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.

To those who saw no irony that night, or now, is it because your gorgeous mind was too clogged up by Fox News, transfat, corn syrup or CNN to hold simultaneously two opposing concepts, such as peace and war, for example, and note that they didn’t quite match, but were clashing? Or you, Bob, can’t you tell that the battle outside that is a-ragin’ is a-causa by this missile-firing and slow jamming man? Can’t you see through his tiresome mask? It’s all a joke, really, as when Obama warned that the Jonas Brothers would be zapped by Predator Drones should they come close to his daughters, but I doubt that the world is laughing.

The Wall Street Journal muses if this latest honor will inch Dylan closer to a Nobel Prize, as if that award still has much legitimacy after its Peace version was bestowed on Obama not even a year into his Presidency, when he hadn’t a chance to really flaunt his bloody hands, though to the astute, there was already plenty of sick irony. The late, great Joe Bageant commented at the time, “The Nobel Committee awarded the 2009 Peace Prize to the very person who dropped the most bombs and killed the most poor people on the planet during that year.” Maybe these Scandinavians just like phony Americans, for in the previous year, the Swedes gave a serial joker, the dismal Paul Krugman, its honor in Economic Sciences. (The Peace Prizes are chosen by the Norwegian Parliament.) These recent gaffs top a long list of errors. Still, it’s a handsome pile of cash they give out, nearly $2 million now, so it’s rather remarkable that two men have turned it down, Jean Paul Sartre because he rejected all official honors, and Le Duc Tho because North Vietnam was still waging war even after it had signed a peace agreement. At least the Nobel Peace Prize never went to Adolf Hitler, although Gertrude Stein, one of America’s most celebrated poets, thought he should have received one. On May 6, 1934, Stein was quoted in the New York Times, “I say that Hitler ought to have the peace prize, because he is removing all elements of contest and struggle from Germany. By driving out the Jews and the democratic and Left elements, he is driving out everything that conduces to activity. That means peace.”

If driving out everything that conduces to activity leads to peace, then present day America would be Arcadia, but with the collapse of our manufacturing base, with many factories fleeing overseas for cheaper labor, a process that still continues, despite the propaganda, Americans are more restless than ever, as evidenced by the recent Tea Party and Occupy outbreaks, though far worse eruptions lay just ahead, no matter what jive masters like Krugman and Obama have to say. As for the foreign fronts, America is busy, as usual, with several overlapping wars.

Maybe Dylan will surprise us all by refusing to receive his Freedom Medal from such a war-monger, and break all protocols by ambushing his bloody host with, “Come you masters of war / You that build all the guns / You that build the death planes / You that build the big bombs / You that hide behind walls / You that hide behind desks / I just want you to know / I can see through your masks.” But, of course, he won’t do anything so outlandish. In accepting this award, Dylan will drape Obama in another layer of cool and glamorize him further, just as Katy Perry did to our grunts and guns in a recent music video.

Breaking up with her cheating boyfriend, Perry impulsively joins the Marines. Instead of squirting a water gun at an arcade with her ex-weasel, Perry is now seen firing an M-16. Instead of lounging in a tub under the creepy eyes of her philandering asshole, Perry is now wrestling underwater with a fellow warrior-in-training. Instead of relying on a two-faced fuckface, Perry is now surrounded by tried and true comrades. The video ends with Perry singing ecstatically under a blue-hued flag, her new sky. Filmed at an actual Marines Corps base camp, this video features 80 Marines as extras, as well as tanks and helicopters, so it is a major collaboration between our entertainment and war industries, something we’ve become quite used to by now, and something we’ll see again when Dylan grasps Obama’s hand, looks into his eyes and smiles.

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.

These were the days before Ipods or even boom boxes. Hell, 8-tracks had barely made an impression on our youthful culture back then. The only source of music that was portable was the transistor radio. In the Baltimore-Washington DC area, there were three or four stations that played the songs people were listening to. WPGC-FM and WCAO-AM played the Top 40 hits of the day while WOOK and WUST played soul and R&B. While radio was not as divided into niche markets then as it is today, the fact is that the very few performers were heard on both stations. For example, Led Zeppelin and the Beatles were never heard on the soul stations, while Bobby Blue Bland and Joe Tex were rarely heard on the Top 40 stations.

There was one man, however, who was heard quite often on both formats back then. His name was James Brown. We would choose our teams and play pickup game after pickup game. Since there were usually more than ten kids hanging around, the odd guys out chose the music (unless we were convinced otherwise). Whenever the current hit by Brown came on the brothers would start vamping. Doing the slide step as they neared a basket or attempting a split at mid court. Then they would tell us lighter skinned guys to not even try. We knew we couldn’t dance like Mr. Brown That particular period of time was when James Brown truly was the king of soul, when he really was The One.

This was also a period when racism had very few shadows to hide it. Black men were subject to whatever wrath a white man felt like imposing on him. Black men with money and power like James Brown felt that wrath perhaps less often but in greater measure when they did feel it. When he released his single “Say It Loud (I’m Black and I’m Proud), Brown was making it clear: he didn’t really give a shit about racists keeping him from his music, money and people. Never much of a militant, James Brown was always proud, even as a street urchin cum hustler in Augusta, GA. A new biography of Brown, titled The One: The Life and Music of James Brown places that pride in the context of the black freedom struggle in the United States. It opens with the story of the 1739 Stono Rebellion in colonial Georgia that saw slaves killing slave owners and increasing their ranks as they marched through the area just south of Charleston, SC beating their drums, singing and dancing in rebellion. Forty slaves and twenty whites were killed during that rebellion and never again did Georgia legally import slaves from the African continent.

With the story of the slave rebellion as his jumping off point, biographer RJ Smith writes a tale that evokes Mr. Brown’s insistence on freedom, his pride, innate musicality, and the high-energy life that helped earn him the title of the hardest working man in show business. Smith gives the reader a fantastic story: from Brown’s roots in Augusta, where he entertained soldiers on weekend passes with his dancing while hustling them down to the brothel where he lived with his aunt, to his casket’s tour of three cities after Brown’s death in 2006. The text details the complexities of a man who, with his bandmates, created a signature musical style that many have used as inspiration but none have successfully imitated. It also traces the political journey of a black man in the United States during a time when the world of Black America underwent a sea change. Never a militant, but always an individual proud of his racial and personal identity, Brown’s politics included Martin Luther King and Richard Nixon; Elijah Muhammad and Strom Thurmond. His support for Nixon’s 1972 campaign led to a boycott attempt by several African-American organizations and individuals that had some success. Smith relates a tale of 10,000 seat arenas with less than 2,000 concertgoers. When I thought about seeing a concert of his in Frankfurt, Germany in 1972, my African-American comrades convinced me not to go because of Brown’s support of Nixon (it didn’t take much—I hated Nixon). They passed out leaflets in the parking lot discouraging attendance. At the same time, Brown’s singles were still being played on the radio and still selling.

At a recent anti-racism rally in Burlington, VT. held in the wake of the murder of Trayvor Martin, a black teen talked about his struggle to maintain a positive self-identity in a culture that insists on labeling he and other black males in as negative of a light as possible. I will paraphrase his statement here: I am going to be me.  Part of that is saying hi to my neighbors even if they won’t say hi to me. Part of that is dating who I want. Part of that is being black. I am going to be me. James Brown would have agreed with that young man. His political actions, his insistence on doing things his way musically and otherwise—all of these actions, writes Smith, stem from a combination of Brown’s ego, mistrust and determination.

To hear Smith tell it, James Brown definitely did not come from comfortable beginnings. He movingly describes just how tough it was. Anything that came easy made Brown suspicious. This didn’t seem to change as he grew older and developed into one of the world’s most well-known people—his fame in Africa rivaled that of boxer Muhammad Ali, while in the United States very few acts sold more records than Brown. Never one to rest on his laurels, Brown gave hundreds of shows every year, went through wives and mistresses almost as quickly as he did towns and cities when he was on tour, and spent money quicker than he could count it. The magic of Smith’s writing is that Brown’s life is told as captivatingly as it was lived. This is a classic rags-to-riches Horatio Alger story but with a twist: it’s Alger’s Ragged Dick as an African-American bootblack who rises above his station.

Smith, who is also the author of The Great Black Way: L.A. in the 1940s and the Last African American Renaissance, and a former music writer for the Village Voice and Spin magazine, has done a public service by writing this biography. His approach to the narrative does more than detail the life of James Brown. It captures the essence of a James Brown performance and manipulates that essence—its franticness, its passion and its sheer jubilation—into a story about one of the world’s greatest musicians and performers ever. In Smith’s telling, it becomes clear that James Brown’s myth was not only larger than life, so was James Brown himself.

His article is humanistic because he recognizes and opposes the offense of the Israeli anthem for an “Arab Israeli” (although Avnery’s bias is evident in how he shies away from calling the people Palestinian).

Avnery is critical of many anthems. I tend to be skeptical of all anthems, as they oftentimes serve as a vehicle of patriotic indoctrination. Albert Einstein recognized the darkness that underlies patriotism: “Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism — how passionately I hate them!”

Yet Avnery found the Canadian anthem to be an exception:

… Canada changed its anthem not so long ago, exchanging the British anthem for one that French Canadians can sing with a clear conscience, without denying their own identity. “O Canada” enhances the unity of all citizens. [italics added]

With all due respect, what Avnery writes about the Canadian anthem and Canada is misinformed.

The “O Canada” lyrics are palpably colonialist and sexist:

O Canada!
Our home and native land!
True patriot love in all thy sons command…

Many Canadians regard the Original Peoples as a founding people; however, their languages are still not recognized as official languages, so in some respects they are worse off that the Indigenous Palestinians are in Israel.

So what kind of “patriot love” should Indigenous peoples in Canada feel, and what kind of “patriot love” should other “Canadians” of conscience feel?

The French version:

O Canada! Terre de nos aïeux, (O Canada! Land of our ancestors,)
Ton front est ceint de fleurons glorieux! (Your forehead is wreathed with a glorious garland of flowers!)

Car ton bras sait porter l’épée, (For your arms are ready to carry the sword,)
Il sait porter la croix! … (You will be able to carry the cross! …)

In the French version, the land belongs to the, presumably, French and European ancestors. The readiness to commit violence in the name of patriotism is evident. Christian symbolism is also present.

Canada exists as a English-French state for much the same reason Israel exists as a Jewish state. Europeans came to take the land of Indigenous peoples — even by lethal force. In Palestine it was the Nakba, for “Canada” it was a genocidal event that included the wholesale extermination of the Beothuk.

And since the point about the disunity sown by the Canadian national anthem has been made, to mention daughters is merely to belabor the impropriety of the anthem of the colonially derived entity called Canada.

At the end of the ceremony, the national anthem was sung. The camera panned from face to face. For a moment, it framed the face of Justice Salim Jubran. He was standing respectfully, like everybody else, but his lips were not moving.

A country-wide uproar broke out. Justice Jubran is the first Arab citizen ever to serve as a regular judge on the Supreme Court.

The right-wing parties were livid with rage. How dare he! An insult to the symbols of the state! He must be dismissed at once! Better still, deport him to a country whose anthem he would deign to sing!

Others treated the judge with respect. He did not violate his conscience! If he had sung the anthem, it would have been sheer hypocrisy, if not mendacity! So he did the right thing!

The name of the anthem, Hatikvah, means “hope” in Hebrew.

It was written in 1878, almost a decade before the founding of the Zionist movement, by a so-so poet, as the anthem of one of the new Jewish “colonies” in Palestine. It was later adopted as the official anthem of the Zionist movement, then by the new Jewish community in Palestine and finally by the State of Israel. The melody was adapted from a Romanian folk song, which in turn was probably adapted from an older Italian song.

The words reflect the spirit of the time:

As long as in the heart within / A Jewish soul still yearns / And onwards towards the end of the East / An eye still gazes towards Zion.

Our hope is not yet lost / The hope of two thousand years / To be a free people in our land / The land of Zion and Jerusalem.

For a Jewish Israeli, the words are hopelessly outdated. For us, Israel is not in the “East”, our hope to be a free people in “our” land has already been fulfilled.

But for an Arab Israeli, these words are an affront. His is not a “Jewish soul”, his eyes never gazed towards “the end of the East”, his homeland is not “Zion” (a hill in Jerusalem). The only words that could appeal to him are the “hope to be a free people” in his land.

How can an Arab citizen, no matter how loyal he be to the state, sing these words without being ashamed of himself? Justice Jubran may be a perfect human being, but a “Jewish soul” he has not.

For me, this incident awakened a very old memory. This caused me to sympathize deeply with the courageous judge.

I was 9 years old when the Nazis came to power in Germany. I was a pupil in the first grade of high school, the only Jew in the entire school. One of the marks of the new regime was the frequency with which national events – such as victories of German arms throughout the centuries – were commemorated by ceremonies in which all the pupils were assembled to listen to patriotic speeches.

At the end of one of these events – I think it was to commemorate the conquest of Belgrade by Prince Eugene in 1717 – the entire student body stood up and began singing the two official anthems, that of Germany and that of the Nazi party. All the pupils raised their right arm in the Nazi salute.

I had to make a decision in a split second. I was probably the smallest boy in the hall, since I had started school a year younger than my classmates. I stood at attention, but did not raise my arm and did not sing the Nazi hymn. I think I was trembling with excitement.

When it was over, some boys threatened that if I did not raise my arm next time, they would break my bones. Fortunately, we left Germany a few days later.

I don’t know if the judge was trembling during the singing, but I know exactly how he felt.

More than a week later, the incident is still making waves in the media, even alongside the endless babbling about the Existential Danger of Iran, because of its profound significance.

If the most senior Arab judge cannot sing the national anthem, what about the attitude of the rest of the 1.5 million Arab citizens of Israel towards the “state symbols”, indeed, towards the “Jewish state” itself? Does it mean that they constitute a Trojan horse?

This is an old question, as old as the state itself. The contradiction has been papered over by the official formula of the “Jewish and democratic” state. (Arabs lampoon it as “A democratic state for the Jews and a Jewish state for the Arabs”.) The Judge Jubran incident highlights the problem as never before. Here is a loyal citizen, who administers the law at the very highest level, and who cannot sing the national anthem. What to do?

The simplest answer is to change the anthem. For the first time, this is now being openly discussed by some commentators.

Disclosure: I never liked “Hatikvah”. The stolen melody is not bad, but it is not suitable for an anthem. An anthem should be uplifting, inspiring, while this one is as sad as Verdi’s song of the Hebrew slaves in Nabucco. As for the lyrics, they are, well, totally unfitting.

Many nations have silly anthems. What about the bloody hands of the German monsters in the French anthem? What about the glorious and victorious queen in the British one? (The last recorded glorious victory of Her Majesty was against 15,000 Argentinians in the Falklands.) Or the totally inane Dutch anthem. Not to mention the present German anthem, in which the third verse has officially replaced the banned first one, the one which my schoolmates sang at that ceremony in 1933.

But the fact that “Hatikvah” is somewhat silly was not my main reason for wanting to change it. It’s the fact that one-fifth of Israel’s citizens, the Arabs, cannot sing it (another tenth or so, the Orthodox Jews, reject it anyway.)

It is a very unhealthy situation for a state when 20% of its citizens loathe its national symbols. For these very same reasons Canada changed its anthem not so long ago, exchanging the British anthem for one that French Canadians can sing with a clear conscience, without denying their own identity. “O Canada” enhances the unity of all citizens.

Changing anthems is not altogether unique. During World War II, when Stalin needed the West, he abruptly discarded the “Internationale” for a new anthem chosen by competition. The words of this anthem (but not the melody) were changed by the Russian Federation when the Soviet Union was dissolved.

So I grabbed the first opportunity to propose a new anthem. It was soon after the 1967 war. Naomi Shemer, a popular songwriter and composer, had written a song just before the war about “Jerusalem of Gold” which became the hymn of the war. I did not like all its lines, but here was a golden opportunity to get rid of Hatikvah. So I submitted a bill to adopt it as the new national anthem.

The Knesset speaker was sympathetic, but told me that he could not accept the bill without the agreement of the author. I arranged to meet Naomi. She was a nice person, though she was a rightist by marriage. (She grew up in a left-wing Kibbutz, but became right-wing when she married.)

To my surprise, her reaction was far from enthusiastic. There was something cagey about it, I thought. But she agreed to allow me to submit the bill, which was duly voted down. At the time, Hatikvah was sacred. (Later I came to understand Naomi’s strange attitude at that meeting: shortly before her death, she confessed that the beautiful melody of that song was not hers at all, but really a Basque song. For many years she had been mortally afraid of this disclosure. But since the melody of Hatikvah is also stolen, it wouldn’t have made much difference.

Hatikvah can remain as the anthem of the Jewish people everywhere if they so wish. A new song will be the anthem of the State of Israel and all its citizens.

The real story behind the incident is, of course, the unresolved problem of Israel’s Arab minority. They are discriminated against in practically all spheres of life, a fact readily admitted by Israeli officials. There are no suggestions for how to remedy it.

The Arabs quite rightly feel rejected and respond with alienation from the state. Their leaders, vying for votes, become more and more extreme, while the Israeli right-wing parties become more and more anti-Arab. In a paradoxical way, Israeli Arabs are becoming more and more Israeli at the same time as they become more and more anti-Israeli.

This is a ticking time bomb, and some day it will explode, unless a real effort is made to allow an honest Arab citizen to feel like a real citizen of the Israeli state, and, yes, to sing a new national anthem.

As long as the Arabs are treated as a Trojan horse, why should they sing? Horses, as far as I know, do not excel in singing.

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.

Lyrics:
verse one:
narration: what does it mean if our shopping sprees rest on the misery of other human beings working in zones with no regulations, no protections, no labor laws
- when it’s profit or people / we know which comes first
when talks of unions can get you fired or worse
forced overtime / but no overtime pay
insult to injury / no minimum wage
health and safety standards / now that’s a mistake
sexual harassment / come on give me a break
and speaking of breaks / how many a day do you take
imagine losing bathroom trips for productivity’s sake
we got the luxury to choose / to look away from the abuse
of countries we’re allowed to use / on the tags but not the news
and history will tell you that this ain’t no fad
while rich economists tell you ain’t so bad
and i ask what you were doing in your early teens
bet it wasn’t stitching jeans / sleeping under your sewing machine
or even so, would you want your daughters
cramped in one room huts, with no running water
working up to twenty hour shifts at 17 cents an hour
where overwork death is their only bargaining power
still they insist, that it’s not so hard
then why the razor wire and why the armed guards
why the beatings and why the locks on the doors
why the tears in their eyes and urine on the floor
chorus:
check your tags – if you wonder how this stuff’s so cheap
check your tags – that’s the other half of your receipt
check your tags – add them up and throw it on our debt
check your tags – do you know if you shopping in sweat
verse two:
and what’s worse is when the prices are still jacked
it’s like twisting the knife deeper in each worker’s back
who would it hurt to pay an extra quarter or more
satirical narration: good lord, child, do you know just what you’re asking for
sure, a better life the workers may be getting
but what kind of example would we be setting
it’s not the money, it’s the unacceptable invasion
of factoring human dignity into the equation
and besides, they’re happy to have this work
without these jobs they might be starving or worse
- so, yo, i guess they should thank y’all for cracking the whip
paying less than a dollar for making a hundred dollar kicks
like telling a slave that they should rejoice
satirical narration: the master’d love not to beat you, but he ain’t got a choice
- straight rationing crumbs while you eat till you sick
then make it sound reasonable, that’s the trick
’cause only a great man can make his way to the top
steady blaming on the victims while he’s calling the shots
and if you blame it on the system, well, I’m right there
i say we trade in this system for one more fair
chorus:
check your tags – if you wanna see how workers get beat
check your tags – that’s the other half of your receipt
check your tags – add them up and throw it on our debt
check your tags – do you know if you shopping in sweat
verse three:
there’s a sale on aisle nine while the trade deficit throbs
can’t give up these low prices, still wonder why you’re losing jobs
guess that’s the price you pay in a market economy
keep losing exports, maybe you can sell irony
i ain’t just talking protectionism, but solidarity
we should demand living wages for all humanity
it’s time we work together against a common enemy
it’s not us against them, unless them is corporate greed
we gotta organize, unionize, strategize
or you can roll the dice like you rolling your eyes
cause eventually them tags will be sporting your town
but there’s two different ways they can come back around
when we demand a fair economy and call their bluff
or when the race to the bottom finally ends with us
chorus:
check your tags – if you wonder why the economy’s weak
check your tags – that’s the other half of your receipt
check your tags – add them up and throw it on our debt
check your tags – do you know if you shopping in sweat
check your tags – cause this stuff don’t come out thin air
check your tags – why you ain’t got one thing made here
check your tags – that’s the record of their sacrifices
they the ones that pay for our everyday low prices

Melody and Lyrics: Lonnie Ray Atkinson

Vocals: Lonnie Ray Atkinson

Music Track: Instrumental (Cradle Militia) by Anitek
(http://www.jamendo.com/en/track/839535 and Anitek)

This song is under the Creative Commons License: Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0.
You are free to download this song and share it with as many people as you like (please respect and include attributions).

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.

The Guardian article in question was noteworthy not just because it reported that runaway climate change might be unavoidable depending on what happens this year (a reasonable prediction that, unfortunately, has lost its impact due to continuous warnings), but because it showed how strong the link is between resource consumption and economic growth. Because of the worst recession in living memory, global carbon emissions fell from 29.3Gt (gigatonnes) to 29Gt between 2008 and 2009. Compare that with the huge jump to 30.6Gt that took place in 2010, even as we still swim in the thick of financial troubles (and apparently, declining amounts of cheap oil). The link is not only explicit – it’s completely out of proportion. Everything seems to hinge on finding a different goal for our economy.

A group called GrowthBusters, made up of a core of dedicated activists and international volunteers, has been pointing this out for five years. Their film, Hooked on Growth, is due for release this October. As part of the effort, an Earth Day soundtrack is currently being sold to raise funds and awareness, and features a mix of artists from various genres. The legendary folk singer, Pete Seeger, makes an appearance, and his amusing live contribution, “We’ll All Be A-Doubling,” is a fine centrepiece for much of the CD’s acoustic singer-songwriters.

If you like your music a little more extreme, there’s a decent amount on offer here as well. South Australian act The Chairman provide “Zero (Al Bartlett).” In the vein of PPK’s “I Have a Dream” and Coldcut’s Blair-bashing “Revolution,” it’s an electronic track featuring quotations from physics professor Bartlett, who is most famous for his lectures on the exponential function. Black Piranha’s “It’s Our World” is New Orleans style classic rock with sincere 80′s riffage. Jake Fader, teaming up with different vocalists, puts in two great songs. The first, the documentary’s theme, opens the album in a Ghostbusters-influenced-reggae direction, obviously. The second, “All The Little Birdies,” is reminiscent of Erykah Badu neo-soul, with its near-rapping and relaxed drum, piano and guitar beat.

Not everything on the compilation will be to everyone’s taste. Like the solutions we seek, it needs to be a diverse affair. For me, the album echoes the history of growth economy: the same ideas run throughout, but towards the end of the timeline it doesn’t seem to be as enjoyable. There was a long period when re-distribution really might not have provided enough for everyone, and growth seemed like a noble goal. Now that the generation of additional money is causing more harm than good, we need to be able to accept that it has outlived its usefulness (and the last couple of tracks on the CD are aimed at kids, to be fair). Hopefully the as-yet-unwritten bonus songs will be beautifully crafted art, and not grim, unlistenable shite.

You can hear samples of all the music here. Both digital downloads and physical copies are available for the same price. If you’re interested in financially supporting the film but don’t fancy the soundtrack, a Kickstarter campaign has just gotten underway to fund final production costs. GrowthBusters is aiming to raise $20,000 and any pledge you make will only be taken from your account if the goal is met by August 7th.

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.

Silvia Cattori: As a jazz musician, what brought you to use your pen as a weapon against the country where you were born and against your people?

Gilad Atzmon: For many years my music and writings were not integrated at all. I became a musician when I was seventeen and I took it up as a profession when I was twenty four. Though I was not involved with, or interested in, politics when I lived in Israel, I was very much against Israel’s imperial wars. I identified somehow with the left, but later, when I started to grasp what the Israeli left was all about, I could not find myself in agreement with anything it claimed to believe in, and that is when I realised the crime that was taking place in Palestine.

For me the Oslo Accord was the end of it because I realised that Israel was not aiming towards reconciliation, or even integration in the region, and that it completely dismissed the Palestinian cause. I understood then that I had to leave Israel. It wasn’t even a political decision — I just didn’t want to be part of the Israeli crime anymore. In 1994 I moved to the UK and I studied philosophy.

In 2001, at the time of the second Intifada, I began to understand that Israel was the ultimate aggressor and was also the biggest threat to world peace. I realised the extent of the involvement and the role of world Jewry as I analysed the relationships between Israel and the Jewish State, between Israel and the Jewish people around the world, and between Jews and Jewishness.

I then realised that the Jewish “left” was not very different at all from the Israeli “left”. I should make it clear here that I differentiate between “Left ideology”— a concept that is inspired by universal ethics and a genuine vision of equality – and the “Jewish Left”, a tendency or grouping that is there solely to maintain tribal interests that have very little, if anything, to do with universalism, tolerance and equality.

SC: Would you argue that there is a discrepancy between Jews and left?

GA: Not at all. I should explain here that I never talk about Jews as a people. I differentiate between Jews (the people) Judaism (the religion) and Jewishness (the culture). In my work, I am only elaborating on the third category; i.e., Jewishness. Also it should be understood that I differentiate between the tribal “Jewish Left”, and Leftists who simply happen to be Jewish. Indeed, I would be the first to admit that there are many great leftists and humanists who happen to be of Jewish origin. However those Jews who operate under a “Jewish banner” seem to me to be Zionist fig leafs: they are solely there to convey an image of “Jewish pluralism”. In fact, when I grasped the full role of the “Jewish left” I realised that I may end up fighting alone against the strongest power around.

SC: Do you fight alone?

GA: More or less alone. I like to fight alone; I take responsibility. Along the years, there have been a lot attempts to destroy the few of us who have stood up against Jewish power. I found myself in trouble for supporting people like Israel Shamir and Paul Eisen, for standing up for their right to think freely and to express their opinions and ideas openly. I remember one of those infamous “Jewish Left” activists telling me, “listen Gilad, once you shun Shamir we will let you be”. My answer was simple: I was not about to bargain with intellectual integrity. For me, freedom of speech is an iron rule — I would never silence anyone.

Within the liberation movement and the solidarity movement, I do not actually believe that we have any intellectuals. And why we do not have intellectuals? Because in the name of “Political Correctness”, we have managed to destroy every single English speaking creative mind within our movement.

What we see here may be an endemic problem with “the Left”. To speak in broad (or rather Germanic philosophical) terms, “the Left” is “forgetful of Being” — Instead of understanding what Being in the world is all about, it tries to suggest to us what being in the world ought to be. “The Left” has adopted a preaching mode that has led to a severe form of alienation, and this is probably why “the Left” has failed to come to terms with, fully understand, and grasp the significance and power of Islam. And this is why “the Left” is totally irrelevant to the current revolution in the Middle East. As we know by now, “the Left’s’ tolerance”, somehow evaporates when it comes to Islam and Muslims. I find it very problematic.

SC: Can you explain why the Left is irrelevant?

GA: Let us look at the current events in the Arab and Muslim world: where is “the Left”? All those years they were trying to tell us, the “public will rise”, but where is the left now? Is it in Egypt? Is it in Libya or Bahrain? We hear about the Muslim Brotherhood, the middle class, the young Arabs and Muslims – indeed, we are hearing about anything but “the Left”. Did you see any interesting Left wing analysis of the regional emerging Intifada? Not really. Recently, I was searching for an analysis of the Egyptian uprising in a famous Socialist paper. I found one article — I then realised that the words “Islam” and “Muslim” did not appear in the article even once, yet the word “class” appeared no less than nineteen times. What we see here then is actually an example of the ultimate form of detachment from humanity, humanism and the human condition.

But I take it further: where is ‘the Left’ in Europe? Where is “the Left” in America? Why can’t they stand up for the Muslims? Why can’t they bond with, or make allies with, millions of Muslim immigrants, people who also happen to be amongst the new European working class? I will mention here what I consider to be a most crucial insight: It is an idea I borrowed from the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. Lacan contends that love can be realised as making love to oneself via the other. The “Left solidarity” with Palestine in my opinion can be similarly grasped as making love to ourselves at the expense of the Palestinians. We do not want them to be Muslims. We tell them to be democratic — as long as they don’t vote Hamas. We tell them to be progressive, “like us”. I just can’t make up my mind whether such an attitude is rude, or simply pathetic.

Recently I came across a critical Trotsky-ite take on my work. The argument against me was as follows: “Gilad is wrong because he manages to explain Zionism without colonialism; he explains the holocaust without fascism. He even explains the recession, the global economic disaster, without capitalism.”

I couldn’t agree more. We do not need “working class politics” anymore. The old 19th century clichés can be dropped — and the sooner the better. In order to explain why our world is falling apart, we just have to be brave enough to say what we think, to admit what we see, to call a spade a spade.

Actually, I would love to see “the Left” resurrecting itself. Yet, for that to happen, it must first remind itself what equality and tolerance really mean, because for “the Left” to be meaningful again, it must first grasp the true meaning of “love your neighbour.”

SC: When we listen to your political comments we forget that you are primarily a musician.

GA: The truth of the matter is that I am not actually interested in politics — I am not a member of any party and I do not care about, or seek, any political power. I am not interested in the binary opposition between “left” and “right,” and I do not care about the banal dichotomy between “progressive” and “reactionary”. And, let’s face it, from a Marxist point of view I am associated with the most reactionary forces: I support Muslim Brotherhood, Hezbollah, and I support Hamas. What do you want more than that! I am the ultimate reactionary being and I am delighted and proud about it all.

SC: You are really a free spirit.

GA: That is because I am not political. I am an artist and a musician; it is very simple.

SC: We can hardly imagine what would you be if you had stayed in Israel.

GA: It would be impossible to imagine.

SC: Are you an exception among Israelis?

GA: It is very interesting; when it comes to the “Jewish left” abroad, I know very few Jews whom I can trust on that level of commitment. They always go along with you, but then as soon as you question the tribal bond and their own role within the “Jewish universe” you will be stabbed in the back. Very rarely does one come across courageous Jews who are willing to engage in deep self-reflection: I refer here to people like Paul Eisen, Jeff Blankfort, Norman Finkelstein, Hajo Meyer and Evelyn Hecht Galinsky. In Israel, however, it is different. You have quite a few people who are actually brave beyond belief. They are really putting their life on the line. These are the people who send us information about the army, about military secrets, about war crimes and names of war criminals. So there are quite a few Israelis who are doing incredible work.

SC: Is writing on political matters and composing music a way for you to contribute to a better world and to beauty? Is one inseparable from the other?

GA: At the moment I am trying to establish a continuum between my music and my writing. I believe that unlike our politicians — whether they are right wing politicians, conservative politicians, left politicians, all of whom are seeking power — artists are searching for beauty. And I believe it is beauty that can unite people.

I will tell you something that I really plan to write about. For many years our so-called “political analysts” have been talking about Israel being a “settler state” and Zionism being a “colonial project”. But what kind of colonialism is it? Is it an accurate comparison?

For if Israel is a “settler state” – then what exactly is its “motherland”? In British and French colonial eras, the settler states maintained a very apparent tie with their “motherland”. In some cases in history the settler state broke from its motherland. Such an event is a rather noticeable one, and the Boston Tea Party is a good example of that. But, as far as we are aware, there is no “Jewish motherland” that is intrinsically linked to the alleged“Jewish settler state”.

The “Jewish people” are largely associated with the “Jewish state”, and yet the “Jewish people” is not exactly a “material” autonomous sovereign entity. Moreover, native Hebraic Israeli Jews are not connected culturally or emotionally to any motherland except their own state.

SC: However, for some of the strongest advocates of the Palestinian rights, such as Ilan Pappe, Israel is a colonial State. They put forward this argument to challenge Israeli policies.

GA: I am afraid that most activists and academics cannot tell the entire truth on this sensitive matter. Maybe no one can survive telling the truth. Indeed, we are daily terrorised by different measures from the thought police. I am convinced that most of the scholars who insist upon calling Israel a “settler state” are fully aware of the problems entangled with the “colonial paradigm”. They must be aware of the uniqueness of the Zionist project. It is indeed true that Zionism manifests some symptoms that are synonymous with colonialism — however, that is not enough: Zionism is inherently a racially oriented “homecoming” project driven by spiritual enthusiasms that are actually phantasmic. It intrinsically lacks many of the “necessary” elements that we understand as comprising colonialism, and cannot be defined in solely materialist terms.

It seems to me that here we come across a crucial problem of understanding and analysis within our movement, and within Western intellectual discourse in general. Our academics are suppressed, and scholarship is silenced, for within the tyranny of political correctness, our academics are forced to primarily consider the boundaries of the discourse — they first examine carefully what they are allowed to say – and then they fill in the empty spaces, formulating theories or narratives.

This pattern is unfortunately common. Yet, such an approach and method is foreign to my understanding of truth-seeking and true scholarship.

It is crucial to mention at this point that I do not claim to know the truth. I just say what I believe to be the truth. If I am wrong, I welcome people to point it out to me.

It appears to me that “the Left” mislead us and itself by depicting Zionism solely as a colonial project. The “Left” likes the colonial paradigm because it locates Zionism nicely within their ideology. It also leads us to believe that the colonial/post-colonial political model provides some answers and even operative solutions; following the colonial template, we first equate Israel with South Africa, and then we implement a counter-colonial strategy, such as the BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions).

Yet, whilst I fully support all of those actions, they seem to be in some regards, not entirely effective at all. The BDS has not, in fact, led to any metamorphic change within Israeli society. If anything, it has led to further intensified radicalisation within the right in Israel. Why has the BDS not worked yet? The answer is simple: It is because Israel is not at all entirely a colonial entity – as we historically understand that term – and it needs to be understood that its power and ties with the West are maintained by the strongest lobbies around the world.

So if the Left wants to stop Israel for real, then it must openly question the notion of Jewish Power and its role within Western politics and media. But can the Left do it? I am not so sure.

Let us return now to further comparison of Israel with the colonial model — Israel is also markedly different, for example, from earlier colonial states such as South Africa, because Israel implements genocidal tactics. South Africa was indeed brutal — but it stopped short of throwing white phosphorous on its indigenous population. South Africa was a settler state, and was exploiting its indigenous population: but it wanted to keep them alive and oppressed. The Jewish state, on the other hand — would much prefer to wake up one morning to find out that all the Palestinians had disappeared, because Israel is driven by a Talmudic racist ideology. For those who have not realised it yet, the Zionism that presented itself initially as a secular project was, in fact, a crude attempt to transform the Bible into a land registry document, and an attempt to turn God into a nasty estate agent. It should be understood that Zionism follows a completely different political operative mode to any other settler state, and the colonial paradigm is simply incapable of fully addressing that.

But here is the good news: interestingly enough, it has been artists rather than “intellectuals” who have been brave enough to speak out. At a certain stage they started to equate images of Palestine with those of the Jewish holocaust, and it was artists who were brave enough to juxtapose Palestinian kids with Jewish ones.

SC: Yes, but can we really compare the two?

GA: Why not? We compare between two ideologies, between two racist ethnocentric precepts. It was the artists who came up with that simple and essential truth. It was the artists who dismantled the colonial paradigm in just a one swift move. Seemingly our artists are well ahead of our “intellectuals”.

SC: I would like further understand your objection to those who consider Israel a colonialist State. Already in the sixties, South Africa severed institutional relations with Great Britain and had withdrawn from the Commonwealth. Thus there was no more a “motherland” outside South Africa. And yet the Black population fought the “settlers” who had installed the apartheid. In that sense, can we not consider that there is a similarity with the present struggle of the Palestinians for their rights against Jewish settlers who settled on their land, and that this struggle is, in a way, a struggle against colonialism? It is true that white South Africans did not implement murderous tactics against the natives. Is it because you’re focusing on this point and emphasising the comparison with the Nazi holocaust that you put forward the uniqueness of the Zionist project, instead of colonialism?

GA: The big question I try to raise here is: why can’t we practice coherent scholarship? The issues surrounding the appropriation of the colonial paradigm is obviously just one example. We are subject to a lethal tyranny of political correctness.

You are right suggesting that some settler states drift away from their respective motherlands; however, Israel didn’t drift away from any motherland because it has never had a motherland. Zionism was never a colonial project in that sense — The colonial paradigm is a spin.

The big question to ask is why are “the Left” and Jewish anti-Zionists desperately clinging to the colonial paradigm? And here is my answer:

1. It is safe; it makes the criticism of the Jewish state look legitimate.
2. It conveys the hope of a resolution: If Israel is, indeed, just a settler state like any of the other earlier historical examples, it will eventually assimilate into the region and become a “normal” state.

Where is the problem in such an approach, you might ask? Well, it is pretty obvious — this entire discourse is actually completely irrelevant to the Zionist disease. It is like treating a patient who has bowel cancer with some strong diarrhea pills — just because the symptoms are slightly similar.

Disastrously enough, this is the level of our left-intellectual discourse at the present time.

SC: But those within the solidarity movement, who denounce “Israeli colonialism”, criticise Israeli racist agenda and support the right to return— aren’t they saying exactly the same thing as you are saying?

GA: To start with, we are indeed part of the same movement, and I guess that we are driven by the same ethical intuitions.

However, there is a clear difference between us, because by employing the “colonial paradigm” their intention is to communicate the idea that the Jewish national project is entirely reminiscent of a 19th century national trend. This is to say that, just like most other European settler nations, the Jews happened to celebrate their “national symptoms” — it is just that they did so after everyone else.

The “colonial paradigm” is then invoked to also support the idea that Israel is an apartheid state, and pretty much like most other earlier colonial settings. My approach is totally different, because I would argue that Israel and Zionism is a unique project in history, and the relationship between Israel and the operation of the Jewish Lobbies in the West is also totally unique in history. I would even take it further, and say that whilst the Palestinians are indeed at the fore front of a battle for humanity, the fact is that we are all subject to Zionist global politics. According to my model, the credit crunch is, in fact, a Zionist “punch”. The war in Iraq is a Zionist war. I would argue forcefully that Zionism has a long time ago moved from the “promised land” narrative into the “promised planet” nightmare. I also argue that it would be impossible to bring peace to the world unless we confront the true meaning of contemporary Jewish ideology.

Interestingly enough, many of those who enthusiastically support the “colonial paradigm”, were also very quick to denounce the work of John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt on the Israeli Lobby. If Mearsheimer and Walt are correct, and I think that they are, then it is Jewish power which we have to confront.

And this is exactly what the “Jewish Left” and Jewish intelligentsia are there to prevent us from doing.

SC: Your views clearly oppose intellectuals such as Bernard-Henry Lévy who support Western expansionism and Israeli policies. For you Israel is the danger. Don’t you think that some people see there an element of provocation?

GA: Provocation is not a bad thing. I wrote an article recently about Bernard-Henry Lévy. The man is lame beyond belief. We have more than a few “Bernard-Henri Levys” here in Britain too, Jews who portray a false image of scholarship. And as it happens, we intellectually smash them, one by one. We expose them for what they are. By the way, Norman Finkelstein did a great job with Dershowitz. We should not be scared about it all.

Also, I think that by the time people don’t have enough money to put petrol in the car let alone buy bread, they will start to look at who is to blame, and when that happens, the Israeli State and its relentless lobbies will emerge at the top of the list. I think that some people are starting to see it now, already. The change will be drastic. I guess that in retrospect, some people can look at my writing now, and admit that I was warning the Jewish lobbies for years.

SC: What differentiates Gilad Atzmon from those who say, “I am a Jewish anti-Zionist”; “We are Jews for peace”, etc, yet always highlighting their tribal identity?

GA: It is very simple: for me, the fight for peace is a fight for a universal cause. For me, to support the Palestinians is an ethical necessity. And if it is a universal cause and an ethical necessity, I do not see any reason to fight it “as a Jew”, “as a man”, or “as a jazz artist”. When I come across those who call themselves “Jews for peace” and “Jews for justice”, I stand up and say “what do you really mean by calling yourself a ‘Jew’? Are you religious?” When a Torah Jew says he identifies as a Jew I know what he refers to. When Torah Jews say “we are religious Jews and we support Palestine in the name of our faith”, I say “go ahead, you have my support”.

But when secular Jews tell me that they work for Palestine in the name of their Jewish values, I must ask them “What are your ‘Jewish secular values’”? I have studied and carefully considered the subject, and, as embarrassing as it may sound, there is no such thing as a “Jewish secular value system”.

Those who refer to such ideas are either lying, misleading others, or even misleading themselves.

SC: If I understood well, those who identify themselves as “anti-Zionist Jews” or “Jews for peace” believe that this makes their voice louder than others’ voice.

GA: For sure, and that is a valid point. But again, I still have some reservations, because if I say “I am a Jew for peace,” and I believe that this is enough to make my voice more important than yours, what it really means is that I am still consciously celebrating my chosen-ness. And isn’t that exactly the problem we have with Zionism?

So, fundamentally, Jewish anti-Zionism is still just another manifestation of Jewish tribal supremacy. It seems peculiar that peace activists, who claim to be universalist leftists, end up operating in racially oriented cells.

SC: Is this consciously a way to humiliate non Jewish people?

GA: That is possible; but I do not think that Jews who succumb to Jewish tribal politics are really conscious of the effect it has on others.

SC: Israelis who describe themselves as ex-Israelis, ex-Jews, are very rare. Are you the only one?

GA: I may as well be the only one. However, I do not really talk as an ex-Jew — I talk as Gilad Atzmon. I avoid collective banners. When you read me, you read what I think. You see it for what it is, and you either agree, or you don’t agree. I do not need flags or phantasmic identities to hide behind.

SC: Few famous artists have had the courage to stand up openly and firmly for victims of Israeli oppression. We know that, in general, well known people are afraid to be placed on the “anti-Semitic” list. Rogers Waters has dared to break the taboo. David Gilmour, Robert Wyatt, followed. What do you say to those who are still scared?

GA: I believe that the only way to liberate ourselves is to begin to talk. The only way to fight is to express ourselves openly. I have taken that risk and if I can do it, then I think that everyone can do it. I have paid a price in that my career has suffered a little, and I make less money. But I can look at myself with pride.

SC: To those who would argue that your political positions are, let’s say, “borderline”, what do you answer?

GA: I do not actually know what “borderline” means. For years I encountered endless attempts to silence me, but they all proved to be counter effective because, if anything, the repressive measures taken against me brought many more people to read my materials, and encouraged more people to think things through for themselves. I was accused by Zionists and Jewish anti-Zionists of being racist and anti Semitic, but embarrassingly enough for them, not a single anti Semitic or racist argument has ever been found in my many papers. On the contrary, there is an anti racist attitude that stands at the very core of my criticism of Jewish identity politics and Jewish ideology. I have been writing now for ten years, and for all those years, I have had a note on my web site saying “If you find something racist or anti-Semitic in my writings, let me know. I will apologise and remove it immediately”. And not a single person has ever come up with anything.

As I mentioned before, I differentiate between Jews (the people), Judaism (the religion) and Jewishness (the ideology). I am against Jewish ideology — not against Jewish people or Judaism. If this makes me into a “borderline case”, then I will have to live with it.

SC: Your voice helps people to understand what Israel is all about. In general, covering this subject is not easy. However, should not journalists take more responsibilities in exposing the power games that devastate the Middle East? What have been the responsibilities in this regard of Western media?

GA: I will be very honest with you; Western media has failed all the way. Western media has betrayed us. It has failed to understand that Palestine is not that far from our “Western haven”. The media have failed to see that we are all Palestinians — Palestinians are at the forefront of the battle against evil, but the rest of us are fighting in exactly the same battle, and we are all confronting the same enemy. What happened in America with the credit crunch and evolved into economic turmoil is the direct outcome of global Zionist politics.

America invests its tax payers’ money maintaining the Jewish State and it launched its people into a war to “save Israel”. Consequently, we are all facing a financial disaster, and as we speak, the Arab masses are rising: they demand liberation, and they want an immediate end to the Zio-political grip. What you see now in Egypt, Libya, Bahrain and Yemen is there to prepare us all, and we may well see the same thing unfolding soon in Berlin, Paris, London, Madrid, Barcelona, and New York City, because we all face the same enemy.

SC: I wonder whether your readers understand what you refer to when talking about Zionism and global Zionism.

GA: That is indeed a very crucial point. You may find it hard to believe but even Israelis do not understand what Zionism is all about. Zionism is the belief that Jews (like all other people) should be entitled to celebrate their right for a national homeland, and this homeland is Zion (Palestine). Though this idea sounds almost innocent, it is entangled with very problematical ethical issues, because Zionism has morphed into political reality in the shape of a Jewish State, built entirely at the expense of the ethnically cleansed and abused Palestinian people. Moreover, along the years, the Jewish State has been utilising some very powerful lobbies and think tanks in our Western capitals; and these bodies promote global Zionist interests such as endless confrontation with Islam and the Muslim world.

While early Zionism presented itself as a promise to redeem all the Diaspora Jews by means of settlement in the so-called “promised land”, in the last three decades Zionism has changed its spots in some regards — The Jewish State actually prefers some of the Diaspora Jews to stay exactly where they are so they can mount pressure on their respective governments for the sake of what they interpret as their Jewish interests.

The role of Jewish lobbies such as of AIPAC, J-street (USA) and Conservative Friends of Israel (UK) is far more advantageous to Israel than any wave of Jewish immigration to Palestine could be. This transformation in Zionist thought signals a shift from the local to the global, and therefore Zionism should no longer be solely perceived as a demand for a Jewish home in the “promised land” — Rather it must be grasped as a global operation, seeking a safe haven for the Jews within the context of “promised planet.”

The Israelis and their allies know very well why they promote Islamophobia. But what is Islamophobia? What, and who, does it serve? It serves Zio-centric Capitalist interests. Islamophobia is the true face of Hasbara (Israeli propaganda). It is there to make sure that Israel’s “survival war” is actually a Western war.

This is obviously misleading, and for the sake of Western interests, shunning Israel immediately would be the right thing to do.

SC: When do you see the emergence of Islamophobia and what was the cause?

GA: That is a good question — historically, it probably first arose in the seventies, soon after the energy crisis. I think that by 1973, we could clearly detect the first signs of modern political and institutional anti-Muslim antipathy as the Western public began to realise the strategic role of the Middle East. The shift towards a “popular anti Muslim culture” was exacerbated further by the success of Salman Rushdie’s “Satanic Verses”, and I would argue that by 9.11. 2001, the Western public was primed for an outbreak of “Muslim bashing”. I will never forget Ehud Barak being interviewed on that day, spreading bile and Islamophobic accusations on every Western media outlet. For Israeli Hasbaraagitators, 9/11 was proof of the “unified ethos” shared between Israel and the (Western) Goyim.

I would like to elaborate more on your question regarding Islamophobia. I realised some time ago that the general acceptability of certain minorities can always be measured by the popularity – or unpopularity – of its “self-haters”. The growing popularity of Muslim “self-haters” in the 1970-90’s era could have suggested that a wave of anti Islamic feelings was on its way to our shore. Similarly, the antagonism towards Jewish “self-haters” in the last decade confirms the success and influence of Jewish lobbies within media and politics. I guess that the rise of my popularity certainly indicates that the tide has indeed turned. We can firmly anticipate a tidal wave of resentment towards Israel.

SC: What is fascinating about you is your freedom of speech. You can’t stand the truth being “half told”. Isn’t it the case?

GA: I think that is a good way to put it. I have developed a severe allergy to spins and deceitful narratives. As I said before I do not claim to know the truth; however, I am pretty effective in detecting lies, ploys and diversions. Being a philosopher I am also effective in raising questions and deconstructing inconsistencies. I am puzzled by the activists around us who believe that we can beat Zionism by sketching out some phantasmic narratives of resistance. I honestly believe that truth-seeking and total openness will prevail. If you want to grasp the growing popularity of my writing, I guess that this is what it is — instead of playing political games I really try to get to the bottom of it all. I try to understand what it is that drives and fuels Zionism, Israel, Jewish lobbying, neoconservative expansionist wars and even Jewish anti Zionism.

And I guess that by now, you realise that I identify Jewish Ideology — rather than Jews or Judaism — as the crux of these precepts and political views.

SC: Thank you.

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.