Let Fury Have the Hour

by Antonino D'Ambrosio

  On Spearhead’s most recent album, Everybody Needs Music, the track “Bomb the World” takes on the absurdity of creating peace through war:

  we can chase down all our enemies

  bring them to their knees

  we can bomb the world to pieces

  but we can’t bomb it into peace

  whoa we may even find a solution

  to hunger and disease

  we can bomb the world to pieces

  but we can’t bomb it into peace

  Franti sees himself as a musical communicator with the singular goal of maintaining a critical approach to crafting humanist music. For Franti, Strummer also served as a model to continue fighting no matter the odds. “Strummer’s music was always uplifting,” he says, “albeit the issues he was singing about were startling and distressing.” He continues, “My message is clear . . . even though things seem hopeless we must keep struggling . . . that is what is at the root of Strummer’s music and at the root of my music.”

  Likewise, Strummer’s music gave Franti the courage to explore: “It showed me, and all who listen, that we are not alone in this world,” Franti declares, “and political songs are important because they can help us change ourselves and then hopefully things we don’t like in this world.” Franti acknowledges that music can’t change the world but does give the listener a belief that change is possible. Thoughtful music also helps us cope with our day-to-day lives and discover a sense of community. Franti adds that it shows us “we are not crazy and that there are people like me out there.” The Clash and Strummer gave him a sense of community and now Franti is helping to create community for countless others.

  Franti shares many of Strummer’s concerns, especially the increasing consolidation of the music industry and the demise of independent record labels. “In the ’70s and ’80s labels like Island Records,” he explains, “put out the socially conscious music of artists like Bob Marley and U2. They did great work to really get them out there to a wider audience. They worked hard for these artists. But then Island got taken over by a larger label, which got taken over by another label, which got taken over by another label.”

  Franti and Strummer also connect in their unyielding belief that music and rebellion react to the conservative state of the world, creating a “groundswell that will lead to another moment where our message will get out there and challenge the way people think.” However, the challenge lies in conveying that message. Like Strummer, Franti encounters opposition to his work, and Spearhead faces an essential “blackout” on the radio. When Franti asks why, the answer given is that they are “too political.” In another example Franti tells me about a recent situation involving one of his band mates who has a sister serving in Iraq. He will not be named to prevent further troubles for the band. Before she was sent over to Iraq, two government agents visited her family and asked about having one child in the military and another in Spearhead, a music group with “radical political views.” “They knew almost everything about what we did, where we went,” Franti explains, “and questioned why we named our management company Guerrilla Management.” Franti pauses and then tells me, “You have to realize they are watching even those involved in the smallest political activity—like going to protests—I call this total information awareness.”

  “Punk rock was everything I needed when I first heard it because it informed me on all levels—socially, politically,” Tim Robbins tells me as we sit in his production office in Chelsea.3 “We would smash disco and smash the system,” he adds with a smirk. Robbins is a creative activist who has achieved enormous success while maintaining a vocal, committed progressive social consciousness in the face of political and media scorn. In 2004 he won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his role as a man dogged by unbearable childhood trauma in Mystic River while at the same time producing, writing, directing, and starring in the sharply critical theatrical satire Embedded.

  Embedded takes on the Bush administration’s war in Iraq, neoconservative influence, and the corporate media’s complicity in supporting a war seemingly built on intimidation, misrepresentation, and outright lies. Robbins crafts the play in the spirit of Bertolt Brecht, breaking down the boundary between artist and audience with the clever use of mixed media (music, video, film, etc.). As Larry Bogad points out in Electoral Guerrilla Theatre: Radical Ridicule and Social Movements, it also stands as an allegory in activist aesthetics for the wall that separates art from reality under capitalism.4 Robbins’s insider-outsider status gives him a unique perspective as well as a significant opportunity to fashion a work that is socially, culturally, and politically rebellious. For me, viewing Embedded was a direct, intense experience that comes at the audience in a high-speed rush.

  Embedded, which opened at the Public Theater in New York City, is dedicated to Joe Strummer and is tied together by punk music (the play opens with the Clash’s “Know Your Rights”) that captures the play’s anger and trepidation toward the government and media that seems to be the moving away from democracy. Like the Italian playwright Dario Fo, who took on Italy’s Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi with the bitingly satirical Two-Headed Anomaly,5 Robbins’s attempt to take a serious political situation and frame it in a farcical light has not pleased the powerful. Several attempts were made to shut down the play, which had its first run in Los Angeles before finding a home in New York City’s Public Theater. As Fo himself declared, laughter does not please the mighty.

  Throughout a prolific career that includes acting, writing, directing, and music, Robbins maintains a sensibility that is every bit as punk as Strummer’s ferocious performances and progressive politics. Robbins grew up in New York City and was introduced to art as a political tool at a young age, due to his musician father’s influence.6 The folk music of the 1960s combined with political art helped shape Robbins’s early consciousness.

  Bob Dylan’s “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll” affected him in a way no other song had before. “The song pulls no punches,” he says. “That’s hard core song writing, that’s poetry and he’s not hiding behind anything.” Robbins became inspired by the song’s “take no prisoners message” and vehement anger about a society that condones the murder of a black woman at the hands of her wealthy white employer. “I’m going to knock you down and I’m going to watch you fall,” he says. “I’m going to stand over your body to make sure you’re down . . . that’s the kind of writing that was nowhere to be found after the mid-’60s.”

  Robbins’s search ended in the mid-1970s when he heard punk for the first time. Robbins explains that his ear was open to punk, its spirit and message. “They had no qualms about going after people, after their gut and going for a knockout.” He continues, “It’s not just that I disagree with your politics . . . it’s that I want to destroy your politics. I want to destroy your hatred, bigotry, your insensitivity, and your mistreatment of the weak. I am going to take you and throw you down into the gutter and watch you suffer “that’s what was missing.” At this point in his life Robbins was on his way to becoming one of the premiere actors of his generation, first in theater with the Los Angeles theater group The Actors’ Gang, and then in television and film.

  The music and activism of the Clash gave Robbins an indefatigable confidence that he could, and should, imbue his own creativity with the same radical consciousness. “Telling the truth in a very direct way that was not half-ass, not touchy-feely,” he tells me. “That wasn’t equivocating, it wasn’t apologizing for itself, it was fuck you . . . and ultimately that was what was so amazing about the Clash.” At this point Robbins recounts his first big acting gig. It was on the hit television show St. Elsewhere, and Robbins played a terrorist. He had completed one day of shooting and that night the Clash were in town on the early part of their Combat Rock tour. Robbins decided to go and participate fully in what he described “the caring, comfortable community” Clash shows provided. The next day he was three hours late for shooting.

  Robbins wryly tells me
that he showed up for work and said nothing about being late. “I was going to pull this part off using all the punk rock energy Strummer and the boys gave me the night before,” he says laughing. It worked. He did not get fired, although he later learned that both the producer and his agent wanted to fire him. The St. Elsewhere performance opened Hollywood’s eyes to Robbins’s immense talent. “Punk made me what I am today,” he adds, “and the only reason I am any good in acting is because I took this attitude from punk rock . . . I had nothing to fear.”

  “Take the song ‘Spanish Bombs’ for example,” Robbins explains while singing a few lines of the song. “At first I listen to it and hear the amazing music. It draws me in, then I start to hear what they are singing about.” Strummer wrote the song in the style of a punk Andalusian poem in tribute to the freedom fighters who fought for democracy against the fascists in Spain in 1939. It alludes to the brutal death of antifascist poet Federico García Lorca and the U.S. role in aiding the military dictatorship’s terrible rise to power.7 The song opens powerfully:

  Spanish songs in Andalucia

  The shooting sites in the days of ’39

  Oh, please, leave the vendanna open

  Federico Lorca is dead and gone

  Bullet holes in the cemetery walls

  The black cars of the Guardia Civil

  Spanish bombs on the Costa Rica

  I’m flying in a DC 10 tonight

  “It made me want to learn more about Andalucia, Lorca, and what really took place at that time in Spain,” Robbins adds, “this is what good music does—it teaches you.”

  As we discuss Robbins’s overtly political work, including Dead Man Walking, Bob Roberts, Cradle Will Rock, and Embedded, he stops to point out a constant source of frustration for him.8 “Be careful about using the word ‘political’ because it will turn people off,” he ardently declares. “‘Political’ is a way to marginalize.” Robbins believes that he and Strummer among other creative activists are really humanists or rebels, not “political people.” Returning to Strummer he continues, “You know there was no one that was less political than Joe Strummer.” He adds, “If you look up the word in the dictionary—it’s someone whose behavior is affected by calculation—Strummer’s was affected by justice, a sense of fairness.”

  I mention to him that Franti and others always return to the fact that Strummer’s work is first and foremost fun and entertaining. Robbins absolutely agrees. “We don’t want to lecture to anybody. I want to feel. I want to be able to laugh . . . to be able to achieve that in the entertainment you are doing, that’s the high art for me.” Robbins, much like Strummer when I met him, rails against contrived and pretentious intellectualizing in political art. Both also seemed to share the simple goal of crafting work that reaches as wide an audience as possible. “Creating something that touches people and still has substance is the real achievement,” Robbins explains.

  Still, for all his success, Robbins continues to face what Franti and other creative activists encounter on a daily basis, what he calls “cultural assassination.” Strummer faced this type of intense media scrutiny during his time with the Clash and more specifically after the release of Sandinista! I relay my conversation with Strummer to Robbins regarding the weariness Strummer and the band felt during the Sandinista! period. Everywhere they went they would face hordes of reporters who wanted to focus on the name of the album.9 Were the Clash communists? Did they believe in violence as a means to political change? Were they providing support to the Sandinistas? Strummer’s music, in effect, had become secondary to politics.

  Robbins has faced this before during his career, first in 1993, when he and Susan Sarandon spoke out at the Oscars about several hundred Haitians with AIDS being detained in “work camps” on the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay.10 Then with his vocal and very public criticism of the Bush administration’s buildup to the war in Iraq and the subsequent occupation. Still, the intense media scrutiny and subsequent backlash was nothing compared to what has engulfed the production of Embedded. “The media went after me with a vengeance,” he says. “It was an attempt to shut down the play.”

  Looking at the reviews of most American theater critics, it is hard to deny that there seems to be a deliberate attempt to destroy the play.11 As Robbins points out, nearly all the reviews don’t even tell the play’s story or look at what is unique about the play. Instead, they focus on the playwright’s politics. The foreign press has been much more fair and balanced, and this is not a coincidence in Robbins’s opinion. “If I look at this through the prism of my own ego and try not to be paranoid,” he tells me, “and I do feel that I am a well-established artist, I have to ask ‘Why is my new work ignored?’ Is this an active decision, a personal thing?”

  Robbins draws a parallel between the critical reception of Embedded and Strummer’s dark time following the Clash’s breakup. “What happens when you step out in front—and when the shit starts and there is nobody there?” he asks me. “There is no sense of loneliness deeper than that,” he continues. “You feel betrayed, bewildered, you wonder how did this happen? I know what I am doing is right, is good. How did I get to be the one who is ostracized? How did I get the blame and why am I held responsible?”

  Like Strummer, Robbins had to endure this kind of attack in connection with his more personal and humanistic projects. Robbins’s third directorial effort, Cradle Will Rock, was a painful lesson in how the media can agitate politically in an effort to destroy a work. The film’s account of the 1930s staging of the progressive play The Cradle Will Rock for the WPA-funded Federal Theater Project did not sit well with some major American film critics.12 At a lunch meeting of American film critics in Cannes, one critic encouraged his colleagues to write reviews that undermined the film. He described Robbins as a “subversive” and the film as “dangerous.” Subsequently Cradle was ignored and vanished from screens swiftly, denying the public the opportunity to see it. “It was a painful death,” Robbins says.

  Still, Robbins was far from defeated and resolutely faced unsettling battles ahead. First, Robbins and his longtime partner, Susan Sarandon, were banned from the fifteenth-anniversary celebration of Bull Durham at the National Baseball Hall of Fame because of their public antiwar stance. Second, a right-wing furor dogged the production of Embedded. In his April 2003 National Press Club address, Robbins described the situation. “Susan and I have been listed as traitors, as supporters of Saddam, and various other epithets by the Aussie gossip rags masquerading as newspapers, and by their fair and balanced electronic media cousins, Nineteenth Century Fox.” Robbins continued, “And both of us last week were told that both we and the First Amendment were not welcome at the Baseball Hall of Fame.”13

  Robbins’s kinship with Strummer runs deep after these experiences. “When they throw all these labels at you,” he argues, “radical, revolutionary, I am trying to say ‘no’; at the core I am humanist and what I believe comes from a simple place “I am just asking questions, that’s all.” Both Franti and Robbins are doing more than asking questions. Their work serves as a beacon continuing a tradition of committed creative-activism, fighting for a world free of tyranny.

  CULTURE CLASH

  From Brixton to El Barrio NYC

  By Not4Prophet

  You have the right not to be killed.

  Murder is a crime!

  Unless it was done by a police man or aristocrat.

  —“KNOW YOUR RIGHTS,” THE CLASH

  Growing up in the B-boy barrio slum sidewalks of Nueva York, with junkies under the stairs, pig police patrolling the avenues, guards at the gates, and guns on the roof, I was a young (Poor-to Rican) punk lookin’ for the perfect beat with nothin’ to eat but the sounds that emanated from the street. Survivin’ on shit and sonics and growing bored with the USA, I grew up groovin’ to Public Enemy, BDP, Poor Righteous Teachers, and storefront preachers. Music was the sustenance for the soul (food) that the gutters and gods couldn’t provide, the (musical) meals t
hat were never enough in my mecca bodega of the mind. Music was my (counter) culture, the notes between the notes between the cracks in the pavement.

  When they kick at your front door/How you gonna come?/With your hands on your head/Or on the trigger of your gun?/When the law break in/How you gonna go?/Shot down on the pavement/Or waiting in death row?

  —“THE GUNS OF BRIXTON”

  I was sprouting up faster than the weed I was smoking, and reasoning Malcolm, Marcus, Martin, Marcos, the Macheteros, Mumia, Move, the Young Lords, Latin Kings, the Panthers, ghetto gangsters with ghetto blasters. But I was always ciphering the sound, digging deeper than the beats, noise and politics, sonic and sedition. I wanted soundtracks that screamed survival, records that roared revolution, albums that were armed, and PE was the only one bringing the necessary noise. So I would dissect every lyric out of Chuck D’s mouth, turn every turn of a phrase into a ten-point program, dust the dust covers for ancient hieroglyphics that would indicate new (un)civilizations that were older than me and music itself.

  I’m all lost in the supermarket/I can no longer shop happily/I came in here for a special offer/A guaranteed personality

  —“LOST IN THE SUPERMARKET”

  Eventually my search for truth (and soul) caused me to venture into enemy territory, a backdoor boricua entering through the exit of racist rock clubs, and sneaking into segregated squats for hardcore punk shows, because I knew that though PE was in an (after school) class by themselves, they couldn’t possibly be trotting this school of hard knocks by they lonesome. Or could they? But I guess I was fooled by the allure of loud guitars and rebel yells, because in my soul sojourns all I ever found was louder mouths that were talkin’ loud and sayin’ nothin’, and didn’t even have a jungle groove to move to. No funk in their punk, no soul in their rock ’n’ roll. So I continued to scratch at the signs of the surface, searching for sabotage and the sounds of survival and what Jean-Michel Basquiat called “royalty and the streets.”