Hi. Welcome to Antiquiet. Sorry we’re only getting around to properly introducing ourselves now. We were kinda jerking around with this site for a few months… Then we suddenly settled on a direction and went for the jugular with that Josh Homme piece. The past few days have been a wild ride. And we’re just getting started. Next week Johnny will be interviewing Nikki Sixx of Mötley Crüe / Brides Of Destruction / Sixx:A.M. This guy has earned a few merit badges you don’t see very often. Not only has he actually been dead, but he’s also one of the only artists to win back ownership of his music from a major label after massive worldwide success, despite signing his name to one of the shittiest record deals ever signed. Oh, and he pissed on some ants that Ozzy Osbourne subsequently snorted, which is a story almost as legendary as the time he spent a night injecting Jack Daniel’s into his veins with Tommy Lee when they ran out of heroin. Lord knows we’ve all been there, but Nikki’s just got a way of talking about it…

Josh Homme is not what you’d call a soft-spoken guy. Locked in a Detroit hotel room, the Queens Of The Stone Age frontman answers the phone by yelling “Johnny Firecloud” over and over again. We’ve never spoken before, yet he greets me like a long lost drinking buddy, the conversational equivalent of a fireworks show. The head Queen refuses to call Detroit by its proper name throughout the interview, instead pronouncing it “Day-twaa” because “I’m trying to help it. The city needs my help.” All of this seems rather natural as we discuss Trent Reznor, Radiohead and Homme’s focused hatred for the record industry.

Antiquiet: Is the Queens sound a conscious or deliberate atmosphere?
Josh Homme: The thing is, that’s from years of doing whatever you want. Everything you do is habit-forming. You will form a habit of one style or another. And it might as well be getting people used to the notion that you’re going to do whatever you want. ‘Cause all the other habits include cow-towing to what somebody else wants. And there’s never a time to do that in music. As I understand it, your obligation is to play your favorite music that noone else plays, so you have to. And my favorite music is hooky, quirky, arty, dark, surprising, heavy, groovy, soft, emotional but not emo. It wears a sweater because it’s cold, not because it’s stylistically there.

Antiquiet: And it doesn’t try to fit into girl pants.
Josh Homme: Yeah, like there’s enough room for your cock and balls in your pants. And it’s in touch with its feelings, but it’s not a fucking pussy, man. Like, I need Lee Marvin, and I need Robert Mitchum. But I don’t need Sylvester Stallone, unless it’s Tango and Cash, ’cause that movie is fucking awesome. Or unless it’s my new steak cologne called Stologne.

The idea that more people kill themselves around the winter holidays is a myth that the media have little interest in correcting, according to a study from the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania. In an analysis of newspaper articles about suicide between Thanksgiving and Christmas in 1999, researchers found nearly half of them associated suicide with the winter holidays, despite receiving press releases warning journalists that such associations don’t seem to be warranted. Suicides drop during the winter months, according to the National Center for Health Statistics, and they usually peak during the spring months. Researchers caution that the flurry of articles on holiday suicides could actually inspire “copycat” suicides. Exposure to suicide methods may encourage vulnerable individuals to imitate them, the study warns.