Anti-Flag tell why their first album of the Trump years doesn't mention Trump by name

It's been 22 years since the members of Anti-Flag rolled out of Pittsburgh with "Die For the Government," the opening salvo in a series of protest-punk explosions devoted to smashing the state and its military-industrial complex while rallying like-minded punks to the cause.

Released in November, "American Fall" is Anti-Flag's first album of the Trump years. On the opening track, "American Attraction," they take aim at one of the current administration's favorite tools, the politics of distraction.

Elsewhere, they sing about fascism, poverty, healthcare, immigration, prison as an industry and racists who don't know they're racists. There's an anthemic chorus of "If they come for you in the night, they will come for me in the morning" while another highlight wonders, "Where you gonna go when the superstores close?"

What about Trump?

There is one thing they never get around to mentioning by name, though – America's 45th president, Donald Trump.

Bassist Chris #2 sees it, "People like Donald Trump or going back to George W. Bush, even Barack Obama for the past eight years, these folks are often symptoms of the disease, not the disease itself."

And Anti-Flag would always rather work on curing the disease.

The bassist checked in from the studio, where they're recording covers of their favorite songs.

"It’s 25 years of the band," he says. "And I was like 'Why don’t we record some of our favorite songs and release them through the year to give people an insight into why our band is the amalgamation of sounds that it is?' And maybe it’ll make sense. If the project fails, then we’ve recorded three today. We don’t need to do anymore."

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Here's Chris #2 on "American Fall."

Question: This is your first album of the Trump administration and it’s interesting that you don’t ever really take him on directly or mention his name.

Answer: I think people’s expectations are for punk-rock records to be as head-on as the Dead Kennedys were, like, “This is Reagan era, this song is about right now and this song only lasts right now.”

We had the luxury of the perspective that songs last longer than that, so why should we allow someone to dictate what our art is going to be when we can be battling the future and the past and present versions of those that are normalizing the same bigotry that Donald Trump is trying to normalize?

That became a conversation and a mantra when writing these songs. We recognized that they could very well last until that scene in “Planet of the Apes” where you’re walking along on the beach and there’s nothing left except a piece of plastic that’s our record sticking out of the sand. And somebody hopefully will find it and be like, “Oh well, there was a community of folks that cared, that tried to not allow this to happen.”

That’s the point of a record, to last longer than you do. So it’s really a matter of trying to make sure the relevancy of “American Fall” wasn’t just the next six months that that guy hopefully has left. I’m not sure that it will ever be seen as anything other than a record made under the Trump era, which is fine, too. We can’t control that.

But the part that we could control, we tried our best to make sure the interpretation lies in the hands of the listener and that the focus was on all of those who scapegoat marginalized communities, who use distraction politics to maintain and grow their power.

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Q: Is it safe to assume, though, that if these are symptoms of a disease that was also there under Barack Obama, that the disease is manifesting itself in a different way under Donald Trump?

A: Yeah. Obviously. The amount of un-closeted racists that feel emboldened because there are active white supremacists in the White House, that is what’s unprecedented territory for all of us.

We actually have a song on the album called “I Came. I Saw. I Believed.” It’s talking about how you look back on Martin Luther King and go, “Oh yeah, he went and marched and yeah, they took a lot of s--t to get that done, but they got it done. And we’re forever better.” But the ghosts of that activism, they’re supposed to be lessons, not necessarily mile markers that we continue to go past.

And what’s important is that Donald Trump and the internet and all of these new things coming out that are changing the landscape of what it means to be a political activist in the world, these things are making it harder and harder to recognize tangible victories and tangible change.

So it often has felt like there are far more losses than there are victories and to maintain that optimism is very difficult.

But what I’m getting is a real sense of activation of people that Donald Trump is lighting a fire under, many folks who were maybe apathetic or cynical towards other walks of life or other people. His emboldening of racists has drawn a line in the sand.

And when you look at punk rock and art as a whole, when that line is drawn, there are more people paying attention to that art. It’s not the belief that bad presidents make for good music. I think the good music is always there. Bad presidents just make it easier to find (laughs).

Q: Was it more challenging to make protest music during the administration of the past eight years?

A: No. I think, in fact, it was a little more dialed in, a little easier to focus on. We knew Barack Obama was elected as the peaceful president and he ramped up the drone program, so that was our aim. We knew he was elected as the health-care president and it was a health-care plan that wasn’t everyone, so we knew our aim.

Donald Trump is tweeting about f—king having a bigger nuclear button than Kim Jong-un. That’s insane to me. (Laughs). I thought Creedence Clearwater Revival had that nuclear s--t on lock. I didn’t think that we would be discussing that.

Q: You talked about racists becoming more emboldened, people with certain viewpoints who were kind of hiding in their parents’ basement, typing things on Twitter, they’re now more emboldened and more public. Has that affected any sort of backlash that you face as Anti-Flag?

A: Well, yeah. I mean, we can’t put anything out on the internet without it being subjected to trolls. So it makes it hard to communicate with folks in our community. That’s what Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and all these beautiful ideas were created for, to keep us in touch with folks that care and members of the community.

Now that discussion gets interrupted by people shouting the word Killary at me as if half of this record wasn’t written under the thought that she was going to be our president. It’s an amazing phenomenon, this sensationalized idea that if you don’t like Donald Trump, then you thought Hillary Clinton was your savior.

And that’s not true for… really, most people.

Q: If that were true for most people, she would have won. A lot of people grudgingly supported her.

A: Yeah, and I am a lesser of two evils voter. Because it’s f—king less evil. It’s that simple to me. I want to do better but if this is where we’re at, let’s go with less evil, because less evil sounds better than more evil. (laughs).

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Q: It’s kind of interesting that as politically divided as we are right now, that here you are, a group called Anti-Flag that’s always made political protest punk and you’re not one side or the other. You did hold Obama to the fire. And you were prepared to hold Hillary Clinton up to that same scrutiny.

A: We existed on Sept. 10, 2001 and we existed on Sept. 12, 2001. We saw the landscape change. We saw people sending back our records. We saw people taking them out of every store. We had parents of band members saying, “You should change your name.”

We lived through all of that, and what we came back to is “We’re called Anti-Flag because we do not believe that nationalism and war are a solution for the world’s problems. And if we derail from that belief now, then anything we've done in the past is all for naught.”

So we doubled down on it and now we have the luxury to say, “No matter what is happening, no matter whether it’s Barack Obama and hope and change or Hillary Clinton and the dynasty politics of her family, there’s work to do.”

There’s work to do in fighting nationalism and war and the things that create nationalism and war, which are racism and Islamophobia and xenophobia and homophobia, transphobia and all these things. Their intersectionality is real and we have to combat them with every breath we take.

We are naïve and idealistic. We are eternal optimists and we think we can all do better. And as long as we can physically manifest the songs from our body, we’re gonna continue to do so. It’s the only thing we know how to do, so that’s our value to this fight. And it might seem or be of less value to others but to us it’s very valuable.

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Q: You’ve mentioned optimism a few times. How do you stay optimistic?

A: Whenever we do interviews, it’s hard to (laughs) ‘cause that when we just talk about all the terrrible s—t, but we get to do this really cool thing where we travel the world and we play songs for people and we get to hear their stories. And from that, there’s a huge shot of optimism.

When Heather Heyer was killed in Charlottesville, we were in Germany. There’s a mass right-wing movement and a political party in Germany right now that is gaining a lot of notoriety and power called the AFD and essentially it’s comparable to Trump’s America First thing. They want Germany first. Their ads are a woman who’s pregnant and it says something along the lines of “Do you want the baby inside her to be a German?”

But when Charlottesville went down and we felt as disconnected from what was happening in America as possible because we were halfway around the world, we were onstage and we talked about it and immediately an anti-Nazi banner unfurled from some kid’s pocket. He was like a f—king magician about it.

And it was like, these people care about what’s happening in the States the same way we care about what’s happening there. That’s the power of this community. There is optimism in knowing this guy has our back, that there are people all around the world standing up to be counted as members of the community in opposition to hatred.

And you gain a lot of optimism when you encounter things like that.

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Q: You started recording “A New Kind of Army,” your first album with the group, 20 years ago this coming February. What was your goal coming into the group as far as what you hoped you could accomplish?

A: I played a show in New York City. And that was my goal (laughs). I thought “If I do that, then we’re Kiss.” The whole thing for me was crazy. I was just a fan.

There was a very cool, progressive young punk-rock woman who was vegetarian. She showed me this band called Anti-Flag and said, “Do you know them?” I probably lied and said, “Of course I know them. Yeah, they’re great.” And that was it. I learned about them.

My aspirations as a musician were to play a show in the city and one of my bands opened for Anti-Flag and I got to be friendly with them. So when I got the call to play the first show, I was done. I had no more musical aspiration. Everything I’ve done to this point has been totally on accident.

I feel very fortunate that it all happened. I feel even more fortunate that we were able – and by we, I mean predominately me and Justin (Sane) – to convince the people from my high school, my mom, everyone who made it possible for a 16-year-old kid to get in the van with those weirdos (laughs).

I’m glad that nothing got in the way of that. I’ve been able to see the world and meet a lot of amazing people and be part of the community that cares about more than just itself. I don’t think I would have gotten that if I had just graduated high school normally and gone to CCAC.

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Q: I guess what I meant, though, was what you were hoping to achieve in terms of did you feel you could affect real change with your music and what change do you feel you have affected?

A: When it comes to “A New Kind of Army,” our expectations were very low. We thought it might come out and Fat. Mike wanted to put it out on his B label at the time, Honest Don’s. And thankfully, we were steadfast. We said, “No.” I don’t think anybody at that time had ever told him no. It was a really funny conversation.

So we put it out on Go Kart, which was this small New York City label. And we were able to then go and do some crazy things. We did a couple dates of Warped Tour that year and the most impactful thing I think we did was coming from the Dropkick Murphys tour, which was kind of a disaster, to tour with Rage Against the Machine in arenas.

That showed us what a political band could do. And while with every record we hope that level, we know that’s impossible. (laughs). It’s very hard to be that one generation-defining band like Rage. But we took a lot away from that.

A great example is the first show that we played with them in Philadelphia. There were two things that happened that night.

One, I learned they gave a dollar from each ticket sold to a local charity. There were roughly 20,000 people there. So $20,000 for a local organization, it will change your next five years. And they just dropped that check off without telling anyone. No press release or anything. I found out at the end of the night when we were settling the show.

The other side of it was that they had people from the Justice for Mumia campaign come out and speak during the show. Up until that point, the politics of an Anti-Flag show was primarily Justin talking about the songs or maybe something he had heard that day. Pat was doing a lot of talking at the time. He would come out from behind the drum set.

But it introduced to this idea that you can bring organizations out, you can make your show be about more than just the songs. And that’s something we do every day.

On the tour we’re doing now, we’ve got three organizations with us, sometimes four at each show. And that means the people who come through the door that day, they’re gonna be introduced to something that maybe they wouldn’t have seen otherwise.

Q: You talked about the value of writing songs that will be relevant for many years. How far back are you guys going in the catalog on this tour?

A: I think on this tour we’re doing “Your Daddy Was a Rich Man,” which is on “Die for the Government” and we talk about how it could be about Donald Trump’s father.

And we’re doing “F--k Police Brutality,” which is also off our first record. I don’t think those guys ever thought that song would have a reach beyond just commenting on what was happening in Pittsburgh at the time.

A common misconception is that an a-ha moment is supposed to happen when we play that song, that someone in the crowd is supposed to be like, “Oh, I thought police brutality was OK and now I don’t” (laughs). That’s not why we do that song.

The thought is that the majority of the audience will be white males. And these are people that don’t encounter police brutality the same way members of African-African communities do. How do we show solidarity with those people?

Well, we have this song and this response to an issue they see daily. It’s a way to raise our hand and be counted as allies to those that suffer that injustice.

Reach the reporter at ed.masley@arizonarepublic.com or 602-444-4495. Twitter.com/EdMasley.

Anti-Flag

When: 7 p.m. Wednesday, Jan. 31.

Where: Club Red, 1306 W. University Drive, Mesa.

Admission: $18-$22.

Details: 480-258-2733, clubredrocks.com.

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