The International Noise Conspiracy Mojo! An LOTD interview archive

Politics make a hell of a lot more sense when you burn your dog-eared Lenin and Mao paperbacks and have sex until the moon falls from its chord in the leaden night.You can vote for imbeciles and party programs, or shake your ass and forge a new Internationale between your hips. Okay, that’s bullshit. But it leans more towards the philosophy of the International Noise Conspiracy more than any whiny tirades from Jello Biafra (who pooh-poohed a really good vegetarian restaurant in Sweden, says Dennis…That’s not surprising). With his vegan tattoo right above his skinny wrist and his straight-edge tattoo bolted across his baking soda white backside, 29-year-old singer Dennis Lyxzen is an old-fashioned lover of justice and human dignity, and a lover of deep embraces and wet kisses, or so I pretend. He loves the curling thunder of Dinosaur Jr. records, and was once obsessive/compulsive about Gorilla Biscuits, and still reads like a motherfucker and makes me believe that the revolution is a Palm Pilot away, no, I mean an MTV 2 video away, no, I mean right back in the MC5 testament, “You can be part of the problem, or part of the solution…” Well, damnit, he just makes me believe.

Most people think of Sweden as a socialist country.

Well, compared to America it would be. There’s some fairness to that statement, because we used to have health care, elderly care, and childcare that the government supplied, but it doesn’t anymore. So it that sense it used to be that, and in the last ten years that has changed a lot. And I think that Sweden has to adapt to the market economy that we have today, and they are totally selling out all those ideas that made Sweden a really good country to live in. I would say that it is like any other country in the world pretty much, but it’s still a little…Well, it has aspects to it that are really good, but most of that is disappearing by the minute actually.

Has the erosion of those ideas led, in part, to your political radicalism?

Oh yeah definitely. I think the first political radicalism you get into is the bigger abstract things, but then when you actually view the world around you and see it change from year to year, you see how it affects your parents or grandparents or people around you, it becomes very obvious. The first time I came to the United States was in 1996, and it’s scary to see Sweden going in that direction.  That can’t be a good thing (laughs).

Did you think the Americanization will filter down into every sector of society?

Oh yeah. I mean it’s kind of hard, because we still have a Socialist-Democratic government, but it’s not very socialistic at all any more. For instance, the right wing controls the city of Stockholm and they’re totally privatizing everything. All the rock clubs are getting shut down because you can’t afford to have them anymore. It’s the whole gentrification thing of the inner cities, like let’s have rich people live in the inner city and move everybody else out. It’s kind of weird.

Some Eastern Europeans have expressed some skepticism obout your politics, which is heightened by the fact that they lived behind the Iron Curtain for so long.

Yeah, I think that when you get into what we’re saying, our critique of capitalism is  equally a critique of the Eastern Bloc. We never said that was something to strive for at all. We talk about socialistic-anarchic ideas that far supercede the actual state capitalism that we feel they had in the former Eastern Block. But we can see them being skeptical because they have been told for so long that this is communism, and people say, oh yes, this is communism, and it pretty damn sucks, so I can see how people can be skeptical about it. But that’s not what we’re talking about. Our critique is like as much valid on labor, working forces, alienation from work, those kind of power structures, which are equally imbedded in the so-called communist cultures. It was on based on ideas that were good 100 years ago and all, but they’ve turned into instead…Well, the dictatorship of the proletariat ended up being the dictatorship of the few and as in America, the power structure serves to keep the power structure intact, not to serve the people.

Usually only around 20% of the people joined the Communist Party.
Yeah, so I can see people being skeptical, but if they sit down and read about they’ll realize that we’re in no way defending the Soviet Union or anything like that?

How did your critique apply when you went on your first tour, which was in China, and how did you end up there to begin with?

Well, we ended up going because we have a friend that lives in Hong Kong, and he was sorta joking around. He saw one of our first shows ever, and he was like, you guys are great, you should put out a record on my label. And we were joking and said, if you bring us over to China, we’ll put out a record. He said, okay, cool.

And he did?

Yeah, we were like, all right. We recorded a couple of songs, sent it to him, and he put out the record. We were there for a month, and played fifteen shows. We were the first band to actually tour China. It was really tricky to go to China as a political band. Like there are so many aspects of it.  First off, you go there and see how people are being treated, how human life is also being commodified as much as it is over here, maybe even more bluntly there, because people there labor for the government, and not for themselves at all.  So that was tricky, and we were worried, like can we actually talk about politics? It was totally illegal. Well, it wasn’t illegal to be there, because we were tourists, but we really couldn’t play there, so it was kind of illegal. Then we realized that no one speaks English, no one talked at all in English, so we were like, ugh. But I was like, well, I can pretty much say what I like because people won’t understand me anyway. We realized though that this was not going to be a tour where we talked about politics, it was an adventure and we would just play music. Then there’s the implication, or the fact, that we came over with rock music and people were really excited. A lot of people are trying to break free of the traditional Chinese culture and do something else. What you feel when you come over is that maybe they’re generally excited by us because we play rock music, but then again rock music is just another cultural import from Western culture. Well, they have McDonalds at Tienamen Square, and Dunkin’ Donuts in Beijing, so here comes rock music.  In that sense, we felt really stupid. True, we are the imperialists bringing you more of this fine American culture…

Even though you’re Swedish.

But all of us are children of rock’n’roll culture in a lot ways, so we came there and it kind of freaked us out, but at the same time hopefully people could get inspired just to play music. It was very fascinating, because being the first western rock band over there is so weird. People never ever saw five white people play punk rock before, so you could just imagine, people didn’t know what to think. We’d do a kick or knee drop and people would just start clapping, and we were like, what? We played this festival, like a rock festival, and there was like 6-700 people there at this big auditorium. So imagine us playing in front of 700 Chinese people. And there’s was like eight other punk type band from that region, people were like going crazy when we played. It was unbelievable, and we were like, what is happening here? It’s definitely like after playing music for a long time and being disillusioned with just playing music, it was really inspiring to go there and see the effect that music can have on people, and know we were there when a scene got started.

One thing you’ve said is that music and art are all image, poise, and surface, but how does that idea hold up over there?

That’s the hard thing. Our perspective on art is that it is a lot of just selling or surface, and selling or old ideas, but at the same time, we live in a post-modern society where people tend to make up the meanings themselves in a lot of ways. Take for example when you play shows. There’s going to be a lot of people that are really excited about us being a political rock band, there’s so political, cool. Then there’s people who like us because we’re a rock band and play good music and think that politics don’t matter, or is just bullshit. Or there’s a lot of people like my friends who say, everything you say and are doing is amazing, but your music kind of sucks. I think that what people extract from it is so tricky to define, especially when you come to a place where no one speaks English and you can’t really sit down and talk about the tradition of avant-garde art in Europe. People would just be like, what are you talking about? It’s really tricky, so what we tried is play music and inspire people. Though I think that music and art is very much in the line of bourgeois self-realization, I still think that it’s important to express yourself, and I think that music is still a good way to express yourself if you do it honestly and sort of really incorporate something that you want to accomplish with it. . So in that sense we still play music. People ask us all the time, why do you still play music? Well, I love to play music. Though we can all sit down and get into deep discussions about the meaning of the artist, at the end of the day I still love to buy records and play, which I think is with the post-modern condition of living with contradictions all the time. That’s something we have to struggle with on a daily basis.

Have your politics been received differently in America after Sept. 11th?

Definitely. In a way, we came and said a lot of stuff before Dec. 11th, and people who didn’t really take us seriously danced around and thought, they’re kind of funny, and they talk a lot about politics, but that’s just whatever, that’s their schtick, that’s what they do, but those people I think become more offended now than amused. I think people used to think, ah, those crazy Swedes, now people actually get more offended by it. But all in all, if you just try and approach that issue, because we talk a lot about that and try to incorporate that into what we are saying, and approach it in an intelligent manner, I think you will understand what we’re talking about and why we talk about it the way we talk about it. I mean there is some new age of McCarthyism here, which is really scary.

There’s already a blacklist of unpatriotic professors.

Yeah, yeah. It’s horrible, and I think that if you could list un-American activities, we have participated in quite a few (laughs). I think that talking about it and looking at what happened, there is a reason why the world looks like it does, and one of the reasons is that there has never been room in America for people that think differently. . And there’s always been hegemony of thinking, and I think now more than ever there’s a need to talk about political ideas and a need to talk about an analysis about why America got attacked, and what is happening in Afghanistan. I think that’s a really important thing to talk about.

At the same time, you’ve described some political bands as dystopian and unfun, so how do you not fall into that same trap?

It’s tricky. First of all, we try and step back from the idea that we have all the solutions to your problems, like here’s the party program that will save you. I think in the first initial stages that allows people to look at what we have and sort of pick out what they find is interesting. We can also be contradictory, and use a lot of stuff that doesn’t make sense out of context. But for people, if they look at our records, there’s quotes from communists, socialists, anarchists, dadaists, everything. We just try and give a guide to the history of resistance, almost a small introduction to radical political ideas. It’s up to people to find out what suits them, or to say, that’s a great idea, or that’s a crock of shit. We try and lay it all out on the table and see if there’s anything you like.

That starts a dialogue?

Exactly. We don’t try to be…Well, we’re not dogmatic. We don’t really have a set of ideas. Well, we all in the band have a set of ideas we want to do, and that’s what we try and present, all these different ideas. I think that is a good start, because any time you start pointing a finger and saying, this is what we should do, then you’re already in danger of becoming really boring. But then the other thing we do is when we play live. When you get our records and when you read the manifestos, there’s definitely a kind of nerdy thing to it…There’s something like, here’s a bunch of guys and girls from Sweden who read Michel Foucault, and that’s not very amusing in itself, but we try…Well, you know what I mean. There’s definitely a nerdy element to it, like we read books a lot, and you should try and read. Coming from the rock point of view of sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll, that’s kind of uncool actually. We know that element exists, but if you mix that with music that we try to make very sexy, danceable, and enjoyable, and especially when we play live we want it to be more in the lines of…well, instead of being Crass, or something like that with boring political finger pointing, we want that feeling of looking in the 1970s and the Black Power movement and the bands that played the sexiest, funkiest music…

Like James Brown?

They still have the clenched fist.

But brought with it the cultural cool. You’ve said that with every recent major political movement there has been a musical movement too.

The problem now is that we have a really big political movement growing and not a lot of music to coincide with that. Our approach is to both make it fun and make people think more is to lean towards 1970s funk Black Power than 1980s Crass. That’s the kind of approach we try and have.

Is there a difference if they dance to you instead of Madonna?

Mmm, I would like to think so, but maybe I don’t really know. I think in the end it’s more fun that they are dancing to us because this band is based on all these political principles and ideas, and its always kind of fun to get people dancing and know that not all these people agree with what we are saying, but they are dancing to what we’re saying. They’re dancing to all these political ideas. In a sense, in the world that we live in today, just dancing itself may be a very liberating act. I’d love to see people dance to Madonna than not dance at all.

So people suggest that you are exploiting poets and philosophers like William Blake and Michel Foucault just to sell more records.

Of course, there’s always this idea of selling culture and selling radicalism. I mean that’s something that we know also. A lot of stuff that we include on the record is not easy or accessible enough for it to be cool. Just like Baudrillard. I don’t think you use Baudrillard as a sales point ever. We could other images maybe. We made a video for “Capitalism Stole My Virginity” and thought we thought maybe we should have footage of Gothenburg and the General Rights, and yeah, we could use that and try to get it out to people, but there’s also the risk of exploiting these ideas. Once you have Baudrillard or those kinds of things, I don’t think that anyone will be like, these guys quote Baudrillard, I think I am going to check out their record.

But does Baudrillard now become a rock’n’roll icon?

It would be kind of funny if he did. I don’t know (laughs). But any time you sell yourself to capitalism, which we do all the time, and any time you sell your art to capitalism there’s always that chance of…Are we selling the idea? We had that song, “For Sale” and that song off the last record that deals with the fact that everything is for sale. The Clash said it when they were doing all the shows at the end of their career, like here we are, just selling the revolution. In today’s society, there’s no real way of escaping the monetary system, no matter how hardcore and DIY you are. You still work within a capitalist framework and kind of sell your ideas. In a way,  Fugazi is selling the political idea to even a further extent than we are, cause their whole marketing point is, we don’t have a marketing point. Not to dis Fugazi, I think they are amazing, but when you look at it that way, that’s a very powerful sales point. We don’t sell T-shirts and we are not a commodity, so buy the record (laughs). There’s always that risk of selling and corrupting the ideas, but then again I don’t think that anything is that holy, and I don’t think that ideas should not be able to be twisted, altered, and used for different purposes. If you are a punk rock puritan, and your goal is keeping punk rock from being exploited from big business, then of course I can see you being pissed off by bands that you see selling out or bands signed to major labels. But I’m not a puritan in that sense, and I really don’t care. I think that the political ideas we have far supercede any youth culture or subculture.

Do you think that choice itself is really a myth?

Oooh. Yeah, in a sense it is. If you come to America like, it’s so crazy because there’s so much to choose from. We were trying to buy cereals this morning and we were just like, ugh.

But they all practically contain the same thing.

Yeah. Exactly. People are always like, yeah, it’s freedom, you get to choose between McDonalds and Burger King. That’s a great choice to have. We have a line on the new record that goes, “The only choice is the refusal to pay.” Because no matter what you choose, you going to fucking pay for it, that’s just how it is.

You also have the line, “The last century promised so much, and now we are outdated.” If you are so outdated, why are you doing it?

I don’t think that we are outdated, but I think that the big ideas of the modernistic plan of the one idea to save us all is outdated. In that sense…Well, that’s a very post-modern song. It deals with the fact that last century had all these, well, you had all these ideologies that were supposed to save us all, and now we look back and it didn’t. Ideology just turned into a trap for people to apply a new set of rules in their lives, and that is outdated. All the big projects went down the drain.

That is somewhat what Fukuyama states in “The End of History” when he suggests that liberal democracies have won the ideological battle.

I don’t believe in the end of history bullshit. I hate that sense of post-modernism. It’s like they’re saying, we haven’t figured out what to do, so we’re going to paint up this really bleak picture and then get on with our lives as university professors. All those post-modern writers have to come up with new theories so they can maintain positions within the university hierarchy.

It’s just another selling point?

It is a selling point, totally. Many of them even admit that they have to come up with something new so they can maintain their position within the hierarchy of intellectual thoughts, so I don’t believe in the end of history.

Is that what you mean when you’ve said, “We don’t want to fall into the trap of exploited nihilism”? Those professors are exploiting such nihilism to maintain a job, nice car, and two story home.

Yeah, definitely. And you read them. I like Baudrillard because of a lot of his points. I’m really into post-structuralism, but I think that a lot of the stuff is just bullshit. A lot of those people talk about the end of history, that there’s no real, and all these abstractions but…

In China there’s several things that are very real.

Yeah. Still here everything is real. We still have to work for eight hours a day. The power relations in our culture are still here. They might be more abstract than they used to be, but they’re still here. Most of us are still at the bottom of the pyramid. A lot of those people try and transcend that.

After you paint the picture of the problem and kids read your liner notes, what’s the next step?

What we expect is just to inspire people, like the way we got into music. Like when I got into music, I got into the Dead Kennedys and Born Against, bands that actually talked about politics, and they made me excited about doing shit. That’s why we pack our records with quotes from books, information, and addresses, so people can see this, and if they think it is interesting, and they want to do something, we can let them know there’s still tons of stuff to do out there. We’re a band that talks about collectivism, so first of all, we have to do this together with other people. The myth of the individual and the American hero is just bullshit. The system needs to be changed, and that is not going to be a pretty sight. But I definitely think that we first look at our own lives. When we talk to people we usually tell them, you have to look at your own situation, like your own culture and where you are at right now. If there’s something that you think is really important, than work with that and analyze that. Like go into a bookstore and choose a book that concerns you. You shouldn’t read Baudrillard just because I read it, you should read something that affects your everyday life. People should just start from there.  We realize that there is a big political movement growing right now and there’s stuff to be done, like I talked to some kid last night, and he was like, what should we do? I was like, it’s not up to me to decide what you should do, if you have imagine and guts, you can do a lot of stuff. We can get into the whole debate of, well, how productive is that and what do you accomplish by doing that, but part of liberating yourself from the tradition that we have is just to do it.

Without giving up the sense of pleasure and sexuality…

Exactly. A lot of times for me political stuff has been about trying to fuse a political idea with something that I enjoy doing. If it doesn’t work out, I’m like, I’ll try something else. Or that worked out really good. Sacrificing yourself to some abstract idea is just going to burn you out. I have so many friends that got into politics and were really gung-ho about it, like “I’m going to change the world,” then after two years of passing out fliers they’re like, fuck this, nothing is happening. If you are not enjoying it…Well, I’m not saying we should just have a good time, I don’t think that if the revolution is the way I see it coming, it’s not going to be a whole lot of fun, but at the same time I think it’s unnecessary to become Christian about it, if that makes sense.