George Lynch has explained his decision to retire the LYNCH MOB band name.
This past August, Lynch announced that he was ending LYNCH MOB, apparently due to the racial insensitivity of the moniker, saying he will no longer record or perform under that name.
In a new interview with “BODS Mayhem Hour”, George spoke about “Wicked Sensation Reimagined”, the recently released reworking of LYNCH MOB‘s 1990 debut album, and addressed questions about why it took him three decades to call it quits with LYNCH MOB.
“There’s always been a problem with the name from day one,” George said (hear audio below). “I remember doing an interview with The Village Voice the first year LYNCH MOB were formed and we decided to use that [band] name. And the interviewer was a young black woman who was very bothered by the fact that I used that name and I had to try to explain it. And I found myself not really being able to explain myself very well — I knew my argument was disingenuous.
“I can make the argument that, yeah, it’s my last name,” he continued. “I know that that’s not what most people think about, ’cause I know what the word represents. So, in the younger, younger days, I was able to just sort of rationalize it. It seemed to be less of a topical hot-potato issue. And I thought, ‘Well, I’m gonna be okay. Most people understand that it has nothing to do with what it’s normally known as. It’s my name, and we’ve got this kind of desert, Western vibe. They strung up cattle rustlers too.’ There’s that argument. It’s all silly argument — I don’t buy it myself. I wouldn’t use it these days. I found myself really scrambling for a logical way out of that interview, and she really had me pinned down. And I felt bad — not bad enough to get rid of the name. So I held on to it, obviously, for 30 years.
“I’ve gotta say, in all the years that I’ve had that name, it’s gotten more and more uncomfortable, and, of course, now, recently to the point of not being able to rationalize it any longer,” George added. “In addition to that, though, there’s some other things at play here. We finished this record right under the wire before the pandemic hit, and once the pandemic shut down touring for at least a whole year or more — who knows if we’ll ever tour again — LYNCH MOB being, basically, my only touring act, the band scattered to the four winds, so I really didn’t, in essence, have a band any longer. And then I finished this 30th-anniversary record and really loved the way it came out and thought, ‘You know, actually, this makes a lot of sense. I should end this chapter of my musical career now.’ This should be the last LYNCH MOB record, because it mirrors the first one — it’s a nice bookend. I can retire the name on a high note, going out with what I think is a good record. Kind of wrap it all in a nice, neat package and put the bow on it. And I felt like the time was right to do that. Everything sort of triangulated and events all just coordinated to come together at this point to make it pretty obvious it would probably be a good time to go ahead and move on.”
Singer Oni Logan first hooked up with LYNCH MOB in 1990, but exited the group after the release of its first album, only to rejoin the outfit in the late 2000s.
Logan is featured on five of LYNCH MOB‘s eight albums, including “Wicked Sensation”, as well as 2009’s “Smoke And Mirrors”, 2014’s “Sun Red Sun”, 2015’s “Rebel” and 2017’s “The Brotherhood”.
