“If Not Us, Then Who?”: The Enduring Thrash Philosophy of Power Trip’s Riley Gale
“Can’t stop the force of ruin/
This world will run through you/
If not now, then when?/
If not us, then who?”
This week marks two months since the passing of Riley Gale (1986–2020), beloved frontman of Dallas thrash metal outfit Power Trip, who died unexpectedly at the age of 34. His death sent shockwaves throughout the global metal community, with the band formally announcing Gale’s passing in a statement released through their Twitter channel:
It is with the greatest of sadness we must announce that our lead singer and brother Riley Gale passed away last night. Riley was a friend, a brother, a son. Riley was both a larger than life rock star and a humble and giving friend. He touched so many lives through his lyrics and through his huge heart. He treated everyone he met as a friend and he always took care of his friends. We will celebrate Riley’s life and never forget the great works of music, charity, and love that he left behind.
Within hours, devastated and sincere tributes flowed across the Internet from all corners of the world, from journalists and industry insiders to the friends and fellow musicians who knew Gale the most. Over at NME, James McMahon highlighted Gale’s affable ability to blend his all-round, nice guy ‘everyman’ persona with his double life as a bonafide rock star. “Riley was no Montserrat Caballé, but the authenticity of what he said, and how he said it — onstage and off — was as pure as virgin snow,” notes McMahon. “Onstage he sang like a dog barking at a dustbin van. Offstage he was calm, even serene, the cool best mate you’d love to have.”
This sentiment was echoed by journalist Reed Dunlea at Rolling Stone, who wrote a heartfelt piece detailing several memorable encounters with Gale over a period of years, in all corners of the globe. “I noticed immediately that Riley looked you in the eye. He laughed at jokes. He asked questions. He introduced you to his other friends. While surrounded by his people, he made sure that everyone who wanted to be included was an integral part of the crew,” writes Dunlea. “In every act and interaction, Riley built community.” In an article for the Guardian, Harry Sword declared Gale to be thrash’s “great idealist,” adding that the frontman was a “passionate student of literature and philosophy,” whose incisive lyricism “laid bare the fears and frustrations of many Americans in the Trump era.”
To fully understand Gale’s allure as a frontman, lyricist, and political commentator, one must listen to Power Trip’s second full-length album, Nightmare Logic, released in 2017 through Southern Lord Records. Filled with stellar riffs, superb songwriting, and a level of urgency and intensity unrivalled by their peers, Nightmare Logic acts as the Rosetta Stone for the enduring thrash philosophy of Riley Gale.
Weapons of Darkness
From the heavy grooves and mammoth dive-bombs of album opener ‘Soul Sacrifice,’ to the massive, head-bang inducing breakdown and swift double-time shift of closer ‘Crucifixation,’ Gale’s reverb-soaked bark cuts through the grimy, 80s-style mix on Nightmare Logic to deliver a furious lyrical screed. The frontman takes aim at organized religion, political apathy, and our modern era of shameless corporate greed and hypocrisy — and he doesn’t miss.
In an interview with Banger TV during the album’s release cycle, Gale outlined Power Trip’s desired approach for LP#2: namely, how to make their unique brand of aggressive thrash metal catchier, while also keeping it grounded in the grand tradition of rock’n’roll:
I don’t think anything is off the table in terms of what would like influence us, but I think there is some sort of limit to our sound, you know? I want to keep it very primal and simplistic. I wanted to do something that was catchy and fun, and if you weren’t moshing and stage diving, you’d want to be singing along or head-banging.
Listening to the interview, it’s fascinating to hear how these core attributes of Gale’s personal life — his conduct amongst friends, family, and fans, his endless generosity, his sense of community, his inquisitive nature, his genuine sense of passion — are deeply suffused with Nightmare Logic’s sinister themes of power, violence and manipulation:
The funny thing is, I’m actually like, a very optimistic person when I hear about the 1%. I think, well, then there’s 99% of us left, and if we don’t fucking like this, then let’s figure this out the fuck out and change it. Let’s drag these assholes out into the street and take away their privilege, you know? And I know that starts to get in a weird line where we’re talking about symbolic violence versus actual, real physical violence and things like that.
In truth, it’s no surprise that Gale’s lyrics are focused through the lens of symbolic order and hierarchal power structures. As the frontman himself details in a 2013 interview with Toby Cook for The Quietus, Gale began reading up on existentialism and post-modern philosophy after being introduced to thinkers like Foucault, Derrida, Burke, Deleuze & Guattari, and Žižek by a professor at college, where he was studying as a writing major:
If you’re going to be a conscious individual in this world, consider yourself attempting to be intellectual, you’ve got to constantly question your role in the universe and embrace change. Everything changes. Society is like space — a swirling mass of different elements, intermingling in different densities, causing reactions from interactions that affect their environments… Creation and destruction. Even though we can’t directly observe it, it is constantly moving and changing. Time and perspective are everything when observing what goes on around you.
I relate to Foucault and many of the French post-modern thinkers because it’s all about examining social phenomena, examining the environments that lead to those phenomena, the social conditioning as a result of them, theorising paradoxes in established ideas, and the general attitude of obliterating traditional perspectives. That intrigues the hell out of me, and makes for some killer song topics.
Given that Nightmare Logic was released mere months after Donald Trump’s election as the 45th president of the United States, in addition to Gale’s background growing up in Texas (a traditionally conservative red state), the record’s politically thematic overture was all-too-timely. For many self-confessed liberals and die-hard progressives, the surreal unreality of a Trump presidency felt like a vivid waking dream. And in Gale’s mind, Nightmare Logic served as a much-needed snap back to reality:
This record is sort of about how to get through that every day; how to wake up every day and still try to be a good person or to try and make a better world. There’s optimism layered [in] all that darkness and a lot of the darkness is actually me trying to wield that darkness as a weapon. We’re born into this world where we have all these people in power who are morally corrupt. This is about sort of turning that against them, you know, using their nightmare logic to sort of defeat them…
I just want people to question it. I don’t have all the answers. I really don’t. I spend more time trying to point out things that I feel are wrong. I don’t think there’s a perfect way of thought; I don’t think there’s a perfect philosophy. I think it’s something that you constantly have to re-examine.
“Who’s going to be the difference?”
While each of the eight tracks that make up Nightmare Logic are imbued with the legacy of Gale’s enduring thrash philosophy, the record’s penultimate track, the rousing ‘If Not Us, Then Who?’ has taken on an apocryphal significance in 2020.
With its devilishly simplistic, call-and-response refrain, combined with a bulldozing bridge section, booming reverse-snare hits, and razor-sharp riffage, the track finds Power Trip in peak form — incendiary, insightful, and inspiring. The track borrows its title from a quote made by John Robert Lewis (1940–2020), a prominent American statesman and 60s civil rights leader, who served in the United States House of Representatives for Georgia’s 5th congressional district from 1987 until his death in July of this year.
As journalist Noah Yoo notes in a piece for Pitchfork exploring Power Trip’s legacy in modern metal, Lewis’ powerful ode to civic duty becomes, in Gale’s capable yet respectful hands, a “rebuke of the death-cult ideologies that devalue human life,” with a “militant call to fight injustice — not with rhetoric, not with words, but with direct action”:
“Get up/
Out of your cave and into the fire/
Time is short, this is our last resort/
To get through to you, what have I got to do?/
Who’s going to be the difference?/
If not us/
Then who?
Sound off/
Take a look at your life, tell me to what do you aspire?/
I want to know how far you’re willing to go/
Can’t stop the force of ruin, this world will run through you/
If not now, then when?/
If not us, then who?”
In a 2017 interview with The Quietus, Gale explains to Dan Franklin how the track’s lyrical approach stemmed from a desire to respectfully advocate for the rights and dignity of women, POC, and other oppressed minorities, while also linking the need for knowledge and an “open mind” over willful ignorance:
‘If Not Us Then Who’ became a broad call to arms that says look, ‘We’re not going to wait around and there’s not going to be a second coming of Christ that’s going to show up and fix everything’. And you can complain on the internet all you want but things aren’t going to change unless we physically get up and try and make a difference, and like I said, ‘If not us, then who?’
I don’t want to say it’s white guilt, but it’s asking people to reflect on their personal responsibility and what they’re willing to wager to try and make the world a better place. Are you a selfish person that wants to hide indoors all day, make money for yourself and keep it for yourself, block out the outside world, be complacent, that kind of thing, or do we want to get together and try? That’s why it’s like ‘Get up out of your cave — which is obviously a play on Plato’s [Allegory of the] Cave. That opening line is about getting out of the cave and actually throwing yourself into the fire of knowledge.
With much of the U.S. caught in the grip of protests, riots, and violent uprisings in the face of unconscionable police brutality and murder, largely inflicted upon members of the Black community, it’s easy to see how Lewis’ words, so expertly channelled and amplified by Power Trip’s savage instrumentation and Gale’s poetic lyricism, have continued to resonant throughout 2020 — a year made all the more tumultuous due to their untimely passing.
Aura as Currency
Speaking about the rise of Power Trip back in 2014, blogger, hardcore-punk historian, and self-proclaimed ‘King of Subculture’ James Khubiar — a close personal friend of Gale who goes by the online moniker of @justifiedarrogancenyc — wrote:
Power Trip is a thrash band. They are a good thrash band. What makes their ascension so transcendental is their aura… The band took everything that their predecessors did and took it to the next level… Aura is the currency in hardcore. It always has been and it always will be. Power Trip can always say they are a rich band.
And much like Power Trip, what’s clear now, in reading the endless list of overwhelmingly positive affirmations to Gale’s talent for hospitality, is just how much of that aura was generated by the frontman himself. As a friend, musician, and much-loved public figure, Gale made sure that his philosophical attitude was an integral part of this aura. Along with his brothers in Power Trip, Gale pushed himself, his music, and his fans to question authority, dismantle injustice, and constantly re-examine their place in the world.
In the wake of Gale’s passing, it would be easy to think that this aura is forever dimmed. However, with the Power Trip frontman fondly remembered by those closest to him and most affected by his presence (even some, like this writer, who regretfully never had the chance to meet the man in person), Gale’s aura lives on in all of us, shining brighter now than ever before.
For more information on the Dallas Hope Centre and their Riley Gale Memorial Library project, go here.
