Early in my career, people wanted to hear music about protest, about trying to change things.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
It wasn't my natural inclination to get into writing protest songs.
I mean, there's a hell of a lot of grounds for protest, but you don't do it through music.
I think if I were over there in America, protest music would be more important. But I'm not going.
Other than Green Day, we haven't had a lot of protest music over the past few decades.
It took me until my teenage years to realize that I was medicating with music. I was pushing back against my stupid school uniform, instructors who called me by my last name and my classmates, who, while friendly enough, were not at all inspiring.
Protest is patriotic. Since the beginning of musical time, American singers and songwriters have used their talent and bully pulpits to show us America's strengths and shortcomings.
When I was a kid growing up in the '60s, music was an outlet for enlightenment, frustration, rebellion. It was more about individualism. Today it's just like a big business.
The nice thing about a protest song is that it takes the complaint, the fussing, the finger-pointing, and gives it an added component of sociable harmony.
I set out to create a means whereby music could be a way of vindicating the rights of the masses.
You can't just sit around and make protest albums all your life; eventually it comes to the point where you have to do something.