Henry Rollins is best known for being the former frontman of the influential rock band Black Flag. Though the music may have stopped, that hasn’t silenced one of the founding fathers of punk.
Through the years, Rollins has remained a relevant figure by being a jack-of-all-trades. Since retiring his angsty lyrics, he has stayed busy owning a record publishing company, writing for the LA Weekly, hosting his own radio show, penning novels and giving audiences a piece of his mind.
Rollins visited the Manship Theatre on Monday night as part of his latest endeavor, the “Capitalism” tour. Rollins’ pre-election tour consists of 50 stops, one in each state’s capital city.
The Daily Reveille spoke to Rollins in August about his spoken-word performances, traveling around the globe, “Adventure Time” and dubstep.
The Daily Reveille: What does the new tour material cover?
Henry Rollins: I am going to be quick to remind my fellow Americans … there’s a lot more that unites us than which divides us. I think a lot of people seem to forget that these days. Things have become very, very polarized and at some points very, very hostile. That’s the wrong way to go about being an American, more importantly being a fellow American.
TDR: Because this is a pre-election tour, is the focus going to be heavy on politics?
Rollins: No. I mean, I think at this point, I think everyone knows who they’re going to vote for, if they’re going to vote. It would never, ever be for me to tell you who to vote for. I think that’s very insulting. I would hope that you vote, and in my opinion, democracy needs you. But who you vote for is none of my damn business. I point out a few street-level political things every now and then. All the politics, my political opinions are derived from reports, you know numbers, not emotion and what I see on the street. It’s just real things— real statistics, real numbers and human motivation.
TDR: Has traveling impacted your mindset for this upcoming tour?
Rollins: Well, yeah. When you see what people endure on a day-to-day basis, it’s a matter of food insecurity, water insecurity, decades-long wars. In the case of being in southern Sudan, meeting young people abducted by the Lord’s Resistance Army and in Uganda, as I did. When you see the daily struggle of some people and what they call normal and how they just get on with things, it’s fairly astonishing. It can make you very pro-people, in that you see how adaptable humans are, how extraordinarily tough they can be — and while being that, they’re also extraordinarily generous and friendly to strangers, like me. So that’s probably been the biggest upside of the travel that I do and the places that I go — the generosity of humans. People are great.
TDR: I read that you did a small voice acting part for the Cartoon Network show “Adventure Time.” Can you tell me about that experience?
Rollins: Well, it’s a wonderful show. It’s perfectly positioned where the adult in the room might get more out of it than the kid in the room. I think that’s the fine art of cartoons. Quite often parents have to sit with the kids, and so the cartoonists and the writers have to make it enjoyable. They build them for adults, and “Adventure Time” does that very well.
TDR: I know you’ve never been a fan of rave music. Would you care to weigh in on the dubstep craze from a musician’s point of view?
Rollins: I think it’s music, and long may it wave, but the only problem I’ve ever had with DJs, having had to share festival sites with them, is the incredible amount — well some of them at least — the incredible amount of self-importance. I mean, please. You’re sampling an Al Green song, you’re not Al Green. Having been looked down the noses of DJ ‘Who-y Who and the whatevers’ more than once, I’m like, ‘Really? Are you kidding me? Man, you play records. Guess what, last night you know what I did? I played records too, in my living room. Like oh, am I a DJ too? Do I get to act like a jerk?’ Dubstep isn’t anything I pay that much attention to, but it’s not war, it’s only music.
TDR: Are there any causes or social issues that college students should be especially aware of or involved in? What do you think our age group can do to build a better future?
Rollins: I think you better become very well-acquainted with the world that you’re about to go into and try and carve a living out of. The environment you’re going into right now is very unstable, very hostile and to a certain degree, uncertain. If it were me, I wouldn’t be goofing off, I would be squeezing every bit of juice out of my instructors, professors and teachers, not getting high and blowing off college. You’re going to need all of the intellectual ammo you can get when you get out there because it’s a very fast-moving game. There are a lot of real bastards who are keeping you from an income because they need, apparently, 10 incomes. So you’re going to be OK. It’s just the more time you spend making your mind like a Lamborghini, the better off you’re going to be.
