Interviews // Chase Lombardo (cumgirl8)

Over 95 bands and speakers recently pulled out of South by Southwest in Austin, TX. Reportedly, in order to support Palestine. I Heart Noise sat down with Chase Lombardo from one such band, cumgirl8, to discuss their decision.

I Heart Noise: Will you tell me a little bit about the band and the collective?

Chase Lombardo: I guess this started, like, 8,000 years ago. Honestly, to be really attentive to details here. Met in a sex chat and then kind of really started getting things going around 2019 in New York City.

I Heart Noise: You recently pulled out of South by Southwest. Can you tell us why?

Chase Lombardo: For years, apparently, the military or the CIA or all kinds of Department of Defense, governmental type agencies have been sponsors of South by Southwest. I think it’s kind of inevitable just being, like, an American citizen being somehow involuntarily related to that. But we saw it this year, honestly, just looking at the website and seeing “cumgirl8” underneath a South by Southwest banner with “sponsored by US army” just right there. It was like, “oh, my God!”

The news started coming out about how it’s a big tech convention, too. It’s not just about the music anymore. It’s about tech and film, too. But we saw that there was a Raytheon subsidiary who creates weapons, and then another tech company called Second Defense who does a little software. And then another strange platforming service, just like three different defense techs. I was like, okay, this is hand in hand. This is the wrong fucking time.

We spend a lot of energy protesting against the genocide in Palestine. This story really hits close to home, what’s happening over there. And it just felt totally out of line with what the entire reason why we’re musicians and why we live this lifestyle, which is pretty humble at this point.

And we don’t make these sacrifices to spread what we believe in just to compromise in the most obvious level, which would be to see our name next to the military industrial complex. We were like, okay, let’s just pull out. We’re not going to do this at all. And then we started thinking about it more and talking to friends, too, and we’re like, okay, actually, “what is music?” It’s about getting together. It’s about community. It’s about just making our voices heard louder and being on stage, and then what better opportunity to go down there?

And we found out there were all these really cool coalitions already planning movements and things like that. All right, so let’s go down there. Let’s go to the source. Some people protest the White House. We took it to South By. We decided to go down there and met a lot of amazing people that are also feeling the same way that we do, and had some really cool conversations with both sides, also about how did this get so far off the mark from what it was supposed to be?

I don’t think South by Southwest was originally intended to be something like this at all. It really lost the plot. So how do we get it back? Because I think people who are in music or even people who are in the little sectors of corporations that find themselves at South by Southwest, I don’t think they want to be affiliated with that shit either, honestly, at least to that extent. We had some really cool conversations, and we went to the rallies, and we spoke.

I Heart Noise: Was this a hard decision for you to make?

Chase Lombardo: It was really hard. And it was down to the wire. We were looking at numbers too. It was like, okay, nobody really makes money at South by Southwest, but we were lucky enough to get offers from official sponsors. And we were like, “fuck it. We got to drop off the official. We can’t do that. We’ll go down. We’ll play unofficial shows.”

And that was hard. It was hard to look at the numbers and be like, “okay, we’re going to take a loss, but we can bring merch down. We’d already set aside this time to do it. Let’s hope that we can figure out a way to make it up and just do it anyway”. And I think we were all on our phones from the second we woke up the two days before we left, just deciding.

And I’m telling you, we waffled between every decision over and over and over again. It took a really long time. Really long time. And a lot of staring at the phone, which was hardcore.

I Heart Noise: Does it help to see that so many other bands have made the same decision?

Chase Lombardo: Yeah, it really did. And not like other bands decisions really influenced ours because there’s a lot of bands that, foreign bands that they couldn’t pull out because of their visas, and we don’t judge that. There are bands that just couldn’t come because they felt it wasn’t going to align with their beliefs and we support that too.

Every band has their own story, and everyone just has to follow their own hearts. And the thing we have to remember is that not one of us are the enemy. We’re all trying to do the right thing here, which is why we’re musicians. We’re doing this for 350 fucking dollars. It’s not that deep. It’s deep as hell. But do you know what I mean? That’s how much South by Southwest pays.

So, all the other money we were getting from other sponsors, other shows, so they would, maybe pay South by Southwest to have a stage, and then they would use their–there’s a really beautiful festival in Denmark that wanted us to play, and they were going to give us the most money. Ironically, another government.

And we were like, hey, we’d love to do it, but you guys have to shuck your official credentials. And they’re like, we can’t do it because it’s a government funding. We just can’t make a stance. And we’re like, all right, respect that.

And they were, this doesn’t change, we would still love to have you down and play this festival sometime. It’s called Roskilde. We would love to play. That’s how that played out. But, yeah, there’s a lot of different stories.

Some bands couldn’t come at all and had to pay all their funding. Lambrini Girls in London had to pay their grants back. Kneecap had to pay their grants back. Other bands couldn’t go and didn’t. I don’t know. Everybody has their own story, but, yeah, it was nice to see other bands that made the same choice that we did. We all met up and did the right thing together.

I Heart Noise: Have you been to the giant protests in New York?

Chase Lombardo: Yeah, Well, there’s one all the time. There are all kinds of different ones, but we’ve been protesting. Yeah, there’s some that start in Brooklyn, some that start in the city, some that meet up on the bridge. It’s really huge in the city. It’s cool.

I Heart Noise: Do you have anything coming up that we should know about?

Chase Lombardo: Coming up, we have a headline show in May!
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