Fish Narc on the Pacific Northwest, the Based Mindset, and Lil Peep's Endless Legacy

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Fish Narc's (real name Benjamin Friars-Funkhouser) first act was massively influential, from his work as one of Lil Peep's primary collaborators to the Thraxxhouse and GothBoiClique collectives that he was (and, when it comes to the latter, still is) a part of. In the last few years he's been putting out more solo music to great success, the latest being the surprisingly gorgeous rock record frog song, which saw release on storied indie institution K Records last month.

Ben's one of those people who I've wanted to talk to for a minute now when it comes to their impact on specific strains of under-and-overground culture, and the fascinating new shapes his music's taken provided the perfect opportunity for a very in-depth and insightful chat. Check it out:

Tell me about arriving at the point of inspiration for what you're doing on this album. It feels natural, but is also pretty new for you.
The "Aha" moment came a little bit before I started to write it. fruiting body was recorded punch-in style, and it was just impossible to do live. I couldn't get enough breaths for the amount of syllables. That alone really just drove my next record to be naturally composed in a classic rocker style that I'd somewhat abandoned. My earlier records feel like Soundcloud rap to me, where the beat is just rock. I was rapping on a lot of the stuff, not being very aware of what I was doing. Some of them are really successful in the sense that they convey a hybrid identity in a way that was pretty unique but maybe didn't make the most sense musically.

For frog song, I wanted to have a more active relationship with listening to music and learning covers um. It's funny, learning other people's songs for the first time had me making stuff that feels more personal, and now I like this record better than I like my other records.

Whose music did you teach yourself?
I started off with some of my friends. I learned Wicca Phase's "Rest" and made a master copy of that. It's just one guitar line, but I wanted to see how it came together, so I copied its the pieces and put my spin on it. Then I did "Numb" by Horse Head for the same reason. I was thinking about what they had me do in drawing class, so I started with those two and then I took a break. Then I learned a bunch of Replacement songs, a couple of Elliott Smith songs, the Nerves, "Hanging on the Telephone," "Kiss Me Deadly" by Generation X. It was probably under a dozen songs.

Talk to me more about your influences when it comes to listening to rock music.
The way I learned how to put albums together after I started becoming a beat-maker, I was forced to sample my own guitar-playing style for beats. As a listener, it's informed by my taste as a younger person, but as the person who's making the music, it's definitely informed by having been a rap producer. I wonder if I'll ever settle on one particular current. It never really feels that way.

As a rock listener, I really like emotional, melodic music. For this record, I was listening to Hüsker Dü's Candy Apple Grey and the Replacements' Pleased to Meet Me. I feel like the Replacements are a perfect band, in that sense. There's a line that goes through all of it, but the band is the object and the records are a symptom of that.

A lot of this record sounds very distinctly Pacific Northwest to me. Talk to me about the music from the region you live in and how that's made a mark on you.
God, you could get me going for a pretty long time on this. I've lived in Washington State almost my whole life, except for four years that I was in a suburb of Boston. We moved back when I was 10, and I was fairly socially maladjusted. My parents were really dead set on helping me pursue the interests I had in rock music, which was stirred by listening to the post-grunge radio stations in Seattle. This was 2002, so my main exposure to rock music in the beginning was a station called 107.7 The End. They played local stuff and did CD giveaways, and at one of those giveaways I got this compilation that came from the EMP Museum called Wild and Woolly. It was a Northwest rock sampler that had the Sonics and Paul Revere and the Raiders up to Green River and what people were calling grunge, along with deep cuts from bands of that marketing moment and a few things from after that—Murder City Devils, the earliest Blood Brothers. That's where the timeline ended. I had no identity or friends, so I just got obsessed with local music. It didn't really matter what it was. I went to Macklemore shows that like 10 people were at. I was at any kind of local show as soon as I was back in the city.

A huge negative about being a musical artist in Seattle is that the amazing music of the '90s was a consequence of a huge amount of capital flowing in as well as a desire to make something. There was investment in the in arts and in the idea of a Seattle sound and scene—which a lot of was pirated from Olympia. It created this iconic palette of sounds that people who were outside of the corporate music sphere couldn't help but to engage with, and I think that culminated with the commercialization of Modest Mouse. I'm not saying any of this in a hater way at all.

So out here, there wasn't a huge amount of people that I grew up with going to shows, but it was a pretty big scene of DIY fools who were into local music and inspired by the way it looked. There were people like Phil Elverum, who went so far as to make concrete musical representations of the Pacific Northwest's atmosphere. I think it encouraged people to pick up instruments in a folksy way. At its core, all that stuff is folksy. Nirvana is an all-male riot grrrl band. Riot grrrl is folk music. Even Alice in Chains in their most ultra-commercial iteration, who I think are amazing—they're blues music.

That's why you get some continuity of sound between movements that are socially and historically disconnected. People reach for a guitar and strum it a certain way. Beat Happening is, like, non-musician music. It's a poetic desire, almost—people using really simple materials and basic chords.

You just mentioned Beat Happening, and this record's coming out on K, which is this massively influential institution for a very specific type of indie rock. Tell me about your relationship with the music that K Records have put out and what that means to put out a record on the label yourself.
It's huge. I was very quickly led to the actual basements and art galleries of the real contemporary underground in the 2000s—which, if you saw the Unwound reunion text, they described themselves as occupying something in the post-riot grrrl culture sphere. That's where I was in the 2000s: the Seattle DIY movement. There was a legitimate website, seattlediy.org, that had anarchist resources and was very zine and folk punk-coded—DIY venue resources, all-ages stuff, food not bombs. It was really easy to access this shit, and it was crazy to think about how many people were maintaining unregulated art spaces. I can't even imagine being able to pull that off.

With K, if you went to DIY shows enough, you were gonna see K artists and you were gonna see Calvin in one form or another. I've seen so many different Calvin and Phil Elverum projects, like Desolation Wilderness. My friends were in this band called Christmas that did a 7" on K. They were wild. K were madly involved, and they were institutional. They had this catalog that stretched back to the '80s
with shit that everybody liked, and it wasn't that hard to put out a record on K. As a kid, I was like, "This is the grail, and I always wanted it."

I didn't know if it would be possible, but looking back, they put out whatever they they wanted and that shit was cool, because that is the folk-minded aspect of what Calvin does. He wants to put out records that create the universe that he wants to live in. What made me really trust him with what I was doing was when he described GothBoiClique as folk-minded rappers. I was like, "You are so fucking cool. You actually get it with no explanation. You understand." I have tons of his mixtapes, and growing up I had tons of K Records releases. Lync was and remains one of my favorite bands. That's a crucial missing aspect of the canon that people don't understand. That Modest Mouse microdoc thing on The Lonesome Crowded West started with footage of the final Lync show.

Putting out a record on K, for me, feels like a dream come true—and it also just feels natural. I'm an Olympia DIY recording artist. GothBoiClique is a home-recording DIY movement that was folk music as Soundcloud rap. Based ideology dictates terms for making folk music, and GBC and THRAXXHOUSE is a based movement. I continue to identify as a based person in the Lil B sense, and I feel like Calvin's like that too.

What does the based mindset mean to you now? Obviously it's a term that's been twisted around a lot in terms of meaning over the last 15 years.
Yeah, I definitely should contextualize that, because people would definitely misunderstand. "Based" originated in the Bay Area in the 2000s, and it was popularized by the Pack. For me, "based" was about being de-skilled. Grab any music as a beat, and any vocals. This paragon of coolness—the idea of the rapper— was available to whoever wanted to treat their instrumentals as a beat and just record. That idea of total "no rules, put it together, and do it with whatever means you have available" was a symptom of but also a major driver of cheap equipment for home recording equipment being available, and it drove people to take advantage of those things. It's a consequence of the fact that people can get a Scarlett and a USB mic. FruityLoops is easy to download, more people have laptops.

Lil B thinks differently from most people. Those insane amateur recordings, with some of them it's very hard to understand what his intention was, and others it's very easy to understand the intention but it sounds terrible—and some of them sound amazing and you're like, "This is bullshit." It's a whole universe, and you just cannot deny his humanity when you experience it. The consequences of that were people like the Raider Klan fools, who were making references to old-school rap while also being super contemporary and online.

With GothBoiClique, it was so laughable to sample emo when we did that. It seemed like a joke—but that was based. I don't like a lot of the South Florida shit, but those fools were based too, because they were recording powerful bullshit, and it was strong because of the intention. That was what Lil B was trying to get people to understand: You're powerful, you're a poet, just put some intention behind it and go.

Talk to me about singing on this album. You've spent a decent amount of your career doing production work, but you're putting yourself out there in an entirely different way.
It took a minute to really realize what the challenges were, because when I started back into it, it was so easy and natural. But because I'd been producing and semi-ghostwriting for people—I say "semi' in the sense that I wasn't like, "I'm here to write a song for you," but in the sense that I was administering a lot of melody for people as they were coming up with words—it was just easy to come up with songs.

I started making beats after I was a singer of two different bands. I toured a lot and put out records, and I felt like I couldn't make any more meaningful songs. So I was like, "When I get really good at producing for other people and have helped them make some really good songs, I'll probably be ready to write my own shit again." Honestly, that's some egotistical teenager shit to say, but it did sort of come true. I got really frustrated with producing for people, so I had to do something that I had more agency in.

I stopped listening to a lot of rock music around the time I started making beats and being in THRAXXHOUSE. I had a really like deep taste from being a huge nerd from middle school to my early 20s, and I drew from that a lot. Making Goth Angel Sinner with Peep, I wanted those guitars to feel like Unwound or Sonic Youth. I've always identified as a guitar player in the Northwest tradition, and I was really proud to bring that to what people call "emo trap." I very rarely contributed things that were emo in style—it was almost Northwest-style stuff Iwas playing, and I had to figure out how to make that into good beats.

In the beginning, most of my beats were pretty un-rappable. They had too much personality. I didn't understand that at the time, but I was main character-ing too hard. You got to give them something that's at 90%, and I was giving 120%—there was no space. As I got better at making beats that people would rap on, it was a cropping and simplification of the technique that I developed as a songwriter.

With writing songs, I was struggling to make stuff that didn't sound like it was made for Peep. I was really locked in with Peep when he died, and coming back to writing songs was a consequence of the long time it took for me to realize that I wasn't gonna produce for anybody else in a meaningful way. Even on WiLDFiRE, which is the record that people who like my solo music have heard the most, there's stuff on there that I just don't really identify with. Musically, it sounded good and made sense, but listening back I'm like, "This would've been really cool if it was R. Stevie Moore-level fidelity right now. Who the fuck was I, making this?" Because I'm always real, making my shit. Sometimes I get so tunnel vision with stuff that, looking back, I don't even recognize it.

Tell me where you're coming from with this material on a lyrical level.
Just this past weekend, all of the GothBois were together hanging out. We're all fans of each other's stuff, and some of us have hung more than others, but some people haven't hung at all, and this was their first time really chilling. I overheard a lot of conversations and analysis of people's music and lyrics and listened to other people's songs with fresh ears, and I was like, "God, some of these guys are just fucking insane." Horse Head is an absolutely insane lyricist, and his new record is his best work yet.

I'm severely influenced, I have to say, by Horse Head. I try to tell stories with little details and bits of humor if I can find ways to insert them. I'm not naturally funny as him, so I'm not trying to do it as much. But I like story songs, and I want to be better at telling them, but somewhat obliquely as well, because I've also been trying to say less and not jam-pack everything.

I was making those early records when the scam rap shit was happening—punch, punch, punch, punch—and it sounds funny to say, but that shit stylistically influenced how I made WiLDFiRE. I freestyled over the beat until I found stuff, and then I worked it out like it was a recording technique. I'd learned that from Peep, who never wrote anything. Maybe he wrote when he was doing triplet rap, but he just hummed and sung until he got the melody and then he'd work words into that. I've used that for a long time, and it's given me some freedom to really choose bars that I liked—but I kind of regret it now, because I want to write stuff more intentionally and go in and record it the old-head way rather than punching in. It's always come from personal experience, and on this record, I'm trying to write songs where I'm observing stuff rather than talking about my reaction to it.

A while back, I retweeted Alice Glass pointing out that people like MGK were ripping off Peep, and you replied to both of us saying that Peep was very aware of his entire deal being jacked while he was alive. You worked with him up to his passing, and it has to be really surreal and bizarre to watch that still take place. I'm curious to hear you talk about what that experience has been like. It's really crazy—I feel like I hear him in everything.
I hear him in everything too. Sometimes it's a little more bitter than sweet, but it is sweet in the sense that, Goddamn, he really wanted to mean so much and be whatever people wanted him to be—and he got his wish, in that regard. I've seen huge vigils for him in federal prisons. I know Peep is this godlike figure whose style is just diffused.

The crazy thing about Peep was—and I like to come back to this, it's relevant to the whole K Records shit—is Peep came from the ideology of putting some intent behind it. Me and GBC—all of us, really—were heels in the Peep superstar narrative. Although the outright harassment has pretty much died off for me, the damage that shit did is done, and it's hard. I know what I've contributed to that shit—that's mine. That became popular. And the very first people who got that stuff on a mood board and were told to copy it—the very first people to to jack me particularly, because I can only really speak for myself—probably didn't even recognize my name at all. They just went and did it, and boom. It was gone, and it was out of my hands. Pretty quickly thereafter, lots of people made Fish Narc-style beats with much more production and technical skill than I have.

It was a major blow to the ego, honestly—but I'm just hella grateful to get to do music still, and amazed to be back in Olympia and part of K. With Peep's shit, I hear songs sometimes and I'm like, "This is just outright, completely ripped. You're even trying to get his cadences." That's the shit that hurts me, because I'm the reason, and I can hear a ripoff of the sound.

Peep was pretty coy about admitting what his influences were, because none of the things he said in interviews were really that true. But he did not listen to, like, Fall Out Boy—no emo shit at all. He listened to, like, Red Hot Chili Peppers—but it was mostly Soundcloud rap. He was into Yung Bruh, Ruben Slikk, Cold Hart, and Wicca Phase. This is going to sound arrogant, and I hope it won't, but it's just true—Peep was the ultimate GBC fan who was led into the group because we basically had to. [Laughs] He was doing it so good, and we were like, "Do we beat this or do we absorb it?" We were already friends with him, so it was like, "No, we're going to add him."

But Peep literally synthesized everything so well. All of us were freaks, and Peep knew how to communicate in a way that most of us didn't. He made something that exceeded the sum of its parts. It's incredible, I hear his music and it's hard to believe sometimes—I'm struck by the effect of it, like I'm a kid. It's like hearing Nirvana come on, where you're like, "Jesus." That shit is crazy, because I was there when he made it, in the room—I made some of it with him, I have original lyrics in my laptop notes because fools didn't have their shit together, sleeping on the couch somewhere without a computer. It was a tiny world people and a limited range of technology—broken laptops, the best studio we had was janky as fuck and we got extorted. Given the smallness of the scene, hearing it as popular music is crazy.

I try not to be too bitter about how I was legitimately conspiracy'd out of my role in it, which really does blow. It hurts that these bad faith, rich oligarch pieces of shit use the most vulnerable and poorest people involved by a mile—these are actual upper-class British people that run that management company. When they flew me out to work on Peep's shit out there, they just dubbed me. I stayed in his apartment for weeks and I only had two sessions—and they ruined my songs. I had to fight them to keep those songs from coming out. I went to a family dinner at a house that one of them had on the Thames, and she had the largest original collection of Carl Jung's works in the entirety of Great Britain. Jesus Christ. These are legitimate upper-crust people—real capitalist-class shit—and those fuckers used us to deflect their responsibility, and it does make me mad because I put soul power into my style and like I synthesize Northwest shit for it. It was part of me before GBC, and it was the thing I brought to the group that wasn't sampling—and people took it from me, and it's not even something I can gatekeep because, as a based person, I'm hella stoked. I don't need credit, and I'm over-credited and over-privileged anyway, so I shouldn't really whine or want more. It's bittersweet, but when I do the mental gymnastics, I consistently land on being grateful.