I've never believed that pop music is escapist trash. There's always a darkness in it, even amidst great pop music.
It is difficult to make political art work.
I think artists can influence only through making music that challenges people, excites them and flips them out. Music that repeats what you know in ever-decreasing derivation, that's unchallenging and unstimulating, deadens our minds, our imagination and our ability to see beyond the hell we find ourselves in.
I think sometimes all the charities are doing is mopping up the blood. It's a shame.
I don't see it in terms of changing things, but rather using language and music as weapons for fighting a mainstream media which is predominately right wing, and loyal to the political framework and its corporate interests.
The people in charge, globally, are maniacs. They are maniacs, and unless we do something about it these people are going to deprive us of a future.
I think no artist can claim to have any access to the truth, or an authentic version of an event. But obviously they have slightly better means at their disposal because they have their art to energize whatever it is they're trying to write about. They have music.
Well, my son really loves wildlife. And everytime he draws a polar bear I want to tell him there probably won't any by the time... he's my age. That's kinda hard to deal with.
My argument would be that I don't think there is much that's genuinely political art that is good art.
I think we're entering a very dangerous time. The West has set itself up, decided it's in charge, not for good intentions, not for the benefit of mankind.
So ultimately, it's idealistic to think that artists are able to step away from the power of the media and the way it controls things, and go on doing their own things.
I wrote a lot of stuff quickly: pages and pages of notes that seemed pretty incoherent at first. Most of it was taken from the radio because -suddenly being a parent- I'd be confronted by the radio giving a news report every hour of the day.
One of the interesting things here is that the people who should be shaping the future are politicians. But the political framework itself is so dead and closed that people look to other sources, like artists, because art and music allow people a certain freedom.
At home I've got a very puerile, juvenile sense of humour.
Music is more difficult - try naming a political band. The Dead Kennedys. The Dead Kennedys are political, but they are more funny than they are political.
I think maybe since there isn't a great deal of access to the mainstream media and people don't understand the language of mainstream media, if you put music out there with lyrics that are loosely political, people absorb some of it and spit it back out.
And I know I'm paranoid and neurotic, I've made a career out of it.
Sometimes the nicest thing to do with a guitar is just look at it.
Generally speaking, if people are prepared to stick their heads above the power pit, like Zinn says, and absorb what's going on around them, it makes them think.
My dad spent his whole life getting into fights for telling what he believed to be the truth. Basically it comes from my dad-and he's screaming right-wing, so there you are.
