I'm drying out from recording and mixing a track, of allthings, a Willie Nelson "tribute album". For anybody who knows the song,"Still is Still Moving to Me," it's the closest thing to a, oh, a Dead Kennedy's "Holiday in Cambodia" sounding song that he ever came up with,and the lyrics are cool too.
Working with Al Jourgensen was never a dull moment. He's the Jerry Lee Lewis of the 90's....... what can we do? He was even supposed to produce Jerry Lee but I guess Jerry Lee backed out at the last minute.
Ice-T is one of the most brilliant people I've ever met. I don't agree with all of his views-especially in the area of women!-but overall he's a fascinating person to be around. The intelligence and energy just kind of rubs off and sparkles. "Cop Killer" is the "Born to Be Wild" of the 90's. Everything that people find shocking now will routine in ten years.It always works out that way. Remember when Elvis Presley's legs were bannedfrom television? I envision that someday an ad will come on television,"Rememberthe good old 90's? Well relive the nostalgia with Cop-Killers-Hating Whitneyin the 90's, starring Body Count, Ice Cube, Ice-T, NWA, Snoop Doggy Dog...."you name it.
We played shows together with Black Flag, we networked together,tipped each other to promoters in different cities when one of us wouldrun across somebody new. There was much more of a cohesive bond between thebands that were then called punk and hardcore because there were so few ofus and it was against everything we hated about the 70's and the musicestablishment. We had to crack open places for us and other people to playin town.The very idea of an all-ages show horrified New York. But once wegot in and were able to do that, it exploded and all these bands came out.That happened in a lot of places, and leaders in cracking open those towns were Black Flag, the Dead Kennedy's, and DOA.
I'm one of the few people in this town who has articulatedanger towards the outbreak of punk fundamentalism, especially when the dictatorof the biggest local so-called punk magazine (Maximum Rock N Roll) is nowadvocating violence against people he doesn't like. What I've had to do isto point out that not everybody who has a long and deep involvement withpunk wants to turn it into something bitter, fundamentalist, isolationist,church and go around playing "cop" on other people. If that was the attitudeI'd found when I first got into punk, I would have gotten right back outagain. I think that circling the wagons and putting up fences right at atime when millions of new people could potentially turn onto the politicsand spirit of punk is sad and irresponsible.
I don't think either the Offspring or Green Day started theirbands with the intension of becoming so enormously popular; that sort offell in their laps-especially the Offspring. My attitude is if somebody blundersinto the level of popularity, at least remember the human factor. These guysare still human beings and hopefully still have hearts and if you keep intouch with them rather than vilify them you may be able to encourage themto go in the right direction. What I'm hoping will eventually happen is thatthey will grasp the amount of power and financial clout that is now at theirfingertips and use those as tools to help real people with real things theway punk politics was always designed to do before, but nobody had any money.
The Grateful Dead, of all people, had been doing this foryears with a grant foundation. They would donate about a million dollarsa year from concert receipts or benefit concerts, and that money would thenbe doled out to people that applied for the grant for everything from soupkitchens, battered women's shelters, rural school districts who don't haveany money for instruments for a music program or an aspiring composer. Itwas a way of putting the politics behind the music into something other thanyour own pocket.
I still think, quality of the bands aside, the only reasonthis later batch of bands(grunge, Green Day, the Offspring) got signed andpushed was to help steer white suburban kids away from political black rapmusic. Reggae they could buy-at least there the revolution was aimed atJamaica-but some of these people were talking about revolution in the UnitedStates. "We can't have these future middle-class model citizens finding outwhat America is really like!! No, no, no! Come on kids! Shoe gaze, shoe gaze!Remember, your slackers! You're Generation X! You're not supposed to care!"The whole slacker myth was imposed from above after these very alleged slackershelped throw George Bush out of the White House.
There isn't one magical solution. I do think that more people listen to artists-especially rappers-and musicians than they do to politions,and if there're going to look at us for leadership and brain food, we oughtto provide some ideas for improvement over the current colapse of the RomanEmpire that we're witnessing in this counrty. I have tossed out some ideas on Beyond the Valley of the Gift Police (Biafra's fourth spoken wordalbum), some of them sarcastic but some of them also very practical. There's alot of allegations about the [government and AIDS] that have even made the London Times, and I haven't really made up my mind. It wouldn't surpriseme a bit, though, the way we play around with germ bombs in the country.Therewas one group of military scientists who immediately went into the heartof Zaire when they first heard about the ebola virus, and there reactioninstead of wanting to exterminate it, was "Wow! Wouldn't this make a greattoy? Let's take some back to Fort Detrick, Maryland." And they did. And sureenough, some of the monkeys escaped., but they were recaptured. But it makesme wonder how many other things like that have happened where the germs didget out. There's lots of evidence that that outbreak of hanta virus in NewMexico the Summer before last that killed large numbers of Native Americanshad actually been leaked out of germ warfare lab right next to an Indian reservation in the Southwest.
This is my home. Home is where the disease is. As long as I stay in America, I'll never run out of subjects for songs.