Playing to less than a roomful of kids at a moped shop just off of the main drag in Kalamazoo, Michigan, vocalist Jayson Green and the rest of Panthers seem lazy. And that's not a bad thing. It's a swaggering come-down from the ear-lacerating Norwegian noise-corists J.R. Ewing just delivered beforehand—waxing Albini guitar slashes in the shape of punk's present tense. Panthers, however, are (no pun intended), a different kind of animal. They groove. Long echoes on the guitars and space between the beats let you catch your breath, and then, just when you stopped paying attention, ROCK! And as hard as anyone, harder than most playing today, with the biggest power chords playable and Green's inspired yowling to match. The Brooklyn based five piece plays motor city proto-punk through a post-punk filter—like the MC5 on Dischord records.  Their short and commanding set on this late October evening consisted entirely of new material and songs from their latest release, Let's Get Serious (Dim Mak).  Two weeks into their first national tour and making their first stops ever in the Midwest, Panthers are properly "jamming econo" in rented vans from New Jersey (they're cheaper) while playing the unsuspected role of headliners due to a last minute cancellation by 90 Day Men.

"It's been a little weird because a lot of people, you know, 90 Day Men are pretty established, so people came to see 90 Day Men and then we show up," said Green after the show. "People don't really know who we are. This is the first sort-of cross-country tour we've done. But the shows have been great. The East Coast is great, Chicago's great, the South… not so great, the Midwest we're just kind of finding out now."

The Midwest seems to be just finding about Panthers as well. Originally scheduled to take place at a local microbrewery, the show was moved out to the scooter shop because of scheduling conflicts with a Halloween-themed poetry reading. However, not having the show at a bar made it all-ages, something the band tries to do when it can.

"We try to play all-ages all the time, but in New York it's pretty impossible," Green said. "You're lucky to get an 18-plus show. If we play a 21-and-up, we try to play an all-ages one right around there at the same time, but New York's really bad. Boston has nothing. It sucks for that kind of stuff. Philly has some all-ages stuff that's cool. This show would do well in New York. It would probably be well attended."

Green sarcastically agreed that perhaps as they headed into America's emo-driven heartland they would do better to put away the philosophical abstracts on social contract and get in touch with their feelings.

"We're too emotionally detached is the problem," he said. "We need to get a little more emotional. We have our wall up. We've got to connect."

But those who like their rock music served with snippets of anti-authoritarian ideology will already connect. Let's Get Serious builds on the lyrical and musical themes of their previous work and answers the question that it left many with when finished. 2002's Are You Down? (Troubleman Unlimited) either charmed you with its sloppy insurgence and overtly radical political rants and obscure references to academia or left you scratching your head at what exactly these boys were about. "C'mon, they can't be serious, can they?" Well, yes, and no.

"I don't like gloom and doom politics really, I like rap politics and fun," Green said. "I think people are really scared to be, for lack of a better word, ‘political' and have a sense of humor also, and I think that it really confuses people when you are. People want one or the other. They think if you have politics with a sense of humor then you don't take the politics seriously, or it seems like it's either satire or it's demeaning or whatever, but I feel like it makes it more appealing to me. I don't like it to be serious business. I like that record, but a lot of people don't. We did [Let's Get Serious] along the same lines."

Green mentioned that some "eclectic sources" were quoted on the EP. Amongst the quoted, a line by Notorious B.I.G. appears in the song, "It's Not the Heat it's the Humility".

"[Rap is] the only new form of music that's actually doing new stuff and it's played on the radio and also is inherently political because of its form, in the same way that punk and hardcore can be inherently political—punk more because of what it sounds like and rap because of where it comes from. Notorious B.I.G. is an excellent example of radical music that everybody buys and it's not necessarily interpreted as such, but it's definitely injected into the music in almost every song. Even when people rap about cars or jewels or whatever, it's a lot of people just being like, ‘you know what, I came from nothing and now you can't say shit to me, like, you fucked me my whole life and now you can't say shit to me ‘cause I'm rich. You can't touch me now.' And I think that is fucking, pretty valid, you know."

And it doesn't need to sound like Jurassic 5.

"I think underground hip-hop is generally, like conscious hip-hop, is usually stupid, because it's usually really spiritual and it's about, you know, talking about loving women but really meaning that you hate women and wanna beat them up and hating homosexuals. That seems to be what underground hip-hop's about. Or you're white and rap about space or something, which I don't like that either. I mean there's some good stuff. I like Notorious B.I.G."

Panthers' sound, said Green, comes from a variety of sources, but the common ground between them is an appreciation for loud, heavy music.

"We really all just come to practice and someone will have one little part and then it builds up and everyone kind of writes around it and then there's something bigger," he said. "Recently we started wanting to make songs with a little bit more space and we got sort of interested in improvisation and things like that, but controlled to some extent, not something as stupid as having a hippie drum circle."

As a result, the songs are also getting longer, something else Green said the band is consciously trying to do.

"The problem is that it's easy to write a long song, you just have part after part after part. We want to try and write long songs that actually go do something. Like the Mars Volta record, it's a totally good record, but they have songs that are just long for the sake of being long, like "here's 20 minutes of ambient beeps," it's like who fucking cares about that? But they're good, I mean I like it and it's a good record."

Lyrically, Green went to school for cultural studies and media theory and said that is what he writes about.

"I don't really consider myself to be a lyricist—I kind of write similarly to how I write essays for school," Green said.

"I'm trying to be a better singer, he said. "I was made the singer by default, so now I'm actually trying to learn how to sing. I'm trying to write songs that have like a chorus, but I don't want it to be, like, verse/chorus/verse/chorus. I don't want it to be about anything, like fit into a locked paradigm exactly."

After standing around this makeshift venue for a few hours Green finally realized the smell of gas fumes from the bikes that had been present all evening and makes mention of it. He has been completely down-to-earth and friendly, as were the rest of the band for the brief moments we spoke, and completely approachable, as this interview was even a sort of ambush by tape-recorder. Saying goodbyes to his tour-mates in Challenger (a leaner, meaner version of Milemarker), he and the rest of Panthers went to find a place to crash for the night, letting their host know accommodations weren't a problem because they all had sleeping bags. The next stop on the tour was somewhere in Missouri en route to the West Coast and then back home to Brooklyn, where there'll return their vans and continue in their inherently and explicitly political form of dangerous, independent rock.