Rolling Stone announced on May 8th that Gabel, singer and guitarist for Florida punks Against Me!, plans to begin living as a woman. According to the brief story on RS’ website:

Gabel, who has dealt privately with gender dysphoria for years, will soon begin the process of transition, by taking hormones and undergoing electrolysis treatments.

Gabel will eventually take the name Laura Jane Grace, and will remain married to her wife Heather. ‘For me, the most terrifying thing about this was how she would accept the news,’ says Gabel. ‘But she’s been super-amazing and understanding.

The full feature, which was released in the new issue of RS on May 11th, goes into further detail regarding Gabel’s transition. She hasn’t taken on her new name yet, but will do so for a year before deciding whether or not she will undergo surgery; she will also remain the lead-singer of Against Me!

Anyone who has ever come out — be it as gay or lesbian, queer, bi or trans — knows how difficult it can be to tell your loved ones, let alone announce it to the world. In a society as repressed as this, even friends and family who claim to be “open-minded” can balk at the prospect. And that’s true for anyone — not just those who have sold hundreds of thousands of records like Gabel has. Major congratulations are due to Gabel and her wife Heather for taking a step that’s both brave and beautiful.

Not that Gabel has been completely hush-hush about her struggle to forge an identity over the years. “The Ocean,” from 2007’s New Wave, included not-so-thinly-veiled lyrics:  ”And if I could have chosen, I would have been born a woman / My mother once told me she would have named me Laura / I’d grow up to be strong and beautiful like her.” In March, during a performance in Corpus Christi, Texas, she performed a solo acoustic version of an as-yet-unreleased song “Transgender Dysphoria Blues.”

Against Me! have also, for what it’s worth, spoken for a variety of progressive and radical causes over the years, including the rights of queer and trans people. Still, it was never quite so obvious just how autobiographical some of these moments were.

Chalking up Gabel’s decision to mere politics (or, for that matter, art) would certainly be insulting. Coming out in any form is a personal choice way before it even gets close to the political realm. On that same tip, it’s hard to ignore the broader world in which Gabel has made this announcement.

The culture of celebrity, colliding with the realities of homophobia and transphobia, means that any well-known figure’s decision to come out instantly takes on social overtones. Comments in the blogosphere have ranged from the clueless (“How will he pass as a woman with arms like that?”) to the callous (“Wow, what an attention ploy”) to those that read as if they came straight out of the Westboro Baptist Church:

The TRUTH is that GOD H-A-T-E-S GAY, TRANNIES, and all other such sickos. Says so right in the HOLY BIBLE, all you got to do is pick it up and read it for yourself. Do not take the word of these perverts, READ IT FOR YOURSELF. It very clearly states that they will ALL go to HELL. Especially the transsexuals, who are worse than gays. Transsexuals want to take the whole gay acceptance crap issue even further and make you believe that mutilating and hacking up a body to make it look like it is the opposite sex is fine and perfect and in line with God’s plan. That is EVIL. It is SATAN who is making them do that.

This was one of the first comments that appeared on Rolling Stone’s website after they broke the story.

Even some pieces in the “neutral” music press have been clumsy, their tone treating gender dysphoria almost as some kind of disease. Nowhere is it mentioned that even the concept of gender identity being a “disorder” remains controversial in the trans community.

Suffice to say that overall the music press is, at best, learning how to “handle” such announcements as they go–and often not even bothering with that. Says HitFix’s Katie Hasty:

A man who sings in a hard rock band becoming a woman is a jolt to the system, in part, because it’s a hard rock band. Speaking purely in generalizations, it’s a genre and an entertainment space dominated by men, perceivably for men… [and] has some codes of machismo. While certain spaces generally embrace icons of androgyny or ambiguities of sexual preference (just read any sufficient history of punk), rock ‘n’ roll as originally a counter-culture has been lab-manufactured in years past into a norm, with ‘normal’ expectations. When a singer is gay, or cross-dresses, there’s still that initial shock. When a singer of a well-known band becomes a different gender altogether… it’s an exclamation.

And there’s the rub. The fact is that in the 21st century there still persists set-in-stone ideas of what men and women “should” be — how they should dress, who they should sleep with, what kind of jobs they can have, and even what kind of music they can play. For a society that calls itself enlightened, such norms border on the neolithic.

On the same day as Gabel’s announcement, voters in North Carolina passed Amendment One, essentially banning same-sex marriage and civil unions. If Gabel were to drop her career with Against Me! and search for a job elsewhere, it would be perfectly legal to fire her solely on the grounds of her gender identity in 34 states — including in her home state of Florida. If Gabel’s life were in danger, would authorities care? The recent cases of CeCe McDonald and Lorena Escalera say no.

In the midst of all this, it can’t be such a surprise when bigots feel free to openly spew their filth at anyone who doesn’t fall within their boundaries. All the assumptions about male and female musicians fit into this twisted puzzle. Music is, quite often, merely a reflection of this.

Then there’s the other side of the coin. Namely, how utterly false these expectations end up being in the real world –especially in the realm of the arts, where, at least ostensibly, honesty and willingness to break the mold are valued. Gabel may be the most high-profile musician to come out as trans, but she’s hardly the first. In the 1970s, electronic artist Walter Carlos, one of the earliest to feature the Moog synthesizer in his work, became Wendy Carlos. She later went on to contribute to the score for both The Shining and A Clockwork Orange.

Punk rock in particular has had a notable flurry of trans artists. Wayne County, a participant in the 1969 Stonewall rebellion, formed Wayne County & the Electric Chairs and provided important influence to punk’s first wave before taking the name Jayne County. Genesis P-Orridge of Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV — two crucial links between post-punk and the formation of industrial music –has been living as pandrogynous for years.

Sure enough, the contradiction of punk has been its visceral nature — a stance that can just as often reproduce society’s worst diseases as reject them. For every sexist Stranglers song there was X-Ray Spex’s Poly Styrene shouting “oh bondage! Up yours!” For every macho dumbfuck threatening to kick your ass, there was a young kid provocatively smearing himself with makeup. In the ‘80s, while Boston’s SS Decontrol were complaining about the “new wave faggots,” Millions of Dead Cops’ Dave Dictor was declaring “I’m a big queer and that makes me more punk than all of you!”

Gabel recalls that it was her experiences meeting January Hunt — a transgender Against Me! Fan — that finally inspired her to make the transition. Support from fans on Twitter has been easy to find, as has the same from within the music world. Indie duo Tegan and Sara’s statement of support was straightforward and simple: “So incredibly brave” (Tegan sang backing vocals on New Wave’s “Borne On the FM Waves of the Heart”).

The Gaslight Anthem, a band who has similarly cultivated a friendship with Against Me! over the years, have also been not only publicly supportive, but pointedly rebutted against the anti-trans hatred:

So Tom’s gonna be Laura now… and in 2012 I still find people on the internet commenting on another persons [sic] life how they insult and condemn a person for his choices…  How about you let another human being make a decision about their lives without your snide prejudices and bigotry?

Yeah, how about that? How about we stop letting artists’ “fans” pick and choose what parts of their humanity are worthy and which ones aren’t? How about we stop acting like their work can be called into question dependent on their gender? How about we understand that the best artists don’t create just to meet others’ expectations, but to make themselves whole?

Most of all, how about we embrace that — with any luck — this is what Gabel is finally on her way to becoming? A whole person. That’s not a privilege, it’s a right. And we should all be so lucky to have it.

Instead, the judge ordered that Tolokonnikova, Alyokhina and Samutsevich be detained for at least two more months. No trial date has been set as of this writing. The women face up to seven years in prison, all for the offense of playing music supportive of Russia’s burgeoning democracy movement.

An estimated sixty supporters gathered outside the courthouse the day of the hearing, many facing down hard nationalist thugs defending Putin. Thirteen were arrested. All were asking the same obvious question: how the hell can music be a crime?

Even Moscow police, the very same repressive force that rounded up the “Pussy Riot Three,” have had to admit after conducting their investigation that the “punk prayer” did not constitute a criminal action. At most, the performance “could have caused offence to believers,” punishable in Russia by an average fine of around 1,000 rubles–roughly the equivalent of thirty-five dollars. Many of Pussy Riot’s previous flash performances–including “Rebellion In Russia,” the song that landed first landed them in international consciousness–have also resulted in arrest. But in all those cases, the “offenders” were released with little more than a fine.

Despite the Russian Interfaith Council’s condemnation of Pussy Riot for “blasphemy” and “inciting religious hatred,” the group’s supporters include a great many who identify as Russian Orthodox. Among them is none other than Alla Pugyachova, known as “Russia’s pop queen,” who shot to fame during the days of the Soviet Union and is now calling for the women’s release.

This while Patriarch Kirill–he of the forty-thousand dollar Breguet watches, who called Putin’s rule over Russia “a miracle of God”–remains steadfast in demanding that the three women face the maximum sentence.

So once again, with so much high-profile sympathy for the three women, how is it that music can be a crime? How is it that one can face seven years of jail for performing a song? And what is it about Pussy Riot that has caused the Russian establishment to dig in its heels so vociferously?

Part of it must simply be how different Russia looks now compared to a year ago. Even with anger against Putin obviously growing, nobody was able to say that his iron grip on power faced a credible threat. Last winter’s elections changed all that. Allegations of fraud were so widespread and flagrant that tens of thousands poured onto the streets demanding an end to Putin’s rule, austerity and political corruption.

It is worth pointing out that until relatively recently, much of the Russian artistic community–including sections of the avant-garde–were either hamstrung by the Russian elite. According to Kirill Kobrin, managing editor of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, the country’s contemporary art scene remained, if not supportive of Putin, unwilling to take him on:

In the beginning of the ‘noughties,’ there was a kind of common idea that Putin’s regime was about modernization, it was about reforms… This idea was very strong until Beslan [referring to the 2004 crisis where Chechen rebels took over a school in the North Ossetian town of Beslan, which Putin’s ruling party used to strictly consolidate the Kremlin’s power -AB]… But then, two things happened. First of all, the regime showed itself not as a modernizing one. And secondly, you have to understand the nature of contemporary art. Contemporary art is about radical politics, it’s about radical gender relationships…

Recent years have seen the Russian avant-garde’s natural propensity for political mischief blossom and thrive. Voina, an anarchist art collective, has gained infamy for its public stunts staging mock executions in grocery stores, and painting a giant penis on a drawbridge outside the St. Petersburg headquarters of the Federal Security Service. Now, the winter’s mobilizations have made what once seemed merely shocking appear dangerous and subversive.

Hand-in-hand with this is the international profile that this case has received. Amnesty International has called Tolokonnikova, Alyokhina and Samutsevich “prisoners of conscience.” April 21st, an international day of solidarity called by Pussy Riot’s supporters, saw actions from Mexico to the Czech Republic to Australia.

In my own city, at a march of a thousand people organized by Occupy Chicago on April 7th, I was randomly handed a button that read “Free Pussy Riot!” The button had been designed and made by local activist who I had never met before. Something is in the air with this case. And when something is in the air, it can travel across oceans.

This is, it bears remembering, a collective of punks whose songs have urged listeners to “do Tahrir in Red Square!” In the age of indignados and occupiers, language like this is bound to strike a chord (so to speak) well beyond national borders. Pussy Riot may have only been talking about “their own” head of state when they screamed “Putin’s pissed himself.” But having watched dictators in North Africa fall and governments in Europe collapse, plenty of rulers likely feel a bit more, shall we say, on notice.

Just as austerity and repression have become world-wide themes, so has the war on women. Band members’ insistence that “the revolution should be done by women” can’t possibly fall on deaf ears with marches like Slut Walk still fresh in young people’s minds. Here in the US too, where states are passing laws making women liable for a fetus’ health two weeks before conception, where young women are forced by school districts to apologize to their rapists, the attacks necessitate a fightback.

In a recent column in The Washington Post, writer Suzi Parker asked:

Wouldn’t it be refreshing to have an American version of Pussy Riot to lead the soundtrack on this country’s war on women? They could protest at Ted Nugent concerts, write lyrics about Rush Limbaugh and Bill Maher and call out politicians on both sides, or the Secret Service, when they insulted women. And with the protection of free speech. Pussy Riot would love to have that freedom.

Parker is chauvanistically naive to say that real protection of free speech exists in the United States–ask anyone evicted this past fall from the nation’s supposedly public parks and they’ll give you a very different answer. So does the stranglehold of the market severely limit the space for daring, avant-garde music to really grow and flourish. And certainly, the whole point of the renewed attack on women’s rights is to get them to “learn their place” and keep their mouths shut.<

For these same reasons, though, Parker is right when she says America could gain a lot from having a Pussy Riot of our own on this side of the pond. The look on Limbaugh’s face alone might be enough to make such a prospect worthwhile!

In fact, what’s striking about this entire twisted tale isn’t how alien it seems to the west, but how much our own stories hold in common. Garazhda, one of Pussy Riot’s pseudonymous members told the Guardian in January that “There’s a deep tradition in Russia of gender and revolution–we’ve had amazing women revolutionaries.” The same can be said of America, from Mother Jones and the “rebel girl” Elizabeth Gurley Flynn to Angela Davis and Elaine Brown.

So too has the US seen, more recently, the machismo of punk rock turned on its head by acts like Bikini Kill, Sleater-Kinney, Bratmobile and the rest of the riot grrrl generation. Though most of that incredible movement have disbanded or moved on, there can be little doubt that its aesthetic has had a massive impact on Pussy Riot’s own actions. Plenty of reporters have similarly commented on the connection.

That sense of commonality is what’s in the air right now. And with it is the notion that your fight is mine and mine is yours, that we each have something to learn from each other in fighting the same power.

Just as Pussy Riot’s own actions were inspired by an amalgam of Egyptian protest, western riot grrrl and their own rich traditions of resistance, so do we have something to learn from them. Namely, that “protest music” isn’t merely the stuff of history books or passive hippies. It can be brash, it can be in your face and on the streets. It can be a battering ram, widening the cracks in the edifice for all to see. Putin and others like him have every reason to be nervous about that. We too would do well to pay attention.

Fourteen years ago when the Swedish hardcore four-piece split up, it was a bit unceremonious. Punk bands have a propensity for going out with a whimper rather than a bang. Their final US gig was in a Harrisonburg, Virginia basement and was shut down by the local police. Not exactly befitting a band who had named their album The Shape of Punk to Come.

Since then, however, the title has proven correct. Odd time-signatures, alternate tunings, electronic sampling and the usage of revolutionary Situationist imagery made Shape far from your typical punk album. It was more in the vein of the Clash or Nation of Ulysses–using the spirit of punk as an excuse to subvert some of the genre’s most ingrained standards. Hardly a surprise then, that like Nation of Ulysses and Fugazi, Refused were political revolutionaries too.

The Shape of Punk to Come is now regarded as one of the most influential albums ever made–not just in punk, but music as a whole in the last 25 years. The “new noise” that the group attempted to forge (“how can we expect anyone to listen if we’re using the same old voice?”) clearly resonated with more than a few people out there.

To be sure, the members of group haven’t been twiddling their thumbs since its demise. Some went back to school and got degrees or started new bands. Dennis Lyxzen, the group’s frontman, formed the (International) Noise Conspiracy and continued to explore that indescribable nexus between rock and revolution. There was always, however, a feeling of that “we never did The Shape of Punk to Come justice back when it came out.”

Indeed, there does remain a lot of unfinished business. Namely that business itself has gotten a lot uglier, a lot more cut-throat and brutal even as it’s proven itself to be a lot more resilient. When Refused called it quits in 1998, it was easy to think that the whole rotten system was on its last legs. The Asian economy was in shambles, and the revolutionary rumblings in Indonesia might be spreading. The general strikes in France a few years before had given rise to a slogan: “the world is not for sale.” Globalization was being proven a sham, and a world-wide movement was taking shape that made it seem a more humane order was right around the corner.

As we all know now, that’s not exactly how it played out. Even as Refused’s star ironically continued to rise in the years after their breakup, humanity’s prospects got dimmer. The alter-globalization movement sputtered out as America puffed its chest into Afghanistan and Iraq. Even as capitalism hobbled its way through the panic of ‘08, it managed to be arrogant and brazen. They created the crisis, and yet we bear the brunt.

Alongside this is the interminable decline of the big-time music industry. It bears mentioning that even as The Shape of Punk to Come became near iconic among musical misfits of varying stripes, Refused were never on any of the “big four” record labels. The condescending, formulaic and whitewashed approach of label CEOs doesn’t square with reality for most people.

And so the amazing thing about Refused getting back together in the here and now isn’t how ill-timed and hackneyed it so often seems to be when bands reunite. Quite the opposite; if anything, the songs of Shape are more relevant, more hard-hitting, more resonant than they’ve ever been. Yesterday’s buzzwords of “national security” and “war on terror” have been pushed to the side in favor of “occupy,” “indignados” and “Tahrir.” In straightforward terms, the same people whose fates appeared sealed just a few years ago have found a voice; the impossible has now, once again, become possible.

One of the common slogans of the Situationists by whom Lyxzen and company have long been inspired is the “revolutionizing of everyday life.” In other words, even the most mundane and apparently co-opted entities under this system have the potential to be turned back in on itself, re-appropriated for the cause of true liberation. There might be more than a little truth to this. Recent surveys have revealed that despite the inexorable fall in both living standards and album sales, ticket sales — even to expensive mega-fests like Coachella — continue to rise.

It doesn’t take too much speculation to figure out why: in a world where so much is denied, even a vague experience of affirmation and communal feelings has no price tag. Cynical booking agents and promoters might laugh at a band playing Coachella having “a bone to pick with capitalism.” But when they make it clear that they also have “a few to break,” there’s a good bet that many of this forgotten generation felt it in every fiber of their being. Indeed, a world of affirmation might be worth a few fractured knuckles.

You never want to hear that kind of news. When it happens, you remember how many Trayvon incidents happen everyday all over the world… It doesn’t seem like the race problem will ever get solved. I like to be optimistic, but it doesn’t seem like it’ll ever get solved.

And yet, later in the interview, speaking of the same 17-year-old high school football player gunned down for walking while Black, some of that optimism seemed to peek through. “Maybe he thought in football he’d have a legacy.” said the widely respected rapper. “But now his legacy can become something that helps change things, hopefully.”

With that, Nas exhibited the ongoing battle between pain and promise that hip-hop, at its best, has long tapped. The killing of Trayvon Martin, and the wave of outrage it’s provoked, has once again put this struggle at center stage.

This is far from the first time that the hip-hop community has been moved to speak out on the flagrant racism of America’s criminal injustice system. Incidents like Trayvon’s are so shamefully frequent that Chuck D’s famous quip, “rap is CNN for Black people,” seems cliche by now. Something about this feels different, however.

Numbers of protest attendees alone don’t do justice, but they do give you an idea. Thousands in New York, 5,000 in Minneapolis, 1,500 in Rochester, somewhere around two thousand at three different actions in as many days in Chicago, a thousand in Denver, and countless smaller actions from Maine to San Diego. All on top of high school walkouts across the state of Florida, and the thousands who have descended upon Sanford in several marches..

Comparisons to the 1955 murder of Emmett Till, which some consider an opening shot in the Civil Rights movement, have abounded. Like Till’s death, Trayvon’s murder has pulled the lid off a long-simmering anger at the persistent racist bile that continues to run through American society.

And as before, it’s opened the way for so many who might otherwise remain silent to stand and be counted — even MC’s not normally considered “political.” Among those is Young Jeezy: “He looks like an innocent kid. I understand the situation as far as dude wanting to be [on] neighborhood watch, but everybody that’s black and young ain’t ‘up to no good.’”

The Game has similarly been moved to dismay in a recent interview: “For some reason, people don’t think that they need any excuse to kill us, beat us, hit us, run us over, disrespect us or anything like that.”

As always, however, the most moving responses have come from artists more in touch with hip-hop’s grassroots. At the time of this writing, Mos Def has teamed up with dead prez to record a tribute track for Trayvon. Immortal Technique has pointed out that vigilante violence is a regular occurrence on the US-Mexico border. RodStarz of radical Bronx duo Rebel Diaz, appearing on Davey D’s radio show, was quick to draw comparisons to Ramarley Graham, another Black teen gunned down by the NYPD a few weeks before Trayvon’s killing.

One of the countless local artists to write tracks dedicated to Trayvon is DC’s Slimm Goines. Though this isn’t the first political song he’s written, it seems that this murder has hit Slimm, like so many others, in a very deep place. When I ask him why he wrote “My Hoodie Weighs a Ton,” he responds “not sure. I just needed to say something. I haven’t written anything overtly political in a while. I just felt I had to.”

Slimm points out that the hip-hop response to cases like Trayvon’s is, of course, nothing new:

Hip-hop has always been quick to take up cases like this. Be it Yusef Hawkins in Bensonhurst back in ’89, the beating of Rodney King, Amadou Diallo, Abner Louima, Sean Bell, the hip-hop world  has always been at or near the forefront in speaking out against the senseless violence against young black men that seems to be excused in this society. Most hip-hop folks, being young and non-white, have intimate experience with being racially profiled, harassed, and in some cases, assaulted for being in the ‘wrong place at the wrong time.

The sense that we’ve been here before poignantly runs through most of the tracks dedicated to Trayvon. Mistah FAB, the Bay Area MC who first popped up on many fans’ radars for his track dedicated to Oscar Grant, released his song “God Don’t Love Me” on March 21st. It’s a simple, bare-bones track connecting the dots between Trayvon’s death and African America’s daily degradation at the hands of the criminal injustice system:

The whole world wanna talk about Kony
But ain’t nobody speaking on the little homie
So many Trayvons over the years
Left so many Black minds puzzled, in tears
We kill them we’re in a cell doing life
They kill us they post some bail ‘cuz they’re white

Pittburgh rapper Jasiri X takes a different direction. The acclaimed activist MC, who, over the years, has responded in this same manner to the cases of the Jena Six, Troy Davis and others like them, does his best to put himself in Trayvon’s shoes:

Trayvon never gave his cousin [sic] the Skittles
Mr. All-Star Game didn’t see another dribble
And George Zimmerman wasn’t even arrested
The message is white life is only protected in America!

Indeed. We most certainly have been here before. Far too many times. But it seems every time that the issue of race is brought up in the US, it’s brushed aside in favor of rhetoric of the “post-racial society.”

What has made hip-hop in particular both so durable and controversial over the past thirty years, however, is that it’s been one of the few bastions in popular culture where post-racialism is called out as a sham. It’s been one of the few art forms that has dared to speak up and say that the Civil Rights movement of yesteryear left a lot of unfinished business in its wake.

Perhaps that might be changing. It may be painful to acknowledge that it’s taken the death of yet another young Black man to finally provoke a modern movement for Black liberation. There’s no doubt, however, that such a movement is needed. The increased attention and mobilization around cases similar to that of Trayvon in the past few weeks — Ramarley Graham, Rekia Boyd — may signify that the time has at long last arrived.

“The world is changing pretty fast,” says Slimm. “From the Arab Spring to the Occupy movement, ordinary people are standing up. We’re less willing to accept the excuses that the people in power try to offer in situations like this. That nonsense about ‘waiting until all the facts are in’ is no longer good enough for us. The facts on the surface were enough for most folks to say, ‘You’ve gone too far this time.’ And, you know what? As the facts come in, we continue to be proven correct.”

That’s what it all comes down to. The countless thousands now marching for Trayvon, Ramarley and Rekia, who have hit the pavement for Sean, Oscar and Troy, the MCs who have dared to speak out from the street corners to the recording studios, were correct to do so. They’ve known what the disdainful shills for Zimmerman and his ilk have never quite grasped: that hungry people don’t stay hungry for long.

I am the former lead singer of a ‘60s band. I performed before thousands at Atlanta Pop 2, Miami Pop, Newport Pop, Atlantic Pop. I did not squander my money on drugs or a fancy home. I went from 1967 – 1994 before I saw my first royalty check. The music giants I recorded with only paid me for 7 of my albums. I have never seen a penny in royalties from my other 10 albums I recorded. Our hit song was licensed to over 100 films, TV and commercials without our permission. One major TV network used our song for a national commercial and my payment was 625 dollars. I am now 72, trying to live on $1200 a month. Sweet Relief, a music charity, is taking donations for me. Only the 1% of artists can afford to sue. I am the 99%.

Chambers is no lightweight. “Time Has Come Today”  was one of those songs that everyone knew in its day. Eleven minutes long, pulling inspiration from soul, rock and psychedelia, social struggle and youthful rebellion, its simple sentiment was one that captured the anxiety-tinged excitement of 1968 (even if it was recorded two years prior and released in November of 1967).

The song spent five weeks at number eleven on the Billboard charts in the fall of ‘68. The single sold over half a million copies, and the Recording Industry Association of America presented the band with a Gold Certification… which Chambers holds in front of his face in his 99% photo. Lester Chambers is just barely scraping by like the rest of us.

Chambers’ photograph contradicts everything we’re taught about those who make music for a living. To believe what the media tells us, anyone lucky enough to be a professional recording artist is only a few inevitable steps away from the charmed life of a Hollywood millionaire.

The harsh reality, however, is very different. Chambers’ story is only one of countless others like it. And if an artist like him is reaching out to a long-awaited movement against income inequality, then perhaps the time has finally come for us to talk about something else that has long been missing from the recording industry: a union for its artists.

Consider the following facts:

– Signed artists shoulder most of the financial risk of their careers themselves. Though the standard record contract provides artists with an advance, they are expected to use that advance for recording and touring costs.

– The traditional record contract pays artists no more than 15 percent of all album sales (the average is actually around 12 percent). Much of the time, artists do not begin to see any royalties until the record label has recouped their initial advance. For every $1000 of music sold, the average musician makes $23.

– The “360 Deal,” a recent development in the record business and presented as an alternative to the traditional record deal, offers to pay for touring and other expenses. In return, however, labels demand up to 30 percent of performance or ticket sale income and up to 50 percent of merchandise income.

– Virtually no record contract provides artists with benefits. No pension, no severance pay for termination of the deal, no paid vacation or holidays. The amount of working musicians with adequate health insurance? Four percent. No, that’s not a typo. Ninety-six percent of recording artists are either under-insured or uninsured altogether.

Many would argue an apparently straightforward solution to the recording artists’ plight: sell a lot of albums. After all, if you sell half a million units at around $10 or so, then even after you’ve paid back the advance, you’re still left with $45,000 (which is still a far cry from what we’re told a Gold artist rakes in).

The problem is that few contracted artists ever get close to that. In 2010, 75,000 new albums were released in the United States, of which roughly 15,000 sold more than 100 units. Forget going Gold or Platinum. For that matter, forget selling 100,000 or even enough to place close to the charts. The vast majority of signed artists don’t even sell enough to pay back their label.

All of this adds up to a recipe for debt. And as any recent college graduate can attest, debt can be a great way to force you into situations that you’d rather not be in.

Oddly enough, recording artists have not one but two unions in the industry. Singing artists are normally represented by the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (AFTRA). Non-singing artists have their contracts negotiated by the American Federation of Musicians (AFM).

Both of these unions are well worth defending, but, in essence, this set-up makes it easier to divide musicians rather than unite them. A band’s vocalist is represented by a different organization than, say, a guitarist, drummer or pianist. Neither AFM nor AFTRA have a comprehensive stance on paying artists royalties, as their primary bases of power are, respectively, in orchestras and session musicians or TV and radio.

Whether a recording artists’ organization can emerge from one of these two unions or from a new one entirely isn’t clear (it bears mentioning, however, that the AFM is fighting for its life as company after company puts its orchestra on the chopping block). But it is absolutely crucial that it happen.

Who Owns Music?

At the center of the issue is that most fundamental antagonism in a system based on profit: those who work vs. those who own. Even though recording artists put in virtually all of the hard work–from writing the songs to overseeing the album artwork–ultimate ownership of the music remains with the label itself. It’s a crime that’s little different from the daily exploitation of an auto worker or Starbucks barista. Music may be a labor of love, but it’s still labor.

And as Lester Chambers and countless others can attest, most of the time it’s the labels that determine the conditions of this labor. Contemporary music history is littered with stories of record companies sitting on excellent albums, refusing to release them as artists’ income dwindles to nothing.

Saigon, one of the most consistently acclaimed rappers of the past decade, had his debut album delayed for four years because Atlantic Records refused to release it. Though he was eventually released from his contract, and the album was put out on an independent label, The Greatest Story Never Told was almost, well, never told.

In 1981, hardcore legends Black Flag were forced to break into a pressing plant  in order to release their iconic album Damaged themselves. The reason? Al Bergamo, head of MCA subsidiary Unicorn Records, had deemed the album “immoral” and “anti-parent.” The members of Black Flag spent the next two years buried under lawsuits and court injunctions, which only stopped after Unicorn Records went out of business.

In both cases, artists themselves had put untold amounts of sweat into writing and recording genuinely unique and original music. In both cases, the asinine whims of their bosses nearly prevented the fruit of that sweat from being realized. The music, the beats, the production and lyrics were all the result of the artists’ creativity and sacrifice. None of that mattered to the label, whose ownership over the music legally trumped the artists’ labor.

The irony, of course, is that we hear a lot of noise about ownership of music in the age of peer-to-peer file-sharing and “piracy.” Whenever the RIAA bankrupts a single parent or attempts to sue a twelve-year-old girl for downloading “Happy Birthday,” the typical justification is that they haven’t paid for these songs, and therefore have no right to “own” them. Conveniently ignored is that the very people the industry is claiming to protect–artists–frequently don’t own their music either, at least in the legal sense.

Never mind that, fifteen years in, there has yet to be any definitive evidence that file-sharing harms album sales. What really scares the record labels is they are now potentially irrelevant. Artists from Radiohead to Saul Williams to Wilco have explored the possibilities for reaching their audience directly through the World Wide Web–free from the meddling of corporate middle-men.

Often, the results have been impressive. Radiohead’s In Rainbows went platinum within a few days of its online release and made the band members more money than they ever had with EMI. They, of course, are an exception. One still-overlooked aspect of the peer-to-peer debate is how artists who are just starting out might manage to make a living off a web-released album.

Nonetheless, if the Big Four are shaking in their boots, then it’s because the age of file-sharing has drastically shifted the balance of power in favor of the artists. That’s an unprecedented state of affairs, and leaves the door wide open to ask fundamental questions about the nature of the recording industry:

Why should those who do nothing get to own music that artists create? Why, despite potentially making a large chunk of change for a record label, should artists be denied any measure of financial or creative control? Why, if artists can reach fans with the music they want to make via Bandcamp or MySpace, should they go through the labels in the first place?

And finally, why can’t this state of affairs be used as leverage to win some real gains from major record labels in the here and now?

To be sure, this wouldn’t be the first time artists asked these questions in a collective setting. Recording artists in the United Kingdom currently have the option of joining a collective organization if they so choose. The Featured Artists Coalition, founded in April of 2008 and supported by the UK Trade Union Congress, has garnered the membership of Radiohead, Gang of Four, Kate Nash, the Kaiser Chiefs, Futureheads and hundreds of others. Its primary goal is to make sure artists’ voices are heard in licensing deals between record companies and outside entities (TV shows, movies, commercials, etc).

Nor would this be the first time the issue has been raised in the US. Over the past decade, artists and producers as varied as REM, Irv Gotti, Courtney Love, Q-Tip, the Dixie Chicks and Prince have publicly voiced the need for a recording artists’ union.

Perhaps our own era of protest and resistance has provided the chance to make these discussions a reality. Corporate America hasn’t been so hated in two generations. The RIAA’s cutthroat behavior certainly hasn’t set them apart from the Goldman Sachs or AIG’s of the world. And Lester Chambers, modest though his effort might have been, provoked a stunning amount of solidarity. The day after his picture went viral, Sweet Relief reported over $10,000 in donations. Maybe, at last, Chambers and the rest of music’s 99% can get what they’ve long deserved.

When M.I.A. flipped off the camera during her guest appearance at Madonna’s at last Sunday’s half-time show, it was the only exciting part of what had to have been the most overblown and lack-luster performance in Super Bowl history. That’s a bold statement when one considers that half-time shows have, in essence, become little more than an exercise in corporate spectacle.

This took the cake though. The costumes, the pyrotechnics, the backup dancers were all there, along with the sanctimonious end note for “world peace.” Just about the only thing that wasn’t intact was Madonna’s enthusiasm. For the majority of the show, we were simply watching a pop star go through the choreographed motions. In this tightly controlled yawn-fest, M.I.A.’s bird was a rare glimpse of spontaneous honesty.

The culture warriors are, predictably, in an uproar. Obvious and instant comparisons to Janet Jackson’s infamous “wardrobe malfunction” eight years go have abounded. M.I.A., alongside NBC and the NFL, apologized almost instantly. She shouldn’t have.

New Yorker music writer Sasha Frere-Jones nailed it perfectly when she wrote:

The outrage is tiresome and deeply hypocritical, in all the tiresome ways you’ve been tired out by before. M.I.A. was illustrating her line [“I don’t give a shit”], acting out the attitude of the words: performing. Fine, it may not be legal to flip the bird on television, but that’s simply a remnant of the fifties we haven’t shaken.

Anyone familiar with M.I.A. will know that this isn’t the first time she’s been attacked for simply being herself. Frere-Jones mentions in her article the infamous New York Times Magazine hit-piece in 2010, where author Lynn Hirchberg traded any actual music criticism for comparisons to terrorists. Add to this the censorship of her videos on MTV and YouTube, not to mention the death threats she got after standing up against Sri Lanka’s Tamil genocide, and we start to see that this latest moment is probably the mildest backlash that M.I.A. had endured thus far.

Now, even Madonna herself has turned on M.I.A., telling Ryan Seacrest that “It’s such a teenager, irrelevant thing to do… There was such a feeling of love and unity there. What was the point? It was just out of place.”

Apparently, Madge’s sense of “love and unity” means you can throw your erstwhile collaborator under the bus. Likewise, her idea of “world peace,” doesn’t include the Palestinians. Moments later, news broke that she will be kicking off her upcoming MDNA world tour in Israel.

This was also a middle finger of sorts. Only this one was directed at an entire people who have spent six decades under the boot of systematic violence and apartheid. Over the past few years, as official Israeli politics have swung steadily to the right, the brutality of its occupation has become ever more naked and apparent. So, then, has the support for the Palestinian call for boycott, divestment and sanctions gained more and more support — including in artistic realms. In fact, with high profile artists like Elvis Costello, the Pixies, Gorillaz and, most recently, Cat Power pulling out of shows, the cultural boycott has arguably been the most visible section of the international BDS campaign.

All of this matters little to Madonna — who is willingly crossing this global picket line and, even amid her own hollow pleas for “world peace,” no doubt knows the cultural cover that her show will provide for Israel’s regional sabre rattling. As if to prove this, a Facebook page was recently started asking that the government’s top brass hold off on striking against Iran until after Madonna’s performance!

And yet, Madge is expecting none of us to see through the hypocrisy. Common sense might dictate that it is her actions — not M.I.A.’s — that are the true insult, the true offense. But then, if one really thinks about it, such rationale is perfectly at home at the Super Bowl.

This is a yearly event during which we’re somehow meant to think nothing of half-naked women being used to sell domain names, car commercials that fervently bang the jingoist drum or militarism out our ears. A few hundred protesters outside Lucas Oil Field bringing attention to Indiana’s anti-labor “right to work” laws is out of line, though.

So, apparently, are we intended to bask in Madonna’s sanctimony while M.I.A. — one of the few remaining mainstream artists who allows herself both principles and honesty — is pilloried. Was there ever a better reason to do away with our culture’s one percent?

On December 10th, police in Banda Aceh, capital city of Indonesia’s Aceh territory, raided a local concert. Featuring several local punk groups, the show was held as a fundraiser for the area’s orphans; punks from all over Indonesia had reportedly travelled to attend. None of this apparently mattered to the police, who stormed into the venue with batons swinging. Of the 100 people in attendance, 64 were arrested and taken to a detention center 30 miles outside the city.

There, the 59 men and 5 women had their clothes confiscated: dog collars and chains, spiked belts and tight jeans. They were all given toothbrushes and ordered “use it!” by prison guards. After being taken outside, guards forcibly shaved off their mohawks and long hair; women were given a short bob. They were then bathed in a nearby lake before being subjected to “moral re-education” classes.

The Associated Press quoted one young punk, identified as 20-year-old Fauzan: “Why? Why my hair?” he said, pointing to his head. “We didn’t hurt anyone. This is how we’ve chosen to express ourselves. Why are they treating us like criminals?”

Banda Aceh’s Deputy Mayor Illiza Sa’aduddin Djamal, remained unapologetic, claiming the detainees were in violation of the region’s interpretation of Islamic law: “The presence of the punk community is disturbing, and disrupts the life of the Banda Aceh public. This is a new social disease affecting Banda Aceh. If it is allowed to continue, the government will have to spend more money to handle them. Their morals are wrong… This training will be an example in Indonesia of the reeducation of the punks.

Meanwhile, perhaps feeling the pressure of international scrutiny, Aceh Governor Irwandi Yusuf claimed the punks’ reeducation wasn’t so much for sake of Islam as it was for their own good. Speaking at Indonesia’s presidential palace, he told reporters that “the government needs to think of their future.” Insisting that most don’t have jobs or go to school, he asked “if they don’t work, what will they be?”

This flies in the face of what some of the detainees have told reporters. One anonymous punk from the Medan area of North Sumatra said he worked as a contractor at a bank. “I’ll probably be sacked for not coming into work for a week.” Nonetheless, Djamal has promised the raids will continue until all punks have been caught and reeducated — personal consequences be damned.

At the time of this writing, the Banda Aceh 64 are scheduled to be released on Friday, December 23rd. For their own part, the detained punks have remained defiant

Aceh is somewhat unique in Indonesia. After the 2004 tsunami, newly-elected President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono brokered a peace deal with the separatist Free Aceh Movement (GAM) that allowed for a relative amount of autonomy from the central government in Jakarta. Since then, the region has become Indonesia’s most conservative, embracing what governing politicians call “key elements of Sharia.” Adultery in Aceh is punishable by stoning to death, and residents fingered as gay or lesbian have been caned in public.

Persecution of music, however, isn’t as singular for Indonesian authorities. The 32-year rule of dictator Suharto (backed till the end by the US, of course) maintained a stranglehold on mainstream culture, including disappearances of dissident artists and musicians. When East Timor was occupied by the Indonesian military in 1976, traditional Timorese songs were banned. Bella Gahlos, a Timorese activist who fled the country in the early ‘90s, estimates that “thousands of people have been killed for singing these songs.

By the early ‘90s, not even MTV was allowed to broadcast in Indonesia (Suharto’s censors were notoriously paranoid of what they deemed culturally seditious). Nonetheless, songs from America’s “punk revival” began to seep through the nation’s archipelagic borders. It wasn’t too long until a growing number of bands began to spring out of an already vibrant underground rock community, armed with little more than a righteous sense of rage that had been pent up for way too long. Though still restricted to the extreme fringes of society, the burgeoning punk scene was an enthusiastic part of the revolutionary upsurge that overthrew Suharto in 1998. Says ethnomusicologist Jeremy Wallach:

Almost from the beginning, musicians in the Indonesian underground movement performed songs attacking the corruption of the Suharto government, even when it was dangerous to do so. Thus, although Indonesian punk is as politically divided as its western counterparts, it is not surprising that many Indonesian punks place their movement and their allegiance in the context of the struggle against Suharto.

Punks’ support for that struggle could indeed be dangerous. Rumor has it that during these uprisings there was an unofficial order for army and police to “shoot anyone with a tattoo,” so widespread was the counter-culture’s involvement.

Now, almost fifteen years after the end of Suharto’s rule, the Indonesian punk scene is the most vibrant in Asia and, according to some, among the largest in the world. Its beginnings might have sprouted initially from the import of America’s most mainstream groups (Green Day, the Offspring, Rancid). But since then its roots have deepened, and the movement has blossomed into one both uniquely Indonesian and organically interwoven with a global sub-culture motivated by a strong DIY ethic and profound distrust of authority.

A small handful of bands, like Bali’s Superman Is Dead, have gone on to a measure of international acclaim and signed to Sony Records (even while encouraging their fans to “steal” their albums). Others, like Jakarta-based Marjinal, have made a name for themselves playing entirely in Indonesia’s kampung (poor urban neighborhoods), giving their tapes away for free and teaching street kids how to busk on trains and corners.

Homeless youth are among the most neglected and abused in Indonesian society. Since 2001, Jakarta’s government has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on “anti-poverty” initiatives that consist of nothing but hiring out local thugs to round up homeless youth and turn them into the police. Naturally, these types of programs have accelerated with the economic crisis. Given the popularity of the sub-culture among poor and working class youth, punks have found themselves frequently in the cross-hairs of such initiatives.

Mike, lead-singer of Marjinal,told a journalist for Time magazine in 2007 “Music gives these kids a way to survive, to make some kind of living… Punk, to me, is addressing the things that are rotten in society. It tells us that we have the ability to be independent and take care of each other.” It’s a spirit of camaraderie familiar to anyone who’s been in attendance at a local gig, be it in Milwaukee, Prague, Johannesburg or Tokyo.

Little wonder that the global punk community has rallied so fiercely around the Banda Aceh 64. When the Guardian and other major outlets picked up on the story, punk websites blew up in protest and solidarity. Propagandhi, well-known as a fiercely anarchist group for almost two decades (who also paid tribute to Bella Gahlos in 2001) was one of the first to release a statement:

In the past Propagandhi has received letters from people in Banda Aceh and all over Indonesia so any one of these people could be the same people who have contacted us… In the off chance that they might see this post I’d like to say to all the Punks who’ve been victimized by authorities in Indonesia that we, the members of Propagandhi, are supporting you and admire that you have expressed yourselves even at your own expense.

They weren’t alone.A petition supporting the kids and released on Change.org gained over 8,500 signatures in five days. Seattle-based Aborted Society Records has announced a “mix tapes for Aceh” initiative, asking people to donate homemade mix CDs to eventually be sent to Aceh. German band Red Tape Parade have launched a similar campaign, urging their fans to send them not just CDs but ‘zines, records, shirts, pins and anything else for support.

Already, demonstrations and actions by local scenesters have taken place at Indonesian embassies and consulates in London, Moscow and Los Angeles. And in Jakarta, the Bendera Hitam punk collective protested outside the Aceh representative’s office.

Almost as troubling as the events in Banda Aceh has been the reactions of some here in the western world–specifically the anti-Muslim bigotry that they’ve attempted to promote. Mainstream media, including the AP and Guardian, have emphasized the religious fundamentalism of Aceh’s government, meanwhile failing to provide a wider context.

For the most part, there’s been little mention of the vibrancy of Indonesia’s punk scene, its class characteristics, or the long history of harassment its endured, even in more moderate regions. And while questions are asked of Aceh’s governor, there don’t seem to be any questions asked about why the US continues to give support to a government guilty of such flagrant violations of cultural rights.

Instead, the problem is made out to be one of Sharia law, and, in turn, Islam. This has suited the “stop Islamization” crowd just fine, most of whom couldn’t care less about punk rock. Unfortunately, while many of these professional Islamophobes may be on the extreme right of the political spectrum, their ideas have become common currency, even in parts of the punk community.

PunkNews.org, an otherwise apolitical site who have nonetheless done an excellent job reporting in solidarity with the kids in Aceh, have been the most obvious example, albeit briefly. The site’s initial post on December 13th made the assertion that not just Aceh but all of Indonesia was under Sharia — a factual error. The editors were quickly called on it, and two days later they retracted that portion of the post. Even more disheartening, though, was that they linked to Robert Spencer’s reprehensible “Jihad Watch” blog.

Spencer, who many will surely remember from his role in the hate campaign against the “Ground Zero mosque” earlier this year, never misses a chance to smear Islam as a religion of hate. Though he obviously cares not an inkling for the right to cultural expression, he inevitably released a story on Jihad Watch entitled “In Aceh, Sheena is not a punk rocker.

Spencer may be smiling at the supposed cleverness of such a title (I happen to think it’s a bit cheap and obvious). His editorializing, however, is nothing but pure bigoted vitriol:

Aceh is a case study in how creeping Sharia works. It gets a foot in the door with promises of moderation, tolerance, and limited applications… As its proponents gain confidence, enforcement of Sharia becomes more aggressive and intrusive on private behavior, because, in truth, Sharia is a comprehensive system of governance for every aspect of human life, and knows no compartmentalization of public and private behavior… Muhammad’s well-known antipathy toward musical instruments can’t help.

One might wonder which part of his own ass Spencer pulled this argument out of, but it’s hard to tell with his head still up there. He is willfully oblivious to the similarity his description holds with any form of religious fundamentalism, and to how such extreme ideas are more a tool of state repression rather than the root. Look, for example, at how the Christian fundamentalism of John Ashcroft and George W Bush ran perfect cover for the crimes at Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo.

Spencer also deliberately ignores that what we have come to refer to as “Sharia” was, for most of its history, a set of clerical guidelines for living and governing rather than a political dogma. Deepa Kumar, in a recent article on political Islam, distinguishes: “While the clergy insisted that the potent rule society in a way that conformed to Sharia law, they viewed their role as censures of a bad ruler rather than rulers themselves.”

In other words, religious ideologies are bent to political agendas; not the other way round. As for the assertion that Muhammad hated musical instruments, it’s groundless. While zealous sects have interpreted it as such over the past hundred or so years, most mainstream Islamic scholars are in agreement that it was only vulgar songs that were proscribed; what counts as vulgar is open to interpretation. Muhammad was known to have musicians play and sing at his wedding.

The editors of PunkNews.org never responded to an email calling them on the inclusion of the link to Robert Spencer’s blog. They did, however, sever the link the next day. Once again, this is to their credit. However, if a reputable punk site can link to a blog like this without thinking twice, it reveals just how deep Islamophobia runs through post-9/11 America.

What makes this so especially tragic is that there is a brilliant history within punk of fighting bigotry. The very existence of a thriving Indonesian punk scene proves that it long ago ceased being a “white boy thing.” Back here on this side of the pond, there are punkers of every race and creed — from the Afro-punk movement to Chicano and Latino communities to yes, even Muslim punks.

Tanzila Ahmed, a Los Angeles activist and writer, lays it out straight up. “In America, being Muslim is an act of defiance,” says Ahmed. “That’s punk.” Ahmed, or “Taz” as she prefers to be called, runs the Taqwacore Webzine.

For the uninitiated, “Taqwacore” is the name for the movement of openly Muslim punk rockers that has taken hold over the past decade in North America. Since writer Michael Muhammad Knight’s 2002 novel The Taqwacores, the scene has coalesced around bands like Al Thawra and the Kominas. In 2010, director Omar Majeed released the documentary Taqwacore: The Birth of Punk Islam, currently making the rounds at festivals around the world.

In a commentary on the site, Ahmed puts her identity, her faith, and the idiocy of both the Aceh “Sharia police” and American Islamophobia, all in perspective:

My baptism wasn’t by lake water but by fire, avoiding the glares of Christian fundamentalists with their barking dogs on the street corner protesting outside my American mosque, or being pulled out by TSA in airport security lines. My Islamic baptism happens when I watch my back for hate-crimes when walking down the street defiantly brown in a white America or when I get told by drunk bigots at parties to go back to where I came from. My boycott these days is of a hardware supply store for not supporting a reality show. That is the American Muslim punk baptism right there.

Taz’s experience — absorbing the sneers of a repressive society bent on shoving you into a box — isn’t unique among punks. And it’s certainly not unique among Muslims. It could justifiably be said that Taqwacore kids bear a double burden. One of the most poignant and enraging scenes in Majeed’s doc is when a Detroit club cancels a Taqwa gig, claiming they’re wary of “the Muslim thing”.

It goes without saying that the righteous indignation that Spencer spewed out against the raid in Banda Aceh doesn’t extend to the kids who have their shows shut down thanks to anti-Muslim bigotry. Neither for the punks thrown in prison in Indonesia’s more “moderate” provinces, squatters evicted from viable homes in London’s St. Agnes Place in 2005 or the countless gigs shut down by cops every year in Europe and America.

For the most part, the response to the arrests in Aceh among punks in the west has dodged this kind of blatant anti-Muslim bigotry. Even before PunkNews.org severed the link to Jihad Watch, people who left comments like “Fuck Islam. If I could put a picture of Muhammed [sic] here I would” were quickly rebuked by several other visitors to the site. Perhaps that’s because the instinct among punks — that repression is repression is repression — continues to ring true. And with it the time-honored suspicion of well-dressed people with cowardly ideas.

In the midst of all this, it’s worth stepping back and asking why, thirty-five years after the Sex Pistols first called Bill Grundy a “dirty fucker” on national television, despite so many attempts to sanitize and market it, punk can still be a threat. Indeed, how is it that this culture hasn’t only refused to fade into oblivion, but found its niche in almost every nation on the planet?

Ultimately, it’s because amidst the crumbling economic casualties of corporate globalization there continues to be a vast, pulsing mass of human beings sick of being pushed to the margins. The flip-side of that coin, then, must be that these indignant many deserve to run the world for themselves — be they black, brown or white, Christian, Jew, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist or atheist. It’s a dream that throughout history has been called a utopian pipe dream. But then, is there anything more punk than making the impossible possible?

A few days before Lupe made Friend of the People: I Fight Evil available — online, for free, over the Thanksgiving break — I had cracked open Jared Ball’s recent book I Mix What I Like! A Mixtape Manifesto. Ball, a professor at Morgan State University in Baltimore and frequent contributor to the Black Agenda Report, puts forth a main point in the book that surely isn’t lost on hip-hop’s most faithful: that the mixtape, “rap music’s original mass medium” as he calls it, is one of the few avenues where radical, bottom-up ideas can be expressed without the meddling censorship of the music industry.

Says Ball:

Unlike other popular forms of mass media today, the mixtape remains among the most viable spaces for the practice of emancipatory journalism and inclusion of dissident music or cultural expression. With few exceptions, the intentionally designed structure of commercial radio [as well as the record business -AB] exempts that space for any such content.

There are plenty of artists who know this first-hand, countless MCs who despite talent out their ears have been deemed too “controversial” by the biz. And as Lupe can attest, even those lucky few with a contract have no guaranteed freedom of speech. A version of Friend of the People was meant to hit the ‘Net last Christmas. But, presumably because of the two-year wrangling between Lupe and Atlantic Records over the content of his album Lasers, the mixtape was delayed indefinitely.

Even after Atlantic finally agreed, under threat of protests outside their headquarters, to release the album, its content was quite obviously compromised by record label meddling. Lupe himself admitted that this harrowing process, not rare in the music industry, took such a large toll that he was for a time thrust into full-blown depression.

The Lupe we hear on Friend of the People, however, is much different than that of Lasers. Right out of the gate we’re exposed to a melange of quotes from Howard Zinn, Amy Goodman, and news soundbites of the crackdown at Occupy UC Davis. These are near-textbook examples of Ball’s emancipatory mixtape journalism — unabashedly radical and seamlessly interwoven with the content of the music.

The whole feel of Friend is one that runs the gamut between impending meltdown and plain-spoken, steadfast humanity. Sampled beats — the rusted-factory electronica of Justice, the longing shoegaze of M83, even John Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme” — are notably un-fucked-with, adding an extra air of underground, spur-of-the-moment guerrilla musicality.

And in case there’s any confusion about Lupe shaking off his own restrictions, he directs a few barbs against his own label on the opening track that no doubt make folks like Professor Ball smile and nod:

You can stick that 360 between your ass-cheeks
Artists let’s mobilize and unionize like the athletes
Radio is making our craft weak
Forced to repeat the same dumb shit that work
Only as hot as your last beat
And rappers, they relating to that last piece

The “360” is in reference to the “360 Deal,” an increasingly utilized contract giving labels not only a slice of album sales, but merchandise, ticket sales and just about anything else an artist does. It’s a contract format “innovated” in recent years by — you guessed it — Atlantic Records, who are no doubt a bit uncomfortable with one of their biggest acts dropping the U-word.

So what’s happened to transform Lupe from an embattled, seemingly isolated MC into one willing to so fiercely “bite the hand that feeds him”? In a word, Occupy. Lupe was one of the first to publicly support this new movement, donating tents, writing poetry in support of it, showing up to demonstrate shoulder-to-shoulder with occupiers in Los Angeles, Chicago and a handful of other cities.

His performance on the BET Hip-Hop Awards, decked out in an “#Occupy” t-shirt with a Palestinian flag draped on his microphone, has already become one of the most iconic moments in music of the past year. It has also come to represent a shift in the way ordinary people are approaching politics, economics, and even culture. Word is that the broadcast of the performance even played an indirect role in inspiring young activists to become involved in Occupy the Hood.

Friend of the People’s content doesn’t limit itself only to the straight political, though that’s undeniably there. Rather, the politics are only one part of a much wider missive incorporating Lupe’s pains, fears, hopes, his most vivid memories, and madcap musings on a whole variety of topics. From spinning his favorite scenes in the movie Friday into a somehow melancholy ending note (“Double Burger With Cheese”) to ruminations on the hardships of being a self-aware working musician (“Lightwork”).

In other words, contrasting with the quasi-sanitized content of Lasers, Friend comes off as Lupe conversing directly with his fans without the label’s interference. Warts and all. There is, obviously, something inherently more democratic about that — not to mention more exciting. Heard in the right context, Friend is an all-too-short glimpse on what music might look like without the one percent.

And so it’s appropriate that he end Friend of the People with what might be the mixtape’s most brilliant moment: “The End of the World.” Such a title might lead us to think we’re being left on a down. In fact, it’s hard to imagine a more intensely uplifting and hopeful note than this track:

The people, united, will never be defeated
And on the People’s Mic will this forever be repeated
Whose streets? Our streets! It’ll never be deleted
No matter how many cops that you send to try and beat it
This is revolution in the making
A rag-tag movement set to take over the nation

In other words, it’s not the end of the world so much as it is the end of an order. An order propped up by greed, violence, racism and oppression. Whose vast majority are kept in poverty while a lucky few live in luxury, and whose soldiers are sent to die for nothing more than oil. Whose artists are lasso-ed into writing songs that sell before writing songs that count. If this is the world whose end is imminent, and if, as the chant goes, a better world is possible, we can all agree with Lupe that it’s about damned time.

Now, the aftermath. The snarls have gone nowhere, not least of all for Prime Minister David Cameron. On August 14th he shifted his attempt at damage control into war footing, declaring at a press conference in his own Oxfordshire constituency that the ultimate culprit of the uprisings was the “slow-motion moral collapse that has taken place in parts of our country.” Said the arch-Tory:

Irresponsibility, selfishness, behaving as if your choices have no consequences. Children without fathers, schools without discipline, crime without punishment. Reward without effort, rights without responsibility, communities without control. Some of the worst aspects of human nature are tolerated and indulged, sometimes even incentive-ized, by a state and its agencies that in parts have become literally demoralized.

It’s not hard to figure out which “parts of the country” Cameron is speaking about. In fact, Cameron knows these areas well; they’re the same neighborhoods and communities he’s spent every waking hour slashing and cutting from over the past eighteen months of his tenure. That the Prime Minister said these words in front of a graffiti mural at a local youth center just about says it all.

Meanwhile, other commentators have been even more pointed. British historian David Starkey provoked over 700 complaints when he appeared on the BBC’s “Newsnight” program to insist that the problem is that:

The whites have become black. A particular sort of violent, destructive, nihilistic gangster culture has become the fashion… Black and white, boy and girl operate in this language together. This language, which is wholly false, which is this Jamaican patois that has intruded in England.

Even those nominally on the other side of the political aisle have joined in the chorus of cultural condemnation. Writing in the “liberal” Daily Mirror,  Paul Routledge proclaimed:

I blame the pernicious culture of hatred around rap music, which glorifies violence and loathing of authority (especially the police but including parents), exalts trashy materialism and raves about drugs… The important things in life are the latest smart phone, fashionable trainers and jeans and idiot computer games. No wonder stores selling them were priority looting targets.

Back on this side of the Atlantic, we’ve heard all of this before. After the urban rebellions that rocked the Bronx in New York City, Jimmy Carter stood in front of a burnt-out, tag-covered wall to declare how “impressed” he was with the people there before turning his back on the community for the next three years.

Ronald Reagan did the same thing during his first presidential campaign — even choosing the exact same wall and the exact same words of his soon-to-be-predecessor — before declaring war on the community centers that had barely kept the area buoyant through decades of neglect. In the wake of LA, it was Bush the First’s turn, followed by Clinton.

Perhaps the players have been switched out, along with some minor script changes, but the story remains the same: moral depravity, tied up to one degree or another in hip-hop culture, seeking to invade a respectable, mannerly western civilization and rot it from the inside. It doesn’t take a political mind to see how racist this is.

Fortunately, this line of thought hasn’t gone unchallenged. Along with the refreshingly sober assessments from the principled sections of Britain’s anti-racist movement, some of the best responses have come from within the country’s vibrant hip-hop scene.

It seems fair to say that Lethal Bizzle is no fan of David Cameron. In a piece published in The Guardian on August 12th, the heavy-hitter of London’s grime scene was unflinching: “Your country’s burning down, and you’re in fucking Italy drinking tea, and eating croissants–for three days!” Bizzle continues, frankly telling author Dan Hancox that “the Conservatives have never cared about working-class people.”

Bizzle, born Maxwell Ansah to Ghanaian immigrant parents, also references his own song “Babylon’s Burning the Ghetto.” It’s a song that could have dropped the day after the riots, but was in fact released four years ago in 2007! (Indeed, the feeling that we’ve been here before is only highlighted by the track’s sampling of British punk band the Ruts’ “Babylon’s Burning” — itself prophetic of the riots in South London neighborhood of Brixton four months after the song’s December, 1980 release!)

Grime has never made the waves in the American hip-hop scene that it’s made in its native country — and in this writer’s estimation that’s a damned shame. Its beats are often at whiplash speed, minimal and gritty — the sound of jagged, rusty metal jutting up from hunks of concrete. This firm rooting might explain why grime has retained so much of its credibility over the past several years, and why many of its biggest names seeking to leave the subject matter behind and cross-over (Dizzee Rascal, Tynchy Stryder) have also had to ditch certain elements of the sound.

Stateside, the best description of grime has come from The New Yorker’s Sasha Frere-Jones: “grime sounds as if it had been made for a boxing gym, one where the fighters have a lot of punching to do but not much room to move.”

That’s a pretty accurate picture of how Britain’s underclass feels. As the riots gained steam and London Mayor Boris Johnson brought his mug out into the open at a “cleanup effort,” one young Black man had an opportunity to take him to task. “There’s a reason for everything, Boris,” he boldly told him. “Think of all the time you’ve spent cutting and cutting and cutting! And then you’re putting off youth fees [for college]. I’ve got so much friends [sic] who want to go to university but have stopped. You’re spending hundreds of millions of pounds a week in Libya when you could be over here! Sort yourselves out over here first!”

So much for Cameron’s “moral collapse.” It’s this basic, hard reality that has made the UK into such a powder-keg. For sure, the cuts didn’t start with Johnson and Cameron — that honor goes to Margaret Thatcher. Though they continued unabated under the Labour governments of Blair and Brown, the current government has been brazenly unforgiving in their notion of “shared sacrifice.”

Nor is this the first that’s being seen of Cameron’s blame-the-victim mentality. The Prime Minister did, after all, take time in his speech at this past February’s Munich Security Conference to state that “multiculturalism has failed,” an utterance that none but the most right-wing of politicians would have previously dared to make in public. And though the argument was primarily directed toward Europe’s Muslim community, there was little doubt that any non-white listening to the speech was also on notice.

Worth remembering is what initially touched off the riots in Tottenham — a protest against the police shooting death of Mark Duggan, a 29-year-old unarmed Black man. The message is clear: billions can be spent on war, millions more on the Summer Olympics, but when it comes to the needs of the underprivileged, the best they can hope for is a jackboot on their neck. With both conservatives and liberals now turning their sights toward urban hip-hop instead of the real root of the riots, that view is merely confirmed. That much of Britain’s rap scene includes the children of immigrants — like, for example, Bizzle — merely puts a sharper point on the attacks they have in store.

It’s no surprise then that the grime scene has yet again taken more of an unapologetic platform in the riots’ aftermath than most other communities. Says Hancox in his article:

In the era of frenetic 24-hour news, live-blogging and Twitter, the response has been quick, honest and instinctive. I was initially directed to Tottenham on Saturday evening after seeing a tweet from Wretch 32 that enigmatically read: ‘Wish I was there. If you know u know.’ It didn’t take long to work out where, and what, he was referring to. His fellow MCs Skepta and Chipmunk, all from Tottenham, had already posted RIP messages in memory of Mark Duggan. Another leading Tottenham MC, Scorcher, tweeted that Saturday night: ‘25 years ago police killed my grandma in her house in Tottenham and the whole ends rioted, 25 years on and they’re still keepin up fuckry’; it was the death of his grandmother Cynthia Jarrett, who died of a stroke following a police raid on her home, which sparked the Broadwater Farm riots of 1985 (Scorcher was born the following year).

This isn’t to say that all of grime have simply been cheer-leading the riots. Hancox also quotes Wiley, largely recognized as one of grime’s greatest innovators as being despondent over what may come next–understandably so — and also quite cynical about Britain’s future. Tinie Tempah, who over the past couple years has moved from grime into a more mainstream UK hip-hop sound, sent out a message on his Twitter account that “The more riots the more repressive action will take place & the more we face the danger of a right-wing & eventually a fascist society,” a quote he attributed to Martin Luther King.

Perhaps Tempah’s reaction was a bit moralistic, but in a country where far-right groups like the English Defence League regularly take to the streets, it’s also understandable.

Nonetheless, the response from the country’s at-large grime community in the wake of the riots has been substantial, varied, and practically overnight. On top of the ubiquitous tweets and Facebook messages, there have been countless songs from underground artists all over the UK — recorded on computers or in small studios — going up on MySpace pages, many going viral. Countless other vids have popped up setting footage of the riots to the music’s grating, aggressive beats. Most don’t appear to be celebrating so much as warning.

Warning of what? Put quite simply, more of the same — which is what the British government can only expect if it delivers, well, more of the same. As it looks now, that’s precisely what the Tories, Liberal Democrats and Labour parties are prepared to dole out.

Given this, it seems obvious why hip-hop became one of the establishment’s first targets. When a system is bolstered by lies, telling the truth becomes a dangerous act. “There are many ways to prevent riots,” says Bizzle, “but the first thing is jobs — I mean fucking hell, where are the jobs? There are no jobs!”

For as horrified as Cameron and company are acting now, what they really fear is this kind of anger becoming turning into action. That may not be too far off. To watch the events of the past few weeks, to take these rebel artists at their word, it seems rather clear that today’s young folks are sick of the raw deal, and are ready to be heard by any means necessary.

This is an act of terrorism. It bears repeating because some news outlets–even supposedly reputable ones–don’t seem to think that acts like these are worthy of the label unless it’s carried out by Muslims. Of course, as we all now know, Muslims weren’t responsible for these events. In fact, they were quite clearly one of the targets.

Anders Behring Breivik hates Muslims, in particular what they have done to his “beloved Norway.” More broadly, he hates the notion of multiculturalism. We all have heard over the past several days about his virulent hatred for any kind of tolerance or inclusion, let alone the kind of anti-racism espoused by the “cultural Marxists” from whom he saves particular bile in his 1500 page manifesto. His links with far-right Islamophobes like Stop the Islamization of Europe and proto-fascist groups like the English Defence League are really the best indicator for what Breivik was trying to achieve.

Perhaps then it’s not such a surprise that among the myriad blights he profiles in this long screed is a music genre with its own history of criminalization: hip-hop.

To those unfamiliar, it may be strange to think of Norway, a country of under 5 million people and typically thought of as lily white, having any kind of hip-hop scene to speak of. More than 200,000 of these 4.8 million, however, are immigrants from Somalia, Iraq, Pakistan or Turkey, along with countless others of mixed heritage. Over the past two decades, Norway’s hip-hop scene had varied from duos like Madcon–whose members are both of African heritage–to the all-white trio Warlocks–because, as we all know, there are plenty of white kids attracted to hip-hop.

One of these kids, believe it or not, was Anders Breivik. In the mid-90s he was apparently a part of Oslo’s insurgent hip-hop community. His best friend was Pakistani, and, if his manifesto is to be believed, the two of them were among the most infamous graffiti artists in the city.

At some point, however, Breivik had a change (or loss) of heart, and now lays the blame for many of Norway’s social ills squarely at the front door of what he now calls the “ghetto/ethnic/multiculturalist lifestyle”:

I personally know of more than 50 individuals who started with hashish and marijuana as a direct result of the hip-hop mentality. Many of these went from light drugs to heavier drugs such as amphetamine and even heroin. I personally know that more than 20 individuals, from my ‘hip-hop community’, have become severe drug addicts and some of them are probably dead today.

Breivik goes on to estimate that around 40% of drug addicts in Norway have been somehow duped into it by hip-hop. It’s a ludicrous claim, bordering on the delusional, but not quite as delusional as Breivik’s overblown, almost self-congratulatory guess at how much property damage he committed as a tagger:

During my two most active years at the age of 15 and 16, I estimate that myself [and his crew] inflicted property damage (through bombing raids – “tagging”) of approximately 2 million Euro combined of which I inflicted aprox. 700 000.

It’s a familiar narrative: pop music produces drug addiction, property damage, and from there it’s only a short jump to all manner of social decay. To Breivik, the sounds of the microphone and turntable, embraced by kids of every race the world over, are little more than the soundtrack of the invading brown hordes.

Anyone, however, who takes a cursory look at Norway’s recent musical history will see a very different picture–one of much more atrocious acts than petty vandalism.

From 1992 to ‘95, probably right around the time Breivik was popping open his first Sharpie, no less than 28 Christian churches across Norway were burned in acts of arson or attempted arson. The culprits for several of these weren’t Islamic fundamentalists, but native born Norwegians Bard “Faust” Eithun and Varg Vikernes, members of the country’s rising black metal scene.

While in prison for killing a fellow musician, Vikernes became a leading figure in what is termed the “estoteric Nazism” movement, a strange mixture of Norse paganism and old-fashioned white power ideology. Eithun was convicted in 1992 of beating a gay man to death outside the Olympic Village in Lillehammer. Both have since been released.

In 2001, Benjamin Hermansen, a sixteen-year-old Ghanaian-Norwegian school student, was stabbed to death in the multiracial suburb of Holmlia; the Norwegian police called it “Norway’s first racially motivated murder.” He was killed by three members of a neo-Nazi gang known as “the Boot Boys,” who had been known to orient to the local street punk and Oi! scenes.

Neither black metal nor punk rock are to blame for these deaths or arson. In fact, the Nazi component makes up barely a fraction of either scene. And yet, according to the logic of Anders Behring Breivik, the punks and metalheads should be just as much to blame as hip-hop is for drug use and urban decay. The only reason they aren’t mentioned is that ultimately, Breivik has a lot more in common with Vikernes and the Boot Boys.

What may be most horrifying about Breivik’s notions on hip-hop is how he believes this particular “problem” can be solved:

“As for the fate of the hiphop industry; banning it altogether is not the optimal solution as it would cause overwhelming short term outcry and it would eliminate positive aspects as well. However, I believe [in] significant restrictions in the rights of media companies which will include censoring negative and destructive lifestyles. An alternative is to limit such marketing to future ‘liberal zones’. Certain positive aspects of the hiphop movement should be allowed to survive such as break dance and positive genres of the music as long as it positively influences the self confidence of European youths and only if it can be re-defined as a European tradition…”

There’s a term for this: apartheid. Perhaps that’s not so surprising considering that Breivik also calls for Israel to “finish the job” in Palestine and for the re-imposition of white rule in South Africa. Ask any Black blues musician what it was like to play in the Jim Crow south, and they’ll likely paint a picture similar to Breivik’s (final) solution.

And yet, here in the States, we’ve heard this basic line before–and not just from the fringe lunatics. We’ve heard Sarah Palin call Common a cop-killer and Don Imus claim that rap was responsible for his own hatred toward women. We’ve heard it from city councils outlawing baggy pants and police chiefs targeting backwards ballcaps.

Likewise, the kind of anti-Muslim hate spewed by Breivik has become a fixture of everyday life. The crusade against multiculturalism is one that runs the gamut from the vile protests against the Park51 community center in New York City to the speeches of David Cameron and Angela Merkel.

As ordinary Norwegians figure out a way to heal from the devastation, the stakes have never been higher. What the tragedy in Oslo and the racist rants of Anders Behring Breivik show us is that the fight for a world of true equality and justice is one that touches every aspect of our lives. If his kind have their way, then this cruel brand of white-bred repression will extend from the halls of power into our schools, our communities, and yes, even our record stores.

It’s no surprise then that all three members of the Madison, Wisconsin group are themselves radicals. Their third album, When The Revolution Comes Everything Will Be Beautiful (Phratry Records) was released right on the heels of the massive labor rebellion that shook their hometown–almost as if history itself is trying to tell us something.

Now, with that uprising faded back into the recesses and everything returned to “normal,” the question of “what next” is on everyone’s mind. Questions about just about everything else—what it takes to fight, what it takes to win, and even ultimately what kind of world we want—are as urgent as ever. The members of USoT don’t claim to have all the answers to these questions (and are rightfully suspicious of anyone who does). The conversation I had with them was nonetheless illuminating; drifting between their music and beliefs, their hopes and fears, the emotional and political, an engaging glimpse into what it means to create something original in a world riven with injustice and conformity.

Alexander Billet: The quote that starts out the liner notes on your new album is one I wanted to ask you about: “It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” Could you explain that a bit?

Russell Emerson Hall (guitar, vocals): That’s a quote from Jiddu Krishnamurthi, and the other thing in the liner notes is that it talks about how there’s no societal change without personal revolution. Because if evil people change stuff then it’s going to result in more evil! A lot of those kinds of ideas went into the record. That quote is just an encapsulation with that. Even if you can “get along” with where we are now, that’s nothing to brag about.

AB: How do you guys think that connects to your music?

Bill Borowski (bass, vocals): Well, it connects to us and we retranslate it out through the music. I mean that’s precisely how I feel about most things and how I interact with the world, the culture, the paradigm we find ourselves in. The emotion that brings out in me is probably what I bring into the music. I’m not thinking about that particular quote when I’m playing, it’s just how I feel all the time.

Jason Jensen (drums): I would say that for me, as far as it pertains to the music, I’ve learned so much from just knowing these guys; especially Russell. They’ll give me all the lyrics so I can read through them and see where they’re coming from and all that. And there are definitely parts of certain songs where that feeling is going through my head, even while we’re playing. I don’t think I consciously try to interpret it into what we play, like “here’s an angst drum-beat.” But as far as it comes across in the music it’s there.

REH: Well, I mean all the music is written as music beforehand. The vocals are normally an afterthought…

BB: Not entirely though. When we’re writing Russell’s normally screaming something. And that turns into the way the words are ultimately presented. It’s that then they have a lyrical context.

REH: Yeah, as we’re playing I’m thinking, “okay, I could probably sing here,” so I’ll just open my mouth and say something. Eventually it starts coalescing into a few phrases and words. And then I start thinking about what that could mean; what I could craft around that seed.

BB: There’s an emotive aspect to the way Russell delivers that lends itself to the chorus and the verses. It kind of feeds us.

AB: So the process is more along the lines of seeing where the music takes you? Like it’s a bit more organic?

BB: It’s very organic…

REH: Well, I guess I don’t necessarily try to match up the emotion of each song to each lyric. There’s kind of just one note emotionally—I’m fucking pissed off! But that’s the thing: I’m not “well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” Right? So I’m pissed off about a lot of shit in society and I’m sick that I can’t do anything about it.

AB: There’s a stereotype out there of “political” artists: that it’s pretty much just rants over three-chords with a manifesto over it…

REH: It’s always about the music first.

BB: Yeah we’re a rock band first.

REH: To me it’s just value added, right? We’re about music but we’re trying to put this other stuff around it. For one thing it just makes the music more relevant. And two: hopefully people will hear it and think about something differently. I’m not naïve enough to think we’re going to change everyone’s mind but it’s important to have as many voices out there as possible.

JJ: One of the things we had talked about before we did this record was putting a manifesto in the liner notes for that reason. You know, so many times you listen to music and you’re asking “what are they saying?” So we put something in there that will represent the message. Hopefully people will read it and think “oh, I never realized that!” Whether it be the notes or list of genocides on the t-shirt we sell… we even experimented with a contest before the record came out: whoever can figure out what the lyrics are gets a free copy of the record. That wasn’t as successful as we had hoped! But that kind of idea—how do we get people to pay attention to what’s going on—was always there in the making of this record. Because like Russell said, we’re a rock band first, but that doesn’t mean we aren’t extremely passionate about these issues.

REH: There’s so many great bands that miss this opportunity. I know that so many artists are so passionate about these things, but there are so many vacuous bands that squander great music with stupid lyrics! Not that the lyrics are necessarily all that critical, but why waste it with something that doesn’t mean anything?

BB: You know Russell writes all the lyrics and he’s a very, very passionate individual so we don’t expect anything less…

REH: But everyone has their say. You know, when I wrote up the liner notes I made sure to give them to these guys and said “here read this. If there’s anything you’re uncomfortable with or disagree with or don’t want your name behind it then let’s talk about it.” I don’t want it to be just me screaming from my platform. I may be sort of the “prime mover,” but I’m not going to do it unless we’re all there. Same thing with the music; if anyone has a problem with a part of a song, we either change it or we move on. I’ve played in bands where I had to play stuff that I couldn’t get behind a hundred percent, and that sucks. I’m never going to ask anybody to do that.

JJ: Going back to the ideas, though, I think I see it differently than these two guys do. I am not an original member of United Sons of Toil. I am now and have been for years, but I met these guys as just a fan. I liked this music, and I was in the same boat as most of our country right now, where I have an opinion on something one way or the other. We maybe don’t have all the info, but we know we feel a certain way. For me, though, it was an eye-opener; hearing these songs it was almost like now I knew why I had these opinions. I learned these things. So for me, getting the message out there is really cool because it changed a lot of how I view things. And if it can do that for other people, then I want that to happen.

AB: The music you guys play is by no means “mainstream,” It’s challenging, it’s incredibly aggressive, it’s the kind of stuff that the music industry has no idea what to do with. Do you think that there’s a natural kind of connection between radical politics and radical sounds?

JJ: A lot of people like really generic music that’s shoved in their faces on a day-to-day basis because that’s all they know…

REH: It’s just like we said earlier. Just like people are told what their political beliefs should be because they’re sold the lie by the elite, they’re also sold a lie about what is valid music.

BB: They use every tool they’ve got; there’s all kinds of media. The seed was planted a long time ago, they’ve watered it constantly and the whole cultural paradigm has grown up in such a way that the only way we can get out of it is just to chop down the damn tree.

REH: You know the system is designed to perpetuate itself…

AB: Right, and that effects all aspects of the culture.

REH: Yeah, it’s set up so that the rich will stay rich. That plays out in music. Record companies want to sell music, so you don’t sell stuff that’s willfully obscure for one. But yeah, I think our music and our politics are equally in your face for that reason.

BB: Yeah, they’re absolutely analogous. As music listeners and music makers, we tend to not like things that you can predict. You know? And politically we like to rub against the grain. We just don’t agree that it works—I mean I just can’t find a system that does work, so maybe that struggle is always going to be there…

REH: Actually, that’s what our whole record is about—the struggle against all of that, and it fails. Is that ever going to not be the case? Maybe. But we’ve seen time and time again, the corruption wins out. And that’s the whole thing: without that personal revolution, the system crumbles, whatever the good ideas are…

JJ: You start getting compromised. I was talking to this guy on the phone, and he said “you know if we could just fire the whole Congress and replace them with blue collar workers all-around. Then maybe it could start to work.” And I was thinking, well, that was the idea when this country started…

REH: Well, no. That was the idea that was sold to us. The country was founded by rich, white, male landowners to keep themselves in power. We were told that we had equality and democracy and representation but that’s not really the case. I’m re-reading Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, and you open it up and the first thing you see is a quote from Columbus’s log book saying “these people are going to be easy to exploit.” That’s the beginning of our country!

BB: Yeah but I think, back to what Jason said, if you do that—just replace everyone—all you’re doing is putting new cogs in an already weak and unstable infrastructure. You can’t build a house on crappy foundations. You’ve got to tear it down and build it again.

AB: That gets to what I wanted to talk about with the album in particular. All of your albums have at least a loose theme tying them together. Why did you guys decide to do an album about the corruptibility of power at this moment in time?

REH: We didn’t actually! Basically, Jason joined the band, we started writing songs, and when we got nine songs we said now we have enough to do a record. But they were done over a certain period of time, and I was thinking about the world in certain ways. And so as we were talking about how to sequence the songs on the record, Jason said “why don’t we sequence them to tell a story?” I was kind of doubtful about it, but I tried it and I thought about what the core concepts of those songs were and tried to arrange them that way. And it worked really well! And I was like “dude, we have a concept album!”

AB: Keeping with that arc, there are a lot of songs with a historical context—“Alcoholism in the Former Soviet Union,” “ILO Convention 169”—but then there’s others that pull on more current events. Like “Contrition of the Addict,” which mentions the overthrow of the Honduran president a couple years ago, or “Operation Cast Lead.” What is it that ties that content together?

JJ: The thing that pops up in my head is that, historically, there are always these kinds of things going on. You can look at 200 years ago or 50 years ago, and it’s the same story! You can piece in whichever part of the puzzle you want because they all fit! We didn’t make nine songs about one specific era, like the 1940s during World War II. We took situations from every walk of life—politics, culture, the economy—and what you see is that it’s the same situation over and over and over again.

BB: Yeah, whether you have the new boss or the old boss the exploiters are still there.

JJ: Exactly, and whether you have a boss you love or a boss you hate, the objective is the same!

BB: Not all of the protagonists in our stories are malevolent though. They can be as good as they want but they still end up corrupted.

REH: Right, like “The Shining Path,” which talks about the Maoist group in Peru. They essentially wanted to create a more “pure” communism. They had these really lofty ideals but they went about it by selling drugs, by destroying peasants’ farmers markets, and basically killing the people who should be supporting them. It failed, of course. But I guess to answer your question, it’s actually in the liner notes right there. I have that little blurb on how the story unfolds throughout the song, then as I said before, it’s back to the Jiddu Kristhnamurthi. In order for radical social change to succeed you have to have personal radical change first.

AB: What you were saying about “The Shining Path” also reminds me about that line in “The Urban Guerrilla,” “strong ideas aren’t strong enough.” In times like these I think there’s very much a question about how do you change society. Does it have to be violent or can it be peaceful? Is it through protests on the street or guerrillas up in the hills? What do you guys think is necessary for that change and what kind of planet do you want to see?

BB: Well that’s going to be different for each of us. But my personal ideal is a society composed of lots of little societies all cooperating and working within for the greater good. You know, everybody has a job and everybody has a function. You find people’s strengths and you let them realize them. Don’t force anybody into it. Maybe those little communities can cooperate with each others, but for right now we’re just too large, too centralized, too concentrated. I think that’s what causes a lot of our issues, but that’s also how the machine makes money. There has to be a complete cultural and social breakdown. Not necessarily violent, but it has to happen. Centralized governments and nation-states are the downfall of all of us.

JJ: I tend to fall between the general idea of socialism and the general idea of anarchy. I can’t quite decide because one side of me wants to see a more socially-driven economy rather than money-driven. The other side of me doesn’t want to worry about government control. The demon in my head is that I fail to see right now any form of government that can succeed at all. So until some crazy thinker comes up with a fresh idea that we haven’t heard of, I think we might just be fucked!

REH: I also have a lot of despair; I don’t see a way out politically. Like I said, I feel people are not willing to have that radical personal change. And I fear that that means we’re sort of doomed. There are a lot of things we can do to make our society by working within the system. I think we should do those–they’re obviously not enough and they should be an endgame, but I’m conflicted overall.

AB: Do you think there’s a certain process happening now—Egypt, Madison, etc—that might push people in that direction toward a radical personal change?

BB: It might push them in that direction—to do some personal reflection. I don’t know if it’s strong enough to change society the way I want to see it.

REH: This has been brought up in Madison over and over again: all these things that we enjoy—safety in the workplace and your weekends and pensions and no child labor—these are all things that organized labor put in place by saying “we’re pissed off and we’re not going to take it anymore.” So can things change? Yes, certainly they can, but is it going to be enough to change the system? With Egypt, okay now the president’s gone, but the military is in charge…

BB: Which is now starting to show it’s face…

REH: Right, and that’s exactly what we’re saying on the record. I mean in our own country we have President Obama saying “change,” and now it just seems like “meet the new boss, same as the old boss.” It’s just another party, a party of the rich by which the system perpetuates itself.

JJ: You even look at the notion of “change and hope.” It was an idea that was advertised and sold to us, and we’ve seen how that’s ended up.

AB: Let’s get back to the music. In “Alcoholism in the Former Soviet Republics” there’s this hypnotic, looping, feeling. The feeling we’ve been here before; it’s also about the massive rise in social decay after the fall of the USSR. Is that the reason you ultimately ended up opening with that track?

REH: Yeah, it’s the beginning, that crossover point, that change from one system to another and it ends up being just as bad. Like all of the songs, there’s a very personal element. Like I said in the manifesto, just shouting about politics isn’t good enough. It’s got to be related back to a human story.

JJ: The thing that’s important about what Russell writes is it gives people that kind of story. It allows them to pull back and look at it and judge it.

REH: And there’s a whole additional layer of personal meaning in all of those songs for me. For example, I’m dealing with alcoholism in my own family, and the refrain of that song is a saying from Alcoholics Anonymous. In “The Shining Path” there’s a section about how, as we get older and start taking on more responsibilities, the banality of modern life, there’s a sense of guilt. I can’t be the activist I once was. And it suddenly occurred to me that raising children is the most intensely political act. Because that will have the most impact of anything in the future. So there’s a lot of stuff in there that’s not in the liner notes that is very personal for me; I’m not just going to shout about how much the world sucks.

AB: Well, I think there’s always a way in which the personal and the political are intertwined, despite what we’re told about our lives…

BB: Right, there’s always a relationship at all times!

REH: Exactly! And I think especially with so many political bands, like you said, it’s just about getting up on a soap box. I remember back in the ‘80s there were all these hardcore bands that were just like “fuck Reagan!” And that just left me flat, you know? There’s no connection to everything. Sure, we’re all pissed off. So what? It’s not that you actually have to present a solution, but try to give it some context other than just pure rage.

BB: At least for yourself…

BB: Because like we’ve said, we don’t do this for anybody but ourselves. When we’re writing we’re not writing for anybody but ourselves.

JJ: Yeah I’ve never heard us once say “what do you think people would like better?”

REH: And that goes back to your question: do the politics and the music go together in that they’re both, I don’t know, willfully obscure? Well, I don’t think we try to alienate people, but at the same time—this is another thing in the liner notes—being a career musician means you suddenly have to worry about selling records. We all have day jobs, which means we’re all relatively free to do whatever we want. We don’t have to let the slightest hint of compromise in.

AB: My last question is just about the relationship between music and social change. Even googling the reviews of When the Revolution Comes, you can see a lot of commentary about how it was released just as things were starting to explode in Madison. Do you think given everything that’s happening right now, is there a door being opened for music to play a role in social change?

BB: Well I think media in general! It’s not just music; every form of art has an impact to a certain amount of people. Folks respond to it, so I totally believe that music has role to play in social change.

REH: As dismissive as I’ve been about our music changing people’s minds, I think back to when I was younger—in college, when I got into punk rock—and I remember listening to Gang of Four and the Clash. I remember reading the lyrics and going “holy shit!” One time early on someone told me “Gang of Four are communists!” And I remember thinking “really, why would they be communists?” And then I read the lyrics to Entertainment! and just thought it was incredible. To me, that’s where that crossover between the personal and the political comes from.

JJ: I think once again I have a slightly different take. The thing with the way we write our music is that we don’t necessarily have the imagery in mind when we write it. I mean people listen to music because they like the groove, they like the beat, the like the guitar part. People who are in it just for the lyrics may not get too far with us. Gang of Four was out there and they were accessible to a lot more people. Are as many going to be influence by us? Probably not…

REH: Well no, of course now; they have a much bigger platform.

JJ: Yeah sure, but how many of our fans are in it for the politics and how many are in it just because they like to jam? You know, I think about the big rallies in front of the Capitol. There were a lot of actors and musicians who came out and supported, and for a lot of people that added something to it. Maybe some people who wouldn’t have supported it otherwise saw that and decided they would. I’m not discrediting Russell’s answer—I agree with a lot of what he said—but it’s an important question: do people get into the politics because they listen to the people playing it, or is it the other way around?

REH: It works both ways. We’re definitely trying to create something bigger than just the music. The politics, the artwork, the aesthetic, everything! That can help pull people into the music. You know, people may get into it because they like the music, but they’ll discover this other stuff.

BB: The music itself is its own entity too. People are going to biologically respond to it whether or not there’s a message. If you can write a message to go along with it, people will get it. It’s a propaganda tool like any other.

No more internal power struggle;
We come together to overcome the little trouble.
Soon we’ll find out who is the real revolutionary,
‘Cause I don’t want my people to be contrary.

— Bob Marley, “Zimbabwe”

March 3rd marked the fifth annual “Music Freedom Day.” Associated with Danish artists’ rights organization Freemuse, it’s designed to bring attention to the repression and exploitation of musicians around the world.  Over 30 events were held in a variety of countries, including, notably, some in North Africa and the Middle East, whose nations have recently been gripped by uprisings and revolutions.  Egypt and Jordan were both among those counties whose Music Freedom Day took on a whole new meaning.

And so it was in Zimbabwe.  This year’s event took place in Harare’s Book Cafe, featuring performances from three of the country’s best-known political artists.  The really impressive act, however, came from the 2,000 artists who ordered the state-run Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation to observe six hours of silence.

According to Albert Nyathi, musician and head of the Zimbabwe Music Rights Association (ZIMURA), the demand came as a protest against the rather brazen ripoff of Zimbabwe’s artists.  “The ZBC owes musicians more than $300,000 in unpaid royalties and this is unacceptable,” said Nyathi.  “We have tried in vain to have that money paid, but ZBC have not given us a firm commitment…”

The vicious, tyrannical and corrupt practices of President Robert Mugabe are by now common knowledge among human rights, labor and solidarity activists.  Once a major figure in the country’s leftist liberation movement against white rule, he is now a leader who has made his peace with the lash of austerity.  During the most recent General Election in 2008, when Mugabe’s Zanu-PF party suffered serious defeats, Mugabe engaged in widespread intimidation, assaults and arrests to maintain his rule.

Perhaps it’s no surprise then that Mugabe cares little for the nation’s rich and varied musical traditions, or their deep connections to popular struggles.  In fact, if Mugabe had his way, that connection would be severed at the root.

There are no obscenity laws in Zimbabwe,  Rather, says US writer and filmmaker, Banning Eyre:

A climate of fear affects composers, singers, DJs, journalists and writers alike, muting and even silencing many artistic voices.  Broadcasters are closely watched and often scripted to avoid any criticism of the state.  Some have lost their jobs when they were judged to have crossed the line.

The ZBC – whose four channels are the only legal stations in Zimbabwe – maintains nothing less than a blacklist of artists who dare to speak out.  Countless artists, including some of the country’s most famous, have complained of having their most political songs denied any airplay whatsoever.

To make matters worse, the Zimbabwe Music Corporation and its subsidiary, Gramma, run what is basically a monopoly over all domestic or foreign music released within the country’s borders.  “Apart from the ZBC not playing us, the recording companies are also refusing to release our music,” says artist Leonard Zhakara.  “I have albums that are ready but the record companies are afraid to release them.”

The consequences of this censorship aren’t mere trifles.  During the 1980s and 90s, when the HIV/AIDS epidemic was reaching disastrous proportions in Zimbabwe, artists who even mentioned the diseases had their songs banned on the grounds that they might offend conservative values on sex.  It was only one aspect of a full-fledged state refusal to acknowledge AIDS. Today, the HIV infection rate in Zimbabwe hovers somewhere around 40%.

Then, there’s the toll that the state takes on the musicians, themselves.  Artists who write political songs risk harassment and even violence.  Fans of their music or concert attendees have been assaulted by gangs identifying themselves as “veterans” of the war for liberation.  Thomas Mapfumo, the famed “Lion of Zimbabwe,” innovator of Afropop, who once toured with Bob Marley, has faced such harassment for his anti-Mugabe views that he was forced to flee the country in the late 90s.

Now, with a wave of revolt sweeping down the African continent, Mugabe’s repression only appears to be intensifying.  On February 19th, forty-five activists and members of Zimbabwe’s International Socialist Organization were arrested and detained on charges of “treason.”  Their crime?  Watching videos of the uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia. The activists have been tortured, denied medical care, and currently face the death penalty if convicted.  The severity of punishment they face speaks to how much Mugabe and the Zanu-PF fear such a revolt in their own borders.

It’s been said that one can measure the freedom of a society by the diversity of its art.  At one point, Mugabe’s cronies appeared to believe this.  In 1972, when the Zanu-PF was still struggling against Rhodesian apartheid, it publicly stated:

In a free, democratic, independent and socialist Zimbabwe the people will be encouraged and assisted in building a new Zimbabwe culture, derived from the best in what our history and heritage has given, and developed to meet the needs of the new socialist society…

Compared to the present reality, those words ring hollow. For the Zimbabwean people, their country isn’t free, democratic or independent.  It most certainly isn’t socialist.  Like countless other tyrants on the continent, it’s time for Mugabe to face the music.

And really, that seems to be a major reason for them to never say “no” to themselves creatively. That’s something that connects the stories they recount of Fela Kuti, Bob Marley, Rage Against the Machine, even themselves. These are all artists that haven’t been limited by preconceived notions of what a musician is, whether that notion comes from other artists, record labels, or the leaders of repressive regimes. If music is to play the urgent role it is meant to in a changing world, and in driving that change forward, then it needs to be able to say “yes” to itself free of these fetters.

Alexander Billet: When did the group come together?

Brian “Mr. Lantern,” vocals: Well, Agents of Change really started about January 2005, and it started more or less as a traditional hip-hop group–MC, turntables, all that. And that was with me, a DJ named DJ kZa, and then a rapper named Hoop Star. Then over the next couple years it evolved; I met Mike through Evil Empire, which Johnny plays bass in and Mike plays percussion. I was singing for them for some time. And then I met Adam through working at Whole Foods. So the band just started to gel over time and metamorphosize from a more traditional hip-hop project into a live band.

MC “Mike” Murda, drums: We were all going to College of DuPage. So we would go use their recording studio at night and then we just started sharing it with the public and people dug it. Then we started doing live shows.

AB: So was it a conscious decision to mix punk and hip-hop and all the other sounds you guys play with?

Brian: It was very conscious. I think we all come from a lot of different musical backgrounds, so just because it started with that kind of political hip-hop center-of-gravity, I think that’s how it originated. But at the same time we’ve always loved so many different kinds of music, including punk, funk, jazz, acoustic-styles, Latin, Afrobeat. All of it! You name it, you got it!

AB: So who where some of the biggest influences on all you guys?

Mike: The Roots. Definitely the Roots, man.

Brian: Rage Against the Machine…

Johnny “BMJ” Thunders, bass: Operation Ivy…

Adam “Jigga Jones,” guitar and keys: Fela Kuti.

Brian: You know, stuff with a message that’s still danceable and high-energy.

Johnny: Yeah, I played some of our new shit for someone and they just said “it sounds like Operation Ivy in 2010.”

Adam: That’s awesome!

Brian: Yeah except now we have to break up after our first album [laughter all around].

AB: You mentioned that you want it to be something with a message but danceable at the same time. There’s an image of political groups out there that it’s politics first and art second, so the music falls behind. Is that why you think it’s important for the music to actually be good?

Brian: Yeah, no one gives a shit if it’s not good music!

Adam: I feel like the message is also bigger than just what we’re saying and what notes we’re playing too. It’s how we’re going about it; what kind of shows we play and how we choose to spend our money on producing CDs. You know, we do our own screen-printing for our t-shirts and things like that. I mean, obviously if you have a song like “Life’s Short,” that’s a message. But at the same time, the overall message of the band is bigger than one song.

AB: Now you’ve also mentioned that your sound is still expanding too…

Johnny: Yeah, we’ve got a guy playing trumpet with us now, and some turntables and different types of percussion we’re reaching out to.

Brian: We’ve worked with saxophone players before. And like I said, we used to have a turntablist back in the day. So it’s an evolution but it’s also coming full circle in a way.

AB: That’s cool to hear you say that, because a lot of artists pick a “sound” and then don’t let themselves evolve.

Brian: Yeah, we’re kind of “post-genre.” And by that I mean we’re kind of this hip-hop-punk fusion thing, but really when you start breaking it down we’re a punk, hip-hop, dance, jazz, jungle, disco, acoustic, reggae… So I think we’d all get bored if we said we’re just going to play this one style of music; we’d probably hate ourselves!

Adam: I think adding to the instrumentation–like adding trumpet into the mix–we’re able to do a lot more down-tempo things that we might not otherwise be able to do.

Johnny: Yeah, another lead instrument is nice–to have something else up top sharing the words and the guitar and the keyboard. You have more to listen to.

AB: Do you think the audience would get bored to if you just played the same thing?

Brian: It depends because you want to give the people what they want but at the same time you’re up there for yourself. But any artist who says they’re only in it for themselves and that they don’t want recognition is a damn liar! Political or apolitical. It’s kind of a give-and-take. You want people to participate and to be inspired. But also part of that punk rock attitude is that sometimes you want to piss them off. You want to push their buttons and challenge them–whether it’s to challenge them with political vitriol or to challenge them to not just stand there looking like a bunch of apathetic zombies and dance. I think those are kind of part of the same thing.

Adam: I think as much as it challenges them, it challenges us too to always be evolving. Because if someone came to our show four years ago they might hear a couple of the same songs but now we have a newer twist to it. We’re trying to always be doing something new.

Johnny: Yeah, plus this guy doesn’t play the same thing on drums twice. It doesn’t fucking matter… [laughter]

AB: Is that true?

Mike: Yeah… I think Agents of Change is, well, always changing! We’re from Chicago; it’s so diverse. You can do to one corner and get some Salsa going on and then at the next you’ve got some metal and then some Indian music. There are so many things going on that we’re always picking up on something different and bringing it to the table. I think that’s what our musical message is. We’re always changing, just like the band name. It’s just bringing that diversity of the styles and the roots of those styles and fusing them together. And it goes along with the lyrics too; Brian’s got some powerful words, but he’s also running around the room, jumping on this table then that table. So we’re just trying to add that instrumentation to add the kinds of emotions that he’s expressing.

AB: On that same tip, do you think the DIY outlook adds to the artistic freedom?

Brian: If someone were to give us a big chunk of money to do the same thing that would be beautiful, but there’s a consequence of challenging the status quo with the music itself and the message. Would we love to get a $20,000 advance to make record? And feed ourselves and put a roof over our heads? Of course, but nobody’s beating down our door right now…

Johnny: Oh yeah, I’d love to get paid to do this shit. Love it!

Brian: It’s easier said than done, though!

Mike: Nowadays you have to prove to the industry that you can do it by yourself before they even give a shit. That’s what we’re doing I think. We’re stating that we are serious enough; we’re doing it by ourselves. So whenever they’re ready, we’re game!

Adam: It’s kind of backwards, though. Because once you’ve already established that fan-base by yourself you don’t need the industry. But then it’s like “oh, you have money coming your way! Okay…”

Brian: “We want some of that!”

Adam: Exactly! It used to be the other way around with radio. You heard bands that you couldn’t hear anywhere else. Now, DJs get a playlist and they’re only allowed to play these twenty songs. So…

Brian: It’s a troubling state of affairs, to be sure. I mean there’s good examples of people making it to successful points and then subverting the process. Like Chumbawamba licensing some of their music out to car companies and then pouring the money directly into anti-car campaigns! It’s a give and take. It’s easy to get corrupted and we see examples of that all over the place, but it doesn’t have to be that way.

AB: Let’s shift to talking about the new record Sucka Free. Did you guys have a set vision when you went into it?

Mike: I walked into it saying I’m going to make the best album I’ve ever made; that’s what I say every time I record…

Johnny: Well, you gotta fill in the story of when you just called me one morning and said you were gonna come over and record some shit. You and your girlfriend had just broke up, you had drank like six cups of coffee or something like that, and then you played drums to him [Brian] screaming in your ear. And those are the three best tracks on the album!

AB: So it was just these two? Before guitar or bass were added in?

Brian: Yeah, “The Only Constant,” “Discoteca Antifa” and “Beneath the Roots” were all recorded like that. I think the whole album is really a document of a time period for us. Because musically, as we’ve noted, it’s totally divergent. There’s kind of this hip-hop live band point we gravitate around. But besides that we go into metal, punk, disco, noise. Acoustic-sounding, poppier stuff to more heavy stuff, sarcastic, serious.

Adam: And we also started recording in 2007 but didn’t release it until 2010! So to say we had the end in mind when we started, I’d say no. I had a totally different expectation going into in then when I came out.

Mike: We were about to go on tour, and we had no recordings of the live band. So it’s like “okay, when I leave this state I want to leave them something so they can remember us.” At first it was just this quick, rough mix, but we really wanted something more substantial. This new album we’ve got going on though… oh my god, it’s like buttah! We’re recording it at Studio Chicago, and these tracks are the best tracks we’ve ever done. Hands down! It’s almost done, we just gotta tweak it.

AB: Is there a release date then?

Mike: This summer hopefully.

AB: Does your live experience guide you guys where to go with your songs or your recordings?

Brian: Oh yeah, definitely! When we get onstage, it’s not just like “alright, robot band! Go! You’re playing these songs the exact same way every time!” You know, there’s a huge improvisational element. The songs are the songs, but…

Adam: I feel like every show we play at least one song we haven’t played before, even if it’s just a little free jam. At least the past couple shows, we’ve been introducing new songs…

Brian: “Silent Spring,” yeah, that song about environmental justice…

Adam: Yeah and “Smile For a Change.” I feel like every show we do something we haven’t done before.

AB: Last time I saw you guys you were playing at the Socialism conference downtown, and you’ve got the Winter Peace Fest coming up on the 12th. Obviously, not every show you play is for a cause, but is there a conscious attempt to do as many of those types of shows as you can?

Brian: A lot our shows are benefits or different types of protests, or sponsored by some kind of social justice or community organization. Not all of them; we do play bar shows. I think supporting independent music culture can be a political endeavor to an extent, but it’s not like playing at the 2007 anti-war demo on the anniversary of the Afghanistan invasion.

AB: How does playing at a protest or rally differ from other kinds of shows?

Mike: Well you can get more drunk at a regular show! When we’re hanging at a bar we can just kick it, be ourselves and just make music. But yeah, when it’s for a cause we try and focus ourselves towards that and give it respect. The Peace Fest is a bit different, though…

Brian: Yeah, because at most protests you won’t be given a set. You’ll be given maybe two songs in between this big list of speakers and maybe a few other performers. Peace Fest you get a full set, even though the whole event is broadly themed toward social justice and anti-war causes.

AB: I want to talk a bit about the world in general. The economy still sucks, shit’s blowing up right now…

Brian: Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco…

AB: Exactly! So do you think there’s space opening a bit wider for music with a message?

Adam: I think it’s possible. I think as we gain more information people are going to want even more, so it’s just becoming this exponential thing where people are just going to have to dive right in face first.

Brian: I think if we were in any part of the world other than America, we would probably give an affirmative response, but it’s not like we’ve gone from five people at our shows five years ago to five thousand. People are still very much in tune with mass culture. I don’t mean to say that people don’t give a shit, but we’re in the heart of the beast and the propaganda is very thick. And so whereas we might host an event that’s free, people might still go shell out for some other expensive show. People will pay 20 dollars to be degraded and objectified for a couple of hours over coming to see us. Now part of that is our fault for not making it, like, sexy enough or whatever. It’s a struggle, and maybe it will take things getting worse for people to start looking for that kind of cultural outlet to express their discontent. It seems like that’s the trajectory, but I don’t think change is necessarily inevitable. It’s a product of struggle and actually working towards it rather than just crossing our fingers or even just hoping or voting?

AB: So on the flipside of that, do you think that music can play a role in making that happen?

Brian: Once again, I think there are examples, but not in America. First one that comes to mind: Fela Kuti. Perfect example! A genre-changing musician who revolutionized the world with Afrobeat, but also was very active. In Nigeria, where he was from, his mom was assassinated, he was arrested numerous times. His house was burned down, Nigerian soldiers sexually assaulted his wives. But he organized and created a space, and helped facilitate the development of a movement of people who were really pissed at foreign oil companies and a corrupt Nigerian state. That’s one example of how music can be a real tangible force for change rather than just paying lip-service to it.

Mike: I think music’s always going to be one of the first things to the word out there. I mean, Bob Marley was a rebel fighter, and there’s a ton of other groups, even in America. Rage Against the Machine have done so much stuff where they’ve stood up for people’s rights. I think music’s always going to create that feeling and help people relate to their situation, whatever it is. It plays a strong part, especially because nobody even listens to the news anymore. I mean what do most young people listen to? They’re going online, they’re checking the blogs and they’re downloading songs! Technology in general too; I didn’t even know about the situation in Egypt until someone tweeted it to me. And then I started hearing more about it and thought “holy shit, this is huge!” So people are getting their information through other means.

AB: So why is it that all of you have stuck with music for as long as you have?

Johnny: It’s like medicine! Are you kidding me?

Adam: Yeah. Why had music stuck with us? I’m not sure…

Johnny: It’s an outlet for everything.

Mike: It’s about sharing. I think that’s why we keep making music; because we have more to share with everybody. We’re just not satisfied yet. We haven’t gotten it out there far enough so we just wake up every day wanting to push it more and more.

Brian: You know, music is a weapon, it’s a drug, it’s a therapy. It’s all of these things; it just enables you to keep meeting new people.

Adam: You’re able to express something that you can’t necessarily put into words. You can share this soundscape that makes you feel a certain way but you can’t quite explain.

In the face of all this, Kweli remains as independent as ever. Some writers have attempted to take him to task for doing some very “un-conscious” things. When TheLoop21 blogger Mychal Smith accused him of selling out for recording a song with Gucci Mane, Kweli put Smith in his place, charging him with being among an all-too-prevalent cabal of writers who “would rather judge the masses as a foolish body, greatly in need of their intellectual musings…”

In short, Kweli’s going to do what Kweli’s going to do, labels and criticism be damned. That’s evidenced clearly in his choice to take a big detour from Prisoner to record and release Gutter Rainbows.

It’s a confusing move, especially since the latter is composed greatly of songs originally intended for Prisoner of Conscious. Kweli has remained more or less mum on the reasons, but still insists that Prisoner is dropping very shortly. With all this it’s certainly easy to dismiss Gutter Rainbows as a rushed afterthought bound to get lost in the shuffle.

That’s thankfully not the case. Though Rainbows does occasionally falter in its coherence it has all the earmarks of vintage Talib Kweli. Lead single “I’m On One” provides the requisite club track, with buzz-fuzz funk front-loaded over synthy boom-bap while Kwe lyrically throws back his shoulders with savvy bravado. Tracks like “Mr. International” and “Palookas” see his rhymes skate that ambiguous line between humor and poignancy that he’s gotten so good at walking over the years.

So what is it that allows the album to rise above being completely superfluous? Probably the time-worn truism that the more things change, the more they stay the same. The shout-outs on the album’s title track (“voice of the voiceless, hope of the hopeless”) might sound similar to the ones we get on the opener of 2002’s Quality, but there isn’t really the sense that it’s for lack of material.

Back in ‘04 Kweli made the kind of astute post-9/11 observations that would put him in Glenn Beck’s crosshairs: “Get searched on the plane / Arabic first name.” “Cold Rain,” with its soulful piano-driven aura, shows not just how little has changed, but actually how the atmosphere of Tea Party Mosque-baiting Koran-burning has made it all a lot worse:

Yeah I’m a product of Reaganomics
From the blocks where he rocking Feds like J Electronica
Drop and make this a lock
If he promises where the heart is
Whether Jesus or Mohammad
Regardless of where the Mosque is
They hope for the Apocalypse like a self-fulfilling prophecy
Tell me when do we stop it?

It’s hard to find a more apt cross-section of modern life in the beast’s belly. This is Kweli’s strongest lyrical suit–his ability to sketch vivid pictures of real and unflinching life and ask, rightfully, why. He does the same in throughout the album, whether it’s with deadly seriousness while telling the story of a forgotten vet in “Tater Tot” or bouncing off of Jean Grae’s maniacal hilarity in “Uh Oh.”

Throughout, even at the album’s weakest points, it’s obvious we’re listening to someone who hasn’t caved under the weight of some very disorienting times. Expectations for “conscious” artists to do everything they can to back Obama have been great indeed, and with so little promise on the horizon during recent months, it’s no wonder that some of Kweli’s contemporaries have made this or that compromise. In the process, though, some very important voices stand to be lost in the shuffle.

Luckily, Talib Kweli has never allowed that pigeonhole to be applied to him. Sticking to your guns might mean sometimes getting passed over by the spotlight. When albums like Gutter Rainbows come along though, they remind us that doing just that is exactly what keeps rap’s spine intact.

Hard as it might have been to miss the news of his release, it’s not impossible.  Much more ink was spilled in the spring chronicling his trial and the run-up to his arrival in jail.  Compared to the media frenzy that followed him eight months ago, mention of his release is being treated with a shrug of the shoulders.

Maybe it’s because celebrities in trouble sell more tabloids than celebs paying their dues.  In any event, that’s how it looks.  In the wake of the relatively easy treatment of Paris, LiLo and Martha, Lil Wayne became the entertainment rags’ golden whipping boy–proof that sometimes, despite the privilege of fame, celebrities do indeed do hard time.  This wasn’t a suspended sentence, nor was it time in some white-collar, minimum security prison.  This was Rikers!  Wayne was in a cell!  He even did time in solitary confinement!

Now, mainstream writers all seem content to wax sanctimonious, saying it’s good to finally see a celeb get his and hoping that he’s “learned his lesson.” What none of them point out is that Weezy’s conviction wasn’t about fame, connections or even money.  It was about good old-fashioned American racism.

In “post-racial” America, we aren’t supposed to mention these things, but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist or that the facts somehow lie.  Those who get in a huff over the insistence that race had anything to do with it should have to account for more than a few discrepancies when the whole thing is put into context.

First will be those who point out that Wayne was in possession of a pistol that wasn’t registered to him when he was arrested in July of 2007.  True, but is there any comparable police presence at the shows of arch-conservative rock musician and gun-nut Ted Nugent?  Here is a man who admits to having transported weapons across state lines many times during his tours, and yet Nugent — whose opposition to gun laws might be enough to make Chuck Heston blush and who has appeared on white nationalist radio shows in recent years – has never even been so much as pulled over by the cops.

Then there will be those who shout that the cops wouldn’t have had reason to stop and question Wayne if he hadn’t been getting high outside his bus, and that it was “stupid” for him to be doing it in the first place.  The stupidity of marijuana laws aside (and they’re pretty damned stupid!), this rationale doesn’t bear scrutiny either.

Take, for example, the recent drug arrest of country legend Willie Nelson.  Nelson was found with 6 ounces of weed on him, charged with possession, and released on $2,500 bail.  Compare this to the arrest of rapper Wiz Khalifa five days after Weezy’s release.  Khalifa had 2 ounces on him–a third of what was discovered on Nelson’s tour bus–and yet was charged with distribution (which carries with it a heftier sentence), and wasn’t released until he posted $300,000 bail!  Combine this with the NYPD’s history of “keeping tabs” on hip-hop, and the case against Wayne becomes a lot less clear-cut.

Just as absent as the topic of race from the discussion has been the shameful state of America’s prisons.  Moral sadists prattle on about Weezy getting “special treatment” by being separated from the general population at Rikers Island, but one wonders about the condition of a jail where inmates have to be separated in the first place.  Recent years have seen repeated lawsuits filed against Rikers accusing the detention center’s guards of acquiescing to or encouraging violence among the population.  Special treatment this ain’t.

Then, there’s the time — perhaps more publicized than any other episode of Lil Wayne’s stretch — that he spent in solitary.  This in particular was harped on by many a commentator with a disturbing amount of glee.  None of these same journalists bothered to point out that the inhumanity of solitary confinement have been well documented by human rights activists, psychiatrists and prisoners themselves.  As Charles, a prisoner at Tamms Supermax Prison in Illinois who had been held in solitary confinement since 1998, says: “Lock yourself in your bathroom for the next 10 years and tell me how it will affect your mind.”

Lil Wayne didn’t do ten years in solitary; he did a month.  His quick return to the studio shows that he’s been released with his mind obviously intact.  Still, if he can be separated from human contact for the crime of possessing an mp3 player, what might have happened to him if he’d been caught for a far more egregious transgression?

Of course, there are countless Black men who are suffering the brunt of the American criminal injustice system far worse than Lil Wayne.  But that’s the point; if that system can get away with all of this while the cameras are rolling, then the horrors it commits against millions of anonymous human beings are enough to boggle the mind.

This could have been an opportunity for music scribes to ask some basic questions.  Like why hip-hop gets such a bad rap while the illicit behavior of rock or country stars barely gets a mention.  Or why it is that Black men are arrested and convicted at twice the rate of their white counterparts for the same crime.  Or how it is that world’s “greatest democracy” can lock up more people than any country on the planet and allow its cops to shoot anyone they like without reprisal.

Instead, those same writers resorted to easy punchlines.  Perhaps it’s a testament to what a volatile powder-keg we all are sitting on.

His new mixtape, The Truth Campaign–recorded with French producer The Truth Teller, is yet another step outside the box for him. Over intricate, room-filling beats Morris manages to create hip-hop that is catchy and accessible without dumbing himself down or shying away from controversy. Here, he talks to Alexander Billet about the new album and his thoughts on hip-hop’s connection to social struggle.

Alexander Billet: You’ve been described as a political rapper, an underground rapper, a rebel rapper, a nerd rapper. How do you describe yourself?

Phillip Morris: I guess I would describe myself as a nerd–I don’t know about “nerd rapper.” But I definitely feel like a nerd, I enjoy being a nerd. I just try to keep the music original, heartfelt. I think I’m getting better at expressing myself and my ideas. I guess I make nerdy music that challenges people from time to time and keeps them entertained.

AB: Your beliefs as an activist definitely play a role in your lyrics, but that’s not the whole story, right?

PM: Well, yeah, that’s definitely not the whole story. I do try to interject my viewpoints and my own personal politics, but I definitely don’t want my music being engulfed completely in that. I try to make sure to keep it in a really lighthearted approach to whatever the subject-matter is.

AB: You have a following among different crowds–hip-hop heads, activists, etc. Do you find a different reaction coming from different kinds of crowds?

PM: Yeah I think so. I mean a show’s a show, even if it is a more politically charged show. But there will be a lot of difference. I try to do a lot of studying the crowd when I’m performing and going from song to song; gauging what I need to be doing to connect with them while still doing what I want to do. I definitely find different parts of me will be coming out more so if a different song is being felt by a different crowd.

AB: The reason I ask is that another thing that’s immediately apparent is how electric and energetic your live shows are. And I notice that the new album really seems to have that kind of boisterous energy. Was that conscious on your part?

PM: With The Truth Campaign it was definitely a switch-up for me beat-wise. I don’t normally rhyme over beats of that type; it was a bit of a stretch for me. But I really wanted to try to do something over beats that were out of the ordinary for me but still widely felt by folks listening to hip-hop in this day and age. I wanted to do something where I could connect my way of doing things with some really relevant, energetic music.

AB: What was it like working with The Truth Teller?

PM: That was an interesting experience, because he was in France and we did everything via email. He’s based in southern France. We never met or talked face to face or over the phone or anything. It’s been constant cyber-communication, which has been challenging; things get lost in translation sometimes. But for the most part we did a pretty stellar job. I’ve never done a project before–other than my first album where I did all the beats myself–where only one person has done the beats. So that was cool but challenging at the same time. Sometimes you just want something that has a different vibe to it. But even while I was making this album I was working on other songs for other projects. So, you know, I’d go make two songs for this album, then go make another one, then come back to this album. That way I didn’t get tired–because I do get tired of my own music rather quickly. You know, before anyone else has heard it, I’ve listened to it like 500 times!

AB: Are there any events or topics that have affected the lyrical content on The Truth Campaign?

PM: I don’t know if there are any particular events… I’ve been unemployed for the past year and half. So that’s been interesting. I’ve had a bit more time to make music, but a lot less money obviously. You know, I can sit down and work on a song for eight hours if I need to! So that’s been one of the main things I’ve been going through. There’s also been a lot of things with the city–getting my car towed and booted and ticketed and then stolen then towed. So I’ve had a lot of struggle with the city and all that bureaucracy.

AB: Did you get your car back?

PM: Oh yeah! It was stolen from the suburbs and abandoned in the city. The city recovered it, but they only recovered it because they were giving it tickets. And they towed it and impounded it, and so I had to go through that ordeal.

AB: About two years ago we were treated to all this rhetoric about electing the first “hip-hop president.” But now the past two years really have shown a very different reality. Do you think that’s changed the game for political hip-hop?

PM: Well people can’t blame Bush for their problems anymore and have started to look for something else to talk about. So some of the more politically charged stuff may have lost a bit of steam, but I still see a lot of talented artists finding a lot of things to discuss in this day and age that are very politically charged for sure.

AB: Your sense of humor is very obvious from the get-go also. I mean you’re a rapper who calls himself “Phillip Morris!” That also flies in the face of a stereotype about activists: that we’re so serious and can’t have a good time. What do you have to say to that?

PM: I guess I’d say it’s important for folks such as myself to keep it lighthearted when approaching it. It is very serious subject matter we’re talking about obviously, but we can’t just be pissed off when we talk about it. Also, it’s just an important part of being yourself and being mentally capable of handling everything. I think political musicians can have plenty of fun if they just try. It’s okay to be upset about things, you know, but it’s also all about positivity too.

AB: That brings me to one of the songs on the album: “Collateral Damage For the Corporation,” which has this really maniacal energy to it. What were you trying to get across on that track?

PM: That track is really more the result of trying to make a politically-charged dance track. A lot of the songs on this album have a clubby type of vibe. And yeah, I just kind of wanted to make a political party song that talks about some serious stuff but does it in a lighthearted way.

AB: Is there a reason you connect struggles going on in Palestine to ones going on here in Chicago?

PM: Well that’s been going on for 40 years–the illegal occupation. And people tend to forget about things like that in their day-to-day personal struggle of getting to work and being a parent or educator or things like that. It’s hard sometimes to give thought to what’s going on outside this country and around the world, but I think it’s important to acknowledge it.

AB: Do think that working people here in Chicago gain something from standing up for Palestinian rights?

PM: Yeah. I mean I try to focus on struggles here at home as well as abroad, and I think it gives people a sense of unity. When we acknowledge others’ struggles and spread the word and do what we can… I guess it’s just that solidarity is the main goal.

AB: I want to move on to the next track: “Revolution Knows No Compromise.” Its feel is totally different! You go from this rather playful track to this really unrelenting feel. Is that Malcolm X at the beginning?

PM: Yes.

AB: Okay, what was it your were trying to get across on that one?

PM: Well, I guess the reason I like the intro at the beginning is because it really does sum it up well–you know, talking about the real meaning of revolution and the struggle that goes with it. It involves a lot more than just talk; it involves a lot of action and being active. I think my main point of this song is to describe that and get that sense of urgency across. We can’t just talk about what we want, we have to actively be working toward that and even actively within ourselves be looking toward getting better. Lantern from Agents of Change has a very good line in that song, which is “blur the line between practice-preach.” And I think that’s probably one of the most on-point things that’s in that song: that it’s really about getting up off your ass and doing anything you can, you know?

AB: So would it be safe to say that you consider yourself a revolutionary?

PM: I think I consider myself somewhat revolutionary. I guess I could always be doing more; there are a lot of people that I look up to that are way more revolutionary than myself. But I do possess very revolutionary ideas and certainly in my approach to music itself. I think we need a revolutionary way of creating tunes–even if it’s not politically charged subject matter–I think it’s possible to be revolutionary by not following norms and trying to educate.

AB: Would you say there’s a crossover or an interconnection between what happens in music and what happens on the streets?

PM: I think that’s definitely true. Music is just a very good tool for touching people and really getting them to listen. You can get folks to think about things that they haven’t thought about or maybe that they have thought about in a different light. Yeah, if we can do it in a way that’s not lecturing then it almost seems like it’s easier sometimes to connect with people in a musical format. It’s not the only element you need obviously, but I do see it as an important element.

AB: What is it that you want people to gain from this new album then?

PM: I really want people to see that there’s always interesting and different new ways of expressing yourself. I try very hard to express myself as best I can on this record and to show growth and progression. I think it’s really important for people not to fall into any kind of mold or just imitate exactly what they see or hear–especially on the radio and especially in hip-hop on the radio that’s just very clear-cut formula. Pretty much the dumber your music is, the greater chance you have of gaining recognition. I want to show that there are other alternatives; you can still make a bouncy, crunk-sounding album, but have some meaningful, well thought-out lyrical content to it. So yeah, I’m just really trying to provide people with music like that.

Now, that hope seems to have curdled like so much oil in the Gulf. With a Democratic majority in tow, Obama has delivered just shy of nothing to workers, people of color, or any of the base that voted him into office. New battle lines have been drawn, and while so much of the energy that pervaded through hip-hop seems to have faded, a closer look will reveal a crop of artists clearly grappling with the question “what next?”

Reading much of the hip-hop blogosphere, though, you couldn’t tell that was the case. In fact, many commentators, including those on the left, appear to be falling into the old confines of the sub-genre–confines that looked to be in the process of fading not too long ago. What’s more, the persistence of these old divisions has led to a kind of malaise among so many of those who would otherwise see hip-hop as the soundtrack of coming resistance.

On the one hand, there’s the irascible waxing over the existence of “conscious rap.” Ever since the label emerged it’s been a troublesome one–so much so that lately some commentators have been attempting to single-handedly put it to death! Back in January, Omar Burgess of Hip-Hop DX penned an article titled “When the Casket Dropped: An Obituary for Conscious Rap.” It’s become something of a minor sensation online in the months since.

As if to mirror Burgess’ lament, the week after Labor Day saw Eric Arnold, writing for the website of ColorLines magazine, pessimistically ponder the future of “gangsta rap.”

Says Arnold: “Some critics have hastily written gangsta rap’s obituary. But in 2010, the genre remains a commercial force; what has declined is its gravitas as protest music. Once outspoken on the subject of police violence, in recent years, hip-hop broadly has been all but silent on politics of any sort, at least from a mainstream perspective. Back in the days, gangsta rappers faced off against label executives in corporate boardrooms over freedom of speech; now they entertain marketing meetings over energy drink endorsements.”

There’s no doubt that both Arnold and Burgess are true believers through and through, and that their attempts to throw their hats into the ongoing debate shows how that kind of hope continues to resonate through the ranks of the hip-hop world. Still, neither of their relatively grim outlooks tell the whole story. A lot has happened since January (as it so often does; time is funny like that). In fact, sitting at the back-end of summer, hip-hop seems to have produced more than a few reasons to be hopeful right now.

This past spring ended with a shot across the bow. The passage of SB 1070 in Arizona provoked broad mobilizations well beyond the state’s borders. Echoes of the 2006 movement to strike down the infamous anti-immigrant bill of Wisconsin Senator James Sensenbrenner–which some called the “awakening of a sleeping giant”–haven’t been lost. Naturally, Public Enemy’s “By The Time I Get To Arizona” took on a whole new relevance, including an eight-minute remake featuring somewhere around a dozen Arizona-based emcees protesting the new law.

Five months before 1070’s passage–around the time Burgess was hammering the last rhetorical nail in the conscious coffin–Jeff Chang sat at the front of the auditorium of the National Geographic headquarters in DC alongside Nas and Damian Marley. “[T]here’s a global context now,” said Chang. “In order for all art forms to move forward, you have to have someone like Nas or Damian Marley to step up and push the edge.”

That’s exactly what they did. No shortage of emcees have paid homage to rap’s reggae roots, but given the lay of the land, the release of Distant Relatives took on a whole new layer of meaning. Dropping six weeks after Gov. Jan Brewer signed 1070 into law with all due vitriol, the collabo had already become the year’s most anticipated. The mixture of Nas’ ghetto manifestos and Marley’s Rastafari testimonial could have been an unwieldy balance–especially with the added lens of Africa’s long struggle for freedom. Songs like “Tribal War” got it just right, though:

Man what happened to us?
Geographically they moved us
From Africa
We was once happiness pursuers
Now we back stabbing
Combative and abusive
The African and Arab go at it
They most Muslim
We should be moving in unison!

With uber-conservative pundits calling for politicians to batten down the hatches at the border, with the accusations of “terrorists” “stealing jobs” reaching a fever pitch, Nas’ lyrics stated a simple truth that put it all in perspective: that the west was built on the resources and humanity stolen from the global south. Any violence visited on the US can’t be viewed separate from its own long legacy of state-sponsored terror–from the African Horn to Sonora to South Central.

To be sure, Distant Relatives’ world-wide themes didn’t just drop from the sky. Just as the effects of globalization has had unseen consequences for immigration and labor, so has hip-hop’s now global reach come back around in recent years. Somalia’s K’Naan, Ghana’s Blitz the Ambassador, not to mention the revival of Fela Kuti’s works from Mos Def to Broadway have all shed light on rap’s cross-continent dominance. Marley and Nas just put a point on the trend.

This from the same emcee who ten years ago was most recognized for his beef with Jay-Z. This from the same artist who five years ago declared his “first love” of hip-hop dead.

Ten days after Distant Relatives dropped, another summertime collaboration revealed the opposite side of the coin. If Nas has spent the past several years fighting the definition of what it means to be “mainstream,” then Talib Kweli has been long public about his discontent at being saddled with the “conscious” label. The irony, of course, is that, between Black Star, Reflection Eternal and his own solo work, Kweli can easily be considered one of the key accidental architects of the whole conscious sub-genre.

And so when the first Reflection Eternal album in ten years hit the stores, the risk of sounding a dated product of the niche market ran high. Like Distant Relatives, Revolutions per Minute provoked fervent anticipation. Like Distant Relatives, it pleasantly met and exceeded expectations by going outside the box. And like its counterpart, Revolutions per Minute has exhibited a timeliness both eerie and appropriate.

Kweli and Hi-Tek took to the airwaves a few days after RpM’s release to perform with the Roots on Jimmy Fallon’s Late Show. It was an appropriate pairing, given that the Roots have likewise struggled with the “conscious” pigeonhole–so much so that when they announced their intent to stint as The Late Show’s house band, the hue-and-cry over “sellout” seemed particularly potent.

Such concerns weren’t entirely misplaced. This is network television after all, and the Roots wouldn’t have been the first to trade in their rebel message for a secure gig. Those expectations have been thankfully and repeatedly defied, however, and that was confirmed when Reflection Eternal led the collabo in a live rendition of “Ballad of the Black Gold.”

Thus-far “Black Gold” has yet to be released as a single off of RpM. It is one of the album’s most outstanding tracks, weaving the woes of global war, colonial oppression, economic meltdown and ecological devastation around the dark maypole of Texas tea:

How they banking while the auto industry is tanking?
Leadership is sinking, oil pollution in the water stanking
Loyalty to petroleum, royally spoiled the economy
We won’t get it poppin’ till we’re oil-free

If you’re oil-rich then we invade it
They call it occupation but we’re losing jobs across the nation
Drill, baby, drill while they make our soldiers kill
Baby, still the desert where the blood and oil spill

Kweli isn’t clairvoyant; there’s no way he could have known how relevant these words would end up when he wrote them months before the oil rig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico (and while the song makes specific reference to Exxon and Shell, BP isn’t included). The decision to perform this particular song live, after untold millions of gallons of crude had spread through the Gulf, was hardly a coincidence. It was proof-positive of what kind of message an engaged artist can deliver when he has an opportunity–however slim–to defy categorization and get the kind of platform that so many others squander.

“I think if two people love each other, then what the hell? I think that everyone should have the chance to be equally miserable, if they want.”

It was an endorsement of same-sex marriage that came from the unlikeliest of places in mid-June: Eminem. That Em–after a five year absence and mediocre comeback record in ‘09–could skyrocket back to the top with this summer’s Recovery was a big enough surprise. Now he was slapping down his past of homophobic rhetoric by saying he supported the rights of LGBT folks to get married (albeit in a typically sarcastic way).

Outlets that reported Em’s reversal acted as if the whole thing took place in a vacuum. “My overall look on things is a lot more mature than it used to be,” was the front-loaded quote. What nobody acknowledged was that this change of heart came against the post-Prop 8 backdrop, after a massive LGBT liberation movement had taken over the streets of DC, and about a month before Prop 8 was struck down.

Nobody could deny that Recovery displayed a different Em on many levels. Critics have noted it to be much less graphic and violent than previous records. Not that the material on the record is child’s play. Case in point would be the second single “Love the Way You Lie,” which seems to have ignited a debate around the message of the song and video. Do they, as some media have claimed, glamorize domestic abuse? Do they, as some others insist, condemn acts of violence against women? What is the meaning of Rihanna’s presence?

In perspective, it’s a message much more complicated than the infamously horrifying barrage of, say, “Kim.” A worthy question might be what affect the movement for LGBT rights might be having on Eminem’s general ideas about gender. When he faded into the background five-and-a-half years ago, he was the establishment’s poster-boy for everything wrong with rap–a convenient scapegoat who could be singled out for his misogyny and gay-bashing by politicians who otherwise couldn’t give a damn about such issues.

Now, with his comeback, Em has shown himself to be the one thing censors hate: an artist whose ideas can change in the midst of bottom-up struggle. For sure, it’s not the first time it’s happened to him; during the ‘04 election season he released what was arguably the best anti-Bush song of the year in “Mosh.” Just like the strong anti-war sentiment that pervaded those heady days, he’s obviously been affected by a groundswell that seeks to go beyond the narrow confines of “men do this, women to that.” One wonders what he might be capable of if that movement can manage to gain back its steam in the coming months.

If there’s any rap group who had embodied the conflict of “conscious” and “gangsta,” it’s been dead prez. M1 and stic.man have, unsurprisingly, never really accepted the conscious label, instead embracing and propagating an aesthetic of “Revolutionary But Gangsta” (RBG). Still, their proud and vocal identification as revolutionaries, lauding of African identity and healthy living have lead more than a few to saddle them with the label. In fact, dp are mentioned explicitly by Burgess as an example of how “emasculating” so-called conscious hip-hop can be when he quotes their admittedly ham-handed “Mind Sex.”

And certainly, “Mind Sex” hasn’t been the only misstep to come from M and stic. But since bubbling up from the underground a decade ago, despite being more-or-less blackballed by the liked of MTV and mainstream radio (“turn off that bullshit!”), they’ve managed to maintain themselves as one of the most respected acts in hip-hop.

That was merely confirmed on June 22nd, when dead prez dropped their Turn Off the Radio Vol. 4: Revolutionary But Gangsta Grillz mixtape for free on their website. Released a little less than a year after their previous volume, Pulse of the People, with the explosive beats of DJ Green Lantern, volume four takes a different approach.

What’s immediately apparent is that Gangsta Grillz was dropped as a celebration of the ten-year anniversary of dp’s landmark album Let’s Get Free. Lead track “Far From Over” makes this clear by directly referencing the lyrics of their breakout “Hip-Hop”:

One thing ‘bout music, when it hits you feel no pain
Ten years later, ain’t shit changed, but the players in the game…

It doesn’t matter how many records they sellin’
‘Cuz all this bullshit that they’re yellin’ gon’ start a hip-hop rebellion
In the real world don’t have no boundaries and fears
This word-sound power that we puttin’ in their ears
Can change the real world!

The next thing that’s apparent is that the beats are taken directly from Drake’s “Over.” In fact, most of the mix’s beats are based 2010’s most recognizable mainstream tracks, but reversed with dead prez’s specific brand of militant Afrocentric uplift–Young Jeezy’s “I Luv It” is flipped into “Gotta Luv It,” Lloyd Banks’ “Beamer, Benz or Bentley” is turned inside-out into “Malcolm, Garvey, Huey,” and even B.o.B.’s “Nothing On You” is morphed into a celebration of black female empowerment on “The Beauty Within.”

For sure, nothing new; hip-hop is built on artists appropriating and reappropriating beats. But while many of these can end up feeling redundant, as if nothing has been added to it, the end result of Gangsta Grillz is how well dp’s radical rhymes mesh with this summer’s most well-known tracks. It’s a reminder that, perhaps, the realms of street and revolutionary aren’t separated by such a wide chasm.

That’s always been true too. It’s worth repeating that the division between “conscious,” “gansta” and most other sub-labels has, from the beginning, been a creation of the industry–rising in tandem with an effort in the wake of radio’s deregulation in ‘96 to sanitize and segregate rap from its own complex insurgent roots and into the realm of easy marketability. Says Chang in Can’t Stop Won’t Stop:

“Just as brands developed their niches, each niche, in turn, came with its own set of brands. ‘Political rap’ was defanged as ‘conscious rap,’ and retooled as an alternative hip-hop lifestyle. Instead of drinking Alize, you drank Sprite. Instead of Versace, you wore Ecko. Instead of Jay-Z, you dug the Roots. Teen rap, party rap, gangsta rap, political rap–at the dawn of hip-hop journalism these tags were just a music critics’s game. Now they had literally become serious business.”

That “serious business” is just what the industry does. It divides in order to conquer. It might seem all-powerful when you step back, but looking at it more closely you can see how many exceptions there are to the rule. The four examples from this past summer–from Nas to dead prez, Em to Kweli–are really just a few of the palpable examples that play at transcending this imaginary division. There’s plenty more to talk about: the return of Lauryn Hill to the scene, the return of the mix tape via mp3, the amount of emcees–mainstream and underground–who have gotten on board with the Sound Strike. It all goes to show that what unites hip-hop is a lot greater than what separates it, and that the powers-that-be ultimately don’t have as much control as they think.

But as always, it’s going to be the next generation that shapes hip-hop’s future. Some have been quick to slap the label of “hipster rap” on rising acts like the Cool Kids or Kidz in the Hall, most likely with an intended effect similar to the “conscious” label. Both have dismissed the term and proclaimed the influence that all rap has had on them.

Richard “Epic” Wallace, one of the three emcees that make up the swiftly-rising Chicago group BBU, notes “[the division between sub-genres is] all built up from the top-down. We understand where that trickle-down effect comes from. You got these figureheads standing at the door, and they tell you ‘this is where you’re gonna fall.’” Since forming three years ago, BBU have been recognized for both their radical politics and their strong, party-oriented beats.

In the end, it all starts at the grassroots–for music and struggle. Even now, with so many dark clouds on the horizon, hip-hop can’t help but be affected by what happens on the ground. It can’t help but be swayed by the anger against BP, the fights for immigrant rights and LGBT liberation, and the unquenchable longing for a better world. Rather than obsessing over the outdated, capital-planted divisions, it’s worth remembering that no matter how raw it is, there’s no way to make rebellion safe.

In an interview with British poet Simon Armitage published September 3rd in the Guardian, the former Smiths singer called the Chinese subhuman. It’s not an exaggeration, and it’s not a misquote; plainly stated, it was a jab at a nationality that comprise a full sixth of the planet and essentially relegates them to less-than-human status:

“Did you see the thing on the news about their treatment of animals and animal welfare? Absolutely horrific. You can’t help but feel that the Chinese are a subspecies.”

There’s a lot that’s simply stupid about this quote. First of all, Morrissey is well aware that China isn’t alone in its wretched record on animal cruelty. The outspoken vegetarian and animal rights activist should well aware of the horrible conditions that prevail in any western slaughterhouse. One would think too that he would be just as aware of how little control most ordinary Chinese have over their proto-police state government’s policies. Ultimately, his argument smacks way too much of vile Kipling-ism donning the facade of compassion.

What’s really frustrating, however, is the overwhelming sense of deja vu. Like most Morrissey fans, I don’t relish the idea of ragging on the man. In today’s troubled era, much of Moz’s old catalogue withstands the test of time brilliantly. Songs like “Margaret on the Guillotine” and “The Queen is Dead” are reminders of how even at the coldest depths of Thatcherism there remained a core of artists giving voice to a bit of sanity. His comments lambasting conservatism have always carried with them a certain, shall we say, frankness. But then, that was part of the charm.

At least that’s how it seems until the opposite side of the coin started to glint out. 1987’s “Bengali in Platforms” didn’t view its subject matter with any real sensitivity; in fact it’s conclusion was that the South Asian immigrant didn’t “belong.” Then came ‘91’s “Asian Rut,” followed closely by the infamous track “The National Front Disco.” By the time he started to pop up at Madness shows draped in the Union Jack, it wasn’t surprising that rumors of racism were swirling.

For whatever reason, though, Moz has always been able to beat the rap. His song lyrics could somehow be explained away as artistic license, the Union Jack incident as tongue-in-cheek provocation. Artists love to push the envelope, and somewhere down the line, Mozzer just decided contradiction was his bag. What’s more, his early support for Love Music Hate Racism seemed to put an end to all the speculation.

Which makes his recent behavior all the more quizzical. In early 2008, I wrote an article for Dissident Voice examining his seemingly disparaging remarks on immigration to the New Musical Express. Many of the comments and emails I received afterwards were, to say the least, discouraging. Some seemed convinced that there was nothing racist in saying that British culture was being “thrown away.” Others, including those who identified as part of the left, simply accused me of “journalistic laziness” and “intellectual cowardice,” though they failed to say exactly what made my article lazy or cowardly.

As it all played out, Morrissey quickly released a statement denouncing the NME, providing a rather compelling argument that he didn’t actually say what the rag claimed he did. Though the “my words were taken out of context” argument is something of a stock cliche in the world of celebrity, nobody could deny that the NME’s standards have declined in recent years. A few days later, when the publication withdrew support for the upcoming Love Music Hate Racism carnival in London, Moz stepped up and donated the sizable sum of 28,000 pounds to cover the difference. When push came to shove, it seemed the singer knew which side he stood on.

And now, this. One has to wonder how many times an artist of Morrissey’s status can make comments of this nature and be let off the hook. Tom Clark, writing in the Guardian, sums it up:

“He’s caused enough upset on race in the past to know perfectly well that he ought to take care with his public remarks. But he hasn’t. So if the charge is causing racial offence, the only feasible judgment is guilty.”

Other former allies have thrown in the towel with him. Martin Smith of Love Music Hate Racism tells me that several of the organization’s participating artists have decided they want to have nothing further to do with Moz.

“You know, you can make comments once, and everyone’s entitled to be wrong or change their mind once,” says Smith. “I think the problem we’ve got with Morrissey is that he’s done it several times! I don’t believe it’s a mistake, I think it’s conscious, and I think he’s gone too far… These are much more serious statements than he’s made before. I mean ‘subhuman’ is crude racism to put it mildly. If someone like Adolf Hitler said that you’d talk about biological racism, which everyone knows is genocidal!”

So is this in fact the last straw? Is Morrissey now finally fated to be forever branded a racist? Most likely, he would deny it up and down (though it’s worth remembering that some of the modern world’s most virulent bigots would never identify as such).

In the end, though, his personal views seem less relevant than the atmosphere in which he’s let these vile comments fly. Ideas like these, long relegated to the fringes of society, are becoming common currency again thanks to the rise of an emboldened far-right. The British National Party and other like-minded groups are winning parliamentary seats in Europe. Roving bands of open fascists are stalking mosques and neighborhoods of color, targeting anyone with brown skin.

All of this makes Morrissey’s comments dangerous. Straight up. The volatile atmosphere of hate is one in which young folks’ ideas become a literal battleground. Right now there could very well be some alienated kid in urban Britannia flirting with far-right ideas. Hearing a well-respected musician get away with calling another race a “subspecies” might be just enough to push their confidence over the edge into beating down an immigrant. Still others on the opposite end of the polarization are just sick of Moz acting like he doesn’t care when the rest of us clearly do.

Plainly stated, Morrissey needs to learn what Bowie, Costello, Clapton and countless others learned before him: that pop artists don’t stand above the fray. They can say what they want and sit back with a smug smile if they wish, but they shouldn’t be surprised when reality comes back to bite them in the ass.

If I was president…
…instead of spending billions on the war
We can use some of that money in the ghetto.

– Wyclef Jean’s “President”

Profound words. And with their author now in the race to become Haiti’s next president, it might be easy to think they’re on the verge of becoming reality. On August 7th, the Grammy-winning artist announced he wants to lead his homeland–still reeling from the disastrous effects of the January earthquake.

“It’s a moment in time and history,” Wyclef declared to the press during his announcement. “America had Barack Obama and Haiti has Wyclef Jean.” True enough, plenty were ready to dub Obama the “hip-hop candidate” during the height of his campaign. Clef is clearly hoping for a Creole-style repeat.

And like Obama during the campaign, Wyclef seems more than willing to adopt the role of the “blank slate.” His rhetoric, his platform, his promises–all are vague enough for folks to interpret, project and read into them whatever they hope. At this early stage, though, the question has yet to be answered: what kind of substance will step up to fill in the blanks?

On the surface, the answer is simple. Going off his music it seems that Clef is poised to launch the spirit of Third World struggle onto the international political stage. Since storming onto the scene fifteen years ago with the Fugees he’s been painted as the hip-hop generation’s Bob Marley. Well before being crowned the ambassador-at-large for the poorest nation in the Western hemisphere, he was calling on Marley’s spirit, pulling from his own nation’s rich musical traditions and translating both into a rebel aesthetic that testified to hip-hop’s global reach. It’s this Wyclef–Wyclef the artist–that we’ve heard on “Gone ‘Til November” and “Diallo,” who spoke so eloquently against the NYPD’s horrifying abuse of fellow Haitian immigrant Abner Louima. One has to admit that if this is the Wyclef seeking Haiti’s highest official post, then it is a great day for the Haitian people.

Sift a little deeper though, and Clef the candidate looks very different. Per Time magazine, Wyclef sees his trajectory following that of another artist-turned-statesman: Ronald Reagan. It’s a chilling statement to make; most Haitians remember how vociferous a supporter Reagan was of the corrupt and murderous regime led by dictator “Baby Doc” Duvalier.

The jarring contradiction–between style and substance, celebrity and principle–is one Clef hopes to ride all the way to Haiti’s National Palace. It also explains why some have been less than enthusiastic about his bid.

First among these was Sean Penn, who on the same day stated to CNN that he is “suspicious” of the artist’s motivations. Penn, who has been doing consistent relief work in Haiti over the past six months, admits he knows little about him, but that “[o]ne of the reasons I don’t know very much about Wyclef Jean is that I haven’t seen or heard anything of him in these last six months that I’ve been in Haiti.”

Then came the discord from Clef’s own peeps. Fellow Fugee Pras, also Haitian, told the Associated Press that he didn’t plan to support his former bandmate. “You’ve got 1.2 million people living in tent city right now. What are the plans to get these people out?”

Ultimately though, the problem with Wyclef isn’t his lack of a plan; it’s whether that plan will actually be in the interests of the Haitian people. In an article for the San Francisco Bay View, Charlie Hinton urges readers (in his caps): “PLEASE SPREAD THE NEWS: WYCLEF JEAN IS NOT A FRIEND OF THE PEOPLE’S DEMOCRATIC MOVEMENT OF HAITI.”

Hinton is a member of the Haiti Action Committee. The movement he is referring to is one as old as Haiti itself–pulling on the legacy of Toussaint L’Ouverture’s and the revolution that overthrew colonialism, running through the rebellions that deposed US-backed dictator “Baby Doc” Duvalier in 1986. Six years after President Jean-Bertrand Aristide was deposed in a US-backed coup, it is a movement that continues.

Despite his claims to the contrary, it is a movement that Wyclef has never represented. In order to figure out why, it’s necessary to go back a little bit.

After the strongman Duvalier was brought down in ‘86, Haiti went through a quick succession of presidents. Between Duvalier’s departure and Aristide’s rise, power changed hands no less than six times. Unelected and often incompetent, these leaders faced a popular movement that had only recently brought down a fifty-year dictatorial dynasty. General strikes, demonstrations and protests were a frequent occurrence, often under the threat of harsh treatment at the hands of police and military alike.

It was against this backdrop that Aristide’s profile began to grow. Originally a Salesian Catholic priest, Aristide came under increasing sway of liberation theology and involved in the movements against poverty and for participatory democracy in Haiti. In January 1988, he told the National Catholic Reporter that “the solution is revolution, first in the spirit of the Gospel; Jesus could not accept people going hungry. It is a conflict between classes, rich and poor. My role is to preach and organize…”

When Aristide was elected in 1990, it was with 67% of the vote–a clear majority. His promises–to sweep out corruption, double the minimum wage and put an end to the pillaging of the country’s economy by foreign powers–were understandably popular. Few voices could possibly disagree, but some did. Chief among them was Haiti-Observateur, a right-wing Creole-language newspaper founded in New York in 1971.

When Aristide was elected in 1990, Haiti-Observateur decried him. When he was deposed in a coup in 1991, Haiti-Observateur applauded. When the FRAPH–a paramilitary organization bankrolled by the CIA–was formed in 1993, the rag cheered as it roamed the country murdering Aristide supporters. After Aristide returned to Haiti in 1994 and was reelected in 2000, the newspaper opposed him every step of the way.

In February 2004, when bands of gunmen–many with connections to the FRAPH and the CIA–were overrunning the north of the country, Haiti-Observateur once again found reason to fan the flames.

On February 25th, three days before Aristide was flown out of the country, Wyclef Jean told MTV that he fully backed the coup-makers. “I don’t consider those people rebels,” he said. “It’s people standing up for their rights. It’s not like these people just appeared out of nowhere and said, ‘Let’s cause some trouble.’ I think it’s just built up frustration, anger, hunger, depression.”

In the midst of the fractured and unrepresentative reporting to which the mainstream media seems so adept, and with virtually no Haitian voices reaching the American public as the coup gained steam, Wyclef served a crucial role: the de factor everyday Haitian, a man whose words may as well have been plucked straight from the streets of Port-au-Prince.

What MTV didn’t report was that Wyclef is the nephew of Raymond Joseph: publisher of Haiti-Observateur. If Joseph’s name rings a bell, that’s probably because he was granted the post of ambassador to the US in the aftermath of the coup.

Thus began the spinning of Wyclef’s image: the reality of his privileged familial connections was papered over with a kind of Third World ghetto superstar populism. For that past six years, if Wyclef has said it, it’s been largely assumed that the populace of Haiti are nodding their heads right along.

The dangers of this kind of “innocence by association” goes well beyond his uncle. In fact, some of the other company Wyclef has kept in his time makes Uncle Ray look warm and fuzzy by comparison. In 2006, Clef produced the documentary Ghosts of Cite Soleil, which in his article Hinton calls a “hit piece” against Aristide.

Key among the film’s interviewees was one Andre Apaid, a well-known industrialist and key backer of the anti-Aristide insurgency. Apaid isn’t even a Haitian citizen; he was born in the US but maintains permanent residency in Haiti. Outside of the Ghosts doc, one will be hard-pressed to find anything positive about this man. His Alpha Industries, one of the largest assembly factories in the country, has been described time and again as a sweatshop–so one can easily fathom what he thought of Aristide’s attempts to double the minimum wage. His father, Andre Senior, is a self-identified “friend” of the Duvaliers.

According to the Center for the Study of Human Rights, Apaid also has on his payroll Thomas “Labayne” Robinson, a violent gang-leader in the slum of Cite Soleil. The Center’s report provides rather incontrovertible proof that Apaid has hired Robinson to kill supporters of Aristide.

Ghosts also positively profiles Louis-Jodel Chamblain, a key leader in the coup. Chamblain’s military and paramilitary experience goes back decades–from a sergeant in the military junta that prevented democratic elections from taking place in 1987 to main leader of the FRAPH in ‘93, to architect of the Raboteau Massacre that killed as many as fifty pro-democracy activists in April of ‘94. The only reason Chamblain walks free through Haiti today is that the murders he carried out were done so in the name of the ruling regime. Hardly the spitting image of rag-tag freedom fighters “standing up for their rights,” as Wyclef has called them.

In Hinton’s view, no election held in Haiti’s current condition will be fair. Aristide remains in exile in South Africa, and his party, Fanmi Lavalas, the most popular in all of Haiti, is legally prohibited for running candidates. And this proscription is most heavily enforced by foreign guns.

“A United Nations army, led by Brazil, still occupies Haiti six years after the coup,” says Hinton. “Their unstated mission, under the name of ‘peacekeeping,’ is to suppress the popular movement and prevent the return to power of Aristide’s Lavalas Party. One must understand a Wyclef Jean candidacy, first of all, in this context.”

Six months after the earthquake, conditions remain horrifying. In an email, Hinton tells me that the million homeless Haitians are, “sleeping in tent and tarp encampments without sanitation in rain and hurricane season. Something like only 2400 temporary houses have been built… [There is] much corruption, with donated food and tents being sold on the street.”

Wyclef has of course paid lip service to this. In fact, despite positioning himself as “a man of the Haitian people,” Clef most likely knows (and cares) very little of their daily existence. And though insisting so on national television is sure to provoke cries of heresy, Wyclef may actually stand quite a bit to gain from the degrading state in which so many Haitians live.

The characters he has ingratiated himself with, though, may be in a much better position to leverage him into the National Palace. Wyclef’s well-publicized support for the American invasion in the aftermath of the earthquake has certainly provided an excellent cover for the US establishment, and they most likely won’t forget it.

“This is a demonstration election,” says Hinton, “being staged to give the aura, but not the reality of a popularly elected democratic government during a military occupation, and Wyclef Jean’s name might get enough people to vote that the occupying powers can claim the elections reflect the popular will.” As Hinton points out, less than ten percent of all Haitians voted in the 2009 Senate elections.

What Clef stands to gain if he wins is worth a lot more than popular support, though. The debacle surrounding his Yele Haiti foundation–in which he diverted donated funds back into payments for himself–starts to shed light on what might await “President Wyclef.”

With so little aid actually getting to the people who need it–roughly one million are without regular access to clean food and water–and with a corrupt, illegitimate government running the country, it’s anyone’s guess where the millions of aid dollars are actually going. It’s here that Clef’s almost certain misappropriation of Yele’s funds starts to take on a bigger meaning.

Charlie Hinton: “Although he’s left Yele Haiti, how he funneled that ‘non-profit’ money to his own business interests is a good indication of where he’s coming from. As a woman told me last week who got ripped off by him in a business deal, ‘there’s no money in music anymore. Yele Haiti is his new cash cow.’ And now he’s trying to tap into all the relief money that is hopefully waiting to rebuild Haiti, that makes the measly $9 million collected by Yele Haiti look like pocket change.”

In exchange, his relationship to the US already cemented, a President Jean would be able to keep ensuring the one thing that Aristide wouldn’t: a constant flow of capital. “As far as investment and business, this is the best time to invest in business in Haiti” he said in an interview to Esquire.com. Knowing his connections to sweatshop owners is enough to make such a statement take on an entirely new, wholly cringe-worthy meaning.

And what of the people? What of the ghettos and slums that Wyclef, in his most Marley-esque moments, insists are in such need of uplift and empowerment? A rarely told tale from the history of Wyclef’s model–Ronald Reagan–might provide some insight.

During his 1980 campaign for president, Reagan’s trail brought him to a South Bronx neighborhood still decimated by the riots that had turned it to a shell three years before. Standing in front of a burnt-out, graffiti-covered wall, he declared what his opponent, President Carter said almost word-for-word in the exact same location in 1977: “I’m impressed with the spirit of hope and determination by the people to save what they have.” This from the man whose presidency accelerated the neglect of poor neighborhoods of color.

For Reagan, such people are nothing more than set pieces in a photo-op. There is perhaps no better indicator what what President Wyclef Jean holds in store for the people of Haiti. It’s with them, however, that hope really exists.

Around the same time, a band of artistic misfits from Akron, Ohio who had spent the past seven years kicking around the underground made it big with their song “Whip It.” This was no t-shirt and blue jeans rock band. They wore neon Hazmat suits and weird futuristic dome hats. They gyrated onstage like feral robots. And the single sounded like a pepped-up supercomputer that had somehow run off the rails and gained an acerbic sense of humor. They were also among a handful of acts that set the bar for the rising New Wave movement.

Now, Devo is back with a new album, their first in 20 years. And far from sounding dated or passe, Something for Everybody sees their inimitable brand of neo-dystopian synth-pop more relevant than ever.

Take, for example, exhibit A: the video for lead single “What We Do.” It starts out, appropriately enough, with a quote from FOX News’ Shepard Smith regarding the catastrophic oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, then launches into a hard, driving industrialized orgy of noise. Just about the only thing that sounds even vaguely organic is the heavily distorted guitar work! The massive volume of images might be hard to dissect–the band performing in their jumpsuits, footage of BP CEO Tony Hayward, Obama wearing the iconic “energy dome” hat–but any mistake of their significance is largely dispelled by Mark Mothersbaugh’s snarky automaton lyrics:

What we do is what we do
Just different names, it’s nothing new
What we do is what we do
‘Cuz what we do is what we do

Gaming, praying, believing, maintaining,
Texting, electing, rejecting, infecting

No doubt about it, this is some subversive stuff. And it’s precisely why Something For Everybody gets the unexpected honor of being quintessential Devo.

For the group, this kind of biting spoof on everyday consumer culture is–as the lyrics declare–nothing new. In fact, it’s practically in their artistic DNA. Casual listeners who may be quick to lump them in with the vast amount of empty-headed ‘80s pop acts might be shocked to know that founding members Mothersbaugh and Gerald Casale were student activists at Kent State on that fateful day in 1970 when the National Guard showed up to gun down four protesters.

Casale was friends with two of the victims–Allison Krause and Jeffrey Miller. The experience would have the affect of driving both he and Mothersbaugh away from activism forever–at least in the conventional sense. Devo was conceived of as a “postmodern protest band,” born as much out of demoralization as lingering hatred for capital’s continued cultural stranglehold. In their view, the hacks that ran society were “devolved,” and the music was written with them in mind. Though they rarely hid their ability to write a great pop hook, their overly slick, synth-laden sound emulated the kind of music that might emerge if corporate America had finally succeeded in conquering our hearts and minds.

In this light, it’s not hard to see what made them such a hit in the early ‘80s. Wedged between the sneer of punk and Reagan’s vapid smile, Devo’s wickedly sardonic brand of social commentary found a niche. Songs like “Whip It” and “That’s Good” seemed to be the kind of consumer-addled reply that corporate boardrooms secretly wished for. If Reagan and Thatcher proclaimed “the future is now,” Devo answered back with a straight face “yes it is; let’s all admire it in the afterglow of the coming nuclear holocaust.”

While Devo’s original formation may have been a symptom of deep pessimism in the face of right-wing reaction, their return to the studio can just as easily be seen as a consequence of the pendulum swinging back. Though the group were more or less buried beneath countless soundalike pop acts cranked out by the music industry during the ‘80s, they have retained a reverence among swathes of underground indie experimentalists. Their influence can be heard from the fervent electronicism of Royksopp to the avant-noise of Ladytron.

“We were real ahead of our time,” says Casale, “and our music seems contemporary now.” In fact, several critics have lauded Something for Everybody as not just a great comeback album, but Devo’s greatest work ever! It’s little wonder why in this era where nothing the rich have to say can possibly be taken seriously.

Opening track “Fresh” plays like a commercial jingle on steroids. Tinny guitar riffs slice through herky-jerky keyboard parts as Mothersbaugh revels the fake glory of consumerism. To hammer the point home, the members of Devo actually held focus groups on the album’s content, and were able to arrive at typically laughable conclusions such as “‘Fresh’ relieves aches and pains,” or “3 out of 5 people would hold ‘Fresh’ with their feet for more than 3 minutes.”

The rest of the album brilliantly follows this same line of lambast. Songs like “Don’t Shoot (I’m a Man)” and “Cameo” are aimed squarely at the cult of celebrity and media. “Mind Games” and “Please Baby Please” shamelessly commodify everything from the modern sex act to the human brain itself.

Perhaps the most ominous (albeit joyously so) track on Something is “Human Rocket,” which could just as easily be seen as a denunciation of groupthink as an anti-war statement:

I am a human rocket on a mission of deployment
I’ve been cocked and loaded, ready for the culmination
I am a human missile, guided by a secret agenda
That commands my every thought and deed and wills me on my way

If any criticism can be leveled against the album, it’s that Casale and Mothersbaugh’s unshakable cynicism remains intact. Devo have created such an airtight world of corporate greed and mindless proles that Orwell himself might cringe. For his part, Casale seems as convinced as ever that humanity itself is inexorably headed down the drain.

In an otherwise excellent interview on the recent Gulf oil spill, he told CauseCast.org that “there’s not enough smart people left. De-evolution is real. What’s happened is proportionate to the increase in population, you didn’t have the same proportionate increase in intelligent people.” And while placing the blame for the spill squarely on the shoulders of BP, Halliburton and the rest, he sees no real way to hold them accountable.

And yet, the resurgence of Devo themselves appears to disprove Casale’s own assertions. Thirty years ago, the window for acts like them was closing. Now, a new generation of fans seem ready to nod their heads and laugh along.

Mothersbaugh and Casale’s own hopes for radical change may be relatively grim. That there is at the same time such a wide opening for their unique and hilariously poignant critique of capitalism is reason to be hopeful. After all, if there really is no hope, then what’s the point of making music in the first place?