THE COUNTRY TEASERS’ Ben Wallers is not the first man to yearn for immortality. Neither is he the first to try to achieve it through art. Check out the cavemen and their drawings. See also: Celine Dion and Pearl Jam. Both have songs titled “Immortality,” and it’s likely that both will attain it. While their permanence will come via ballads from blockbusters and short pants worn over long johns, Wallersif and when he gets hiswill achieve infinitude because he imitates (by his own admission) country, goth, and punk with equal fervor and composes off-color, genre-bending missives to panty shots in Elle magazine. Although the Teasers originated in Scotland in the early ’90s, Wallers now lives in London, and the band is actually a rather loosely held, long-distance collective that rarely sees the whites of each other’s eyesone “member,” occasional bassist Kaanan Tupper, even lives here. The Teasers exist mainly as an outlet for Wallers’ cynicism, multi-instrumental dexterity, and love of Tammy Wynette. But unlike the band’s handful of previous proper releases, this year’s Secret Weapon Revealed at Last (In the Red) was recorded as a group effort, even though Wallers insists he “can’t convey [his] ideas to ANYONE.” A globe- spanning legion of fans might beg to differ.

I e-mailed the ringleader a couple of conversation starters, and he wrote back, longhand, on eight pages of mailed paper sprinkled heavily with random capitalizations, sporadically underlined verbiage, and his favorite “I” word. Hell, maybe Wallers will achieve eternity based solely on his letter-writing prowess.

Seattle Weekly: To label your lyrics “Southern gothic” is one thing; “audacious,” “ballsy,” “fucked up,” “provocative,” and “offensive” are a few other possibilities. I understand the reverse propaganda complicit in these socially observant/socially mind-fucking songs, but I sure as hell wouldn’t play them for my mom. Words like “I love the swastika/ I also love the Jew/I love the Negro/And the KKK, too” [from “Hairy Wine” on 1999’s quaintly titled Destroy All Human Life] could easily be misunderstood. Do you have an overt agenda to push the boundaries of modern music?

Ben Wallers: I felt driven to this mode by the banality of other lyrics, which so often ruin bands for me. Lyrics always come last for me in the songwriting process, so there is pressure on them to do a good job of advertising the music I’ve just recorded. Obviously, this agenda is fulfilled by shock tactics. I have never had a problem with people “taking offense,” but also black people never seem to come to our gigs. I dislike segregation and hope that one day I’ll produce a lyric that somehow crosses the divide and provokes members of the black community to come to our gigs even if it is only to attack me. I am against “us and them”-ism.

On the other hand, my contempt for humanity makes me assault their bullshit-sodden ears with whatever extreme obscenity I can conjure off the top of my head. My aestheticI mean, “what I like”goes quite far into an area of abhorrence [that] I often fail to justify in arguments with people I love. Like my parents. The art world has caught up to this recently. Yes, I actually do believe that I psychically influence the world of aesthetics! My extremely powerful ideas float into the atmosphere and rain down on fertile heads. You know the spooky bits on Radiohead’s OK Computer? All mine! So I juxtapose “love swastika” with “love Jews” because my passion about aesthetics is no less real than human love. I don’t think I’m pushing boundaries exactly, but we’re all striving for something new and different, aren’t we?

On the other hand, I’d certainly let my mom hear “Golden Apples” [also from Destroy]. With your songs it is possible to be as equally touched as splenetic.

I’m a composite. Have you seen Woody Allen’s Zelig? When you juxtapose a punk track with a love song, the love song’s poignancy is exaggerated and its sentimentality counterbalanced. There [are] a lot of retards, hobbyists, and professionalists in music. They don’t have time to study the medium’s heavy potential for art making. Fucking cunts: “A, E, A, B, A, E, G.” Wankers. Having said that, I will concede to having ascertained at least one hidden agenda in my songwriting, namely IMMORTALITY. That’s why I write so much20 albums, averaging 15 songs each from 1989 to 2003because I’m chucking everything at the cup hoping something will get in. Think of John Peel as the cup; you shower him with 10 completely different styles of song so at least he can go, “Ah, this one’s good, it sounds like the Fall.”

One might infer that you’re a fairly political guy and also something of a history and literature buff as well. Do you feel compelled to respond to the current world climate?

My problem is that I don’t have to go out of the house except to buy food. I just recorded a song called “Only Recording Is Real” because that’s the way things appear to me just now. There’s no war in Iraq, there’s no race hate crimes on the street, there’s no growing old, penniless, and dying; there is only a 12-track studio, a piano, a drum kit, some guitars, and some microphones. From a happy point of view, I live in the Garden of fucking Eden. The current world climate affected my song “Please Stop Fucking Each Other” [from Secret Weapon] because at that time the Pakistan vs. India cricket series was being imitated by the Kashmir nuclear war game. One tends to shy away from current events like Bush’s war [because] they are perennial facts of historical life; cliché, banal, and remote. People like Bush and bin Laden are the real performance artists. Look at the SCALE of their work! Look at the SACRIFICE involved! Look at the power, meaning, and message! Wow. What their work really approaches seriously is the Crucial Artist Question: CAN I MAKE MYSELF IMMORTAL? Bush dares to say: “Yep, I thaynk ah cayn.”

I recently came to the conclusion that I should back out of serious topics altogether and focus instead on what I’m good at: observational humor. Ian Curtis’ best joke was when Joy Division came back from the pub to the studio. The old-school bar staff had not comprehended Joy Division’s young sophisticated drink orders and failed to comply with them. Curtis changed the chorus “They Walked in Line” to the masterful “They Wanted Lime.” Genius. Too bad his melancholy got too heavy.

lcassidy@seattleweekly.com