Propagandhi Interview
By Al Burian
Transcribed and Edited by Kate Monahan

MR: To start with, I wanted to quote you from your new record: "Success: the ability to perform within the framework of obedience." Considering the size of this theatre, and knowing that this theatre will be at least three-quarters full for your show tonight, by even very mainstream romanticized standards of rock music success, you guys are successful. So, by your own definition, do you feel that you’re performing within a framework of obedience?

P: I think we’re talking about different degrees of success, first of all. In some ways you can say we’re successful: we’re able to sustain the band at a certain level. But we don’t get pats on the head from the establishment or cultural icons, or from mainstream media at all. And for us, not just being involved in a band and the music scene but also in a record label, we see how people operate to try to get those pats on the head from the establishment and to try to take the path of least resistance to success. That’s what I think those lyrics mean. For us, musically and lyrically, we’re honestly doing and saying what we believe, and sometimes people are ambivalent about it, but a lot of times they’re hostile about it. I think a lot of bands avoid any confrontation no matter what they believe. They don’t bring it from their heart for fear of impeding their progress.

MR: Whereas you’re actually a pretty confrontational band...

P: Not confrontational, but we hope that our lyrics and the content of our records create more potential for somebody to be hostile towards the ideas in this culture. It’s not like we’re tailoring our ideas to make sure we’ll be able to play certain tours or play to a certain amount of people or sell a certain amount of records. In fact, that song was written while I was honestly wondering about the cultural climate that we’re living in now, much of which I think is just shit music and meaningless lyrics, wondering if there can be any relevance for us or if it should be totally ignored.

Relating to more conventional ideas of success and all that, I think a lot of the mainstreaming of punk rock in the early 90s, like Nirvana and Green Day, has really brought us up being more of a spectacle that a participatory thing. Just with the sheer numbers of people being interested in this type of stuff after being exposed to it through more conventional corporate media outlets, we approach it by saying: "Look, since those people are there, why not try to popularize radical political ideas instead of keeping them underground?" Ultimately, the goal is to spread these ideas and not just keep them as a ‘safe’ or subcultural idea, or preach to the converted.

MR: You’re saying you’re not getting pats on the head from the establishment, but, on a broader level, a lot of people like you, you have a popular, well-respected band and record label. To a certain extent you are compromising your ideas, but in some ways you’re compromising your ideas as soon as you even package your ideas on a demo tape.

P: In terms of commodification and selling things that other people are profiting off of, there are a lot of compromises. I think that’s just an ongoing thing that has to be revisited from time to time. Say 5-10 years ago, there were lots of indy record stores in North America. Now the chains have gauged them all. So, what’s the alternative? To not go along with the whole mainstream process by just basically selling demo tapes out of your house, or do you allow certain distributors access to your stuff to get the word out?

MR: Is there an artistic middle ground?

P: It’s dependent on many factors, even the personalities of certain bands: what they’re willing to do or how hard they’re willing to work. We’re not going to sign to Sony, ever, but I totally value the fact that Rage Against the Machine existed or exists, and were doing what they were doing.

Ultimately, there has to be a multi-level unit providing access to and popularizing this stuff.
Anybody born into the framework of the capitalists who grows to be anti-capitalist is living in a compromise. I’m sure I’m a living contradiction, so unless you’re out of the city, living in a hut and growing your own food and all that type of stuff, you’re going to have to face this type of thing.

MR: In terms of where you draw the line, in the FAQ section on your CD-ROM, your reply to "Why are you on Fat Wreck Chords?" was "Because we are." I’m getting the sense that you don’t like to be asked that question and are sick of the whole…

P: It is a sickening question because there is an abstract line drawn between art and the rest of real life that doesn’t make any sense where people will point and say "You’re on Fat Wreck Chords" while they’re eating at McDonald’s. It’s just abstract and meaningless to me at this point.

People should be critical of these types of things, but it shouldn’t be about keeping score of who has less connections to capitalism. It should be more about who is moving ahead the cause towards rethinking economics in favor of people...

...figuring out workable replacements to the current system or actually pointing out the real enemy instead of having this side game that people keep score on. Let’s start thinking about the shit that’s really happening and directing our energies towards real strategies.

MR: I actually brought in a quote from I Spy that I thought was interesting in that context: "I’ll be dead and fucking gone before my music is bought and sold just like appliances and cars."

P: But it means with no heart, no ideas, no message. Just distraction propaganda for the masses and consumer culture instead of actually putting competing ideas up to people who have been denied them since they were born.

I think a lot of major label music is, in some ways, simply a function of the existing order of things. Historically, anything that is original ultimately becomes commodified, consciously or subconsciously. But aside from making money off of it, it becomes disassociated from its original cultural context and from the ideas and soul of the music. I don’t know much about jazz music, but it’s certainly happened with rock and roll, hip hop, punk rock; it’s disgusting to see.

MR: Apart from the ethical implications, choosing a record label is a marketing decision. You have the power to do what you want with your band and you’re making the decision to reach a certain audience. When your first record came out, I thought it was a good idea: a band that is a Fat Wreck Chords type of band but is representing different points of views to people who otherwise would basically come into contact with a lot of bands that discuss no politics or express fairly misogynist viewpoints. A theme in your music is being disappointed with your audience, being frustrated by the chicken-shit conformance or by the people who tell you to shut up when you’re explaining what the song’s about. But you are gearing your band towards these people on purpose. Is that where you want to be?

P: Yes. We were the kids who, when we were 15, were at shows not paying attention to all the words and were diving on people’s heads and that kind of thing. As time went on, things sunk in. I think we were radicalized by music and we weren’t just sent out the door because we didn’t behave properly or didn’t learn quickly enough. People learn at different speeds at different times in their lives. I think we all been through that in the past and I think we should at least extend that courtesy to the younger people at our shows. Sometimes we lash out in songs a bit, venting against the ignorance of the society where we are bred. But the rest of the record is just putting ideas out there in what I think is a really positive sense to try to allow for people to actually contextualize the lyrics and the record themselves. Maybe a younger person will take the ideas to heart after a while, or at least consider them. We try to introduce people to the ideas and show people that there are well-established resistance groups all over the United States and Canada and the world, and it’s not a total cultural vacuum because this stuff exists and it exists outside of punk rock.

MR: How old are you guys?

P: 27. 30. 27. 30.

MR: Someone tried to kick my ass one time because of your band. I worked at a copy store with this guy who was in a popular local Oi! band and we had this weird tacit musical war going on where he brought in all the stuff he was into one day. The next day I brought in a bunch of CDs, one of which was the Propagandhi/I Spy split: "I’d rather be flag burning." Which I thought was funny, but never really thought of as offending somebody, but this guy got really mad. But then he realized you were Canadian…

P: See, that’s what Americans think: that they have the only flag on Earth.

MR: But the cover motif of your new record is the American flag.

P: And that’s the other thing. Canada is not its own country: It’s basically the stink of the U.S. It’s owned and operated by the U.S. Besides that, Canada’s history is not something that we want to endorse in any way; it’s genocidal, colonialist, nationalist—everything we’re trying to educate people about.

MR: Don’t you think that if you put the Canadian flag on the cover and you delivered the same criticism...

P: The U.S. is the superpower, the only one. Canada is a nation of 30 million people that is essentially used for resources by multi-national corporations. It’s just a carved up piece of land that’s being exploited.

If you go to Canada, it’s all American companies. And that’s how the world is. That’s the idea of the record.

MR: Although in Canada, from the American point of view, at least you have a heath care system.

P: But it’s being disassembled right now, actively. We’re living in a time of rapid privatization of everything. We live in Canada under an American context at this point. The U.S. is by far the best case study for thinking about how concentrations of power use anti-Democratic methods to retain power. You can take the U.S. and apply it as a template to places like Canada and Britain and France, and get the same fucking product: concentration of power means gain of power by fucking with people. Americans are not aberrations. When Western industrial powers act in ways that are completely unlawful or undemocratic towards the citizens or people abroad, you’ve got to understand: they’re not an aberration, they’re atoms that are part of the structure. And if people can understand that, then we can start working for something new; actually for democracy.

MR: I wanted to talk a little bit about how you got to where you guys are with your playing. You were saying that you were stage-diving 15 year-olds, but what gave you all your current politics?

P: For me, it was being interested in music at a very early age. And then my musical interests eventually got me into being exposed to political music, and then through a very long general process over five to seven years, I slowly began understanding politics... finally. And then, that just became my life’s interest.

For me it was speed metal bands and stuff like that. I remember thinking "this music sounds awesome, but what the fuck are they talking about? It’s nonsense." But eventually it started to sink in and made sense.

And for me, I like the lyrics of all those bands, but I never got any of records that I thought had bad lyrics, like all the NDC and them. But when I got M.O.D. records, I looked at the lyrics and those M.O.D. records were just the fucking funniest things. But then you just get older and you start being sick of feeling like a goof for what you’re saying all the time. Eventually you just start to realize...this is what everyone’s talking about.

MR: So, you started your record label, G-7, in the space between your last record and this new one?

P: It took a long time to get it going. We basically got home from one of our tours and started it, but then it was like two and a half years before we really started to work on the new record.

MR: Do you do distribution as well?

P: Very, very little distribution. After we’d established it to a certain point, we realized there’s all this other stuff you’ve got to take care of properly, like operating it under a capitalist framework: paying taxes and accounting and all that kind of stuff...things that didn’t get paid attention to properly for a while. The longer that got left on the back burner, the bigger of a problem it became. It’s just a lot of work for two, maybe three people.

MR: Based on your politics, it seems like you’d want to distance yourself from the actual process of selling, not start a record label and sell music. It also seems like you’d want to put out your own music if you were going to take that step.

P: Yeah, I think the parts of the label that have been hardest to deal with have been getting down to the numbers: calling people up to say "you owe us money," and dealing with that kind of stuff. But the unfortunate reality that we live in is that you basically have to cover your own ass or you’re going to get fucked. We’ve been ripped off numerous times: certain people who we’d been supporting by having them sell our records have gone out of business and we get nothing in return. Trying to stay on top of that kind of stuff and accounting has always been a real hassle because its something that we’re really not interested in doing. We’ve never taken the time to go to business schools or school or anything like that. So yes, the idea of just getting the stuff out there is, I think, the most appealing thing. And dealing with all that other stuff is just like, fuck...

The one difference, I think, between our label and other labels or workplaces is that we’ve made sure that our workplace didn’t just reproduce traditional capitalist hierarchical workplaces. It’s democratically organized—that’s a huge component of the label—and it’s something that we want to promote and show to the world.

MR: Do other people work there as well?

P: Yes, there’s three other collective members.

MR: So, five people total.

P: Yes, so when anybody that has an idea, there’s no hierarchy at all.

MR: Is everyone paid to work there?

P: Everyone’s paid.

MR: Is everyone paid equally? And do you guys pay yourselves, I would assume?

P: Yes. And everyone shares in the lesser...
...menial tasks.
And conceptual tasks.
And again they pay the bands fair wages, of course.

MR: But owning a record label... doesn’t it seem like it makes more sense to you to put out your own records?

P: We do, in Canada.

The thing is, if we can jump back to the early part of the discussion, when we got together with Fat Wreck Chords originally, it surely wasn’t a marketing decision. They only had one 7" out by Lagwagon. Ebullition wouldn’t touch us with a 10 foot pole.
We hadn’t put out any albums thus far.

So we said, "OK, we’ll do this." And it continued from there, and an actual friendship developed between us. Obviously, ultimately, if we sat with the people at Fat over drinks, and talked about workplace structure or economy, there’d be an argument. But, they’re our friends, and we could have just put records out ourselves, but we just don’t believe in turning our backs on people who’ve helped us out, been nice to us for nine years. But in Canada we put out our new record and we put out a comp. Eventually, I’m sure it will move to that more and more.

MR: How long have you been on tour?

P: Just two days. This is literally our fourth show in the last three and a half years.

MR: How was the first show?

P: Technical difficulties galore...
(laughter)
...but I think we overcame.

MR: Where was it?

P: Greenbay.

MR: The whole tour is a package tour, right?

P: Yes, with Fat Wreck Chords. This is by far the most regimented tour, even after just two days, I can tell: this is the most regimented tour we’re ever going to be on in our lives.

MR: In terms of sound checks and...?

P: Everything. Like the level of professionalism of a band like Avail is kind of stunning and overwhelming. But I’m sure we’ll get into the groove of how all these bands work, and get to shows on time and all that kind of stuff. (laughter)

MR: OK, I have one more question. I’m just curious, actually, whether you’re still talking a lot between songs.

P: It’s hard, two days in, it’s hard to tell if we should be or shouldn’t be. But when I look back on a lot of that stuff, I see that my talking made more enemies than it produced a circle of allies, at points. Either because I’m not very good at saying things, or just because the things I was saying were purposely trying to provoke people. I don’t know. But the less the three of us idiots go near the mike, possibly the better. (laughter)

I think we’re good at putting together lyrics and songs, and now I think we’re getting good at drawing in people who can help contextualize those. I really like our work in that department, but I don’t like our work outside of the playing live...

Which is why we try to have access for activist groups to come to tables at shows. We have a very thorough book table that’s traveling with us to all the shows, and actually did really well in Greenbay last night. There were a lot of kids buying really cool stuff.

Which is good if you take a look at how it was last time, where there was less people, but talking every song, and then no one was buying anything.
I guess if you want to be intense, you should filter it over people who do that full time and that’s their imperative.

There’s probably lots of people who actually spend time doing that, and the worst thing to do would be to misrepresent your ideas, or, even worse, someone else’s ideas. So, if you can do it best in a song or on paper, then fucking shut the hell up.

MR: So, less talk, more rock, eh?

Yeah.
(laughter)

MR: Well, thanks a lot. Is there anything else you’d like to add?

P: I’d like to give a plug to ZNET (www.lbbs.org). It’s probably, in my humble opinion, the best source of progressive activism on the Internet.