Cipher

A conversation with Moe Mitchell

(July 2005)

Interview by Adam McKibbin

Protest and political songs tend, by nature, to see the world in the stark terms of “Us versus Them,” and the listening audience is invariably part of “Us,” i.e. the Good Guys, keepers of the sensitive and socially conscious flame.  The “Them” are the sexists and racists we’ve left behind in our own lives, and the creeps and crooks who occupy our boardrooms and Cabinet meetings.  It feels good to think in these terms.  On Children of God’s Fire, Cipher dispenses with that paradigm, instead challenging their audience to confront the “Them” within themselves.    

The perspectives that fuel that album are complex and, at times, incendiary.  In front of ambitiously bruising slabs of hardcore, Cipher frontman Moe Mitchell ponders everything from patriarchy to the pharmaceutical industry.  These are songs of fire and brimstone, and as Mitchell seethes about flaccid narcissists and wayward messiahs, drops some history lessons and quotes from the Bible, some listeners may find themselves wishing for footnotes.  Or, as Mitchell notes (and accepts, some listeners may be content to just rock out. 

Let’s jump right in with a biggie.  When you’re talking about taking apart the framework in the country, working towards an actual revolution, what’s the timeframe in mind?  If some kid is wondering whether he or she should get involved and wondering when there’s going to be a payoff, is there an answer?

Okay, yeah, that’s a pretty big question.  I’ve had many conversations about this.  I think it’s more in the doing than in seeing the immediate results.  I think that most of history is the time between serious revolutionary, social change.  You may very well be in that time period, but that’s not the point because we all make our contributions in terms of building upon something.  The 60s didn’t just happen.  There are hundreds of years of struggle before these major events.  All those men and women that contributed to that…maybe they didn’t live to see it, but I think that going into it, you need to be completely comfortable with that. 

Why is your lifetime a significant measure of time when you’re talking about change?  In the grand scheme of things, who are you, you know what I’m saying?  The important thing to do is to keep your eyes on the prize and to be content with challenging oppression and being on the right side of history.  [Needing] immediate results is the signpost of a very anxious society.  The Zapatistas, before anything happened in terms of what happened in 1994, built something from the early 80s in the jungle.  Even now, people ask them about the results since 1994, maybe some things that people are frustrated about from the outside, and they’re like, “Listen, what we’ve been doing has been going on for more than 500 years, so an extra 10 years or 20 years is not that big a deal for us.”  That’s a good clock to work on when you’re talking about revolutionary change, rather than, “Wait, I just did this protest and nobody came!  It sucked!”  Things take time.  It’s not necessarily for your lifetime.

That’s refreshing to hear.  It’s such a short attention span culture that a lot of people – politicians or activists or even musicians – often pitch it to kids like they can seize the day and then they’re going to wake up tomorrow and not recognize America anymore.

Right, right, right.  It’s kind of the McDonald’s revolution kind of thing.  We have to work to challenge everything in our society, everything that we do just because we do it, including how we understand time, how we understand results, how we understand what victories are.  We talk about revolutionary change, but sometimes we don’t even think about what that means.  We don’t necessarily think about what alternatives we’re going to build, and what infrastructures we’re going to build now in order to reach those alternatives.  How can we create a pattern that people will be interested in joining?  Not a lot of time is focused on that, so what happens with a lot of people involved in social change is they burn out really quickly and it’s over by the time they’re 30 or something.

There was a fair amount of that with the last presidential election, where people were inspired for the first time to get active and campaign for Dean or just campaign against Bush, and once that fell through, it was kind of like, “Well, screw doing all that work again for nothing.”

Yeah, yeah.  One thing that I hope was gained from that experience – I mean, there were a few things that were gained.  First of all, a lot of relationships that were never forged on the left were forged in order to challenge Bush.  Those relationships still exist today, you know?  So that’s a good thing.  I think another thing is that it kind of radicalized a lot of people.  I think even losing did that, especially the way that people thought things were done.

A lot of people who campaigned against Bush weren’t really into Kerry.  They recognized the failure of our two-party system, and it sort of radicalized a certain portion of our population that was really complacent.  Those sorts of things will have lasting effects, so I’m excited about that.

But, yeah, it’s true.  I was involved in a lot of that work on the ground, and it’s amazing.  It’s like in one day people who were super active, who had the fire in their belly, were totally deflated and went back to their jobs and gave up.  It’s a product of this easy, cookie-cutter, fast-food society; I want my results now.

If you study the movement of the conservatives and the people on the right, it’s funny because they learned a lot from the movement work that was done in the late 60s and 70s, especially in terms of planning things out.  The conservative takeover took decades.  They are comfortable with being marginalized, with being the vocal minority.  They understood that they could slowly chip away, decade after decade, and that big waves were not going to happen in two or three years.  Rolling back reproductive rights isn’t going to happen in a decade; it’s going to take two, three decades, but it can still happen.  These conservative foundations are funded for 20 years, and we know you’re going to lose, but you support our values and that is what’s important.  On the wishy-washy liberal left, there’s a lack of discussion of values, and of clear language about who you are.  There’s a shortsightedness in terms of the money and the passion and the issues.  The results are what we see today.

Yeah, those conservative roots trace back to Goldwater and, at that time, they certainly weren’t afraid of being labeled radical or on the fringe. 

Oh, definitely not, they embrace it, it’s their identity.  It seems like the ethos of liberal culture is to be nice and to be liked, but there’s something very appealing about conservatives standing up against wishy-washiness.  If folks on the left would embrace their identity, embrace being marginal, embrace being radical if you’re radical, embrace being whoever you are…  That’s why people got into Dean.  Even though they didn’t know what his politics were about, he would say what he wanted to say, and people were inspired by that.  There are so few mainstream politicians from the left who are able to shoot from the hip and just be a human being.  But you see that on the right; Bush is totally like that.  He says whatever he wants to say.  He can mess up and he’s human and people understand that.

So much of hardcore and metal and punk all fosters this feeling of “us versus them,” where the audience always gets included in the “us.”  A lot of your songs, though, challenge the audience, leading to “us vs. us” or even “us vs. you.”  Is that a fair characterization?

Yeah, that’s definitely a fair characterization.  When we started off writing, we didn’t want to make a record that would be easy in terms of letting anybody off the hook.  We wanted to challenge ourselves, we wanted to challenge our listeners, and we wanted to pose questions that would result in other questions.  It’s not about us revealing all of these great jewels of knowledge.  It’s really about trying to create dialogue.  This binary that we often exist in, where it’s “us versus them,” that’s a problem.  If we’re using that binary in order to challenge the things that we dislike, we automatically have sort of sold into one of the basic features of the things we’re trying to destroy. The empire exists because we’ve been told that binary exists and we believe in it.  It stifles useful debate.  We can’t have an honest discussion about things like 9/11 because it’s a very emotional topic in this country.  There’s no room to ask simple questions like “Why did this happen?”  There’s only room for “They hate freedom,” and “They’re totally crazy,” and “We need to eradicate this terrorist scourge” – or it’s “I support terrorism and I support random acts of violence.”  There are just two options you can choose.  Sign me up for Guantanamo or sign me up for the Navy SEALs.

One of the things we wanted to do was create an unsettling position for the listener where they can’t easily sit in an us/them position and they have to critique things and own their complicity in the war, or in filling up their SUV and everything else.  That’s all of us.  It’s not us, Cipher, pointing the finger at the mean, faceless, capitalist hegemony.  We’re all in this together, trying to figure this out.

Do you get a sense of how much of your audience is engaging with you on that level?

You know, it’s hard.  When we started off, we were really frustrated because we were a band with a lot of things to say, and it seemed like kids were really into the mosh and we were always like, “Are they hearing us?”  Because of 9/11 and the war on terror and Bush—and also because we’re almost the exact opposite of a lot of heavy music now, where it’s totally cool to talk about killing your girlfriend, et cetera—we juxtapose against it and stand out.  In the past year or two, we’ve been like the political band, the refreshing alternative.  I would say that the majority of our listeners are traditional heavy music listeners, and they’re not necessarily on-the-ground activists, but I guarantee that at every single show, there will be someone who looks like a random hardcore kid who either tells me, “Wow, man, your politics totally jibe with mine,” or “I never really thought of it this way.”

At the traditional hardcore shows, yeah, most of these suburban white kids who listen to random metal aren’t out doing street outreach.  It’s kind of like a mixed bag.  As artists, you need to be comfortable with however people take it in.  Once we put it out there, it’s no longer ours.  You can claim people’s interpretation.  If somebody wants to listen to our music and just rock out to it, I’m completely comfortable with that, just as well as somebody listening to it and then becoming a guerrilla (laughs), you know what I’m saying?  I mean, it is good music to rock out to, as well as being very challenging political discourse.  I kind of divorced myself from trying to own how people take it in.  We have a message and we have a mission and of course we want to advance our politics and we want to create a space where we challenge the people in a scene that has become very apolitical.

I wanted to talk about the Cipher street team because that’s a pretty unique undertaking.  Are you pleased with how it’s been progressing?

Yeah, you know, it’s really slow.  We’re trying to build it slow and strong.  We know how street teams are normally done and we don’t want to go that route.  That’s very hierarchical, and we want a space where, as we grow in terms of the amount of people who are into our band and the amount of records we sell, we grow even closer to the people who are into us.

The next step—once we grow the street team to a certain level—is to dialogue with street team members, have reading circles and things like that.  The last step is to take it to a place where our music is just a soundtrack to what the street team is all about:  a centralized forum for direct action.  When we looked at bands that had really great politics and then got really, really big, we thought, “Wow, they could have harnessed that power for some dramatic social change,” but what was lacking was the grassroots infrastructure to make that happen.  We’re trying to develop a street team that has that infrastructure.

How much resistance have you encountered from the music industry?  James Spooner said you guys would have been signed to a label like Victory years ago if it hadn’t been for those thorny messages.

Yeah, I mean, I think there has definitely been resistance.  We try to do some cutting-edge things musically, and we espouse a pretty intense line of radical politics that, frankly, frightens some people.  If you’re a metal or hardcore label guy, and you get this package on your desk and you’re listening to this stuff, the number one thing you’re thinking is, “Is this going to sell a lot of records?”  Our music isn’t easy like that, so the answer is a question mark.  It might not.  And “Do I want to deal with this volatile message when I can just go with the status quo and sign up what’s happening?”  Chances are, unless you’re really inspired by the message, you’ll do the latter.  That’s why working with Uprising Records is really cool, because Sean [Muttaqi] really jibes with our politics, and he sees what we’re trying to do.  But, yeah, I think it’s a struggle that we’ve embraced.  It makes us even focused, knowing that we’re treading an untrodden path. 

It’s fair to say, then, that you don’t see a lot of kindred spirits, whether in hardcore or in music in general?

Not a lot, but we see them consistently.  When we’re on the road, we always meet new ones.  There’s a small underground of political bands that make heavy music.  There used to be a lot more, but it’s just not what’s happening right now.  As far as the hardcore scene is concerned, a lot of the straightedge vegan scene has some sort of politics, so we’re able to dialogue with a lot of those bands.  Even then, they don’t really touch upon some of the stuff that we discuss.  Hardly any band talks about homophobia or patriarchy.

Also, there are a number of bands that do have a reputation for being political, but when you talk with them, it’s hard to move beyond this sort of Frankenstein level of “Bush bad!  Authority bad!”

(laughs)  Yeah, yeah, that’s another thing.  Some of these bands – when your experience in the movement is limited to you writing songs, it creates a one-dimensional understanding of the movement.  When artists talk about their relationship to the struggles that they’re talking about or waxing poetic about, it’s so much more interesting.  It’s kind of weird when white kids from the suburbs rail about capitalism because they never talk about, “This is a very difficult position for me to be in because I’m a white kid in the suburbs in the United States of America.  These are my politics, but they’re very conflicted politics because, yeah, I go to the mall.”  That would be so much more interesting than “The proletariat needs to rise up against the empire!”

As someone who grew up in a small, white town in the Midwest, I know that there are a lot of those conflicts that are hard to reconcile, and there’s a lot of guilt associated with it—at least for some kids—but nobody really talks about it.

Yeah, exactly, and that place—that uncomfortable place of being like, “Wow, there is guilt here and this is a really uncomfortable position to be in”—is where really exciting art comes from, and also the dialogue that we need to move forward and build communities.  That’s not happening a lot.  Again, it’s back to binaries.  It’s more comfortable to say that we’re the freedom fighter, leftist, neo-revolutionaries and they are the evil fascistic right-wing neo-Nazis.

As a man attempting to develop strategies that aren’t self-serving that could effectively create a space to challenge patriarchy, I need to be clear about how I benefit from it on the daily.  Fighting against violence against women is very important, yeah, but that’s the most egregious manifestation of patriarchy, when it comes out in a very physical, violent form.  But it happens in the most understated ways all of the time.  I was listening to this panel discussion about challenging patriarchy in our political circles and I’d never thought of some of the points they were bringing up.  They were talking about language, not just words, but inflections, and how women sometimes pose things in the form of questions when they’re actually statements.  I thought that was so interesting.  She was saying, “We create spaces where women are so uncomfortable in expressing themselves that things that are total statements—“That book is on the table”—are inflected as a question.  We’d rather, as men, focus on the easiest manifestation.  “I’m against rape.  I’m against violence against women.”  Okay, yeah, you know what?  Most regular human beings are against rape.  Yes, that is the most egregious manifestation, but when you only deal with that, you don’t deal with the roots.  The same thing happens with white supremacy and a lot of white political anti-racists who go on the frontlines and challenge the Klan or something.  That’s cool, dude, but how about when one of your family members or friends cracks a joke or does something that really challenges your politics?  Are you going to be the one that says, “I’m uncomfortable with that and this is why,” or are you going to be the one who laughs it off?  Those are the harder battles.