Huebel tries to subvert the machine.

Question: How has the Human Giant become a promotional venue for bands?

Rob Huebel: Well, I mean, you would think that MTV being MTV you could just get any band that you wanted and use any music in the world. I think the music industry has changed a lot and we sort of quickly found out that that's not the case any more. Back in the day, I think there was some sort of rule where, if MTV played a video of theirs, then they could just use whatever they wanted so they used to have all this cool music in shows and stuff like that and, of course, when we come along, all that has changed. The music angle and stuff is actually really expensive and I get it. I mean, you know, everybody wants to get paid but, you know, it's frustrating. Like, you know, we did this 24 hour marathon and we had some really cool bands on there, you know, we had, like, the National and Ted Leo and Mastodon and we know these bands and, like, they're really cool guys. When it came time to, like, do the DVD and, you know, all the bands were, like, yeah, put it on the DVD, man, like, they're all really cool guys but, you know, they don't control it. It's the record companies. So we found out that it's all going to be, like, super expensive to put on there so we couldn't put everything that we wanted on the DVD. So, you know, we ended up, you know, you just have to talk about money with the record companies and we're not good at talking about money. We always get beat up. I mean, it's really cool to have your own show and try to incorporate music that you like, especially on MTV because, for us, we've always kind of felt like, you know, we don't really fit in on MTV very well. We're not, like, young good looking dudes that live in the Hills, you know? We're just these kind of jerks that try to be funny. So it's fun to sort of, like, try to subvert, you know, that sort of machine a little bit and just kind of insert music that we like that their audience wouldn't normally listen to, you know?

Recorded on: 4/1/08