mehan jayasuriya

“We started out really young — That Dog was the first music we had ever done, really. And every single detail we knew, every single part we felt because they were the first parts we had ever written and played. There was so much pressure toward the end that it got a little stressful. So to release ourselves from that felt freeing. I felt like I was on a different path — I didn’t want to do a lot of vocal harmonies or weird chords. I wanted to straighten things out. But after a while, I realized that that’s how my brain works. And all of us in That Dog, that’s how all of our brains work. We were really lucky to find each other in the first place and it’s amazing that after all these years, we still speak the same language.”

“They should have been chess players because they were always three steps ahead of the game, you know? When everyone was doing hardcore, they were doing this weird hardcore/thrash hybrid. Then, when everyone was doing that, they had moved onto this kind of darkwave thing. After that they had moved on to the kinda psychedelic REM-styled stuff. And then with Cement, it’s almost like everyone had finally caught up to them in a sense, as that record almost sounded contemporary.”

“A fancy word for terrorists these days is super-empowered non-state actors. The Internet offers tools that any organization can use to become ‘super-empowered.’ It has been generally accepted political theory since Max Weber that nations have a legitimate ‘monopoly on violence,’ but that monopoly is being broken up by a bunch of non-state upstarts, like Mexico’s narco-gangs, the Iraqi insurgency, and Blackwater private security. No one knows how a new balance of power will be struck, or how much violence will ensue before that equilibrium is found.”

“Pizza used to be a Weird Ethnic Food and now it is Death Culture Sustenance. Do you think when Indian Americans are ultimately absorbed into the amorphous Honky Culture Vacuum, dosas will be synonymous with the spectral remnants of your once vibrant culture?”

“Really nice work by Prof. Shirky’s students there. Making a wide variety of dystopian points in an elegant fashion.”

“Check out the “MIT students” working on the drone project: “The three of us (Brandon McCartney, Natassia Zolot and Radric Davis) can spend the summer focusing on the Panopticopter.” That would be the real names of the rappers Lil B, Kreayshawn and Gucci Mane. (While I have no doubt about Gucci’s engineering prowess, I certainly doubt his ability to stay out of jail for an entire summer; and he seems to prefer working with Kreay’s awful co-conspirator V-Nasty.) “We laughed about it, but then we said this was an idea that’s just one step removed from reality,” says co-founder Mehan Jayasuriya, who put in the rappers’ government names “as a little Easter Egg” for fans. “It’s just believable enough that people might fall for it, or some percentage of people might actually think it’s a good idea, which would be horrifying.”