Four years ago, rap-rock band Hollywood Undead were scheduled to play the Soundwave Revolution spin-off festival. But then, as rapper Funny Man elegantly summarises, “Van Halen got sick.” With the festival cancelled but the travel time scheduled they decided to come out anyway, playing their own headlining tour. They even put in the effort to head across to Perth for a show.
“We spent, like, three days in Perth – that was pretty cool, man. We got to hang out on the beach; our hotel was right on the beach. Kicking around there, checking out the city a little bit. We even saw an opera at the Sydney Opera House.” I’m slightly suspicious of this unrelated factoid, so I ask Funny Man which opera he went to see. “I think it was called Dan Antonio? The Shakespeare play?” he says. “I left halfway through. It was a little too much. I couldn’t sit through the whole thing.”
The line between fact and fiction is pretty blurry with Hollywood Undead. Though the rock half of the band sounds pretty pop-punk, their aesthetic and subject matter is straight horrorcore. I tried to sum up their sound to a friend by calling it “Good Charlotte fronted by Insane Clown Posse” and he made the most horrified face. They rap-sing about murder, suicide, the apocalypse and chloroform while wearing masks like hockey-playing killers or Mexican wrestlers. Funny Man insists that several members of the band have actual criminal records, which is why they found it hard to get into Canada.
“They don’t take that shit lightly up there,” he says. “They don’t allow DUIs, drug charges, any sort of criminal charges. If they see it and you don’t have any documents saying, ‘It’s OK, you’re here for work, blah blah blah,’ they will not allow you in. Luckily we have a lawyer who files all these documents for us to make sure that we get across, that we don’t have any trouble. They give us a hard time as is, but it’s always a fuckin’ pain in the ass and it always costs a lot of money.” He’s sanguine about the trouble with the authorities they’ve had on tour, however. “That’s our own fault because we’re idiots. We’re just a bunch of degenerates.”
To illustrate that fact, Funny Man tells a story about giving half a prescription sleeping pill to an unnamed bandmate on a plane, and the trouble that caused. “He woke up in his sleep, started sleepwalking into the galley and he started pissing everywhere. He had no recollection of it whatsoever. As the flight attendants are telling him, ‘Dude, you just pissed all over the galleyway, what are you doing?’ he’s just like, ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about, that wasn’t me.’ It turned into a huge argument. Then when we landed, I forget where, we had a layover somewhere in Australia, and the TSA and all the cops were waiting at the gate for him. He got in some trouble; we had to talk all the cops into letting him go and all that stuff. It got pretty hectic but it was pretty funny. I guess it was my fault for giving him that little sleeping pill.”
There’s one odd fact in the catalogue of bad behaviour that makes up the Hollywood Undead biography. Back in 2009, they toured with Sonny Moore, the man who would become famous as Skrillex, in the period when he’d left hardcore band From First To Last and put together a new group called Sonny and The Blood Monkeys, but before he’d surprised everyone by switching from angry mall-punk to world-conquering electronic musician.
“He grew up with us,” says Funny Man, a fellow LA native. “We’ve known that kid for a long time. He started this band and we picked him up and as he was touring with us he was writing all that music for Skrillex, and then next thing you know he’s fuckin’ Mr. Skrillex. It was cool, man, it was fun. That tour we did, he did a cover of ‘Fuck Tha Police’ by N.W.A and I heard it the first night and I got stoked, then he asked if I wanted to come up onstage and sing it with him every night.”
Funny Man cites N.W.A as a formative influence, along with the rest of the 1990s hip hop boom, like Wu-Tang Clan and Snoop Dogg. “All that, man. That was what I listened to. It was certainly nice having older cousins growing up who knew what was up, stealing their mixtapes and listening to them in my bedroom, getting yelled at by my parents for listening to all those cuss words. Look at me now – I talk about pussy, weed and butthole all day, every day, dawg.”
There’s a sour note in that fulfilling life of his, however. The members of Hollywood Undead all redesign their masks for each album, and Funny Man’s current design, a black lucha libre mask with “FM” written in gold – an accessory he wears at every show and sees on kids in the audience who know all the words – doesn’t have any meaning for him.
“It’s just a mask that covers my face,” he says bitterly. “You know what’s funny is, I regret doing that one, because after a while I started not feeling it anymore; I just went back to my old mask and [I’ve] been using that one. I learnt my lesson for this next cycle to make something that I’ll appreciate more and want to wear. Not be so bummed out about it.”
Catch Hollywood Undead atSoundwave Festival 2015alongsideSlipknot, Faith No More, Soundgarden, Marilyn Manson, Incubus, Lamb Of God, Fall Out Boy, Ministry, Judas Priest and many more atSydney Olympic ParkfromSaturday February 28 and Sunday March 1.
