Seth Rogen’s rollicking, eruptive laugh is a deceptive thing. It might fool you into thinking the curly-haired Canadian is just a laid-back goof who has stumbled into an enviable Hollywood career, acting in blockbusters alongside jaw-droppingly beautiful leading ladies and his hilarious best buds. But that guffaw belies a very real savvy that has allowed the 31-year-old to navigate his path from ensemble member on Judd Apatow’s prized TV classic Freaks and Geeks to one of Tinseltown’s most influential and recognizable power players. Rogen has starred in A-list comedies like Knocked Up and Funny People, written soon-to-be classics like Superbad and Pineapple Express, lent his voice to box-office smashes like Kung Fu Panda and Monsters Vs. Aliens and watched his peer group similarly evolve from a ragtag cluster to standalone superstars.

As the “Apatow Gang” has turned from 20somethings to 30somethings—gathering some Oscar nominations along the way—Rogen has remained one of the most visible faces of them all. It makes sense, then, that he and his longtime writing and producing partner, Evan Goldberg, would be the driving force behind getting the band back together. This Is the End was written and directed by Rogen and Goldberg, marking the first time the duo has stepped behind the camera. Based on a short originally titled Jay and Seth Vs. the Apocalypse, Rogen leads a cast of pals including Jonah Hill, James Franco, Danny McBride, Jay Baruchel and Craig Robinson as they play themselves trapped in a post-apocalyptic Los Angeles. The world begins crumbling around them during a party at James Franco’s house, where celebrities like Rihanna and Emma Watson make cameos, also as themselves. Holding the mirror up to nature, natch.

Here, Rogen talks to FILTER about directing that fireball-and-sinkhole-strewn insanity, what it’s like to write 500 jokes for Borat and what role he’s coveted most in his career.

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Read the first part of our story of Rocket from the Crypt, including a conversation with John Reis.

Below are interviews with RTFC bandmembers, collaborators, and fans from throughout their career.

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It’s tempting to add a taste of controversy to this band. Six dudes from a notoriously aggressive San Diego punk scene playing weird rock music and putting on insane live shows, touring incessantly for nearly two decades, remaining frustratingly forever on the fringes of popular consumption? Rocket from the Crypt seemed to have drama built into their DNA. And then there were the myths.

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You might not recognize Eric San’s mammalian stage name, but you’ve probably already heard his infectious music as Kid Koala. The Ninja Tune scratch DJ and producer impressed audiences early on with his technical precision and flights of fancy on the turntables for 2000’s Carpal Tunnel Syndrome. Since then, he’s created several graphic novels; written music for films (such as Scott Pilgrim vs. the World and Looper); toured with Radiohead and Beastie Boys; and collaborated with Gorillaz, Handsome Boy Modeling School, and Del the Funky Homosapien and Dan the Automator as Deltron 3030.

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Sweden has, historically, never been short on cranking out top-notch pop. In its hands, the genre has taken forms as varied as disco (Secret Service), dance (Ace of Base), rock (The Hives), indie (Lykke Li) and even the genuinely creepy (The Knife). But as the name suggests, the idea is to be popular. And being popular usually doesn’t mean being sincere.

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A funny thing happened to Talib Kweli last night. Performing onstage with Yasiin Bey (formerly Mos Def) as Black Star, he was fixed on one guy in the audience wearing a T-shirt that read, in rhinestones, “More Tupac, Less Drake.” And, amidst this set, facing a couple thousand people, all Kweli could think was, “Why do you have to wear that shirt at my show?” 

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I begged Andrea not to make me go. I told her I would find someplace where I could hide from my editor and that if I stayed I knew that we could make things better again. But she refused.

“You have to go,” she said, “because if you don’t you’re going to fuck everything up.” When I looked up and saw her face illuminated beneath the naked light bulb, I knew she was right so I got out of bed and gathered my things.

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“Ask about our Seven Deadly Sins packages,” tempted the intentionally sexed-up outgoing recorded message of the hotel in Perth where Nick Cave was holed up on the Aussie leg of his 2013 tour. It was pricelessly apropos. After all, it’s hard to imagine another songwriter—nay, writer—who has so fearlessly navigated the minefields of sin and redemption as has he, fighting a veritably unwinnable artistic war against moral complacency and torpor.

Said moral battleground has been trod once again, and in the aftermath has arisen Push the Sky Away, Cave’s 15th album with The Bad Seeds. At first listen, it seems rife with biblical symbolism—hardly shocking for the gent who actually penned the introduction to a 1998 Canongate publication of King James. Yet Cave is quick to insist that the record’s “religiousness” stands utterly apart from…that book.

The songs teeter precariously between the Cave of devastating romantic lamentations (“Wide Lovely Eyes”) and he of the foreboding tales (“Water’s Edge”) of those trapped living on the wasted fringes of our incessantly unforgiving mortal existence. He drags us through an imagined but frighteningly recognizable world, explicated by arcane metaphors and bare, uncloaked confessionals (as well as the occasional delicious blasphemy)…and leaves us once again in a perplexing yet also enlightening exegesist purgatory. But if it were easy to comprehend Nick Cave (or morality itself, for that matter), well…everyone would be doing it.

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Historically, festivals have been a way for a culture to collectively throw off the shackles of their mores, taboos and any other number of social institutions that contribute to a functional and safe civilization. In this vacuum of order, sexual hedonism; chemical experimentation; gluttony; drunkenness; and excess become commonplace and sanctioned expressions of participation.

Modern music festivals are perhaps the most dubious example of this type of Dionysian collective celebration, with their Gestapo-style security, rigid scheduling, mandatory proof of identification, insurance concerns and adherence to the profit model. Our consumer masters have deemed fit, however, to unload “free swag” onto us to demonstrate their willingness, as corporate “citizens,” to join in on the fun and throw proverbial caution to the wind.

All in all, a pretty bleak state of affairs, but your mind is still a magical motherfucker, even if you’ve fried it with a steady diet of reality television and social networking news feeds about the Mayan calendar.

My antidote to being lulled into the semi-narcoleptic and docile state, ideal for consuming, that your masters wish to induce in the fully immersive commercial (FIC) that is the modern music festival is to retreat into the mind. This is the same exercise that served as the impetus for almost all of the existential music and philosophy we use as a cornerstone for modern “individuality.”

Here I have outlined some steps.

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Way back in 2006, when the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival was a single weekend, two-day affair (ah, the olden days!), the French foursome of bassist Deck d’Arcy, guitarist Laurent Brancowitz, vocalist Thomas Mars and guitarist Christian Mazzalai made Phoenix’s desert debut to a packed crowd inside the fest’s second-to-smallest tent. Supporting their then-impending album, It’s Never Been Like That, the hits were sparse but savvy and distinct: arguably “Long Distance Call,” that 2006 record’s jittery single, and “Too Young,” the flirtatious pop cut from their 2000 debut featured fondly and memorably in Sofia Coppola’s 2003 tour de force Lost In Translation.

Seven years, one Mars–Coppola knot-tie and a 2009 main stage stop in Indio (that time touting the soon-to-be critically adored Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix) later, and Phoenix have ascended to the festival slot previously reigned over by Jay-Z, Gorillaz, Arcade Fire, Kanye West and Radiohead. In addition to feeling the heat left by the others who’ve soaked up the Coachella Valley sun, Phoenix will be unveiling songs, many for the first time, from the band’s upcoming release, the slyly titled Bankrupt!, an album already weighted heavily by the buzz and expectation built from its brilliantly executed (and Grammy-winning, Platinum-selling) predecessor.

Here, the Guide talks to Mars about why the band’s highly anticipated follow-up is called “Bankrupt!” and not “Ludwig van Phoenix,” the strange elegance found in overindulgence and which Coachella performance “changed everything.”

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