Jonathan Tyler – Mister Resistor
2020
91 Likes
Best comment
“Nikki Lane brought me here... this reminds me of early Foo Fighters, so I gotta love it.”
The story
Jonathan Tyler first made noise in Dallas fronting Jonathan Tyler and the Northern Lights, a hard-rock and blues-rock band that got signed to Atlantic after SXSW in 2008 and toured with Lynyrd Skynyrd and Kid Rock. Mister Resistor heads somewhere stranger.
He wrote it on the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, and it's about being watched – surveillance, data collection, the feeling that every move you make is a line in somebody's file. His resistor is one person who can't stop the machine alone but makes as much noise as he can. Tyler wanted an '80s feel and pointed to Neil Young's Trans and the krautrock of Can and Neu!. Rob Schnapf produced it at his studio in East LA, played the guitar solo and wrote the strings, and Nikki Lane sings backup.
Tyler produced the video himself, with Josh Werblun editing. It cuts classic footage of unrest and rebellion against nostalgic scenes of pop-culture comfort food, and the effect is dystopian. The song later landed on his album Underground Forever. Paranoid? Sure. Compared to what?
