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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I propose a different way of reading Dr Durst’s lyrics, one which is not bound up with religious interpretation. Through careful examination of Dr Durst’s songs “Nookie” and “Take a Look Around”, I have found that Dr Durst’s familiarity with central psychoanalytical and philosophical concepts shines through in almost every line; his fans have so far tried to change the world through his music, but the point, to paraphrase Marx, is to interpret the music. Only by deciphering the lyrics can we fully appreciate the intricacies of Durstian poetry.

While I don’t have the time at present to explore the entirety of Dr Durst’s prolific output, I want to lay out what I think is the most appropriate way to read his lyrics. I want, in particular, to prove that Dr Durst is dealing with highly abstract Lacanian, Mouffian, Hegelian, Kierkegaardian and Marxist concepts, which he cleverly hides under provocative profanity and sexual explicitness — no doubt this is his way of influencing what leftists have problematically called “the masses” without intimidating them.

Take, for example, the classic song-treatise, “Nookie”… Dr Durst’s purported aim here is to expose a former lover’s infidelities. Of course, this is only a pretext for engaging in extremely subtle micro-analyses of ideological “givens”.

“I came into this world as a reject,” Dr Durst proclaims in the song’s opening line. At once we are reminded of symbolic castration as formulated by Jacques Lacan. To enter the “world” — that is, to become a player in the intersubjective game the rules of which are inseparable from language as such — involves a rejection of jouissance, of primordial enjoyment which gives us our ontological substance. What Dr Durst is giving us here is a way into his philosophical system as a whole, acknowledging his debt to Heideggerian existentialism and structural psychoanalysis.

“Dwellin’ on the past / It’s burnin’ in my brain / Everyone that burns has to learn from the pain,” Dr Durst continues. Though this could be interpreted in almost infinite ways, I believe the most fruitful way to read this involves seeing it as an explanation of Dr Durst’s political stance. To dwell on the past causes “burning” in the brain — could there be a more obvious indictment of political conservatism, which forever looks to the past, and whose “hot-headed” American representatives (I am thinking in particular of Ann Coulter and Glenn Beck) always seem slightly brain-fried from all the yelling they do at the cameras? What Dr Durst seems to be saying is that it is time for conservative pundits to “learn from the pain” of having been defeated by the obvious Stalinist Barack Obama — they have to deal with it and find new ways to promote the conservative cause.

Nevertheless, Dr Durst introduces a layer of ambiguity in his political analysis. “Should i be feelin’ bad? / Should i be feelin’ good? / It’s kinda sad I’m the laughing stock of the neighbourhood,” he writes. So far he seems to be portraying the conservatives as clownishly as he can; it is not the “wishy-washy” liberals that he condemns for their lack of conviction, but the conservatives — they don’t know what they want, Dr Durst is saying — do Mexicans steal all available jobs in the United States, or are they lazy, jobless bums? Yet he goes on to write: “I’m a sucker like I said / fucked up in the head — not!” What is that “not” doing there? Is Dr Durst deliberately contradicting himself in order to mask his position on the issue of conservatism, or is he doing something sneakier, something of the most astonishing brilliance presented as childish humour — looking for redeeming qualities in the conservative party, adopting the liberal voice in “I’m a sucker like I said / fucked up in the head” only to counter this with the most universal signifier of negativity, “No(t)”? Is Dr Durst urging for a dialectical reversal here, by appealing to the human capacity for negativity in the search for something hidden in the fabric of conservative rhetoric which would both destroy and save conservatism itself — in other words, by having “I’m a sucker like I said” and “Not!” in the same line, is Dr Durst trying to show that only American leftism, with its power to take a stance only to reject it later (something conservatism has never been known to do) can allow for American conservatism to triumph and develop in unprecedented ways?

This is a complicated argument, and warrants an unknotting of ideas. What Dr Durst is implying is that up until this point in US politics, conservative pundits have drawn their strength from the denial of every single liberal proposition ever put forward. When gay marriage is “promoted” by the left, the right at once attacks the very idea as un-American, and so forth. That is the first meaning of the “Not!” in Dr Durst’s lyrics. If one party says “I’m a sucker” the other party immediately says “No!” But, of course, this is ridiculous; surely a conservative would actively hope for a distracted liberal to admit that she was a “sucker”. Yet such is the state of politics in America that the task of the politician is to contradict his opponent, not to defeat him. The second meaning of the “No(t)!” in Dr Durst’s line is a condemnation of this state of affairs. He is saying: “No, you are not a sucker! No, you do not need to have a urination contest with your political opponents.”

But the most important “No!” in Dr Durst’s line is, in fact, a solution to the deadlock of democratic politics. Just as he referred to Lacan’s idea of symbolic castration earlier, that is, the abandoning of jouissance as a precondition for entry into the intersubjective realm, Dr Durst is now asking for a new kind of castration: political castration, that is, the rejection of the enjoyable kick that politicians get from slandering their opponents. Where proposition X (e.g. “I’m a sucker”) would typically be countered with its negation in political discourse (“You are NOT a sucker”), the “No!” flowing from Dr Durst’s pen is, in fact, a rejection of the entire system we have been discussing. If the conservative pundit would only cease to oppose the liberal, and instead focus on finding original arguments for conservative causes, a new kind of agonistic pluralism might emerge in the political field, one which would allow for real clashes of opinion rather than simple negations of previously proclaimed statements.

Dr Durst, who is famously left-wing on most issues, is paradoxically asking the conservative mentality to strengthen itself so that the left may at last have a worthwhile enemy, and vice-versa. Earlier I wrote that Dr Durst is arguing that only leftism “can allow for American conservatism to triumph and develop in unprecedented ways”. This does not mean that Dr Durst is actively trying to get the conservatives to triumph; what it does mean is that Dr Durst longs for the day that conservatism might actually pose a serious threat to Obama’s communism, so that politics, itself, can be revived as a serious thing. This is the dialectical process necessary for the political field to be reborn: each party must accept that simply disagreeing with the enemy is not enough, and that there is a mutual interdependence in their relationship which cannot be eradicated through the balancing act created by “just saying no” to whatever your opponent says. Each party needs the other for its own identity, but that does not mean that the most fruitful way to individuality is by screaming “No! No! No!” to anything a liberal or conservative says. It would be much more productive for this system to be discarded altogether — we need a “return of the political”, as Chantal Mouffe puts it; that is, we need to accept that there are some disagreements which cannot be resolved, and a “centrification” of politics is not an acceptable remedy for this irremediable situation.

Dr Durst’s most famous line (“I did it all for the nookie! Come on! The nookie! Come on!”) points to a new kind of jouissance to be found in politics: the bliss of putting up with “constant shit” (this “shit”, of course, refers to the tribulations of having any kind of political presence) in order to arrive at a different conception of the role of politics, itself. To say that one is “in it for the nookie” is to be optimistic about the future of politics. Dr Durst is no gloom-and-doom prophet. He wants to see a shift in the way the social sphere operates; and for that, it is necessary to stop with all the shit and actively develop an original, idiosyncratic political stance which does not merely contradict another political stance.

I will return to this topic some other time; I do hope that I have at least partially shown the relevance of Dr Durst’s poetry to academic fields like politics and philosophy. The importance of the Limb Bizkits is easy to overlook in our current anti-intellectual climate; with some luck, I will prove myself competent enough to promote Dr Durst’s lyrical accomplishments as a new way of viewing the role of philosophy in the modern world.

There is no outcry. We must kill them over there so we don’t have to kill them over here. It doesn’t matter who we kill, as long as the ratings go up, corporations cash in and the masses get some bonus thrills before returning to the regularly scheduled programming.

Initial responses to the Tucson tragedy have tried to shoehorn Loughner into being a Tea Party, Sarah Palin zombie, but this grinning dude is even more messed up than that. A high school drop out, aimless and living with his parents, he was also kicked out of the community college. Loughner tried to join the US Army although he considered as war crimes our invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. Among his favorite books are Mein Kampf and the Communist Manifesto. He dismisses others as illiterate and ungrammatical, yet barely makes sense in his own writing.

Let’s face it, sanity and coherence are no longer our strong suits. From President to busboy, we babble in slogans and sound bites. For over a century, the mass media have corroded our syllogistic chops. Browsing some crime story, one is distracted by a shoe add. A genocide photo may be juxtaposed with a new, improved laundry detergent. On sale too, no less. All become spectacles and life is a meaningless collage. With jump cuts and commercials, television accelerates our derangement. The mind is not supposed to blink that fast for decades on end without deadly consequences. Speed kills, period. With remote control, five hundred channels, ipod in one ear, cell phone in other and laptop a humming, we can hardly remember who got wiped out yesterday, or even a minute ago. We no longer have reality, only reality shows.

With a national decline in articulation, is there a surprise that there’s a vertiginous drop in the literacy of our mass murderers and assassins? A man used to be able to hold a gun or knife in one hand, pen in the other. Not no more. Charles Guteau, who shot President Garfield in 1881, could wax, “I weave the discourse out of my brain as cotton is woven into a fabric. When I compose my brain is in white heat, and my mind works like lightning. This accounts for the short epigrammatic style of my sentences. I write so rapidly I can hardly read it,” and, “Life is a fleeting dream, and it matters little where one goes. A human life is of small value. During the war thousands of brave boys went down without a tear.”

Fast forward to Seung-Hui Cho. From his play Richard McBeef, Sue kvetches, “What are you doing to my son! You said you would have a nice chat to get on terms with him. And this is what I catch you do! What kind of step-father are you? Pretending to be nice to him with a fake smile on your chubby face!”

Is it possible to be more tone deaf? Oh, the bathos of atonal youth! Granted, Cho had problems with speaking and socializing his entire life, but he was also an English major in a well regarded writing program. He even took advanced fiction. As poet Richard Hugo observed, “A writing class may be the first and last place where many young people are taken seriously,” so inside they duck, though it may cost them a pretty penny, payable in infinite installments. Anything to get out of the suburbs, I suppose. In any case, count Cho as another young, inarticulate American with a hazy beef against nearly everything. Impotent, many look up to the military. Loughner tried to enlist, Cho dressed up as a Marine.

They like to flash that hard, reliable tool of lethal discharge, rat, tat, tat, tat! Extending the body’s reach, it feels agreeably snug in the hand.

Military culture provides a subtext to the Tucson shooting. Giffords’ opponent in the last election, Jesse Kelly, ex Marine and Iraq war vet, staged a fund raising event advertised as “Get on Target for Victory in November Help remove Gabrielle Giffords from office Shoot a fully automatic M16 with Jesse Kelly.” (If Loughner was so disturbed by bad grammar, why he didn’t target Kelly for this punctuation-free snippet?) Shot through the head, Giffords was then treated by Peter Rhee, among others. Rhee served for 24 years in the Navy, including tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. Discharged, he worked for five years in Los Angeles, where he dealt with around 30 gunshot wounds a day. Improved emergency care has helped to hold down our murder rates. To get at the real index of violence, one should look at murder attempts.

Responding to the Tucson shooting, Sheriff Clarence Dupnik cited “vitriolic rhetoric” in the media as a poisoning influence. “This has not become the nice United States that most of us grew up in.” How nice it ever was for how many is debatable, but it’s undeniable that our culture has turned more savage. We haven’t always enjoyed caged fighting, people eating maggots on TV or popular music that openly advocates murder.

Mammie Smith recorded the first blues record in 1920. It contained this passage:

Now I’ve got the crazy blues
Since my baby went away
I ain’t had no time to lose
I must find him today
I’m gonna do like a Chinaman, go and get some hop
Get myself a gun, and shoot myself a cop

So yes, drugs, guns and cop killing are not entirely new in pop music, but this song was an aberration. More typical of that era was a cheese wagon like “I’m Looking Over a Four Leaf Clover.” Can you imagine Eminem singing, “One leaf is sunshine, the second is rain / Third is the roses that grow in the lane”? The current top hit is “Grenade” by Bruno Mars. A love ballad, it features these sweet lines: “I would go through all this pain, / Take a bullet straight through my brain, / Yes, I would die for ya baby.”

Looking tough has become de rigueur and even pre-teens now strut around like gangstas. America also leads the world in the adoption of military fatigues as casual wear, where T-shirt slogans such as “Kill ‘Em All” and “Made in America, Tested in Japan,” over a mushroom cloud, are deemed witty. Our soccer moms steer military trucks. Rush Limbaugh used to open his show with a sustained salvo of automatic weapons.

Interviewed by M. Thomas Inge, Truman Capote spoke of the prevalence of tattoos among murderers, “I have seldom met a murderer who wasn’t tattooed. Of course, the reason is rather clear; most murderers are extremely weak men who are sexually undecided and quite frequently impotent. Thus the tattoo, with all its obvious masculine symbolism. Another common denominator is that murderers almost always laugh when they’re discussing their crimes.” Well, Americans have become the most elaborately tattooed people on earth. Not all of us are murderers, of course, we just want to look like we’re always ready to bust a cap. By flexing our masculinity so insistently, so insanely, we’re distorting both the male and female aspects of our nature.

When the recital started, he performed some perfunctory turns and flashed his mastery in a few signature aerials. Then he grabbed a chair and abruptly sat down facing his audience.

Njinsky glared at them. Time passed but the audience was silent. More time passed and still Njinsky stared. The audience sat motionless.

After several minutes, Njinsky rose. He took rolls of black and white velvet and made a giant cross the length of the room. Then he stood at the head of it with open arms and said: “Now I will dance you the war, with its suffering, with its destruction, with its death. The war which you did not prevent and so you are responsible for.”

And then Njinsky erupted across the room, his monumental gestures filling the space with horror and suffering. The audience was breathless, fascinated and petrified. Njinski’s movements and expressions suffused the room with twisted, contorted bodies and savage explosions. He took his audience to the trenches, the front, and the body-strewn aftermath. He was ethereal and violent; a perfect embodiment of tragic, terrible humanity.

His audience was discomfited, but undeniably moved. His recital was intense, brilliant and compelling.

If you go to the neighborhood library or check Wikipedia, you may find Njinsky as a historical figure or a physical genius. But you will hardly find the spirit of the phenomena he represented. And it’s even less evident on the TV channels and radio stations and art galleries we frequent. They are devoid of urgency and sadly lack the cogent, poetic ferocity that comprised Njinsky’s St. Moritz performance.

Contemporary pop culture is virtually bereft of real relevance and depth and the corporate architects who promote it go to extraordinary lengths to keep it that way. Taylor Swift is as challenging as a lukewarm bath. Lil Wayne is as evocative as a mustard burp. And Justin Bieber is as meaningful as bread crust crumbs in mayonnaise.

Sure, there’s a Sinead O’Connor tearing up the Pope’s picture here and there or a Sharon Olds addressing “The Solution” we seem to have chosen for ourselves. And now and then we hear a Rage Against the Machine; but the Bob Dylans are desperately missed. There’s no future in banal Beyonces, toothless Labeoufs or spineless Twilight and Harry Potter sequels.

There’s no edge to our art anymore because it’s filled with entertainers instead of artists and the few artful souls that do unintentionally get featured usually lack awareness or philosophy.

Kurt Vonnegut used to say that artists were like canaries in a coal mine. That they were super-sensitive and “keeled over” due to toxic conditions long before normal folks even sensed they were in danger. Vonnegut envisioned art as an indispensable herald, a critical means of alarm.

But despite the unparalleled toxicity of our times and our complicity in the systems that endanger us, artists aren’t sounding the alarm. There are as many doom-impending calamities in the world now as there are countries, but most artists are hardly even sentient, much less super-sensitive.

Albert Camus went further than Vonnegut. He plainly stated that “the time for irresponsible artists is over” and that in any troubled era, it was every legitimate artist’s role to create dangerously.

We are involved in one war and one quasi-occupation, but no performer on any significant stage or medium is dancing the war for us or compellingly conveying the shabbiness or shame of the occupation. Our socio-economic system is exposing us to a catalogue of environmental perils, but our creative communities spend more time cashing in on the system than condemning it. Our technological dependence is rendering an inestimable number of our natural, physiological capacities obsolete, but more artists are turning to the new, dehumanizing technologies than disputing their real, long-term merit.

Art for art’s sake was fine when there was nothing at stake, but when everything is at stake artistic expression demands courage and accountability. So if you fancy yourself a literary or filmic or singing sort and your muse isn’t telling you to dance our inhumanities or paint our self-destructiveness or pen our vainglorious insanities, please ignore it and find another pursuit among the uninitiated throngs. We already have enough artists who create safely and serve no purpose.

But the strikers this time aren’t the beleaguered UAW.  This time, they’re the 84 members of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra (DSO), affiliated with the American Federation of Musicians.  The DSO members have been on strike since October 4, opposing management’s efforts to rip out the heart and lungs of their contract.

Unfortunately, like management teams all across the U.S., DSO’s bosses are using the combination of the national recession and organized labor’s perceived institutional weakness as the basis for re-inventing their relationship with the union.  Management feels they’re on a monumental roll.  Accordingly, sensing the musicians’ vulnerability, they’re coming at them with everything they’ve got.

In addition to demanding an immediate 33-percent cut in base wages for current members, and a 42-percent cut for new members, DSO management is calling for major concessions in basic benefits (pensions and health care) and asking that long-standing work rules be changed.  In other words, they’re intent on eviscerating the union contract.

While there’s always been a creepy “paternalistic” aspect to labor relations in the U.S., it gotten a lot creepier lately.  An analogy:  Think of two scenarios, each involving a teenager whose parents have just learned that their kid is flunking his math class.

In Scenario A, the parents attack the problem by laying down new rules and procedures.  Math homework will now be the priority; it will be done first, and there will be no TV until it’s finished.  A math tutor will be hired, a regimen will be followed, the earlier chapters of the textbook will be reviewed to determine at which point the kid “lost contact,” and they will proceed from there.

In Scenario B, the parents not only make math homework the priority, they use the kid’s poor grade as an opportunity to re-invent him as a teenager.  They insist he stop hanging out with his low-life friends, that he stop wearing the latest fashions, stop using the latest slang, stop listening to the latest music, stop eating junk food, and stop talking and texting on the phone.

They take away his car.  They insist he get a haircut, start doing the dishes, mowing the lawn, cleaning the garage, being nicer to his sister, going to bed earlier, and referring to adults as “sir” and “ma’am.”  This kid’s math grade has made him so vulnerable, his parents are using it as a launching-pad for a full assault.  And that’s what’s happening to the unions.

Instead of addressing economic concerns the way they used to be addressed — by asking for temporary wage freezes, or side-stepping pay raises altogether and adopting profit-sharing, work incentives or stock offerings — companies (who, clearly, see themselves as America’s “strict, responsible parents”) are aggressively going after everything that ever appeared on their wish lists, and steamrolling loyal workers in the process.

But there’s been a surprise or two with this DSO strike.  For one thing, the musicians aren’t the wimps or dilettantes the company thought they were.  Instead of behaving like lily-livered flautists and skittish harpists, they’re behaving like brass-balled professionals.  Indeed, they’re behaving like old-fashioned UAW members.

For another thing, and in something of a surprise, the citizens of Detroit have been supportive of the strikers.  In fact, so disappointed and angry are civic donors with management’s harsh treatment of the musicians (who are living off a $150/week strike fund, plus money earned from fund-raising concerts), citizen groups have formally protested, and donations to the Orchestra have plummeted.

Founded in 1914, the DSO has long been a source of enormous cultural pride.  The good people of Detroit don’t want to see it diminished or disgraced.  Of course, this cultural legacy means nothing to management.  Like hyenas attracted by the scent of blood or the sight of an animal in distress, they’re fully aroused, ready to move in for the kill.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I guess that I know the answer: you would feel disturbed, and you may even want to protest.

However, Mike Gerber, a writer for the Jewish Socialist Magazine and a member of the ‘Jewish Socialist Group’ has a very similar agenda – he is about to launch a ‘Jews only’ jazz radio show.

Here is an extract from his press release, which he circulated this morning: 

I’m Mike Gerber, author of the book “Jazz Jews”, as a result of which I’ve been asked to host a regular Jazz Jews show on the internet station UK Jazz Radio…

My Jazz Jews show will feature: Jewish/jazz fusions of every kind; rootsy Jewish music such as klezmer; Israeli jazz; and there will also be a focus on Jewish Great American Songbook composers. I will play tracks by some of the many Jewish musicians who have contributed to jazz more generally…

I assume that we wouldn’t accept an Aryan classical music radio show, yet a ‘Jewish Jazz show’ must be somehow kosher. At least kosher enough for www.jazzradio.com to host it.

I met Mike Gerber ten years ago. He came to my house to interview me about Jews and Jazz.  He sat with me for many hours, desperately trying to squeeze out of me an insight into the inherent bond between Jazz and Jews. I could hardly help him.  I am not a musicologist. Furthermore, I cannot hear any particular Jewish musical influence in Jazz. Though it is true that more than a few Jazz  master artists and iconic composers were Jewish by ethnicity ( and this fact in itself deserves a  study ), but jazz, as an art form, is far from being Judeo-centric or Jewish. 

The greatness of jazz music is grounded on its capacity to bring together people of all colours and ethnicities. Jazz made itself into a cosmopolitan language and a symbol of freedom because of its diversity of  sounds, rhythms and cultures.  And with all due respect to Michael Gerber and his obsession with Jewish cultural importance, I cannot  hear the Jew in Gershwin or in Michael Brecker. I could instead hear Africa, Cuba, Blues, Baroque,  NYC, Paris. In fact I can hear everything but the Jewish Ghetto.  

When we met, I suggested to Gerber that for many Jewish artists, Jazz is actually an escape route from the  ghetto, from the chicken soup, gefilte fish, Zionism and other symbols of  chosen-ness. At the time, I also  discussed this issue with drummer star Asaf Sirkis, song writer Chaz Jankel and legendary New York saxophonist Bob Berg and they obviously agreed with me.  I myself can testify that twelve bars into my new path as a young Jazz enthusiast, I  managed to forget Zionism, Israel and the IDF. I didn’t want to die on the Zionist altar : instead I dreamed to swing in Paris, or bop in NYC. For many of us, Israelis and Jewish musicians, Jazz was a window of opportunity. It was a true means towards liberation.

Gerber didn’t like my idea that much. It could easily dismantle his Jewish project.   Gerber spent seven years writing a gigantic text about Jews and Jazz, which is, in my opinion, one of the most disturbing books in the history of Jazz literature.  As Gerber’s website suggests, the book “explores the role of Jews in breaking the colour bar in American jazz, and in using jazz as an instrument against apartheid and against Soviet repression”.  

But here is a clear problem: though it  is indeed very important for  Gerber to present Jewish jazz as a ‘progressive affair’ at the heart of the anti Apartheid movement – it is far from being clear why Jewish Jazz musicians are far from being actively involved in the anti Zionist movement. 

If Jewish Jazz musicians are somehow wonderfully progressive – how is it that we hardly see any Jewish Jazz collective movement denouncing Zionism or Israel?

Gerber is obviously totally foreign to Jazz and its spirit. He clearly fails to realize that playing music is the ultimate form of being amongst others. When you play music, issues to do with race, identity, politics and cultural barriers are put aside.   Being there and producing beauty with others is in itself the strongest possible statement. Jazz musicians do not have to say much, for the music carries the strongest message. In our Jazza festival last week, we had at least four Jewish artists. They operated as ordinary human beings. They didn’t carry any flags or banners. They didn’t ask for any special treatment.

Michael Gerber, however, didn’t come to our Jazza concert (though he somehow always calls me in advance to ask for a ‘free press pass’ for Ronnie Scott’s when I play there). Jewish Socialist Groups did not support Jazza either, nor did any other Jewish organization. But, let me tell you, many Jews did. They joined us as ordinary human beings. Unlike Mike Gerber and his Jewish Socialists they obviously assimilated into humanity.

Zelig For Breakfast

Three weeks ago Gerber asked me to send him some music for his ‘Jews only’ radio show. I obviously refused. I suggested to him that when he decides to feature and promote Gentiles’ music, he should contact me again and I will consider. This morning after reading Gerber’s press release, I wrote back to him in sarcasm — I suggested that my (imaginary) German Friend Klaus Hofmann wants to host an Aryan Jazz programme. I thought that it would be nice to have the two racist Radio programmes next to each other.

Gerber was hurt. He answered immediately:

“A key part of my show is Jewish jazz, which also includes a lot of Israeli jazz.” He went on to say,  “If it’s OK to have a Latin jazz programme, it’s OK to have a show that’s largely about the Jewish jazz sub-genre.”

Gerber’s answer took me by surprise.  Though Gerber  is a member of the Jewish Socialist Group, and in spite of the fact that Jewish Socialists claim  also  to be anti Zionists who support cultural boycott of Israel, Gerber, all of a sudden, decided to endorse the Jewish state as a  Jewish cultural Mecca. He even became an active mouthpiece for Israeli art (instead of boycotting it).  When pushed into a corner the Jewish Socialist somehow changed his spots. He even managed to endorse Zionist culture.

I can accept that Israel is indeed a well of very many incredible Jazz talents. However, one question is still left open – is there such a thing as Jewish Jazz?   

Gerber is either misleading, or may even be  misled by himself. There is a big difference between Latin Jazz and Jewish Jazz : Latin Jazz is a clear musical genre that is intrinsically associated with a piece of geography. Musicians around the world can easily define Latin Jazz in musical terms. Anyone can join a Latin Jazz combo once achieving a reasonable command of the Latin musical language. Jewish Jazz, on the contrary,  is not an art form, and it is not a musical  genre. There is no such thing, outside of Gerber’s universe. I guess that in order to make it into Gerber’s book, all you need is a Jewish mother. This is also exactly what you need in order to make Aliya to Israel and dwell on Palestinian land.

As much as I am happy with Israel exposing its true nature, I am very happy with Mike Gerber pushing his agenda.  It was Mike who already ten years ago opened my eyes to  this  bizarre Jewish collective hubris. It was Mike Gerber who inspired  me afew years ago to invent the satirical character Artie Fishel, the American musician who is totally convinced that Jazz is neither American or African, but entirely Jewish.

Like Gerber, Fishel wants to bring Jazz to where it belongs, namely The Promised Band.

As tragic as it may be, Jewish politics is always a form of Zionism.

You can listen to Artie Fishel and his Promised Band while thinking about Mike Gerber and his kosher socialism.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

AB: Did you get your car back?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PM: Yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But unlike the rigid politicking of politicians and increasingly Machiavellian style of today’s political essayists – so brazen they no longer hide behind illusory moral façades – the band’s latest work is also unapologetically humanistic.

Those familiar with the writings of Gilad Atzmon – the famed ex-Israeli musician and brilliant saxophone player, now based in London – can only imagine that Gaza was the place that occupied his thoughts as he composed The Tide Has Changed.

The title track, an 11-minute melody, transmits the host of emotions that engulfed many of us when Israel began mercilessly pounding the resilient and hostage Gaza Strip in late 2008. First there were the simultaneous strikes which killed hundreds. Some of us woke up to watch the dreadful images of poor police cadets in Gaza reeling under the ceaseless bombardment in a heap of human flesh. Body parts of young men and their families scattered across burning buildings and pulverized concrete. Those still alive were hauling whatever remained of their bodies across the sea of the dead, mostly in their graduation uniforms.

It was a moment of disbelief, of questioning much of what we’d previously held to be true. It came as a shock and awe to our collective consciousness, and was further bolstered by endless days of constant shelling and tragedy. And the tide began to change as if the moment of death, of release, was the very moment of liberation. Gaza’s thousands of victims may have produced the nudge for millions around the globe to begin to finally confront their inner fear, their subtle sense of shame for allowing a tragedy of that magnitude to continue for all of these years.

As Gaza held strong proving once and for all that unspoken values – human spirit, the will of the people, the collective dignity of a nation – was stronger than all that military genius can possibly generate, millions went to the streets in a most disorganized, chaotic and yet genuine expression of human solidarity witnessed in many years.

The tide has changed, then, and continues to change. The frenzied and disorganized, yet real sentiments have become an unwavering and well-articulated commitment to justice. The shift cannot always be validated by numbers or demonstrated in charts, but is nonetheless felt widely. Israeli researchers refer to it as the global movement aimed at delegitimizing their country. They are laboring to link it to anti-Semitism somehow, but to no avail. Palestinians and their friends vary in their own reading of what happened during, and after, those fateful days, but contend it was Israel’s murderous acts that incepted and cemented the process of its own de-legitimization. Gilad Atzmon & The Orient House Ensemble articulate it in music – melancholic at the start, but upbeat and unwavering later on.

And So Have We, another track, starts with the soft cries of Gilad’s saxophone, accompanied by the sound of drumbeat, and haunting vocals is a sad procession. It invokes the sounds and feelings of the Freedom Flotilla, laden with people from around the world united by a mute sense of powerlessness, then emancipation. When the hundreds of activists set sail abroad the Mavi Marmara and the other ships, they freed themselves and the rest of us from the stifling weight of inaction in the face of injustice. It lifted for a moment the huge burden on our collective conscience. It showed civil society at its best, its most humane members sailing and braving the high seas to extend a lifeline to Palestine, to Gaza, which had been left undefended, hungry and alone – but never defeated.

Much has been said about the Freedom Flotilla. Hundreds of television and radio shows ran discussions and debates about its significance. Thousands of articles were published, and many books will follow. Even YouTube was caught in the storm. But in the midst of articulation and counter-articulation, a sentiment so beautiful, so poetic was lost; no words can possibly describe the triumph of human dignity that day, no matter how lucid or earnest.

It really takes a bit of imagination. We have been forced to believe that the world is now divided between civilizations that are willing to fight and kill to impose their collective will on the rest of us. That we had no other option but to join that clash of civilizations or to perish. That ‘our way of life’ – whomever we might be – is now being challenged and threatened. That conflict is hardly based on class analysis, gender, racial or any other classification, but is a clash between religion-inspired collectives.

That was then. Now we have seen hundreds of people, of different religious beliefs, value systems, races and class affiliations leave their homes, families, livelihoods, and entire worlds behind, staring death in the face on their way to Gaza. They have confronted and defeated the old but persistent illusions. They have demonstrated that it isn’t what divides us that matters. What unifies us is much stronger, real, deserving, lasting and worthy of celebration.

The Tide Has Changed is not meant to be a sad melody, but the sound of people marching. It is the sound of boats reaching the shore. It is the sound of people’s collective retort to racism, hatred, siege and war. It is a well-deserved moment of triumph, of victory.

The legendary British music icon Robert Wyatt is a big supporter of Palestine. A few days ago he came down to London to promote For the Ghosts Within (Wyatt/ Stephen/Atzmon, Domino Records), a new album we produced together with violinist Ros Stephen. We had a lively chat about Palestine, music, cultural resistance and about the importance of the coming Jazza Festival.

For Robert Wyatt, music is where “people are introduced to each other”. “People were playing each other’s music long before they were mixing politically or socially” he says. Musicians can anticipate change. “In the deep south, white kids were listening to Black radio stations and Black kids listened to Country Music, long before these kids could share space or even meet”. Music has this unique capacity to cross the divide, to bring people together, to introduce harmony and yet, for some reason, not many musicians are brave enough to jump into the deep water. Not many musicians celebrate their ability to bring change about.¹

In 2003 Robert invited me to the studio. He was recording Cuckooland at the time. He had in mind an instrumental version of Nizar Zreik’s tune, originally sung by the Palestinian singer, Amal Murkus. That day in the studio, I spent a good few frustrating hours with my clarinet trying to emulate Amal’s articulation, her sound, her personal take on micro-tonality, colour and dynamic. A few months later, when Cuckooland came out, I realised that somehow, that afternoon in the studio, I had managed to dissolve some boundaries. Robert’s attempt to bond an ex-Israeli with a Palestinian composition was indeed a success. I have been collaborating with Robert since then. This year we made an album together.

Robert Wyatt is a legend, a British musical icon. Over the years, he has formed his own language, he has brought to life a new and original sound. He is an incredible craftsman who has influenced generations of musicians all over the world. His production techniques are totally unique; he starts from scratch and builds his music layer by layer sometimes employing the most basic techniques. He manages to collate the bricks and mortar of lyricism, broken melodies, voice, drum snaps and wit into a lucid musical narrative that always sounds unlike anything else. His music is fresh and extraordinary, yet it is also simple and transparent. You somehow always see the light through Robert’s music and thoughts. I have been very lucky to be around and witness the way he bends notes into songs, words into poems, ideology into responsibility, love into beauty and beauty into meaning. But far more importantly, I had a chance to exchange ideas with the man. Last week I had the precious opportunity to discuss music, Palestine, Israel, cultural resistance, politics, the left and compassion with him.

“For the musicians who support the long suffering people of Palestine, silence is simply not an option” he says. In spite of Robert’s popularity in Israel, Robert is not exactly shy of telling the world what he thinks of Israeli policies. For so many decades, “the people of Palestine have been subjected, not just to humiliation, but also to a sadistic relish that can only be designed to destroy them”. But the Israelis have failed, he continues, because the Palestinian people are resilient. “The colonised is always more resilient than the colonisers realise.”

It is no secret that support of the Palestinian cause is on the verge of tipping into a mass movement, the tide has clearly changed in recent years, and yet, in spite of his criticism of Israel, Robert manages to maintain his universally compassionate attitude. He wants to see change, he also believes that such a change is attainable. With his well known, kind ‘Santa Claus’ giggle, he asks the Israelis “what are you scared of? These Palestinians are only other people like you.”

Such a simple statement summarises Robert’s world view. On planet Wyatt almost everything is magically simple but at the same time profound and compassionate. “My politics is clear”, he says, ‘I am an anti racist’. “The idea” he continues, “that some people believe others to be inferior is plain silly.” We, he maintains “are different yet equal.” Such a seemingly simple statement re-locates the political debate within ethical and universal discourse. We should celebrate our differences, yet it is the notion of equality that should stop us from doing so at the expense of each other. Robert is a jazzman and it is hardly a surprise that a jazz musician offers such a profound yet elementary insight. Jazz takes great delight in our differences yet it also yearns for equality. In the 1960’s jazz artists located themselves at the forefront of the civil rights movement. It is a natural progression that jazz artists should continue to champion the struggle for a better world.

Robert believes in ‘people’s power’ as opposed to the politician. Our elected politicians fail to stand for clear justice, he says. “It is humiliating for us as citizens to have such a morally cowardly governments.” And yet, “although politicians cannot initiate a serious change, they will respond to change once it happens amongst the people.” Palestine is a good example of this. We are currently witnessing a rapid expansion in the popular support of Palestinians and their rights. It seems as if everybody out there has decided to collectively “ come out of the closet” Roberts suggests. This movement cannot be explained in political terms, for the political establishment has nothing to do with it. I think Robert is correct here. The emerging mainstream solidarity with Palestine should be seen as the outcome of a general craving for justice, an outburst of collective ethical intuition.

I spoke to Robert about fear. I suggested to him that the ‘war against terror’, could also be grasped as a war against the terror within: a terror caused by the fear we inflict upon ourselves. We are tormented by the idea that others may be as vicious as we are or could be. Robert took this concept further and suggested that the types of fear he detects in our midst are largely the ‘threat of democracy’ and the ‘fear of the truth’. The threat of democracy can be understood as the sheer panic at being outnumbered. The fear of the truth is obviously fuelled by the tormenting thought that our lies risk exposure. Such an insight certainly helps us to understand Israel and its relentless efforts against the indigenous people of Palestine. It also explains Israel’s reluctance to cooperate with different international fact-finding missions. But Israel is not alone. Threat of democracy and truth is also a spot-on diagnosis of the dilemmas plaguing British politics. The UK obsession with immigration merely reflects the fear of being outnumbered. Furthermore, Britain’s continuous institutional failure to properly address the events and individuals that led us to the Iraq war is an indication of our intrinsic fear of truth.

I asked Robert, about his roots. I wondered whether he was afraid to be ‘outnumbered’. “I am English, this is what I am, this is what comes out of my mouth. However, I am not in a stagnated pond of culture, I came out of the pond into the river, which is composed of hundreds of ponds and a lot of fresh water is coming in. This is the place to be, this is the only place for me.” I understand exactly what Robert is referring to. My own journey has also been an expedition from a pond to the river and from there straight to the sea. However, unlike the salmon in Robert’s Maryan, I have no plans to turn around. The sea is the only place for me.

It has been said before that artists, rather than politicians, are there to provide us with a vision of a better world. When I listened to Robert singing What A Wonderful World I could easily touch the ‘blue for me and you’. I had to agree, it is indeed a wonderful world against all odds.

1. To watch Robert speak about Palestine and music.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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