Artist description M.X.'s unique blend of punk and reggae or punk and folk or punk and Irish or punk and just-about-anything are intertwined with songs about police violence, oppression, racism, sexism, Northern Ireland, and uh, er, oh yeah, love. ______________________________________

Similar Artists Scottie digs the Clash, Tom Waits, Bruce Springsteen, Lee "Scratch" Perry, reggae music, irish music, hiphop music, punk, folk, everything. So that's what he plays. __________________________________

Artist History M.X. Turner on The Wrong Kind of Asshole for America (1995 Triage Records): "I was on tour with Remember Alice, a no-longer-existing Celticpunk band made up of an Italian singer, an Italian-American drummer, an Italian-American fiddler, a Swedish-American bassist, a Japanese guitarist and a German/Jewish guitarist -- but a Celticpunk band nevertheless. Somewhere between Asheville, NC and Memphis we got talking about Dennis Rodman. Someone remarked that in his opinion, Dennis Rodman was an asshole. I countered that I didn’t agree, that I liked Rodman and his style (especially his then willingness to support people with AIDS and breast cancer research and cross-dress, something that no pro athletes are willing to do giventhe sexist, homophobic nature of sports in this country). Even if Rodman was an asshole, I said, he’s the wrong kind of asshole for America, that assholes like Ronald Reagan and John Wayne and Donald Trump are the RIGHT kind of assholes for America. And an album title is born. Originally, the album cover was gonna be sixteen photos -- eight featuring the RIGHT kind of assholes for America (see above), and eight featuring the WRONG kinds -- Malcolm X, Leonard Peltier, Emma Goldman, Mumia Abu-Jamal. You get the idea. Upon further review, we decided that was just too oh, another rhetorical political band. It would have been a fine cover that would have hit people squarely over the head, and since I hate the welts when someone does it to me, I know how others would feel. So we have a photo of me peeing into a urinal done-up like a U.S. flag. Well, that’s not so subtle, but it’s not so didactic, either. There’s meant to be humor and oddness. Look -- the image says let go of the idolitry, the symbols, and concentrate on what we need to do to make things work. If this country’s so great, how come school programs are going down the tubes, AIDS is out of control, people don’t have health care or roofs over their heads, that immigrants are shot at forty-one times by the cops? Me peeing on the flag is a sign of respect, not DISrespect. What’s allegedly great and free about the U.S. of A. is that we CAN release an album with a cover like this. Just like burning a flag. The nation is stronger for acts like these, not weaker. It only becomes weaker when small, narrow-minded people restrict such actions in the name of freedom. That’s not freedom, that’s fascism. I don’t stand for the national anthem at sporting events. People sometimes yell at me for it. You know what? I’m a bigger believer in the U.S.A. than they are. ‘Cause I understand what the Constitution was getting at. They don't. As long as politically-conservative people get steamed at flag-burning and the like, we won’t move forward. And by moving forward, that means making sure everyone on U.S. soil is taken care of humanely, and everyone on other soils can live their lives without militaristic pro-corporate anti-environmental interference from Uncle Sam and Auntie Samantha. It is really me pissing, by the way. Photographer Whitney Cox used a motor drive and we went through a roll-and-a-half of film on that one stream of golden consciousness. (I’d been drinking since nine that morning to make sure we got the desired result.) " ______________________________________ M.X. on Ya Got A Kalashnikov ... Ya Got A Job (1993 Triage Records): "The idea of Ya Got A Kalashnikov...Ya Got A Job was simple. Make a punk album without a punk band. The basic idea got all moshed around during the making of the album. We brought in a lot of acoustic instruments ... fiddles, accordions, saxophones. We stripped songs down to their bare essence. Nearly every song was a different configuration of the band of musicians who worked on the project. Maybe if we had it to do all over again, we might do it with full-band arrangements. Maybe some of the songs would be more fully realized. But that means it would've been a more mundane album, even if some of the individual songs had come out better. The title comes from this: at the time, I'd been working for a number of years at Human Rights Watch, a big human rights organization (as you might've caught from the name). One of our Africa researchers came back from a mission to Somalia -- this was way before anyone was paying attention to the warfare going on there between different factions (which the racist U.S. media said was being waged by "warlords," an image that conjures up colonialist images of primitive natives battling one another. How come WWII wasn't labeled as a conflict between "warlords"?), and way before the U.S. military intervention there. I asked my coworker what it was like there. "Well," she said, "Mogadishu [Somalia's capitol city] is pretty tense. Iran into a friend of mine, who's a camera person with the BBC down there. I'd just gotten in and asked him what the scene was like. 'The economy's falling apart, there's no normal life, the militias control everything. There're no jobs for anyone. Unless you join one of the militias. Ya got a Kalashnikov, ya got a job.'" A Kalashnikov is a Russian-made gun. Kalashnikov was the big Soviet arms manufacturer and now, I guess, is the big Russian arms manufacturer. AK-47s are made by Kalashnikov -- the AK stands for "automatica Kalashnikov, "in other words, an automatic machine gun. We used that title 'cause we wanted something that was a bit challenging, a bit intriguing ("what the hell...?!"), and let people know it wasn't a love-honey-get-down-and-partyalbum. Political bands really run the risk of hitting people over the head, and we didn't wanna do it with this album and this album title. Justin Novak's a great artist who lives up near New Paltz, New York. Primarily he sculpts. He's done shows the theme of which is how fucked up commercial consumer culture in our society is. Justin's work is dark and brilliant and funny and heartfelt -- often all at the same time. I asked Justin if he had a piece that we could photograph for the album cover, and he volunteered this one. Usually artists want their whole work shown or nothing at all, but Justin suggested this detail. It's from a piece he did about Operation Desert Storm -- the full piece depicts an obese U.S. general commanding troops atop a horse staggering from the weight. In front of the general is a cliff that the troops, wearing gasmasks, are rushing toward. At the base of the cliff are spikes, with one soldier already impaled. A big part of being punk is doing something different. I think that makes this a punk album." ______________________________________

Instruments guitar, drums, bass, bodhrán, keyboards, violin, vocals ______________________________________

Albums Ya Got A Kalashnikov ... Ya Got A Job (©1993 Triage Records); The Wrong Kind of Asshole for America (©1997 Triage Records); Clobberin' Time -- cassette-only release (©1995 Triage Records) ______________________________________

Press Reviews http://www.scottmx.com/reviews _______________________________________

Additional Info M.X. appears on: Triage Records 1999 release Snipers In Derelict Houses; drums on 1999's self-titled debut release The Diana Berry Band, and rhythmtree record's 1999 release, Cash For Guns EP (guest vocals on NYC Blues -- Fuck the Mayor) ______________________________________

Location Brooklyn, NY - USA

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