From what I see, nowadays punk and anarchy are still connected with "fast loud music by smelly drunk chaos-people" and, yes, I know I'm over-generalizing here. So when the occasional venue still describes us The ex as "anarchopunk" that's a real bummer, since it attracts an audience that expects a kind of music - which we don't play - and it keeps away another audience that actually might have liked it when they would have come. That's a pity, for both them and us.
G.W. SokPunk, and rock in general, is often very myopic. When people sing about "the world," they're generally focused almost entirely on the west and Europe. Sometimes South America. Sometimes Asia. But rarely Africa. The Ex, famously, is one of the few rock acts to travel and perform in Africa which, may be home to more musicians than just about anywhere else in the world.
G.W. SokIn the 1960s, people like Bob Dylan, his music and words were a threat to the society and mainstream of the time. It shook people alive, and directly and indirectly things changed. But, as I see it, the change is never through the music alone. It's also the circumstances around the music that will cause/create the effect. And sometimes it's just strictly accidental that a piece of music becomes a form of protest.
G.W. SokAfter 9/11, we had this "terrorist-Muslim-threat" in the US but at the same time, next to that, in Holland we had this growing awareness that the so-called integration of new Dutch people, a lot of those that had come to live and work in our country originated from countries such as Turkey and Morocco, and a lot of them are actually Muslim, wasn't quite the success the state always had thought it was. The "new" Dutch didn't feel totally accepted, treated as second-rate citizens, and parts of the "old" Dutch suddenly believed that the new ones were trying to destroy our society.
G.W. SokI believe in freedom of speech, and at the same time I think that sometimes it can be worth it to not say something. In my opinion there is a sort of limit to that freedom, but where that limit exactly lies is open for discussion. As soon as there is no longer any discussion possible, than it has reached its limits and therefore freedom of speech will no longer exist.
G.W. SokFrom what I see, nowadays punk and anarchy are still connected with "fast loud music by smelly drunk chaos-people" and, yes, I know I'm over-generalizing here. So when the occasional venue still describes us The ex as "anarchopunk" that's a real bummer, since it attracts an audience that expects a kind of music - which we don't play - and it keeps away another audience that actually might have liked it when they would have come. That's a pity, for both them and us.
G.W. Sok