"I remember reading a really interesting book about Australia that presented an alternative history. The author's point was that the official history of Australia really bears no relation to the real Australia. The official history bore no relation to the real one, but the people in charge, the people that toe the line, make decisions that people actually have to live with.
When Amy and I wrote “Everybody Knows”, we were thinking about Washington city as the economic capital, as the last place to go down, basically. So many people come into this city, and they're just passing through. They're just coming here to make their bones. It might be a college student, or it might be a lawyer, or it could be the president, but all of them are coming in just to take and are leaving like a bunch of frat kids. They don't give a fuck about about this city. It's almost like a vacation spot to them because they don't have anything invested in it, it's not their home.
The point of that song is about what it's like to live in a situation like that. People are just coming in and it's very hard for any one to actually lay any roots. For those of us who live here, we really hang on tight. People who live in this town have a tense relationship with it. I think it's because we're dismissed.
I can give you a really good example of what it's like to live in Washington. About eight or ten years ago, there was this republican, almost missionary, movement to name as many things as possible after Ronald Reagan. It was led by a group whose mission it was to name something after Ronald Reagan in every city in every county in the nation. They built the largest federal building in the district and called it, “The Ronald Reagan Building”. Of course, Ronald Reagan was no friend of Washington, not to the people who lived here, at least. They really grinded our faces in it though, when they decided that they would name the national airport, “Ronald Reagan National Airport”.
It had been our national airport forever, and they asked the people that own the airport who said, “no”. Then they asked northern Virgina where the airport is actually housed, and they said, “no”, as well. So they went to Maryland, which is the other side of Washington, and they rejected them also. It was uniformly rejected and they did it any way. To make matters worse, they sued any media outlets that refused to call the airport, “Reagan Airport”. They forced them to do it by law suit, it was incredible. This is a crystal clear example of the abuse that gets heaped upon the people that live in this city, and you can't say a fucking thing about it. At the end of the day, though, it's our city.
I also meant to talk [in that song] about the country. We have people who are really sick running the country, we have corporations that are wreaking such terrible havock, but ultimately it's our country. I'm not a nationalist, and I couldn't give a fuck about nationalism. I'm talking about that I woke up here, and I live here. This is where I spend my time, and that was really the point of the song.
Reclaiming has been a pretty central theme in my life, even from the very beginning. So many people thought that straight edge was fundamentalism, but really I was saying that I was just reclaiming the right for a person to be themselves. It was so obvious to me that we don't need to do what we're being told to do. We don't need to pay any one to do any thing for us, we have it already. I even have a song, “Reclamation”.
I'm also really interested in reclaiming language. There's a lot of word play that I use. People have really stolen certain words. An egregious example of that would be the term, “politically correct”. I always ascribe it to the Reagan revolution, the idea of taking “politically correct” and turning it into something that people really wouldn't want to be associated with. It's a very big brothery thing to do, to take words that sound right and tell people that they're wrong. It led to a kind of irony that trickled down into the underground. Punks would start using it to belittle other people and I would think that the conservatives have done really well here, they've really fucked up language and made us eat our own shit.
It's an ongoing practice by the government, and the military by the way, to deny the existence of certain conversations by changing the language used. They're not really taking responsibility for the fact that, and this is really the bottom line, the United States has employed people to murder other human beings around the world. They can call it whatever the fuck they want, but it's murder. Even the use of the word “war” is dubious; what kind of war is it where you don't have two sides? It's really cynical use of language.
The Dead Kennedys had this famous song, “Fuck Off Nazi Punks”, and there's all this wondering whether or not there were any Nazi punks before Jello told them to fuck off. In some ways, people fill in the blanks. I knew of some assholes, but didn't know of any Nazi punks to speak of. By the 80s, by the 90s even... I mean, Fugazi was playing shows in rooms with fourty guys doing the Nazi salute to us. I'm not blaming Jello for it, I'm just talking about language.
There are people in our world that I think suffer from a very deep pathology, and what they're suffering from is a disease really. They have anger and violence in their belly and they're looking for ways to express it, they want the toxicity out of them. They're looking for any way to release this poison from their system, and the triggers are very simple rules that can't be broken. Any breaking of these rules becomes an invitation to violence.
I think that even in a situation like, “Fuck Off Nazi Punks”, the idea is that people might say, “that sounds like me, I'm in”. I'm not blaming Jello but it was a really specific choice of words on his part and in a way, I never knew of a Nazi punk before that. I sure as fuck came to know them afterwards.
I can remember really clearly during the 80s, when the skinhead thing was really intense, and The Dead Kennedys had played a show where there was this big confrontation with these skinhead guys. Jello and I had come to a real disagreement about how to contend with the situation. We each had our own batch of skinheads in each of our towns, in San Francisco and Washington.
Jello's position was that you had to fight them and beat them out of your city. My position was that was the only language they spoke, so why engage them with the weapons of their choosing? My position was get to know their names and refuse to fight them because if someone's built to fight and you refuse to fight, they get bored and then they leave. Since I think of assholes as a virus, you could line up every fucked up skinhead guy in the city and kill them, there's just going to be another round, you can't stop it, it just takes different forms. I decided that we just needed to get through this with as little bloodshed as possible.
I don't control the venues or the pricing in the venues I play, I control myself. I decide whether or not I'm going to play in those places. That's really the crux of it, with all this stuff. It's really a yes or no, especially with Fugazi, for instance. It wasn't that we had control of the situation, what we had was a giant, big, fucking no. We said no so many more times that we said yes, it would make your head spin. We said no to so many things that you might think were opportunities. We just turned things down left and right because we knew that we would have to be selective if we were to be in a comfortable place for doing what we wanted to do.
This wasn't only after we were popular, by the way. From the very beginning of the band, we said no. For instance, I will never play a show that is not all ages. I don't even go to punk shows in DC that aren't all ages because I think that it is unethical to discriminate against somebody because he or she was born in a certain year and not before it. I think that it is a discouraging and disgusting cave to the alcohol industry. If you can't get into a show because you're not old enough to drink, isn't it kind of obvious what's going on?
The fact that people would let their music, and by extension, music submit to the complete fiction that rock n' roll and music are somehow intertwined is insane. Music has been around forever and longer than the music industry, than the alcohol industry, than alcohol itself. Music was a form of communication that I think probably predates language. How did music become something that you have to go to a bar to see? Something is deeply fucked up with that."
- Thanks to Ian for the interview.
