“What the hell is your problem, Manitoba? Phone me and tell me what your god damn problem is with our DVD.”
That’s the message that Sum 41 guitarist Dave “Brown Sound” Baksh would like to send to the Manitoba government. Last night, the Manitoba Film Classification Board informed Sum’s label, Aquarius Records, that the bonus DVD, Cross The T’s And Gouge Your I’s, that is packaged with copies of the band’s new album Does This Look Infected? has officially been rated R. That means, if kids under the age of 18 want to buy the album without the DVD being confiscated, they’ll have to provide ID. All this for a movie that shows little more than the Sum boys goofing around, with the odd shot of someone’s bum or a woman’s breasts thrown in.
“I’ll tell you what’s so racy about it,” Baksh says. “There’s 11 points on a checklist that the board of Manitoba has, the board of video review, or whatever they’re called. Basically, they have this checklist that rates everything from G to R. Depending on what you get on the checklist, that’s what the rating of the movie’s going to be. Apparently we had all 11. All 11! So Manitoba got mad at us and now kids have to get IDed when they buy the CD and if they’re not 18, they take the DVD away. They have to get their older brother or some bum to buy it for them.”
Baksh claims that no one else really seems to be offended by the DVD and suspects that Manitoba may have some sort of vendetta against the Sum boys (“I think Manitoba has just been looking for an excuse to ban us,” he says. “I think they were just mad because we didn’t play there and then all of a sudden got back at us by rating our DVD XXX”). He says that the label is currently trying to come up with solutions to the problem, but either way, Sum’s army of goons will get a chance to see the controversial DVD.
“Don’t worry, we’ll find a way to get the kids our DVD, whether Manitoba likes it or not,” Baksh pledges. “When you knew something was bad, when you went to go see an R rated movie, weren’t you more excited because it was R rated? I would try harder to get the DVD rather than let some guy in a record store tell me I can’t have it because I’m too young. Half the kids who are buying this Sum 41 have seen this stuff already. The kids are just like us – me and my cousin used to steal porno mags from the local convenience store all the time.”
All in all, Baksh thinks that the non-stop controversy following Sum 41 and their antics is often blown out of proportion. Take, for instance, the now infamous incident in a New York nightclub this past Halloween. Sum’s Deryck Whibley was booted out of the club for spitting on a patron who made fun of him after the singer locked himself in the restroom, something Baksh plays down. He claims that it, just like the smut factor on the DVD, was taken far too seriously.
“Derek locked himself in the bathroom,” he says. “Everybody thinks he locked himself in the bathroom because he was emotionally stressed. But really he locked himself in the bathroom because there was a latch at the top of the door he did up. Because as well as the lock on the door there was this latch. He forgot to undo the latch so he thought he was locked in. He just wanted to get out, but of course he was obliterated, so he forgot about the latch.”
