An excerpt from an interview with Guy Picciotto of Fugazi by: Yogesh Chawla and Sachin Pandya The entire 17 page interview appears in the poetry journal PGI #5 Full Disclosure: Fugazi is a band that originated in DC in the late 1980’s. Guy Picciotto sings and plays guitar for Fugazi. We had a very interesting discussion with him, as well as a good time. We hope you do too. This interview was conducted with 3 phones and a tape recorder on October something, with a little bit of help from Yogesh’s cat, little Che Guevera... Yogesh: Your music and lyrics have always been politically active and aware. If you take songs like ‘Lockdown’, you’re talking about the current prison situation or ‘Recap Modotti’ you’re talking about the hardships that immigrants face. We’re wondering what you feel really strongly about right now? Also you guys play your whole entire set list, and a song like ‘Lockdown’ is a little older but does it become more important to you as conditions in prisons deteriorate? Guy: Well it’s weird, to me, the songs, we never think about them as being time contextually bound. I never feel weird about doing songs that we wrote 14 or 15 years ago. They seem as relevant to me now as they ever did. You’re right, we play everything. When we go on tour we basically relearn every single song that we ever wrote. We make up the set as we go along, every night is different. So it’s kind of like we are always really in touch with our entire output. I think that a lot of times there’s almost this sense that there shouldn’t be any freedom to what you can do with a political song like it has to be generic in this way. I think it’s always really funny that a lot of peo-ple who write songs, they shy away from addressing anything political because they feel like it’s so confining to have a stance. But to me, I don’t see a division between subject matter within lyrics. To me writ-ing lyrics, the one thing that’s great about it is that there’s a freedom to it. If you want to address a political thing or a non political thing or if you want to address a political thing in a way that’s incredibly nuanced or very complicated and isn’t maybe necessarily clear, I think that’s as valid as writing something which is a bombastic anthem that’s really obvious. I don’t see why you can’t do both, or why you can’t do different things within it that makes things confusing. We have a song, ‘Do You Like Me,’ people ask me about it all the time because it seems to be so fragmented. It’s like all of a sudden there’s political material in what had seemed to be just a love song. It is unsettling to them. I just don’t understand why there isn’t the same freedom afforded to someone who is trying to write something politi-cal as somebody who is writing something else. It’s kind of like why can’t ‘The Times They Are A Changing’ be like somehow impregnated with ‘I Am the Walrus’? Why can’t they be the same thing? Sachin: Right, that’s something that we are also facing with poetry. There’s this question of ‘oh, are you a political poet or are you just a poet’. How do you respond to these things? Guy: I find it kind of absurd. If you’re a human being and you live and breathe, you obviously have some kind of political viewpoint or political things affect you or social events affect you. Things just affect you. I have just never understood the compartmentalization of the whole thing. ................ Yogesh: We experienced similar things. We went to this school board meeting, just the kind of looks that we were getting while we were leaving or even just the people who were talking to us about the issue. If you say anything that is against what the national thinking is right now, you put yourself in a really difficult position because you’re looked at as unpatriotic. These events, they were really tragic, but they’re also really tragic in the sense that all these important causes like protesting the IMF, protesting the World Bank, the WTO, and bringing awareness to these issues, It’s seen as unpatriotic to do that. Guy: I think people now have to be seriously fucking brave and also seriously intelligent about the way they do stuff. I think now it’s really important for people to be on top of their shit but also to keep struggling and to keep not being intimidated. There were some peace protests here in DC that I went to and the feeling was so strange because the only people who would really show up, it was like the serious fringe, which was great. It was great that they had the courage to come out, but it really makes you wonder where the more middle of the road progressive people are standing right now. I just think the silence is really eerie. ................ The entire 17 page interview appears in the poetry journal PGI #5 Check back here because we will update the site with audio from the interview