The music Greg Obis has made over the years has acted as a lyrical outlet for his dissatisfaction and disappointment for how human society chooses to function.
This was always the undercurrent during his tenure with his earlier beloved post-punk and post-hardcore bands Yeesh and Clearance. But with his newest project Stuck, he has found a way to crystalize his communication skills and be more direct with his emotions with an onslaught of .
On the band’s new EP Content That Makes You Feel Good—their first release with Exploding In Sound—Obis feels that he was able to move away from the inward reflecting frustrations he kept bottled up inside on their self-released debut Change is Bad and point to larger universal issues.
This lyrical shift is on full display throughout the EP, especially on the seering single “City Of Police.” The song finds Obis singing in character as a police officer out for blood in the name of the greater good. That good being upholding the powerful stranglehold the racist and abusive police force maintains on the community. The song has echoes of the goons that Jello Biafra vividly portrayed on the Dead Kennedys’ classic “Police Truck,” but this time around Obis has no need to allude to these cops committing these crimes in the shadows. In real life, they do their evil deeds out in the open.
“I don’t want to say that making political music is useless,” said Obis, “Functionally, it does something. I think that’s the first level of what I want to hit, especially with ‘City of police.’ The conversation has fallen so far away from what was [being discussed] a year ago and we’re going to see it continue to move away from defunding or abolishing police as we have to plow through these new narratives like the crime wave—that being a result of bail reform.”
“That song in particular is very of the moment and 2020. But obviously, police funding or abolition isn’t going to happen overnight,” he explained, adding, “I think it’s, like, important to have arts that speaks to that. I want to get people riled up about it.”
It’s a welcome turn from someone who has done the work dredging the ugliness out of his psyche for the sake of art. You always hear a play on the phrase “You need to work on yourself before you can be good to others,” when the topic of self-improvement comes up. It’s hard to imagine anyone going deeper into that notion when reading the lyrics to the Change is Bad slowburner, “Bug Song.”
“I’m the cicada who is screaming for help / I am the yellow jacket stinging himself,” he sings in the song as the tension builds to unbearable heights, “I am the bedbug bleeding the world dry / I am the ant laboring till I die.”
Obis, who grew up in the suburban town of Oak Park just outside of Chicago, understands that there was some dark and heavy shit that he needed to sort through on Stuck’s debut. The album was written largely as a way to grieve the death of his parents—his mother passed away in 2015 and his father in 2018. With that record and those feelings behind him, he feels as though that is territory he never necessarily needs to revisit as a public figure. At least, for now.
“Change Is Bad really helped me work through some grief and some really complicated feelings. And it felt really good to write it. But I think it is gone,” explained Obis. “I felt like I wanted to take a break from doing my laundry in public a little bit. Just because it is exhausting. Those songs are occasionally hard to play or perform. ‘Bells’ is a tough one. But I don’t think it’s like a thing that I’m never gonna go back to because I think that that personal dimension is important to having the ‘soul’ of a song. But also, I think I wanted to get away from it a little bit.”
I caught Obis after a long day of work at his day job as an engineer at the famed Chicago Mastering Service. Both uncomfortably full from just scarving down our dinners—chicken for me, chickpea pasta for him—I ask Obis if he can explain his main gig, mastering records for bands. It’s an art that needs clarifying, as many memes have been circulating online lately poking fun at the recording practice and questioning its importance.
“It is like a weird kind of dark art, as people refer to it,” Obis explained with a laugh. “In essence, it’s making it sound good one last time at the end and getting everything appropriately loud. I think my simplest explanation is always in a song or in a mix, you’re getting all these instruments to blend together in a way that makes sense. And mastering is more like a further step out to make sure all the songs blend together and work together on a record, that they all kind of make sense and are cohesive.”
Obis also works around town running live sound for gigs at long-standing and important Chicago institutions like The Empty Bottle. With so many big post-punk bands from all over the country and from across the pond mining influence from the Windy City, he takes pride in the hometown scene he has found himself embraced by. “I’m so over the moon about Chicago’s music scene right now,” he said emphatically. “Like 2020, in particular, was just such an absurdly good year.”
When I reach him, it’s days before Lollapalooza descended upon the city’s Grant Park with an attendance that they have estimated reached around 385,000 people. While we both spent a fair amount of our conversation talking about how great it is that Chicago’s indie rock scene has become recognized for the American export that it is, we both expressed our worry about what was about to roll into town over that weekend. With the whole thing being broadcast live on Hulu, it could have been one of the few times we could watch a super-spreader event from our homes in real time.
For Obis, he is worried about what the lasting effects caused by the negligence from local government and the people who run the festival will be on the musical community in Chicago.
“It’s gonna be bad,” Obis said bluntly, “It’s probably going to be a super spreader event. It’s really sad to watch. I think we have everybody in Chicago just being like, ‘Why is this happening?’”
It was a disheartening situation in the eyes of someone so in tune with the city’s live music ecosystem. Since our chat, AP News reported that only 203 COVID cases were linked directly to the festival, far from a superspreader event. But Obis saw the loose restrictions around Lollapalooza—led by mayor Lori Lightfoot—as a part of a larger issue surrounding the return to live music in Chicago. Is the money worth putting fans and musicians in danger? What if it had gone the other way?
“At the end of the day, all the people who run Lollapalooza are gonna make a ton of money,” he said with a sense of frustration, “It’s the local music community and the local venues that are really gonna be hurting from this.”