Anti-Flag

A conversation with Justin Sane

(July 2009)

Interview by Adam McKibbin

Veteran punks Anti-Flag are back on the road with Warped this summer, in support of another album of fiery but catchy sociopolitical anthems.  But while time has stood still in that sense, there have been many changes afoot.  Though the band pre-dates the last Bush presidency, their career had been inextricably bound with W’s Administration for the past eight years (when their profile rose dramatically); now they look into the Oval Office and see a president they supported.  The biggest controversy of their career – signing with a major label – is newly part of a bygone era.

So… now what? Founding singer/songwriter Justin Sane phoned in from out in the wilds of Warped to discuss the State of the Anti-Flag Union for 2009 and beyond. Oh - and we also talked about Brett Favre.

I know that Warped is always a great reunion for you guys, getting to see old friends and bands you’ve shared bills with over the years, but have you made any new discoveries so far?

I’ve made a lot of new friends, but I wouldn’t necessarily say I’ve discovered new bands.  There are new bands out here that are good, and I definitely enjoy a lot of the bands that are playing, but I was aware of most of them before the tour started.

It seems like every band is on Warped – and when money is pretty tight, it’s nice to be able to kill lots of birds with one ticket.

Yeah, it’s great value for kids to be able to come to one show and see this many good bands in one place.  It’s definitely a deal.

I did an interview with Rise Against once about Warped and they said one of the things they liked about Warped was that it wasn’t a headliner crowd, so they got to be in front of crowds who didn’t necessarily agree with them politically.  Have you guys had a similar experience?  Do you get more backlash when you’re on Warped?

Absolutely.  And that’s essential to what we do:  being in front of people who don’t have the same ideas you have, or maybe just haven’t thought about the things we’ve been thinking about.  There’s an exchange of ideas and we’re able to encourage people to think about something.  You know, just throwing out there the idea that homophobia is not acceptable, or racism or sexism isn’t acceptable.  I don’t think that’s a message that people hear too often, especially with homophobia, which I think is the last socially acceptable form of discrimination. 

Having the opportunity to put that basic concept out there to people… I can’t tell you how often I’ve had people come up to me on Warped Tour and say “I never really thought about it in that way before, and you guys encouraged me to look at things from a new perspective.”  Any time I hear something like that – for me – it’s the ultimate inspiration to give me the drive to continue doing what we do. 

And of course sometimes we’ll meet people who say “I heard what you guys said and I think it’s total bullshit.  You guys suck.”  [laughs]  We get that, too.  I don’t have a problem with people disagreeing with the things we say, but what’s important to me is that people express themselves in a respectful way.  When I discuss ideas with people, I try to do so in a respectful way; I’m willing to listen and hear out anybody’s point of view, so long as they’re doing it in a way that’s constructive and not just insulting or stupid.

You guys are coming off your deal with RCA, your profile has grown – was there thought about taking the summer to do your own headline thing?  Or was it pretty clear-cut that you wanted to be on Warped?

Well, we haven’t been on Warped Tour in two years – this would have been three years that we’ve skipped it.  We’ve been doing a lot of stuff in Europe over the past couple summers, so we were excited to get back on Warped Tour.  It really is like a homecoming.  We’ve been on this tour so many times and, like you said, there are so many friends out here.  It’s like getting together with your friends for a month-and-a-half-long party.

Anybody who’s followed you guys from the beginning probably knew that you guys wouldn’t relax or mellow out because you signed to a major or because Obama got elected.  But it certainly seems that a lot of people on the left have relaxed a little bit.   Is it harder to get people fired up about politics than it was a year ago when anti-Bush sentiment was at its height?

Well, I think it is important to take the organization that came as a result of George Bush and the George Bush years, and to take the emotion and activism that was sparked by the outrageousness of the Bush years, and keep that momentum rolling.  America is a pretty conservative place in a lot of ways.  A guy like Barack Obama being elected president probably wouldn’t have happened if it hadn’t been for George Bush.  A lot of people consider Barack Obama to be a radical left kind of guy.  I really don’t see him that way, but I know how my relatives think, and a lot of them think that Obama is this crazy out-there liberal.

I think Obama is a step in the right direction, but it’s important to realize that it’s only one step.  There’s so much work to be done.  The day that Barack Obama was elected president, gay marriage was made illegal in California.  We’ve got a horrible problem with our health care system.  We’ve got an economic crisis that’s devastated so many people.  There’s still a war in Afghanistan and there’s still an occupation in Iraq, no matter what they tell us.  We have troops over in Iraq and they’re going to be there for a long time – at least that’s what we’re told.  The list goes on and on.  There’s a climate summit coming up and Obama hasn’t committed to going to it – it’s important that he does. 

With the closing of Guantanamo Bay and taking some steps to ramp down the war in Iraq and some other things that Obama has done, I think he’s taken some steps in the right direction.  But by no means is the job done.  We all know that our society – and our world – have some serious problems to deal with, and America is in a unique position to give direction to the rest of the world.  That being the case, I think it’s important for people who worked so hard to get Barack Obama elected to put pressure on Barack Obama to do the right things and follow through with his promises.

Definitely.  And I sure don’t envy that guy and his job.

No, and that’s the thing – I’m so glad Obama won.  I really am.  A lot of people say to me “Oh, man, Obama sucks, he’s useless, it’s the same old thing.”  As far as I’m concerned, he’s so much better than John McCain.  If John McCain had been elected, who knows, we might be at war with Iran right now.  Just Obama keeping McCain out of the White House was reason enough to vote for him.  Nevermind the Supreme Court, which was another issue.  With that said, there are some problems with Obama – he’s not perfect.  But I kind of think that any positive we get out of Obama is going to be the icing on the cake.  I don’t think he’s going to be the absolute solution, but our country and our world is much better off that he won and McCain lost.

It’s amazing how it’s shifted the global perspective on America.  I’ve known people in the UK who were surprised a few years ago to meet Americans who weren’t George Bushies.  Say they were 20 years old – since they were 12 years old, the picture of America for them had been George Bush.  

Yeah, I witnessed that firsthand – I lived in London as well, actually, over the last year.  Just being there and spending a lot of time in Europe – just the idea that America would elect a black man president said that America was moving forward and changing.  It really sent a message that America needed to send.  A lot of people thought it was a country that didn’t care about the rest of the world and was just trying to dictate to the rest of the world, almost in an old style Soviet Union way.  So it’s very important we’re able to send a new message and say, yeah, there’s a new sheriff in town and things have changed.

And the flipside of that is that some people here are literally buying extra cartridges and shells with every little spare bit of money.

[Laughs]  Yeah, it’s very interesting.  I think a lot of gun collectors and gun enthusiasts and what not, I think they just see that ammunition is going to be taxed more.  I think that’s why a lot of them are stocking up.  And there probably are a lot of them that think that Obama is going to take their guns away.  It’s kind of ridiculous.  But there are right-wing talk show hosts who are putting that idea out there.  What’s tragic about that is that we have real, major problems – and we could be using the people’s airwaves to have an honest debate about those issues that really matter.

Unfortunately, I turn on talk radio and hear disinformation and red herring issues like gun control.  I think these issues are meant to take people’s attention away from what really matters – away from General Electric paying less than a hundred dollars in taxes last year because they get so many tax breaks.  How can someone who makes $30,000 a year pay more than one of the biggest multinational corporations in the world?  These are things that we need to change.  But a lot of these people are taking their lead from a group of people that are friendly towards corporate America. 

We’ve seen the rise of Glenn Beck and these right-wing voices you alluded to.  Where are the conservative punk bands?  How come the kids who think Obama is the Antichrist who’s going to take their guns away… how come they don’t pick up guitars?

In general, I don’t think that conservatives put a great emphasis on art and creativity and expressing themselves in that way.  I think that’s why you don’t really see that kind of thing.  I think punk rock mostly has a history of being a counterculture movement.  Counterculture isn’t really something that fits in with the conservative model or worldview.

There’s the Toby Keith thing, the post-9/11 hyper-patriot thing, but not a lot of “we’re the outsiders.”

Yeah, a lot of “Freedom isn’t free” type of tunes.  [Laughs]

The last time I talked to you guys, the RCA deal was a new thing, and we talked about the reasons behind the deal and the hopes for what it could mean to the band.  Now that it’s in the rearview mirror, how do you think it shook out for you guys?  If there’s a band on Warped who’s being courted by the majors, would you recommend them to go after that bigger pulpit or to steer away from it?

Well, at this point, things have changed a lot since we went with RCA.  Getting on a major label right now is a little bit like getting on the Titanic as it’s on its way to the bottom of the ocean.  Major labels are dying – and they deserve to.  They’ve not been smart enough to have a business model for the way our world is changing with CD burning and the internet.  So, no, I wouldn’t recommend that a young band signs with a major label.  We were in a much different position; we had a ton of leverage because we’d been a band for so long and we had such a strong following.  They looked at us and they said “Oh, this band will instantly sell this many records and we can instantly make this much money.”  The money never materialized for them, I don’t think.  [Laughs]  Again, they were trying to work on a model that was relevant for 1995, and it was 2005. 

RCA worked out great for us in that it gave us a lot of legitimacy in the eyes of the mainstream press.  All of a sudden, we were talking to CNN and USA Today and US News & World Report.  We were talking to media outlets that we never had access to before.  That was what we wanted – we wanted to inject a different voice into the mainstream debate.  So, in that respect, signing to RCA was very positive for us.  We had a two-record deal.  We said “Well, this will be an experiment, we’ll give you two records and then we can talk again if we need to.”  At the end of two records, we were ready to move out of there, and it was nice because we had such a nice, clean break, and we were able to immediately make another record.

Even though we had complete artistic control at RCA, there was still a lot of red tape.  There were still a lot of bells and whistles we had to ring and blow in order to move forward and get things completed.  We really rant into that with the second record.  Just getting anything done was almost impossible.  So we were really happy to get the hell out of there. 

And now you’re being pushed and promoted by people who really buy into the band – not just someone who’s basically assigned to you.

Yeah, it makes sense for a publicist at SideOneDummy to be working for us because they’ve got Flogging Molly and The Casualties.  At RCA, they’re working the American Idols and Dave Matthews and Anti-Flag.  They just don’t get it and they’re never gonna get it.  It’s a difficult pitch. 

But I will say this:  when we started at RCA, we had a great publicist.  She was amazing.  She did get our band and she was one of the reasons we went there.  There were a lot of people that got our band.  But one of the things we understood is that major labels change people like a chameleon changes colors.  There was really no one left from the first record when our second record came out.  That was one of the reasons we fought so hard to have a two-record deal. 

My closing question is actually a sports question.  It kind of ties in to some of the themes we’ve talked about.  Now that Pittsburgh has become a championship city… is it more satisfying being the underdog or the top dog?

[Laughs]  Well, you know, we’re the working people's team.  [Laughs]  Baseball – you can have it.  We’re from Pittsburgh, dude.  We’re tough, we like the tough sports.  It’s awesome.  It’s my guilty pleasure – I really enjoy football and hockey.  So it’s pretty bad ass being the city of champions with the Steelers winning the Super Bowl and the Penguins winning the Stanley Cup. 

Part of the reason something like football becomes such an important part of the culture somewhere like the Midwest is that there’s not a lot there, man.  We’ve got a bunch of old rusted-up steel mills that haven’t run in thirty years, we’ve got terrible weather for five or six months out of the year.  It’s not like there in L.A. where you go sailing or to the beach or you have all kinds of cosmopolitan restaurants and museums and et cetera, et cetera.  Sports teams give people something to rally around and be excited about.  On one hand, it’s really sad that people have that little.  But on the other hand, it’s something a whole community can come together over, whether the team is winning or losing.

I grew up in Wisconsin and Brett Favre is causing a lot of heartache back in my home state.

Vikings all the way, baby!  Adrian Peterson, Brett Favre… I am stoked.  Green Bay was always my default second favorite team because A) the city owns the team, which is how it should be in every city and B) Brett Favre is the man.  When they let Brett Favre go… oof, man, I was very angry.  They went from being one game away from the Super Bowl to not even making the playoffs – and as far as I’m concerned, they got what they deserved. They should have kept Brett.  You don’t dis Brett Favre, man!  It’s like dissing Jesus or something.

They’re pretty much one and the same in Wisconsin.

[Laughs]  Well, I tell you what, man – I like the Vikings’ chances.  They got a tough team, a great offensive line, a leader like Brett Favre… I think Brett’s still got some magic in those old legs.  I am on Team Vikings.  But I feel Green Bay’s pain.  Green Bay is actually one of my favorite cities to play – it’s always very warm and welcoming.  But football, dude, it’s all good fun – what the hell!  Let them play football games and not fight wars.  I’ll back that any day.