What: Mindless Self Indulgence
When: 7:30 p.m., Thursday
Where: Mill City Nights, 111 N. Fifth St., Minneapolis
Cost: $24.50-27
Ages: All ages
With the moniker of some unfortunate fairy tale child of old, Little Jimmy Urine’s music and performances are befittingly out there.
Urine fronts Mindless Self Indulgence, whose jungle-electro-glitch-rap rock was born out of a specific desire to combine hodge-podge interests into a pseudo-cohesive whole.
His sobriquet, derived from his own disbelief that no one made fun of his birth name of Euringer, indicates his utter disregard for the mainstream.
“At the time that we [formed], it was very anti-establishment,” Urine said. “We were like, ‘Well, what are people doing? They have guitar solos. So no [expletive] guitar solos in this band. What are they doing? They’re doing ballads. OK. No [expletive] ballads in this band. What are they doing? They’re going really, really slow. OK. Everything’s really fast in this band.’”****
Formed 15 years ago, Mindless Self Indulgence hasn’t changed much, though audiences have.
“We wanted to build this band from the future, and now we’re in the future and everybody kind of gets it,” Urine said. “People understand glitched-out beats, and they listen to dubstep; they understand having your choruses being ‘[expletive] you;’ they understand not just being singer songwriters; they understand a bunch of high-energy people dressing up.”
High energy is right. It is essential for their chuck-it-in-a-blender-and-shout-it-back formula for music.
However, the clamor of their alternative fans has not garnered mainstream success. But even that has worked to MSI’s benefit.
“We have total freedom in a lot of ways — MTV never gave a [expletive] about us. Radio never gave a [expletive] about us,” Urine said. “I wrote a song called ‘Fuck Machine,’ and I don’t have to change it.”
The band’s recent album, “How I Learned to Stop Giving a Shit and Love Mindless Self Indulgence,” also boasts songs like “Kill You All in a Hip Hop Rage,” “Jack You up” and “Stalkers (Slit My Wrists).”
So, there’s that.
But this semblance is not all that surprising when Urine speaks of early childhood interests. He speaks of sci-fi classics “Blade Runner” and “Heavy Metal” before mentioning that he loved R. Crumb comics.
“It makes sense when I look at the band and we aren’t Duran Duran,” Urine said. “The band is basically a living ‘Rocky Horror Picture Show’ in a sense.”
Much like “Rocky Horror,” MSI operates with an ever-present air of unpredictability.
Yet, here they are, still touring, shocking and smashing their way across the country.
