“If I was a Muslim I’d be burning flags, its win, lose, or starve and we don’t know about that” - Sole
Internationally known musician/rapper/activist Sole recently made Denver his home. Sole has been called everything from genius to pretty boy, to the baddest poet, to the white based god. Either way he has been causing a great stir on the internet and social networks with his viral political songs from his upcoming mixtape Nuclear Winter Vol. 2. His latest song “Donald Trump In A Gilded Age (Mac Miller Détournement)” has lyrics such as, “You can’t eat money,” Money doesn’t grow on trees, it grows on the back of immigrants (and third world labor),” and in regards to Wisconsin’s current situation, “Watch equality rising the top 1% richest, making waiters out of teachers.” I recently had the pleasure to interview Sole:
1) Why did you start the Nuclear Winter mix tapes?
Originally, it was because URB Magazine asked me to make a podcast for them. I didn't wanna make a lazy mixtape of other people’s songs for them, so I decided to do something new. I had just listened to three versions of "My President" about Obama, and got annoyed. It was clear he wasn't changing shit so I wanted to make a song about it. Next thing I knew, I recorded 6 tracks like that. I sent it to URB and never heard back. So, I recorded 6 more songs and gave it away on my website. I made the record because I became obsessed with folk music, and the folk implications and possibilities of the gangsta rap mixtape aesthetic. I wanted to make anarchist anthems out of pop hits by using the Situationist method called “detournment.”
2) What are your thoughts on the protests in Wisconsin right now?
Well, I'm pretty moved by it. Last I heard, farmers were on tractors driving towards the capital. They say Madison is the Kremlin of America. Thank god. It's so sad Rus Feingold lost his seat to a tea party hack, he was one of the best people in the government. The American people are really going to suffer from their lack of curiosity. Not until they have lost everything will they realize it's time to take the country back, for the people, not for would-be tyrants posing as populists, a.k.a. phony libertarians who wish to bring about a new medieval age.
3) Could you see protests occurring in Denver if a similar law was passed?
I could. I very well could. Colorado is very progressive. I feel like Denver would be a pretty easy city to shut down.
4) What are your feelings on Denver becoming an embassy for UFO and extraterrestrial talk?
I didn't like the angle they took on it, I felt they trivialized the whole thing. By focusing on disclosure because they "have a cure for cancer" is some tinfoil hat shit. If you want to really have a serious conversation about extraterrestrials, all it takes is a little probability. There are far too many unexplainable events, going all the way back to Sumerian scripture, all of which raise enough questions to make this a worthwhile venture. I believe UFO's have visited the earth. I find it plausible that ancient gods were imperialists who used us to mine minerals. Why is this up for debate? The British Government has declassified its UFO documents and they are public property now. If the US government would open its books we would see what they know. Project Blue Book was a campaign to make all UFO theorists look like crackpots. That is why COASTTOCOAST AM shares the radio waves with Rush Limbaugh, and that is no coincidence. George Norey is a fake truther, an imperialist at heart, an evangelist for a phony spirituality, and a fear mongerer. All of this is a smoke screen to make people who are curious about the nature of our universe look like crackpots. Dick Cheney put it best when talking about WMD’s, “The absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence.”
5) You are a D.I.Y. artist, how does this relate to your feelings on the record industry, postmodernism, and capitalism?
I would say I'm an anarchist. Emma Goldman and her husband moved to Connecticut when they wanted to assassinate Carnegie. They opened up an ice cream shop and used it to buy a gun and make poison daggers. This is how I view art. When you are poor and broke you cannot fight the system, you need resources. By being DIY I keep all my money, no one is sucking the air out of my zeppelin. In an era where the only thing labels know how to do is spend money, and line their own pockets instead of making money for their artists, there is no use for labels. As a post modernist, I view the internet as a concrete battlefield. When French philosopher Baudrillard (inspiration for the matrix) was asked to cover the first Iraq war for Le Monde, he refused to go to Iraq. He wanted to watch the war from his living room on CNN, because as he put it, (and I paraphrase), "the war is not against the Iraqi people, its true target is the American people, and Vietnam syndrome." This sort of understanding informs my approach to art.
6) Who did bring in the tea party?
The tea party is ideologically backed & guided by Karl Rove and his good old boys network. The Tea Party Express is funded by the Koch brothers among others. They are the heirs to the coca cola company, who are known union busters in Columbia. In Central America, if you try to organize against coca cola you find your body dead in a ditch. This is who hijacked the populist rage against the economy and the wars in America, because the democrats are spineless cowards who are unable to go against their own special interests in favor of those who vote them in. These gutless wonders deserved to lose the last election. I don't know if I will ever vote for a democrat again. Who voted the tea party in? The uneducated masses in America who have a very narrow understanding of world history, economic theory, and get most of their information from Fox news because it confirms their racist/jingoist beliefs. I'm sorry if that sounds harsh, but Noam Chomsky called it before Obama got into office. He said that his biggest fear was that if the recession got worse, we would risk a rise to fascism if anyone could pull on the heart strings of the underprivileged and under-represented by race baiting. I'm not saying everyone in the tea party is racist, but it’s some racist shit. Let’s be real, Rand Paul ain’t no Ron Paul.
7) Do you think Charlie Sheen and Alex Jones are CIA agents?
I don't think Charlie Sheen is a CIA agent, if he is sign me up!
Sheen has been ripping it up and calling everyone out and I love it. Alex jones on the other hand very well could be a CIA agent, the thought has certainly crossed my mind. His politics are bizarre and his cult is grossly uninformed on world events. He too is a Fear monger. To me he is little more than a televangelist peddling DVD’s. He continually makes false predictions and his followers don't seem to fault him for this. I think he raises a lot of good points, but then draws absurd conclusions. Mexicans are new world order pawns? Really? No... the US government's subsidization of American farmers makes Central and South American farmers uncompetitive in their own markets... so they had to come north because they couldn't find jobs. This is not an issue anymore, they don't need to come to America to be broke.
Whether he is an agent or not I don’t care either way, the result is the same. My biggest problem with him is that his supporters get lost in the vortex of zeitgeist youtube videos instead of reading about world history or economics. Alex Jones, like Bill O’Reilly is an anti intellectual bully who gives his supporters all the fuel they need to look no further than what he tells them is the truth. I wish Alex Jones was a gateway drug for people to get into Howard Zinn, Slavoj Zizek, Chomsky, or Democracynow, but it seems like all that really results from that show is his supporters obsessing about things we can never prove, instead of actually trying to effect change in a meaningful way.
Another thing that not many people talk about is how after Obama got elected Glen Beck became Alex Jones. Albeit a more racist bullyish version, but he is Alex Jones 2.0 . I’m sure some execs at Fox sat him down and cherry picked all their favorite elements from Alex Jones and saw it as a tool to destroy the working class in America. It worked!
8) What do you think happened to Tower # 7?
I think it fell. I don't waste time on the 9-11 shit because if “the bush administration/NWO” blew up the towers, why didn't they fake finding WMD's in Iraq? These events have been the complete unfolding of American hegemony in the world, and the rise of non-aligned people's movements across Africa, the Middle East and Latin America...
This does NOT benefit the new world order... it sets it back. Power is its own conspiracy. We don't need an Illuminati or Bilderberg group, all we need is some greedy folks trying to make a buck at any cost.
9) You say, “Money doesn’t grow on trees, it grows on the back of immigrants (and third world labor),” why do you think immigration is such an inflamed topic in the U.S.?
The owners of the world will do anything to distract the masses from the real issues at hand. That said, yeah if you're a construction worker in Arizona your wages have been destroyed by immigration, but that's the fault of the bosses that hire them, not the folks trying to feed their families. America is a nation of Immigrants. The only people who have a right to bitch about immigration are the Native Americans.
The powers that be want to distract from the fact that we are a brutal empire that will stop at nothing to control the world’s resources. The American people have the lowest life expectancy of any civilized nation. We have the worst health care of any civilized nation. The average American life expectancy has actually gone DOWN since 2000 AD. When I got out of high school you could make $18 an hour answering phones... now you make that and you're rich! All the jobs have been outsourced and replaced by automation. We have been sold a lie: work hard, go to college, own a home because it will go up in value because the sun is shining on it. If its got an FDA approval it can’t be harmful. If a doctor prescribes it, it must be good for you.
The American education system does little to educate. I grew up thinking America invented democracy... but it was invented by the Greeks... back then only rich people could vote... everyone can vote now, but thanks to recent supreme court ruling on Citizens United the real voting will be done by the dollar. Citizens United says a corporation can spend as much as it wants to get an individual elected, that’s the irony of how the tea party swept into power. These people thought they were throwing the robber barons out of power, but they just brought in a new horde of them.
10) What are your feelings on Bradley Mannings treason “charges”?
First of all, Bradley manning hasn't been proven guilty of anything, yet he is in solitary confinement most of the day and subject to inhumane treatment. This is illegal yet nobody stands against it. So let’s say he is innocent, we very well could have destroyed a young man's mind. Let's say he is guilty... then I say "that's treason you can believe in." The powers that be are scared shitless that more Bradley Mannings will pop up so they want to make an example out of him. It’s a sad state of affairs. Bradley Manning is also gay, makes me wonder: if the military hadn't marginalized his sexual preference would he have even done this in the first place? Whatever happened to "innocent until proven guilty?" Is this how we treat American citizens? Is this how we treat the people who dedicate their lives to defend the constitution? And when they act on that oath is this how we should treat them?
The real war criminals here are Bush & Cheney. The Wikileaks documents exposed countless examples of US officials using blackmail to bully around our allies. We have used our consulates as spies, under Bush & Obama we have violated the Geneva Conventions countless times. When that chemical spill happened in Greece, the CEO was brought to court. In America, the BP oil spill contaminated the ocean, yet the CEO gets a pension and no jail time. If it was a Shakespeare play, it would be poetic, but since it's the reality it's more of a tragedy. A uniquely American tragedy.
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Sole and the Skyrider band will be releasing their newest album “Hello Cruel World” in July of this year. Look out for Nuclear Winter Vol. 2.
For more info on Sole:
HTTP://YOUTUBE.COM/SOLEONEDOTORG
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