 years, and it wasn't bothering anybody. It wasn't taking up prime real estate. But after I released the song called, “Sad Little Man,” about Anthony Fauci, I pushed the wrong buttons with some of the overlords on the internet, and they just completely removed my page.
Mr. Jekielek: What was the pretext?
Mr. Skistimas: The pretext was that I wasn't relevant enough to be on Wikipedia.
Mr. Azrieli: You were relevant for the past 10 years, but then suddenly ...
Mr. Skistimas: Yes, all of a sudden.
Mr. Jekielek: Comical isn't the right word. It got removed precisely because it became more relevant.
Mr. Skistimas: Right. Those are the tactics. The idea is that they would rather try to erase you from the conversation altogether. It's the same thing with YouTube. They've attacked a lot of my videos and have pulled them without any warning whatsoever.
Mr. Jekielek: You mentioned the megaphone, and I actually use that term as well. It’s the mechanism used to manufacture perceived consensus in society.
Mr. Skistimas: In a Chomskian fashion, manufactured consent, that type of thing, Jan?
Mr. Jekielek: We're very susceptible to the idea that the people around us think a certain way. If it's a lot of people, you will think, "That's just how things are." Even if you're very contrarian, you can be quite susceptible to that perception. As you were pointing out, only a very tiny sliver of society actually believes in the consensus view, but the megaphone has the ability to push it through the culture and society.
Mr. Azrieli: It's like a civil religion. There are a set of secular precepts that we all seem to just take on faith alone. The Covid pandemic wasn't the only thing on the agenda. The climate crisis got paired right alongside it. There were protests in Brooklyn for Black trans individuals happening at the exact same time that Hasidic Jews were getting arrested for attending funerals. What we as a society have become less Christian, and as we've become less nomian we're trying to find new ways to express that very necessary religious aspect of our identity.
Mr. Jekielek: Pardon me, less nomian?
Mr. Azrieli: Nomian. Carl Schmitt defined the Greek word nomos as meaning the ethics of a polity when it begins to occupy a space. For example, our founding fathers wrote the Constitution. The American, nomian ethic is freedom of speech and the right to own a firearm.
Mr. Skistimas: We're talking about core values and core assumptions about what is good in the world.
Mr. Azrieli: Absolutely, and in America, it's the Constitution. In Christianity, it's the Judeo-Christian ethic. Both were effectively torn apart by our response to Covid and our response to each other, with Americans refusing to talk to each other and love each other. The message now has to be that we have to rekindle that love for each other. Because at the end of the day, we're part of the greatest country on earth, so there's no reason we should be at each other's throats.
Mr. Jekielek: Why do you think the whole music industry has gone in this direction? We'll call it the progressive direction or the antinomian direction.
Mr. Skistimas: It's an organic unfolding of events. I used to make a joke where I would say, "This is all Elvis's fault for shaking his hips on TV." But really there's some truth to it, because that hadn't been seen before when he appeared on Ed Sullivan. That was controversial back then. Then the next thing you know, The Beatles come along and long hair is something. Then there was free love, make love not war, and that became a thing. Over the decades, it has naturally unfolded, and some of it was innocent and wasn't intentional.
Eventually, there have been underlying satanic themes for just shock value. Eventually, those themes get taken hold of by a generation and brought into another generation and are taken more seriously. It's just organically unfolded in that direction to where it's a constant desire to push the boundaries.
Mr. Jekielek: That's very interesting. Matt, do you think it's an organic thing to push the boundaries, or is it an agenda-driven thing?
Mr. Azrieli: I don't think that it's an agenda. Everything is just as stupid and accidental as it appears. An instructive example of this is the Church of Satan, and the head is some guy in Austin, Texas. But when he talks, they're not sacrificing a goat in the Satanic temple of Austin. There's no child sacrifice. I mean, come on. Again, I'm not advocating for it. The point is that he just sounds like a moralizing Calvinist. He just sounds like a CNN news anchor.
At the end of the day, people say things for status. They want to look cool and have prestige. In the name of that idol of prestige, we've just gone down a rabbit hole of stupidity in order to look cooler to each other.
Mr. Jekielek: The Satanic Church is very much the inversion of all the Judeo-Christian values. That suggests a very deliberate attempt to foster a different kind of culture, a different kind of mentality as opposed to something accidental. That is an example.
Back in the day, you had Herbert Marcuse with his concept of repressive tolerance which essentially says that if you have a progressive Left-wing view, all you do is morally right. If you have a traditional, conservative view, everything you do is morally wrong, and you have to struggle in the appropriate way to get rid of those things.
To me, it's not just happenstance, whether it's the Satanic Church or whether it's accepting these progressive values as a creed. Earlier, you mentioned this secular religion.
Mr. Azrieli: Ariel Pink made a very good point about this. It was just in some kind of offhand tweet, but his point was, if you were really anti-Christian, would you begin doing all of the terrible things that Christianity says that an anti-Christian person is going to do? The traditional argument behind abortion was, "It's not a wonderful thing, but unfortunately it has to happen sometimes." That's what it was. Now, it's a completely different thing.
Right now you have people like Marina Abramović who was awarded some kind of a role with Ukraine for whatever reason. She's a sensationalist, shock artist, and so much of her art is simply about that subject of abortion and lionizing it.
At the end of the day, it's easy to predict where our society is headed because it's just decaying. The things that we're doing now that are pretty bad. In Canada, if you didn't get a Covid vaccine, you couldn't ride a bus, you couldn't go to the grocery store, and you couldn't watch your wife give birth to your child. Often you couldn't receive medical treatment.
In Canada most people die before they ever get an organ from the donor list, but we took people who were about to get an organ transplant off the donor list. We essentially said, "You're not taking the vaccine. You're going to die. It's not our problem."
If you look at what's happening with medical assistance in dying [MAID] in Canada, as of March 17th, 2024, people just with mental illnesses are going to be able to have access to a MAID provision That means that a nurse is going to be able to kill them if a couple of doctors sign a waiver. It's very predictable, and it's very sad. But is it a conspiracy?
Unfortunately, we're just as stupid as we seem. That's my opinion.
Mr. Jekielek: Brad, you mentioned global tyranny. What do you mean when you say that?
Mr. Skistimas: What I'm referring to are all of the mandates and restrictions that were put in place all around the world during Covid. People were being told, “Stay home. Stay away from your friends. Don't speak up. Cover your mouth.” There was a lot of that happening and it wasn't just in cities. It wasn't just in states. It was all over the entire world in every country.
Mr. Jekielek: Are you seeing what you're doing respectively in your music and in the music industry as a renewal to counter that degradation that you're describing?
Mr. Skistimas: Yes. It's interesting that to speak out against those things is now the counterculture. It's a weird inversion of what it used to be, because you're still speaking out against the man and you're still anti-establishment. But because you're not going along with the government and what they're telling you to do, you have become the bad guy. It's a weird inversion of what being anti-establishment used to be.
Mr. Azrieli: That is 100 percent correct. But that's why we can bring this cultural revolution and do our best to impart it. But I don't mean like Mao's Cultural Revolution, God forbid.
Mr. Jekielek: You are overcoming cancel culture, correct?
Mr. Azrieli: That's the thing. Today, if you're an incredible poet, an incredible songwriter, or an incredible artist, who can you work with? There needs to be an underlying infrastructure for talented people. This is the thing that we're so bad at, creating this system or this oligarchic kind of bureaucracy. We're terrible at organizing with each other and supporting each other.
I'm a singer/songwriter, a little bit of an amateur, but that's not my job. My job is to support people like Brad and artists like Chad Prather, so that their great music can come to the forefront of the American conversation.
The song, “Ain't No Rock and Roll,” is a piece of art that's a testament to what the Western world lived under during Covid. It's important that we don't let anybody ever forget it. We can't allow that memory to be erased. There are all sorts of people now claiming that they never told us to wear masks, for example, and that is completely absurd. But that song is going to last forever. That's the legacy that we're trying to leave for our children, which is the legacy of living in the truth.
Mr. Jekielek: You also write about that in The American Beat.
Mr. Azrieli: Absolutely. The American Beat is a side project that we're getting together. We want to talk more about culture, art, and aesthetics. Look at what Rolling Stone did and how they lionized the Boston Bomber. People understand that Rolling Stone magazine is certainly not a counter-cultural magazine anymore. It's another tentacle of power, and that's a depressing realization to have.
Mr. Jekielek: What's in the future for Five Times August?
Mr. Skistimas: This song, “Ain't No Rock and Roll,” is out now and we’ll see where it goes with Baste Records. I'm really happy that something like Baste Records exists right now and that's really important. What's bubbling up right now in this counterculture arena is things that didn't exist three years ago. Baste Records didn't exist three years ago, but now it's here, and that's very exciting.
Now there is an avenue for artists like me to collaborate with other artists, and we are finding each other. I've connected with so many different artists over the last three years where we all support one another, and that support system is now in place. We want to collaborate with one another. I look forward to doing that over the next year or so and seeing where those collaborations lead to.
Mr. Jekielek: There's a whole parallel economy that has been developing. Vaclav Havel conceptualized it back in the day, and you're very much part of that ecosystem.
Mr. Azrieli: Listen, if we're as successful as the Velvet Revolution and we have our own Charter 77, and if somehow I'm elected the president of a new regime of New America, I'll take it. But that probably won't happen.
Mr. Jekielek: Apparently, you have some pretty high ambitions, Matt.
Mr. Azrieli: Listen, I want to start a successful record label. That's actually a pretty monumental ambition, all things considered.
Mr. Jekielek: Where can we find the song?
Mr. Azrieli: You can find it wherever music is streamed. We're very excited to announce that we're going to have Five Times August on Vevo on YouTube, which is hopefully going to take our movement forward culturally and introduce us to a huge audience.
Mr. Jekielek: We have to hear the song and we will finish up with that. Matt Azrieli, Brad Skistimas, such a pleasure to have you on the show.
Mr. Azrieli: Thanks for having us.
Mr. Skistimas: Thanks Jan.
Mr. Jekielek: Thank you all for joining Matt Azrieli and Brad Skistimas and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host, Jan Jekielek.
🔴 WATCH the full episode (50 minutes) on Epoch Times: https://ept.ms/S1024MatAzrieliBradSkistima
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