Kerrang! Magazine Cover Story
The artist better known as grandson isn’t about to let that happen without a fight. He’s positively crackling this morning.
The Californian summer sun is creeping high above Los Angeles, still a few hours off its scalding peak, but rather than basking in the ambiance of the City Of Angels, Jordan paces endlessly through a leafy garden, seeking answers to difficult questions he might never find.
Initially, this feels at odds with the ‘grandson’ we’ve met before. The ‘YouTuber pluckiness’ and podcasting mic of his first K! cover for Death Of An Optimist back in 2020 has been swapped for urgency, uncertainty and a smartphone selfie-cam held chest high. The deep-set introspection dug into around 2023’s I Love You, I’m Trying is turned inside-out, his probing mind more interested in the motivations of others than wrestling with demons of his own. And as he unpacks the themes of third album INERTIA with a jittery reflexivity at odds with the suspended animation of its title, it’s clear this is the old grandson, just with his anger, agitation and nervous energy cranked to 11.
Back in late 2020, Jordan ventured that his outlook for the future was “cautiously optimistic”. Donald Trump had been voted out of the White House. Joe Biden felt like a promising president-elect. Five years down the line, that optimism still flickers, but it’s struggling to hold back the dark.
“I believed more in narratives of good and bad back then,” he shrugs, openly acknowledging his disenfranchisement in a two-party system awash with anti-working class lobbyists. “I thought if I threw my weight in one direction on the political spectrum things could change and the tide would turn. Since then I’m a lot more pessimistic, a lot more cynical, a lot more angry. I cling to that optimism as a lot of people do, like a life-raft to hold on to in your imagination. Things might get better. But as [that optimism is harder to find] and I see people allow themselves to be duped by hatred and fear over and over again? I just had to make a fucking angry record.”
INERTIA fits that bill fantastically. Rapid-fire banger AUTONOMOUS DELIVERY ROBOT, for instance, is a damning critique of the dehumanising march of technology. LITTLE WHITE LIES tackles the resurgent, often wildly hypocritical use of organised religion as a political tool to push conservative agendas. SELF IMMOLATION, meanwhile, is an incredibly powerful chronicle of how on February 25, 2024 Air Force serviceman Aaron Bushnell set himself on fire in front of the Israeli embassy in Washington to protest ongoing violence against civilians in Gaza, and the grim absurdity of pictures from that day where police came to the scene with guns raised and precious little comprehension.
Deep down, INERTIA isn’t about violent rage, however. Taking the term from a conversation with his father about how many people default through life, “on a path you didn’t intend to be on, as one person or a society” Jordan hopes these songs can provide the impetus to rock people off course.
YOU MADE ME THIS WAY feels like a keystone in that, stressing the need to understand and find empathy for those on the other side of the political spectrum, “without the kind of ‘whataboutism’ that leads people to do things like inviting a climate scientist and a climate denier to a debate when 99.9 per cent of the community have already reached a consensus.” It’s also about confronting one’s own echo chambers, as Jordan did with the Jewish community where he grew up when he realised that their unapologetically Zionist beliefs in no way aligned with his own. ‘Republican or Democrat,’ he rhymes, acerbically. ‘You can stab me from the front… or stab me from the back!’
Lead single BRAINROT kicks off the conversation with a bang, challenging listeners to find space away from the mind-numbing torrent of content to find the space to form thoughts of your own: ‘Watch the stars walk the red carpet / Watch the cops shoot the wrong girl in her own apartment / Become a slave to the free market / Where you pick up the gun or become the target…’
“Social media started out as a tool,” Jordan expands. “It’s allowed me to connect with people all around the world and for my music to be played in places that I couldn’t even imagine. We grew comfortable with it. But social media began to grow its own consciousness, which you could call ‘the algorithm’. That algorithm got trained on ‘who you are’ and it is designed to show you less and less that might disrupt your ideology lest they risk you leaving that platform. The thing that you are is the thing that you become doomed to stay. And these weapons are only being sharpened.
“When I was a kid and I Googled something, I didn’t receive AI interpretations of the question or targeted ads. It feels impossible now to get through all of the clutter of what’s being bought and sold online just to form an independent thought. Never before have people been exposed to this kind of casino-like assault on out senses. We need to learn to compartmentalise ourselves from the internet. It is so important to live in community and experience the world outside of our phone. The world can still surprise you. Maybe you can surprise it, too.”
