If the best way to get to see a country is from the back of a motorcycle, Rich Aucoin should be intimately familiar with a good swath of American. Aucoin has famously toured by bicycle, giving him ample opportunity to take in the country at the ground level and enough experience to compose a song for each of the 12 states he pedalled through for his next album.
Naturally, “Reset,” his latest release, is an anti-gun anthem.
To fundraise for mental health charities (Mental Health America/Canadian Mental Health Association, Aucoin began cycling across American just after the shootings in Parkland, Florida while took place on February 14, 2020 and took the lives of 17 people and injured 17 more. The country was (once again) tense after another how-could-we-let-this-happen event, and Aucoin took to it like Kerouc-meets-Pirsig in an attempt to “write something immediately that spoke to their frustration with the gun laws in their country.”
“I wanted to really see the states alone as an observer with lots of time to process the experience. I’ve loved touring there and was interested in how such a progressive country could elect their current president,” says Aucoin.
“After cycling through town after town with decaying downtowns where photos were displayed in the local cafes showing the town in full bloom after the second world war, I could see how his propaganda of ‘Make America Great Again’ really conned people.
“I spent a lot of time on social media and alone over those months and could see how the states had re-entered a period that felt like the late-60s again with both a resurgence in student protest movements and a renewed interest in psychedelics. I was also meditating a lot and thinking about these things while riding.”
For the song itself Aucoin crafted a heavy anthem in the style of Jack White (read: all drum and bass) but using nothing more than a heavily distorted Rhodes and Wurlitzer keyboards. He combined the backing vocals of Kyla Carter, Simone Denny, Maylee Todd, Carleigh Aikins, James Baley, Tarik Henry with a choir of 20,000 people, recorded during the music festival of 2012 at Vieilles Charrues, Evolve, Ottawa Bluesfest and Canada Day in Trafalgar Square.
Of course, Aucoin has had the last two years to work on the song, and a lot can happen in two years. At least 36 mass shootings have occurred in the US since Aucoin’s tour and upwards of 36,000 people have died in America from gun-related deaths each year. So it wasn’t until the quarantine imposed by the current pandemic that Aucoin found the time to edit together the hundred or so news reports on these mass shootings to create the video for “Reset”.
“In going through the hundreds of videos, it reminded me of how often these shooting happen in America and that there’s such a large number that many shootings now need to have a year next to the city’s name to differentiate between them and the mass shootings which have occurred in the same city the year or two before. The shootings have occurred in all types of places and events from a Waffle House and Walmart to a Youtube headquarters and EA Sports Competition,” says Aucoin.
Aucoin also took the liberty of colourfully replacing all of the weapons in the video with some phallicly Freudian counterparts.
“I wanted to remove guns, victims and shooters from the video and have the focus be on protest in response to events,” explains Aucoin. “Guns sales go up during times of fear like after a mass shooting or now during the pandemic and so this is an important time to refocus the attention to dealing with the epidemic of America’s gun violence as they continue to rise. Suicide also accounts for the highest number of deaths by guns and I wanted to shed light on that problem as well as the mass shootings occurring frequently.
“One thing I wish there was more footage of, to include in the video but was impossible to find, was discussion around toxic masculinity and violence against women as many of the shootings include domestic violence at their onset. There is lots of messiness in the discussion of gun violence and mental health as well as both sides, seem to be using different dictionaries for their terminology. The NRA is a lobby group masquerading as a civil rights organization but, just as the Tobacco Institute (TIRC) was dissolved in 1998, hopefully the NRA will be deemed unconstitutional as well.
“Finally, I wanted to block out the guns of this video in the way I blocked out the president in the previous video but wanted to find an object which would demonstrate the desensitized way we see weapons, I picked the dildo because it seems out of place for someone to be showing it off in public and yet the dildo is an object of pleasure not a weapon of death. We should have a bigger reaction to seeing weapons of death being allowed to be touted around in the name of freedom.”
Aucoin is also quick to point out that Atlantic Canada is not immune to such violence, with the recent Nova Scotia attacks still very fresh in everyone’s memory.
“Working on this was especially difficult in the weeks post the deadliest mass shooting in Canadian history while myself and the rest of the community all reflected on what was happening all around us.”
Rich Aucoin’s fourth album, United States, will be released September 18, 2020. You can, however, get access to a good chunk of immediately along with some other cool options over at Aucoin’s pre-release Indiegogo campaign.