Artists who fuse together politics and their art often
have to toe a line between speaking to audiences that
are already politically active and those that are not.
Can you talk a little bit about how you approach the
complication of preaching to the choir versus reaching
new listeners?
First and foremost, when you preach to the choir, when
you speak to people who already have a revolutionary
mindset, you’re going to encounter more cynicism. It’s
funny, because you’d think that you’d encounter more
cynicism from people who don’t already know what’s up. I
think a lot of it has to do with the human ego, that always
seems to have to play itself out to the degree that, “Oh,
don’t try to educate me, I already know that,” or “Oh,
Technique’s just sayin’ stuff that I already know.” Well,
congratulations, I’m glad that you’re so fucking enlightened,
you know what I mean? Now have you done anything with
that knowledge you have?
Personally, I live what I rhyme about. And I’ve continued
to take this as far as I possibly can, so when I went to Haiti,
and I went to Afghanistan to do what we did there, it was to
serve as an example for what people can do here. To say,
hey, if we can do that there, then what’s the excuse of not
being able to do it here in Eugene, Oregon, or in Seattle, or
in Olympia, or wherever. And I think another thing people
need to understand is that being a revolutionary doesn’t
mean you have to do it by being a guerrilla fighting in the
jungle, or being on stage. You can be a lawyer and help
clients that don’t have any money who you know are
innocent, you can be a doctor, a teacher, you can be involved
in independent media. There’s a million things you could
potentially do to offer your services when you have a
revolutionary mind state. In terms of balancing all that, I
think it just takes patience.
You’re most recent album The Martyr has a pretty omi-
nous title.
I think the point of The Martyr is to show that you don’t
have to die for revolution. That it’s more important to live for
revolution. That it’s easy to romanticize a revolution, but — so,
there’s a book called Pedagogy of the Oppressed, a good read
that I had a long time ago and in the book there is a passage
that reminds me of your question, where it talks about how a
revolutionary has to die for his revolution, but not in the
sense that he physically dies, but the things about him that
are selfish and shallow have to die. For example, he has to be
able to sacrifice his ego, his time, and sometimes ends up
sacrificing his family, which is why a lot of revolutionaries
don’t turn out to be some of the best parents. These are all
things to take with a grain of salt.
‘
When the notion of revolution comes up, people
automatically assume that the government has to kill you to
silence you, but I think that’d be the worst mistake the
government could make now. I think what they look to do
primarily is to discredit people, to marginalize them. Or to
try to get them out of the newspaper, make them seem
insane, or whatever. And I really don’t have skeletons like
that in my closet, you know, I’m not into little boys or
midgets or anything crazy like that, you know. I’m a regular
guy. What are they going to do, tell people that I like
football? At some point people have to realize that a
government has to measure public opinion about what
they’re involved in. And if that public opinion turns against
them, then they endanger their investments. And that’s
what they’re more concerned about, more so than some
young man with a bunch of radical ideas.
It seems like a certain type of double consciousness has
to exist in an activist who is also a performer. People
have sometimes criticized you for a lack of P.C. lan-
guage in your lyrics. Can you speak to the difference
between how you handle yourself on the mic and how
you convey your beliefs in a different forum, such as the
political sphere?
Over the course of the years I think there’s been an
evolution in my persona and in my music. I mean, I took the
word “nigga” out of my music as much as I could. I still say
it sometimes, only because I grew up saying it. But I don’t
mean it disrespectfully. I think there’s been evolutions in my
class politics, in racial politics, in gender politics. When
people criticize me about that stuff I tell them, “Yeah, okay,
now try finding some of those words in the last few albums.”
Yes, everybody is a work in progress. I grew up in the hood.
I had a prison experience where people were divided not just
by race but along class and gender lines. It’s not like it was a
happy community where people embraced individuals who
were heterosexually ambiguous when you’re incarcerated.
That was my experience.
Now, if someone is offended by curses they might as well
hang themselves, because they’re not ready for the real
world. I’m much more offended by a hundred thousand-plus
innocent victims that are categorized as “collateral damage”
of the war in Iraq than I am by the words fuck, shit or pussy.
And if you’re not, as a human being, then there is something
pretentious about you, there is something selfish about you,
and you really need to do some soul searching instead of
being overly anal retentive about my lyrics. Because I’m
trying to stop these injustices by bringing them to life, while
you’re being a word Nazi. I can’t help you. You need a different
type of help.
Does being of Afro-Latin decent affect your identity as
an artist in this country?
Well, my background is very simple: my grandfather was
a black Hispanic, an Afro-Peruvian, he came from the West
Indies. He bought his freedom and moved to South America,
and the bottom line is that my mother didn’t raise me to
resent that part of my heritage. The way a lot of Latinos
seem to say to themselves, “Well, alright, at least we’re not
black.” That’s the kind of racism that happens in the Latino
community, and sometimes it’s worse than white people’s
racism because at least when you look at white people’s
racism they tend to love themselves. In fact, they love
themselves so much — and this is not an across-the-board
blanket generalization of all white people, but of white
supremacist society, which is what we live in now — they
change history to make it seem as if they did things that
they didn’t. That’s how much they love themselves.
But a lot of Latino people end up hating other people,
black people, white people, even themselves, because they
themselves are part white, part indigenous, part black, and
they haven’t come to terms with that as a part of who they
are. And I think my mother never raised me to identify like
that. And my father, too. And that gave me the dignity and
the self-confidence to represent myself no matter where I
am or what I’m doing.
On this tour, you’ve visited more than seventeen of the
individual Occupy movements throughout the country.
Can you talk a little bit about how you’ve experienced the
Occupy movement on a national scale?
I see the Occupiers themselves dealing with a lot of local
issues. Like drug addiction, homelessness. But these things
are perfectly relatable to everything the Occupy movement
was meant to exemplify. Because if people use those as
criticisms, and they say, “Oh look at these homeless people.”
Oh, homeless people, you mean people who lost their
houses because a bank came along and stole every single
thing that they had? Oh, you mean drug addicts, you mean
people who are thrown in prison for 30 or 40 years of their
life because of marijuana possession and the three strikes
law? Because they’re criminalized rather than given help.
These people are sick, they need help. A person who takes
meth wouldn’t be breaking into a car at five o’clock in the
morning if they were cured. They have a disease, they need
help. I think it’s incredibly important to point out that the
Occupy movement started out on a national stage, and is
now dealing with each of the local problems Occupiers have
based on what the demographic of their city is. I think that’s
a good thing, but I also think they should refocus on the
national platform, to unify all of them.
ew
When the notion of revolution comes up, people automatically assume that the government has to kill you to silence you, but I think that’d
be the worst mistake the government could make now. I think what they look to do primarily is to discredit people, to marginalize them.
’
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EUGENE WEEKLY
DECEMBER 8, 2011 35