United Nations‘ Geoff Rickly (also of Thursday/No Devotion, etc.) had a lengthy chat with Noisey regarding the constant legal struggles that have come with naming their band after an intergovernmental organization—among other legally questionable decisions. The following exchange took place regarding that:
Noisey: When you were naming the band back in 2005, you had to have known some problems would arise, yeah?
Geoff Rickly That’s the funny thing: no. It actually never occurred to me. There’s no problem here clearly, that’s a government organization and no one would ever confuse the two. I was more worried about the artwork, and I was even preparing the label to print a second version of the record that was going to have a black cover, because the original had the Beatles on fire. And I figured, well obviously the Beatles will sue. Apple Records is notorious about that. So I was worried about the art, had no idea that the name would cause anything, and we never got sued for the art, and only had flak from the United Nations.
Noisey: But a lot of stores were scared to sell that though, right?
Rickly: That’s true, yeah. We had a lot of stores that wouldn’t take that cover, and we had one pretty big account retail store took, I think 7,000 copies? And when they realized there were all of these copyright violations, they have a no return policy, so they sent us pictures of them destroying the record. That was their policy, they would destroy them but they wouldn’t return them. So we have all these absurd pictures of stock boys destroying all these records.
Among the other woes were the departure of a paranoid publicist, the removal of their Facebook page, cease and desist letters (which show up in the artwork for their latest album “The Next Four Years“, out today, July 15th.) Rickly later explained of the bands questionable motives:
“I think it’s really funny that our counterculture, like the idea of punk or whatever, isn’t really counter, it’s a subculture, maybe. It’s a tiny version of the same culture. I think there are aspects of it that have been counterculture, like straight-edge for the right reasons is counterculture, I think veganism for the right reasons can be counterculture. But for the most part, it’s the kinds of cliques and things that become glorified and cool, and everyone’s racing to be the biggest band in the basement.
It’s like, all these people share all the same values you’re supposed to like claim to be against, and you’re like, “This is so stupid, punk is so lame.” That’s kind of a lot of what United Nations has become about, it’s self-critique. It started off as social commentary, but then we realized how stupid that was because we’re just a band. And then the second seven-inch was about how dumb punk is. And then we were like, “Wait, we’re a punk band.”
So now the new record’s about how stupid and pointless we are. It’s become more and more meta to the point where now I feel like we’ve actually found our thing that we do, which is a self-examination of value systems, like our own. A lot of the record’s about that.”
