Metal Anarchy

During a recent interview with Metal Hammer, AFI’s Davey Havok discussed the success of their 2006 single “Miss Murder.” Notably, the vocalist expressed disappointment in the way the song represents them.

Havok said the following:

“It breaks my heart that ‘Miss Murder‘ will always represent us, and that I will die and someone will look up AFI and ‘Miss Murder‘ is what they’re gonna find. I don’t dislike ‘Miss Murder‘, it’s a pretty good song! But never, even when we wrote it, did I think that it was the greatest song. I even voted to not put it on the record, but that experience really proved to me that it was all about marketing, because everything after ‘Decemberunderground‘ is better than ‘Decemberunderground‘.

I have campaigned to keep it off the setlist and recently succeeded. When we play a festival or when we’re playing a city where we feel we have a few more passive fans, we’re gonna play it, and I don’t mind it, but I do enjoy the optics of removing it from the set.”

He also added:

“The writing of ‘Decemberunderground‘ was a miserable period. We had signed to Dreamworks, but they sold it to Interscope. Bummer.

Our A&R guy was hellbent on trying to get [Interscope boss] Jimmy Iovine – who had expressly claimed in the press that rock is dead – to pay attention to AFI, and so it was suggested that we collab with Jimmy’s great love at the time, which was 50 Cent. I have nothing against 50 Cent, but what does that even mean?!

Even worse was this was the era when ringtones were the new technology craze. I love this man and I still see him once a month at the least, but this motherfucker says to me, ‘What if you were to be the first band to write a ringtone album?’”