Diandra Interviews F16s: It Is Time To Eat The Rich!!!!!!!!

For the F16s, joy is what you find within you when devastation is around you. In essence, nothing like a crisis mode to make you stand up for yourself, your people, and your right to live. If there is one place one earth, beyond the U.S., where Covid hit viciously, it is the F16s native India. For their new album, Is It Time To Eat The Rich? through humor and upbeat bops, they observe the existential crisis we have all entered, to a certain degree, at seeing the best way to have survived this pandemic…. was by being ultra-rich. 

Diandra: Describe an “Easy Bake Easy Wake” moment in your life.

F16s: When we actually finished Easy Wake Easy Bake, the song. We’d broken our heads over the arrangement and were just wasting time until everything just came together. Josh and Shank hung out, smoked, and finished the song the next morning.

Diandra: Is It Time To Eat The Rich Yet? does comment on excessive wealth and greed. Where do you find your balance between wanting more and feeling like you have enough?

F16s: That’s the eternal struggle within and without, isn’t it? Contentment isn’t supposed to come easy in our line of work, serving as a deterrent to any sort of artistic growth. Taking pride in the pursuit is the advisable thing to do, like Sisyphus, but less sad maybe. 

Diandra: The album comments on how the pandemic changed India. What would you say was your spiritual and/or social takeaway at seeing its effects?

F16s: Scientific temper, already at an alarming dip, plunged further as Whatsapp forwards cooked up a myriad of “side-effects”. This wasn’t restricted to the poor or the uneducated, most of the misinformation seemed to bubble up from the normally reasonable and the well-educated. God-men ran amuck trying to sway the public, touting their miracle cure as the only way. From the onset, the labour class were directly impacted and ignored – their jobs gone as they had to find their own way back home with what can only be referred to as cattle-herding by the government.

Diandra: With themes of “alienation” and lyrics like, “dancing to our doom,” do you feel life and death has been redefined for you and to what scale or meaning?

F16s: We’re here to live well, not long.

Diandra: When people are alone they do discover more about themselves. What are two new things about you that have developed in these last two years?

F16s: That no one with any self-awareness is a good person. Everyone has shades of good, but when the chips are down we will eat each other.

Diandra: There is a joy and good humor to your music, despite it singing to duress. How do you feel that your culture and family taught you that lesson?

F16s: Our music exists in spite of family and overall culture. We find ourselves in search of meaning and connection outside our culture, since Indian culture wants little to do with us.

Diandra: What is your favorite childhood memory of music?

F16s: A mixtape that had Ace of Base, Shaggy, Whigfield and Michael Learns to Rock, among others with a roughly written playlist on the inlay. Truly awful, in hindsight.

Diandra: What is the most random situation or thought that oddly inspired a song?

F16s: We try to be deliberate with the way we write our material. I know it makes for a good story but we can’t think of one right away.

Diandra: Describe each song of the EP with 3 words or less.

F16s: 

– I’m on Holiday: A literal holiday

– Easy Bake Easy Wake: Gilded Protest

– Trouble in Paradise: Hooks for days

– Sucks to be human: Why stick around?

– The Apocalypse: Cabaret Macabre

Diandra: How do you feel the world will or should change post-pandemic, including in terms of its relationships with music and money?

F16s: We won’t change. It’s a terrible time to be an artist, with each field saturated like never before. People have so much choice, and don’t forge a connection with the music. There’s no give and take. No one’s having to try.

For More Information On F16s Click Here. 

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