OTEP INTERVIEW
Earlier this year Otep made a short visit to the UK to play some intimate venues on their Art Of Dissent European Tour. With Swansea chosen as one of those dates, we spoke to the vocalist prior to the gig. Otep Shamaya was surprisingly in a amicable mood considering the day she’d had in Wales’ second city. During the day she'd been ripped off, verbally abused, threatened, seen her band mate assaulted, threatened with arrest and stranded in a strange city. Yet she was still generous with her time and spoke to us not only about current album ‘Kult 45’, but at length about US politics and equal rights. This is her state of the union address. We start by picking up on an earlier conversation we had with Otep about rape, something that she has written about on ‘Kult 45’ with ‘Trigger Warning’s graphic lyrics.
“I don’t know how things are in Wales, but in other parts of the UK, when we went to the cinema there was an ad for reproductive rights for women and the morning after pill. In America that's considered heresy. It's either the church or all the right winger idiots - they think that it’s the abortion pill - they don’t understand how women's bodies work. When they put together a women's reproductive rights council in congress, it was all men and one of the men said that if a woman is raped, her body instinctively knows that it’s been raped and will shut down the pregnancy. And if she doesn't then she wasn't raped.”
Don't you think one of the first casualties of fundamentalism is irony?
“Sure, but they lack the capacity for irony.”
One of the biggest is pro-lifers sending death threats?
"Of course. Or the fact that they support the death penalty. Or the fact that they’re not candy striping cancer wards. We've got concentration camps down at the southern borders of America where they are holding asylum seekers where at least three children have died in US custody. Some of them were as young as 8 months old. I think the oldest was 7 years old. At least four that I know of between 12 and 14 year old girls have been raped by guards and they were told that if you tell anybody we’ll kill you. Or we’ll send you back or you’ll never be found again. So obviously they didn’t say anything until one of the older girls saw them crying. They don't say anything about that. They don’t go to St Jude’s hospital in America, I don’t know whether they have that out here - it's a free hospital for children with cancer. It's all funded by donations, fundraisers and that kind of thing and it's these children that have lymphoma and stage 4 leukemia and every day they wake up not knowing if they are going to live or die. Yet none of those people are standing outside of abortion clinics or women's reproductive rights clinics. None of those people that are protesting there are going to these clinics and helping these children have a better day. Every if they have one more day, one more hour, one more second they could bring a smile to their face. They could dress up as a clown or bring them cake or something to make them happy. They don’t do that.
“In the States we played at a venue that oddly enough, right next door, there was a women's reproductive clinic and they do mammograms, smears, they give out free birth control to women who need it at certain economic levels and also they perform abortions and so there were some protestors outside. They had some security people that were outside checking the women. These women aren’t walking in all happy. This is a huge decision for a woman to make. Going to the gynecologist is a big, scary and uncomfortable thing. You are very vulnerable and even though the women that make this choice for themselves and for the baby (‘cos they're not in any position to raise a child at this point), it's still a very difficult decision for them to make. I went over to the protestors as I’m wont to do and I said to them, ‘I’m with you’, because first of all, they thought what is she doing here, you know baby killer and all this stuff, so I said, ‘no, I'm with you. I've got the solution, we could end it right now.’ They said ‘OK, what's the solution?’. ‘Mandatory vasectomies. No baby batter, no baby. There you go.You don’t have to worry about it anymore. There’s no more rape, no more abortion clinics’. And the lady goes ‘Mmm’ and the guy just walks off. They don't want to do anything real. Vasectomies can be reversed, locals, in and out of the office in an hour. They don't want to do anything real about it. It's all imaginary to give these people some sense of purpose, some sense of divine connection.”
I think it's just appeasing a sky fairy.
“It’s that and it's also a form of cultural control. They want to make women a permanent underclass.”
To put it into context, in this country we have TV adverts reminding people that they are not allowed to rape, so what does that say about society?
“It's tough out there, you know. At least you guys have that here. At least you have some sense that women own their body a little bit more than they do in the States. In the States it's a little tougher and that might change now that we've had this historic election recently where 100 women were elected to congress on the 100th anniversary of the suffragette movement, which is fantastic. It might change for the better and I'm hopeful. And I’m a lesbian so it doesn't matter to me personally but it does matter to me in general as far as injustice to women and their rights.”
Dare I say it, you sound very optimistic.
“I am. For the first time in 2 years.”
Listening to the album it doesn't come across like you're optimistic at all.
“Well that was right after Trump was selected and so at that time, I wasn’t. He is the most unqualified person ever to be in office. He doesn’t know how a bill becomes a law, he doesn’t know how the government works. He thought it was a pyramid - that the president sits up here and everything else is beneath but its equal. Three equal houses of government , but the Republicans own both houses - they own the senate and the house of representatives so he was free to do whatever he wanted to do. He was so ineffective because his tiny amount of supporters like to believe that he is a successful businessman. HE IS NOT. He’s filed for bankruptcy I think 11 times in 4 years. Do you get Mad Magazine over here? In the 1990s Mad Magazine actually did a cartoon about him. He’s on his knees begging US banks to loan to him because they won’t loan to him. Then behind him are the Chinese government and the Saudis and now the Russians. So that's where he was getting most of his money. He was selling these ridiculously gaudy apartments to government officials and billionaires to these very powerful people in Russia, China and Saudi.”
Whilst I agree with you on the Trump issue, do you think Trump is more a symptom that the actual problem itself in so much as it shows the whole political system has now got to the point that those two people - the so called best two candidates to lead the free world?
“First of all, we have this very archaic system in America where you have the popular vote which Hillary Clinton won by 3 million votes - more than any candidate ever; at least in modern era. And he won the electoral college which is designed to help slave owners by 77,000 votes. So there's the difference. The majority of Americans wanted to move forward with Hillary Clinton, the majority of Americans wanted to move forward with the Obama policies and she actually sat with Bernie Sanders and they designed the new Democratic platform so they were going to build on Obama’s successful policies and then advance those even further. They all get socialised medicine through their government jobs. So the majority of Americans wanted to move forward with Hillary Clinton who, just with the numbers, not by gender was the most qualified person ever to run for presidency in the history of the United States just by her education, what she's accomplished in life, first lady and all the things. I mean if we remember when her husband was president, she was one of the first active first ladies. We’ve got active first ladies in the past, but there was a time when they became more figureheads and they brought cookies and tea and that kind of thing. Well she actually wanted to be involved in helping to push and make social change and Obama care which is what they call medicare for all, which is socialised medicine basically. She started it in the 90s and it was called Hillary care. She proposed universal health care for all people and they shot her down for it. They said that she was a commi and socialist, which shows how stupid they are because they don't realise that communism and socialism are competing ideologies. She has done so much, has been a senator for New York and was there during 9/11. She was on all the different committees that helped with the first responders and was also trying to find who did it.
“Then being Secretary of State under President Obama, she was one of the most successful secretaries of state that we have ever had. She brought with her this knowledge and she was a working class person too. She wasn't born into money. She got her law degree and then she chose to dedicate her entire life to public service. The Clintons have more money than God; they are wealthy and could be sitting on yachts in the mediterranean somewhere; but no, she's still, at her age, devoting her life to public service. And the hitjob that they've done on her for three odd years has probably been one of the most scandalous things that's ever been done to a person ever.
“Now we look back and I knew it then that the people that voted for Bush, voted for Trump, now say ‘ooh, ouch, bad idea’, because one of the things that they attacked her on was that she wanted to put a no fly zone in Syria which means that all the refugees would be safe in a particular area. If they knew that those 1988 era Soviet migs were going to fly over and try and cluster bomb civilians, our drones and our superior fire power would have shot them right out of the fucking sky. Oops, I swore.”
I’m not offended.
“Call the cops, they'll be here in 5 hours,” laughs Otep, after her experiences of the local constabulary. “People on the conservative side of American politics, they still watch old movies and they don't understand that the Soviet Union fell, that it doesn't exist any more and that Russia isn't really a superpower any more. They have one aircraft carrier that runs on diesel. They have to have a fuelling ship that follows it and they don't even have that cool rubber band thing that shoots the airplanes off the end of it. They have a skateboard rank and if that pilot doesn't get enough torque at the end, he's going to drop. There's a great documentary in the States on Netflix called Active Measures. You saw where the Russians tried out what they did with Trump first in Crimea. They had a Trump like candidate versus a female candidate who was very similar to Hillary Clinton. She was educated, she was smart, she was well liked by the people and they released all this fake information and fake news stories about her and he won.. When they decided that Trump was going to be the right guy for them, he’s easily bought and sold. Whether or not they've got these tapes on him which is all everyone talks about in America, these terrible tapes they may have with some kind of compromising material on him. He's just a blithering idiot and it would be easy for Putin to say ‘Donald, your hair, it's the most beautiful hair I've ever seen and your hands are so big, my god they're the biggest hands in the world’ and Donald’s like ‘yeah, I like it. Alright what do you want me to do?’ Everything that he's done - now he's pulling us out of Syria, which helps Assad and it also helps Russia and it also helps Iran in a strange way.”
Didn't Putin, Assad and Erdogan have a meeting recently to decide what's going to happen in Syria?
“I think they did yes and so by pulling the US troops out that means that they are definitely going to win. That allows Russia to have a much larger presence in that area which then gives them more territory and makes them more of a military power.”
It allows them to have more gas.
“Yes, which makes Putin richer. The theory is that he might be the richest man in the world because everything's nationalised in Russia so he's the top guy and every oil, gas, whatever else, the payments go to him.”
Did you hear about the Russian poisoning case in the UK? When Putin was spoken to and the Russians accused, the first retaliation was we’ll cut your gas off. Going back to my question, I don't agree with Trump and I don't agree with Clinton but I think it was more of an indictment - have you seen the old Bill Hicks sketch where he goes: ‘U.S. politics - hi, I’m a red puppet, I represent the Democratic party; I’m the blue puppet, I represent the Republican party. Wait a minute, that’s the same guy with both puppets.’
“No that's a falsehood and I'll tell you why because I'm not saying that there's not corrupt politicians on both sides, there are, but in fact the very definition of being a politician means that you have to be corrupt. Politics corrupts. Power corrupts. The platform of the Democratic party is very different from the platform of the Republican party, so when you sign on to a particular party you are signing on to that particular platform. When you stand on the Democratic platform they are standing for the working class. They stand for women's rights, equal rights for gays and lesbians, equal rights for all Americans. They stand for common sense immigration, lower taxes on the working class and higher taxes on the rich and universal health care education for all. One of Hillary Clinton’s platforms was going to be that if you made less than $100,000 a year you got free community college.
“The Republican platform is tax cuts for the wealthy, trickle down economics which means that the more money they have that somehow it trickles down to the working men. The only thing that runs downhill is shit and it's definitely not going to be rich people and it’s economically factual that it never works. It didn't work under Reagan. Even his own vice president called it voodoo economics so there is a difference between the parties. There may not be a difference between certain politicians, like we have a guy called Joe Manchin who is a Democrat out of Montana. He's a very conservative Democrat but he's a Democrat, so sometimes he still votes on the Democratic side. Then you have to decide as a person who is a progressive like I am, do I want a Republican or Democrat in that seat. I want a Democrat in that seat because essentially there's a big possibility that the Democrats are going to retake the senate and if that happens, if he stays in office, he will then have, depending on how he votes, if he votes against the party, he can be pulled off different committees. He can have certain sanctions put against him and that's what Nancy Pelosi did as Madam speaker. She rallied the entire Democratic party in the house and said we are one party. The first thing she said was ‘you're not getting your wall, you're not getting funding for the wall, you couldn't get it when you owned both houses of congress, you're not getting it now’.
“Another thing that they did, they put a bill on the floor to help raise the minimum wage in the country, so there is a difference. This idea that there is no difference is a ploy to give people who say voting doesn't matter, being engaged and involved doesn't matter, being informed doesn’t matter because nothing matters. It's the same guy with 2 puppets - no it isn't. IT IS NOT. We’re all humans, we all have the ability to be corrupted one way or the other, but there is a difference and the side you choose is to what you are to stand for and the Democrats and the Liberals stand for equal rights for all people; living wage for the working class; health care for all people; better education; higher wages for teachers, police officers, fire department; better, smarter military and smarter border security. I'm not going to say wall as I guess Trump has never heard of a ladder or a shovel or anything else. Even when he went down to his own border and met with border control they showed hmi our wall goes down 20 feet into the ground and they're building a subway under there. And El Chapo who’s one of the biggest drug lords said that most of the drugs weren't brought in on the border they were brought in on cargo ships and where do those containers get checked? They come from overseas and where does Trump have interests?”
Trump is on about keeping people from coming in with nefarious agendas, but people who come in with nefarious agendas will look at something like the wall and find a different route. It’s as simple as that. All it’s going to stop is people with legitimate concern and do it the proper fashion.
“The statistics on illegal immigrants, undocumented people or whatever you want to call them, people who've come in through the wall, over the border, whatever you want to say, that come in with or for nefarious reasons, is a very small statistic compared to actual home grown Americans. They other day he was talking about the wall and he had some women that had lost their children...illegal aliens as they were calling them. However just yesterday or the day before, five officers were shot by a 21 year old man who was an intern for a day, got fired, walked outside, got a gun, came back inside and killed everybody. That was on the year anniversary of the school shooting that happened. The true national emergency is Trump. The people that rape or assault or kill or murder, statistics of undocumented people vs natural born citizens of America is astronomically different. It's a tiny percentage vs a macro cosmic. Most people are encouraged either by someone they know or their spouse or random acts of violence that happen in neighbourhoods and all that. He's not addressing Chicago where there's gang violence. He's not talking about that. He's not trying to take guns out of people’s hands. In fact he's just doing this playbook that Autocrats do - find an enemy, make it the other, it doesn't matter whether it's true or not, scare everybody….”
Was it Goebbels that said say it often enough and people will believe it?
“Yes, the bigger the lie, the more people believe it. When he went through this whole thing with the wall, he said Mexico's going to pay for it and Mexico's like, ‘we’re not paying for this. There's nothing you can do to make us pay for this.’ In fact the joke is now like if they do build a wall, Mexico should put a staircase on the other side. What are they going to do to stop them? The walls I want to see built for Trump are prison walls.”
Going back to the music, there's a stark difference in talking to you now and listening to the album because the album was so guttural and so primal. Is it something you look back on and say that was a snapshot of that time or do you still feel like that?
“Well I've been out of America for 3.5 weeks now so it's a little different to seeing his bloated sewage face all the time and hearing his dumbness and his constant splurge of stupidity. ‘I'm going to stop ISIS in a week.’ Really? He couldn't do it and he's not going to be able to do it. The fact that he is a known sexual predator (as is Bill Clinton), the fact that he's been caught on tape saying he just walks up and grabs them, well I'm from Los Angeles. We've never considered Trump a star. He said if you’re a star, they'll let you do it. No, he's an idealist reality TV star. That's all he is and he was the butt of every joke. I’ve been introduced to some very wealthy people who are great benefactors and great advocates for animal rights and equal rights and human rights and they've known Trump for a long time and they say he's a racist, he's a sexist, he's an idiot and we've never considered him to be one of us and that's his biggest problem. He's just some idiot from Long Island or wherever he came from and he never felt like he was part of the gang. It’s affected him so badly over the years that even becoming president wasn't enough for him. He doesn't feel like he's made it yet. He needs more and more and more power because that's all he knows. But everything that he touches dies - Trump States, Trump Airlines, Trump Magazine, Trump University. Imagine this, here's the President of the United States of America, he’s elected or selected to be president, he's forced to pay $25 million for a stupid university which was later considered fraudulent. He had to pay $25 million for fraud before he was inaugurated. He was still elected but they hadn't inaugurated him. They had to close down his charity for the same reason. Now they're looking into his inauguration which somehow amassed to $100 million and didn't spend any of it or hardly any of it.”
Considering that Trump has spent the vast majority of his presidency thus far, undoing what Obama did - he's overturned Obama care, he's taken you out of the Iran deal - say worse case scenario he gets another 4 years, once that time’s up, can't whoever comes next just undo what he's done? Or do you think that the damage would be too much because you can see society being really ripped apart by this presidency. It's like the death of democracy - the right to disagree seems to have become if you don't agree I'll punch you in the face - people are literally fighting in the street.
“People are being attacked. They (Trump supporters) actually attacked a BBC reporter and camera person the other day because he kept on saying ‘fake news, fake news.’ He's making it where the media are getting death threats which again is a page out of the autocrat playbook. You spoke earlier about President Obama - we miss him so much - he inherited George W Bush and Dick Cheney's disaster. At that time, we still are, fighting two wars and not doing very well in those wars because those guys are playing chequers not chess. At the same time, the US auto industry was collapsing, the housing market was collapsing, we were on the verge of the greatest recession, so it took Obama about three years to fix what George W Bush destroyed. From that point forward, he tried very hard to reach a compromise with the Republicans who were in congress at the time and unfortunately I think he bit at that carrot way too many times because they would just say, ‘yes, we’ll do this’ and then he would say ‘yes we've got this plan’ and then they'd come back and say ‘no, we’re not going to do that.’ It was hampered in so many ways.
“What's happened in the first two years of Trump's presidency is that he's been coasting on what Obama and Biden built together - Obama's military - fantastic - it's one of the most advanced, fair militaries in the world, our economy and he's coasting on that, our stock market, all those things and now it's starting to fall apart. There's still about 700 jobs that havent been filled in the White House two years in because he doesn't know what to do. He’s hiring people from Fox News to work in the White House to advise him. If he gets another four years I don't know where we’ll be. We might be a third world country by then because they are rolling back regulations on clean air and clean water - he doesn't think climate change is real. He's in the pockets of oil farmers so he's rolling back regulations on them.
“One of the things that upset me tremendously was President Obama had helped trans kids in schools who were getting bullied and Chump rolled this back. Why? There was no point in doing that. He had no reason to do that. That's just evil. That's just mean, that's just being a bully. There's no reason to try and hurt someone that already feels like they're an outcast, that’s already trying to find their place in their own world without pulling back protections from them so that they are not going to be hurt or bullied. Now we’re seeing an unprecedented amount of suicides amongst young children. This has affected me deeply as a member of the LGBTQ community who is very vocal about coming out, being out, being proud and there's nothing wrong with you, there's nothing to be ashamed of, you are born who you are. There was a nine year old boy who came out and the day he came out, he went to school and he was bullied so badly. The teachers did nothing, the councillors did nothing, the principal, the superintendent - nobody did anything to protect this little boy. He was bullied so badly. He was nine. He killed himself, committed suicide.
“Another little boy who was ten told his parents he thinks he's bisexual. They tied him up and they tortured him for ten days and they beat him with a shovel until he died. His own parents.
“This is from a man who has connections with a convicted paedophile who used to go to these parties where they would have these young girls - they'd bring these girls over from Europe at 14 and they make them look like they're older than they are and they were offering them drugs, drink and they were like, ‘yeah we live in New York in these big penthouses’ and they're forced to have sex with these older men and Trump was one of them. For him to have this strange moral superiority to say that he has the right to tell someone else what is right is wrong.”
Isn't that how Bill Cosby fell because he went on TV moralising and people went …
“The thing is about Bill Cosby again goes back to power. People in Hollywood knew about Bill Cosby, they've known about it for 30 years. I talked to a friend of mine who’s an academy award nominated screenwriter, very connected in that world. He said he knows for a fact there's an agent - Bill Cosby's agent and he has this red folder on his desk and that red folder is for that call. When it comes in that he's caught. Bill Cosby had so much money at one time he offered to buy NBC.”
He was the biggest star in America.
“He's some 80 odd years old and now the women are finally being believed because it's now becoming more overwhelming and in some ways, Trump helped that a little bit by exposing it and bringing it to light. So if there is some sort of silver lining - which is hard to say there's a silver lining on a pile of shit - it's the fact that Trump's blatant idiocy and hypocrisy exposes so many people that swept across America that Bill Cosby was struck up in and a lot of other people as well. Unfortunately, somehow Trump has predated that even though he's got five children by three different women. If President Obama had five children by three different women what do you think? He's an Afro-American. People call him Afro-American which I have an issue with.”
If I remember rightly, they went after his Obama’s mother.
“They did, they went after his mother. They also went after his father and said he was a Muslim Kenyan socialist, communist, fascist which means they don’t even understand. They threw everything against him. But he was also a black radical Christian. Who was also a Muslim. I mean it's like they cant keep their story straight. Whatever’s scary. That's what they were throwing at him. Fascism, marxism - these are all competing ideologies you idiots, but my issue again in America we separate races by saying African American, Asian American, even Native American, which is the indigenous Americans, but not white people. They just call them whites. Why? That is not our land. We came from here, we came from this side of the pond so why aren't we European americans? Which we should be.
“They do that because that provides a false sense of white supremacy in America which America is actually a dominion for white rich males and thats what its for. That's the only reason why they do it. The only people that don't deserve a prefix are the indigenous folks because it’s their land. They've been there for 35,000 years before they discovered Columbus lost at sea. I've been pushing this a lot. I actually wrote an article. I've actually been thinking of writing a book about it. I wrote an essay recently for a feminist organisation. It started off about women not having last names. Like our names are from the paternal side. It’s either your husband’s name or your mother’s father’s name and that goes back to the ancient times when men were named after the land they lived on. Or if they were servants, something they did.
“One of my relatives is Irish and their name means keeper of the gate. Women were maids or maidens and if you didn't have a husband then you were either worthless to society or you were made to go to a convent. The term old maid, that was a big deal. So women don't have their own last names which means that we don't have our own identities. We are basically relegated to property. We are property to be exchanged from our father to our husband and if you don't have that then you have no identity. It means that we are robbed of what our ancestors did for the advancement of civilisation. We can go back into ancient Egypt - the first to female pharaohs, I can't pronounce the first one sorry but the second one was Hatshepsut - there was in native America before the European invasion gender roles were almost unimaginable. Some tribes recognised as many as 5 genders - male, female, two spirited male, two spirited female, transgender. Then the colonists came and said no, you're a guy, you're a girl, that's it. Even though they had their own proclivities that they didn't want to talk about. I've veered into that as well because again that robs people of a certain type of history - that identity of hate, there was people here from 35,000 years.”
They've just brought in here over the last decade a black history month. I know that it's been over in your country a lot longer. Do you think there should be a female history month?
“Absolutely. Sure. We do have something similar to that. We do have a women's history month. What they've done is certain states have minimised women's contributions to society. They actually took Hillary Clinton out of textbooks. They took out someone else too. What we learn in schools over there is George Washington, who was the first President of the United States every year since you're in first grade to fifth grade. I get that, he's on our money. But what else is there to know? We also have monuments like Mount Rushmore with all these white presidents or European American presidents on there. Where are the attributes to Sitting Bull? Or to Crazy Wolf or Chief Seattle? Those people who - see our forefathers, as very flawed people. They were very inventive but flawed. They were smart and the fact that they were wealthy and didn't want to pay any more taxes to the king because they were like, we’re over here, why are we paying money to him? So they decided to declare that we’re our own country now. And when they decided that they didn't want to be … at first they wanted a president for life and George Washington said it was too much like a monarchy, we don't want to do that. George Washington was reluctant. He didn't want to be president, but they borrowed all these great ideas from all these great civilisations. Democracy was invented by the pagan Greeks, the senate was invented by the Etruscans and was later pulled in by the Romans. Benjamin Franklin, who was very instrumental in developing a lot of our early ideas, was very impressed with the aircorp federation where all the chiefs of all the tribes would get together and vote. Now the one thing that they left out was when they would vote. They would always vote with the idea that what would happen on this decision that we vote for seven generations ahead? What if everything that we did now, we thought 7 generations ahead? But they left that part out. They also left out the part that women could have the right to vote and after the civil war ended, free African Americans who were former slaves, males had the right to vote before women. European American women had the right to vote before African American women. We've had in this history a very cramped and volatile history of war and segregation and oppression that when we were living under President Obama, we felt like this breath of fresh air.
“There’s a funny meme on instagram that was like cracker, cracker, cracker, cracker all the way until you get to Obama, when there's a piece of candy, but that showed the difference of being led by all these people. It never showed the diversity of our country. You look back at the segregation rule and you see that we desegregated schools in America and you see these European American teenagers throwing milk and eggs at these African American children as they are entering and people say bullying is at an all time high! I’m like, what about the 1960s or 1950s? That was really bad. I think bullying was a lot harsher then than it is now. Those European American teenagers grew up. In a very small amount of time, we've done a lot of great things but the conservatives like to glorify their forefathers as being these deities, without looking at their flaws. Their slaves - they raped their slaves, you can’t have sex with your slave and not rape her because she's not willing. She's not going to say no. They tore families apart. They had hemp farms, which is insane, when you think of George Washington sitting with his pipe, smoking weed and some of our early money was made out of hemp. The hypocrisies were madness and so when suffragettes fought for the right to vote, the ku klux klan would throw acid in their face. The rule of thumb was a real thing. You could beat your wife with anything that was not wider than your thumb.
“One of the things I remember I read was one of the journals of one of the earliest colonists who arrived in early America and one of the things that he noticed about the native Americans was how smooth their skin was. They weren't covered in pox and all the plagues and everything that were brought over from Europe. That's why they wiped out so many native Americans because they didn't have the immune system for it that European Americans had developed over time. In fact the silent genocide that occurred towards them is not taught in our history books either where the United States military (and the reason I bring this up is pertinent because of Trump, he likes to call Senator Elizabeth Warren, Pocahontas which is also a major slur because Pocahontas was only 14 years old) forced Pocahontas to go with them and help them explore, forced to marry and all that. So these were paedophiles. One of the things the U.S. cavalry did was, during the winter, the native americans were freezing, so they gave them blankets and the blankets were covered in pox so it was biological warfare that killed them.
“There was Wounded Knee. He brought this up recently that the wall was going to be the Democrats Wounded Knee. Wounded Knee was a massacre. There was a movement within the native American community, it was called the ghost dance where they had this one prophet from this tribe that united all these other tribes together under the one idea that if we all worked together we could become self sufficient. If we stopped fighting amongst ourselves between tribes, between nations, we could love each other, put that first, nature would reward us, the gods would reward us, we would love each other, we would become independent and we would become a stronger sovereign nation. But in order to do that we had to do several things and one is to take care of each other, keep the villages clean, make sure everybody's healthy, make sure everybody's got food and also we must do the ghost dance. Basically it's just you step in a circle together with their feet and that's the ghost dance. It scared the hell out of the European American military, so they said we can’t have them united and they told them it was forbidden. Well they decided you don't have the right to tell us that, we’re on our own land that you gave us. We signed a treaty, this is our land, we can do what we want.
“One day they found out that they were doing the ghost dance at Wounded Knee. They waited for the braves to leave on the morning hunt and the cavalry charged in, murdered almost everybody there - women, children, the infirm, the elderly and some of the braves that had stayed behind, by the time they had heard the shots, they returned and most of the cavalry was leaving at that point and they did some of the most atrocious things. They cut the genitals out of the men, women and babies and they put them on their saddle horns or they put them around their hats and they scalped them and pararded them around as if they were treasure that they had just found. It was evil because they dehumanised them. It's still in part of our early writings.”
I think politically people are no longer seeing the either side, they're no longer seeing people as people, they're desensitising them….
“I disagree with you there. I disagree with this centrism that you like to do. You place blame equally on both sides and that's a deadly mistake for you to do that because when Trump first did his flight ban on the seven nations that never attacked America or never did anything wrong, there were people there from the Black Lives Matters movement, people there from the LGBTQ community; there were people there from all walks of life. There were even Trump supporters there which they got them to move rather quickly because they were saying some pretty horrible things. That was at LAX. 10,000 people showed up to the airport, so there's a difference between people showing up to support solidarity and the other people that show up on the other side. The conservatives want to exclude people that aren't white, who aren't male, who aren't christian, who aren't rich. So there's a difference. You can't apply the same standard from one side to the other if it’s not equal. That's a false equivalency and that's part of the problem. That's what keeping people from being proactive. It keeps them from being informed and involved and active and reactive. It allows this void to happen, which then allows these ideas to occur that ‘oh yes, I am superior to you because no one’s standing up to you’.
“When we had the women's march which was right after Trump's election, it was the largest march on Washington in the history of the United States of America. A million women showed up and the sister marches in Los Angeles 750,000 people turned up - men,women, children. There was another march that I went to and there was people there from all walks of life. Native Americans were there in their full regalia playing, It was all for the idea to support folks that were being marginalised and preyed upon, who were being told that they were not allowed in this country when the idea of America was that we don't come from a blood line, we’re not a monarchy. The poem ‘The New Colossus’ said:
"Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,”
That's what America's supposed to be for. We’re supposed to invite people in and then it becomes a better country the more we have. When the evangelicals come after the gay people, I say, you need to throw your phone in the trash because a gay man invented the computer - Alan Turing. Unfortunately the British government, after he helped defeat Hitler, they chemically destroyed him. The funny thing is that they say he committed suicide by taking a bite out of a poison apple and what's on the back of all Macintosh computers? An apple with a bite out of it.
Also Tim Cook, the head of Apple - gay man.
“When people say they don't believe in immigrants, there's a man whose name is Steve King, he's a congressman of Iowa. He said ‘what's wrong with white supremacy? What other culture has ever done anything for the advancement of civilisation except for white people?’ Again, throw away your computer man. Don't look at your TV because an immigrant probably wrote the code for that. Someone from another country probably built that.”
Going back to the album, I remember when you first came out way back with the Jihad EP and I felt that it was an absolute tragedy that you were just lumped in with all the nu metal bands, which you clearly weren't. The fact that you're still making music so much later when a lot of those bands have gone by the wayside, bands that commercially were bigger bands, there seems to be a big change in the style of your music. I’m picking up a lot more punk elements in it, a lot more industrial elements in certain parts. Was that a deliberate choice or was it something that was a progression?
“If you look at the Jihad EP, we were signed after four shows. We only had five songs and we were signed strictly off a live performance. A guy from Capital Records walked in, he was there to see another band, he heard us play and he goes, ‘I'm signing you’ and that's how it happened. He said ‘how many songs do you have?’ and I go ‘11’ and he goes, ‘great.’ We don’t. We’ve got to write six more songs everybody. When we started I knew what I wanted to do - it was a fusion band because I like bands like The Doors. You look at the keyboardist Ray Manzarek, a classically trained pianist who loved jazz, so it had jazz elements. The drummer was a jazz drummer but also liked the samba and the rumba and Spanish elements. The guitar player was a flamenco guitar player but was also into jazz and Morrison was a blues guy who loved poetry and also the psychedelic age was happening at the same time so they fused those elements together. If you ever see their live shows they would do what jazz players did. The keyboard player would get his 8 ball bars and then he gets to solo it out and then it goes with the drummer and the drummer rolls it out, then the guitar player souls it out and then go right back to Jim and Jim does his thing. That affected me greatly and also bands like Radiohead. I think their early stuff brought in a lot of different styles and they're still trying different things, they can do what they want.
“As a fan I'd like to see them go back to live instruments again because the electronic stuff I do enjoy but I'd really like to see them go back to instruments because they are so talented. They're amazing musicians. ‘Street Spirit (Fade Out)’ - that riff is one of the most incredible riffs ever written. It’s beautiful and the song itself is amazing and then bands like Nirvana who were like punk bands but then they also brought in other elements too. Kurt liked Celtic Frost, The Melvins and The Beatles so he brought in loads of different styles.
“When I started the band I wanted to bring lots of different styles. I was very early on inspired by hip hop and poetry so those were my two elements and I brought that in. My drummer at the time was a hip-hop and jazz guy and he could also do blast beats, so that's where those came from. Our guitar guy at the time was kind of similar. He was the kind of guy that could play metal riffs and he could also play grunge riffs and our bass player he also liked metal but he could also play a lot of jazz so when we started, that's kind of where we started from - that was ‘Sevas Tra’. So we go to ‘House of Secrets’ and I now wanted to do a concept album and so we did a concept record with that. At the time that's when George W Bush was first elected and 9/11 happened. I come from a military family and we were bombed by people from a different country. We were attacked by people from a different country and then we went and attacked Iraq. It’s like Pearl Harbour happened, Japan bombed Pearl Harbour, lets go...it makes no sense. I was heavily inspired to write that record not only as my brother died the year before. He was in the Navy and so there was a lot of pain and anger from that lingering into ‘House of Secrets’. There was also anger and frustration with our president and his idiocy and sending our good men and women in the US forces into the wrong country. Not that I thought Saddam Hussein was a great guy or anything but there’s pictures of Dick Cheney shaking hands with him and doing a deal with him because we did not like Iran. I’m not saying he’s a good guy, but that's not who attacked us.
“When we found out that Afghanistan was holding Osama Bin Laden they refused to let us have him. If they wanted to turn that place into a giant flaming piece of glass (because it’s all sand), I would have been happy with it. I wouldn't have cared.
“We’re the only country that has ever dropped two nuclear weapons on another country. We dropped two of them on civilians and so if we were going to do that then, why would we do it now? I would have supported Bush - people are going to start nuking all of your people until you hand him over. I’d have been fine with that. Not a lot of Liberals or Democrats would have agreed with me but I was that angry that so many people were hurt; so many children were hurt; so many innocent people died and we helped arm the Soviets because that was their Vietnam.
“Then we go into the next album and each record I didn't want to keep on making the same album. I wanted to write albums that directly reflected where I was in my life at that time and a lot of people were upset that I was not as angsty or despondent as I used to be. Well the idea of ‘Sevas Tra’ was just Art Saves backwards is not just something clever that I wrote, it's a philosophy, because for me growing up in a very violent and poverty stricken area, there was violence inside the home and outside the home. There was no safe space except here inside my head, but I wrote and I could draw, that's all. So for me, art was a method of healing and stepping out of myself and being able to navigate my own life and surroundings and being able to understand them, because as a child, you don't understand why am I being hurt by the people that are supposed to love me the most. If I go outside I’ve got to fight every single person that doesn’t like me or says something wrong to me or I'm going to get hurt.
“One of the things, the silliness on this tour is that the guy that attacked my drummer, he tried to fight me last night. They ambushed me at the van after the show and then he literally stormed over and grabbed my face and I just looked at him and I said, “what are you doing?” He said “I'm having a conversation with you.” I said, “well you were over there and we were talking just fine, and he said, “well I'm not gonna stand 3 metres away from you and talk” and then I said, “do you think that I'm intimidated by you?” I said, “I've been fighting grown men since I was four years old. You think I'm going to be scared of you?” I said I’m not. Then his girlfriend started mouthing off something in German and no disrespect to Austrians but these two Austrians are assholes and so I told her that I don't fight girls because I'm very strong. I deadlift all the time. I'm also a trained fighter. I was thinking of becoming a professional boxer before music happened so I usually don't fight women, especially little ones. She had a lip ring. The first thing I’d do was bust her mouth open and then “that's going to hurt you a lot. I'm not going to fight you.” Then he starts screaming at me and I just looked at him again, and say, “when dude. Let's do what you're gonna do.” Then today I guess he felt emasculated by that so he tried it on my drummer and that's wrong one. Wrong one.”
So aside from that how has the tour been going?
“Terrible. The shows have been great, the fans have been great, the interaction with this guy has been awful. There's a group of promoters that are now trying to blacklist him from the United Kingdom because of all the stuff he has been doing wrong. When I first came here I wasn't told that he was our tour manager, booking agent and that he was also the lead singer of the direct support band. Nor did I know that his band were going to be our drivers because we were told that we were getting transportation provided, a driver and tour manager. So I thought that's pretty good. It turns out it's all the same guy. So last night at the last venue, we were in Lancaster and he tried to get a bottle of Jack Daniels and said it was for me. I don't drink. I'll have an occasional cocktail but on the road, no way. We’re way too physical of a band. I can't do it. Then the venue is like ‘no, we know they are a sober band, it's not happening’, so he got really upset about that and went downstairs and got really drunk. Then he tried to ambush us. Aside from that, the reception from the fans has been amazing and we have been so happy that we have that one hour and a half to engage with them, but the rest of it has been misery."
You recently did a piece on Twitter where you were talking about Kevin Hart’s homophobic jokes. People were coming to you and saying its a comedic routine, it's not what he thinks, and I think your parting remarks were that words have real life consequences.
“That is true. Words have consequences and people look to people with platforms whether we like it or not. Sometimes I don't want to be a role model, but if you come out and say something like he said he'd kill his child if he was gay. When youre saying that, even if it’s a joke, you're still saying that in front of people that go ‘that means gay is wrong’, ‘that means gay is unacceptable’. Even though that's funny it still means that gay is unacceptable. So yes, words have consequences.
“Even though I love hip hop and I don't see the humour in it. You spoke about Ricky Gervais earlier, being a great vegan but there's this recent youtube release where it’s Ricky Gervais, Jerry Seinfeld, Chris Rock and Louis CK and they're all sitting around talking and somehow it gets brought up by Chris Rock that Louis CK is the blackest white man that he has met. Ricky Gervais and him start bantering back and forth that it's because Louis CK uses the N word in his act and then he says it. He starts saying it left and right and Chris Rock is like, ‘its OK, he can say that.’ Jerry's like ‘I don't think you can,’ and then Ricky Gervais was with this high pitched laughter. Seinfeld breaks it down and says ‘I don't know why this is funny.’ Louis CK says ‘I found the humour in it;’ Jerry says ‘I know you found the humour in it, I haven't and I don't want to.’ There was this moment there that was like, I thought about hip hop and the way that I don’t ever have any desire to use the N word ever; it's not in my system, it's not in my body but it’s OK for them to use homophobic slurs or whatever it was. It’s changing now but it was OK for them to say that. Kanye West says it, everybody says it but if I was to say it.
“We’ll even talk about something that nobody ever wants to talk about because they are a legacy band, they're Soulfly. Soulfly recently released a song called ‘Sodomites’ where they just basically quote out of the bible how God destroyed Sodom because of gay people. That song - ‘Sodomites’ - which is what they used to call us in the old days as a slur, you were destroyed if you were Sodom. One of the first men that died in Alcatraz was put in Alcatraz because he was gay - he was a sodomite. We still have anti-sodomy laws in America which applies to both heterosexuals and homosexuals. You're cutting your nose off to spite your face kid. That song was on Sirius XM radio, nobody said a thing about it, nobody spoke out against it except for me and when I did I got attacked. If I wrote a song that was anti Brazilian and said negative things about Brazilian people, what would that make me? A racist? For sure. And what does that make him?
It's the same mentality that's shown about Phil Anselmo, the ‘but he was in Pantera’ mentality.
“Honestly, it (the racist video infamously addressed by Rob Flynn of Machine Head) did affect his career quite a bit. He's now trying to rebuild himself. He even blamed it on painkillers. He does have a bad back and that's why he was on heroin so long. I know Phil. We’re not best pals but we know each other. The first time that I met him was on Ozzfest in 2002. He came up to me before the show, he’d heard me do soundcheck and he came over to me and he’s a big tough guy and he said ‘what kind of vocal cross system do you use?’ I said’ I don't use one Phil. He goes, ‘yes you do.’ I told him ‘I don't. I'm about to go on stage, you can watch me right there’ and I plugged the mic in and he said, ‘hell you don’t and I said, ‘no I don't.’
“The few other times that we've met he was in another room and I heard him using some colourful language against certain groups of people including gay people, so I walked in the room and I grabbed him by the ear and I was like ‘Phil, hey, stop that’. He was like ‘I'm just a dumb hillbilly. Just leave me alone.’ I was like, ‘no man, you're more than that. You're an icon bro. You can't do that. People look at you and they see it’s ok.’
“The same thing happened to me with the singer of All That Remains, Phil Labonte. He called me a faggot on Twitter a few times because he'd just been divorced and he wrote on his Twitter that he missed his wife, he was lonely. Some of his fans started ribbing him so he started calling them faggots so there was this metal magazine called Metal Riot and they copied me into it because they know that I'm gay and if I see an injustice I’m gonna be like ‘tow the line’. I did a podcast for a long time called Loudmouth Radio and people for a long time said that I would meet my political match in debates once I spoke to Phil Labonte because he was a Libertarian. Libertarians are diet Republicans, states rights and all this nonsense so I said: states rights means that Alabama could reinstate slavery; states rights means that Mississippi could take women's votes rights away because that's what we have right now. Although they made it legal in all 50 states for gays to get married, it's still legal in 16 states in America to be fired for being gay. We actually had a debate and every thing. The easiest way to debate someone that is a puddle is that if you’re the ocean we can stay on the surface if you want and crash waves. We can go deep. The puddle can only stay on the surface and once you smash that puddle, there's nothing left. So I smashed that puddle, there was nothing left. So he hung up.
“When I was first brought into this conversation on Twitter I was like, OK are you just mad because I beat you on the debate? I was trying to get him out of it, like snap out of this thing so then he just said, ‘shut up faggot.’ So I said ‘hey man, you need to watch your mouth’ and so he came back and said ‘faggot, faggot, faggot.’ Did he get any sort of negative feedback in the metal press at all? No. Zero. Did I? Yes, absolutely. There's this hypocrisy that exists within the metal community that sometimes makes me wonder, I don't think the metal community thinks I belong - I'm kind of happy about that. In that regard when I started the band, going back to the music, I never had a genre in mind. I didn't go, oh I'll make it a metal band. I started making songs and writing music. Whatever happens songs build themselves. We just kind of rock out, jam whatever the guys play. Sometimes there'll be a mistake in the tuning and then the drummer will start coming in and the big roar that everybody loves that just happened it was a culmination, this song was getting heavier and heavier and I was improv-ing lyrics and then all of a sudden I just hit that roar and everybody stopped playing. They were like where did that come from? I don't know. I listened to Slipknot the other day and I’d also been listening to the Deftones. That's where I learnt my banshee scream from - Chino and also Deftones were a big influence on me; the way that they were able to fuse rap hip hop, singing, screaming - all of that was amazing. Rage Against The Machine - same thing. You'll see us covering that song today (‘Wake Up’. When I first started I didn’t think about genres at all and so now when they call us metal I’m like ‘labels are for soup cans. Leave me be out of that.’”
Lars Ulrich was very much the same when they were calling Metallica a thrash band. That's limiting us to make one type of music and then ‘Load’, ‘Reload’ etc so he said we’re a band. That's all we are is a band.
“And that's what I want to be. I don't want to be put into a genre because that will limit the scope. For example when I first wrote ‘Perfectly Flawed’, I was still on Capitol Records at the time. I sat with my A&R, he was listening and I was like ‘Perfectly Flawed’, that's going to get them - it’s great, it's a beautiful song. The co writer that I wrote that with - Holly Knight - wrote ‘Love Is A Battlefield’ with Pat Benatar and she wrote a song with Aerosmith. She wrote the bridge for ‘Ragdoll’. She wrote for Abba, Tina Turner, she's written for almost everybody. She's an incredible musician and writer and she's an incredible piano player and we wrote ‘Perfectly Flawed’ together and so I'm thinking this is hit city lady over here. I wrote a song, it's about self acceptance, it’s beautiful, it’s depth, it's not just a pop hit or whatever and it fits perfectly in the record business because there's all these different sounds. He turns around and looks at me and he goes it's a great record except for ‘Perfectly Flawed’ and I was like ‘what’? He said ‘that's not an Otep song’ and I said, ‘I wrote it. How can it not be an Otep song?’ He goes ‘yeah, so maybe you should write for someone else’ and I said ‘no, I wrote it for me and for people like me who never felt perfect and have always wanted to live us to some standard.’ If I see in a magazine there's now this big thing about airbrushing, I don't care if they airbrush somebody, it doesn't matter, but in real life I want to feel like I belong; not to live to someone else's standard. I still made him put it on the record but they didn't push it. As you know there’s no video for it and every ballad that I've done since has been the same.
“On our current label, we released ‘Equal Rights, Equal Lefts’.The current label Napalm Records hated it. They said that's a rap song. What are you doing writing rap music? I said have you not listened to anything I've ever done? ‘Battle Ready’, ‘Tric’, ‘Possession’ - I can go down the list of all these rap songs that I've written. They said we’re not going to do anything with it and I said OK, fine. So I actually organised a video myself with friends and financed it myself and we put it out ourselves and it’s become now a crowd favourite. That song, out of all the singles that we've ever released, it was the fastest song that people learned, the fastest song people knew out of a new record ever. Whenever we play a new record usually there's like this hesitation where people don't know the words. This one - I said equal rights, equal lefts - I looked at the guitar player, he looked at me and first big sounds come in, we start going “equal rights, equal lefts fighting rights to exist” and they're singing back. I wrote my label a nice little letter and let them know exactly how wrong they were.
“The same thing happened on this album with Kult 45 when I wrote ‘Boss’ which was to me, about combating gender roles because even women in this essay that I wrote for this feminist organisation, I said before I started off, we’re trialling the cultural archaeology of women's history let me begin by first saying this is not an insult on men, I must dismantle any distortion that there is because there isn't. Some of the most committed feminists I know are men and some of the lousiest are women. There's proof in that in what I call gender traitors who voted for resident chump and then I went on to say how it reminded us that there is a sub group of people that disguises itself as conservative women that are living among us and so there was at least some silver lining with that. But when I wrote that song I would get some women that were like ‘Otep’s boss bitch’. And I'm like why have you got to put that at the end? Why can’t I just be ‘boss’? I said if you become a detective, are you detective bitch? If you're a doctor are you a doctor bitch? Why do we have to gender that? Why do we have to genderise anything? I wrote that song and they didn’t like it and again it's become one of our fan favourites. I'll give them the whole spiel that I've just given you guys. It's difficult again to sometimes function within these confines when they are constantly trying to keep you in a box and I'm not someone that can be kept in a box. I don't want to live in there. I'm never satisfied with my work and I'm never really satisfied with the state of things. I always want to try different things; I just follow whatever inspires me. At that point, gender roles that was becoming a thing because if you think about it, who decides what is masculine and feminine? I’ve got short hair, you've got long hair. Does that mean, you’re feminine and I’m masculine? That's ridiculous.”
Prior to the Victorians and 1800s it was quite normal for men to have long hair because they really didn't have any way of cutting it.
“We see pictures of our forefathers and they've got powdered wigs on and rouge and they're wearing frilly lace and that was a thing. That was a man then. It's just like who decides these things? The Beatles changed the world when they came over with their long hair in America. They changed the world because everyone was used to Elvis Presley and his slick back hair. All of a sudden, men started growing their hair. These arbitrary ideas of what gender specific is ridiculous. Obviously there are certain things - biologically there are certain things that are a little different, women can have babies, men can't. Although we all start from a female template and hence male nipples, the coccyx, our tailbone is from our tail, the one that we used to have. There's this tendon (points to her wrist) which we don't even need any more and it’s because we used to hang from trees; some people have it, some people don't. All human beings begin female and then at a certain point in time when we’re gestating inside of our mothers, gender is determined. So that’s why, when people say they are confused at times about who they are, and they feel more masculine than feminine, I think that's biological because of how we formed, how we grow inside.
“Again that's another reason that I wrote ‘Boss’ to pollinate people with these ideas. I did an interview with some people in the States, it was a husband and wife team and they are evangelicals. The husband said to me that he was angry with me when he first heard ‘Warhead’ as he thought that I was against the troops. All of his evangelical people were supporting the war and if you don’t support the war, you don’t support the troops. That's ridiculous. I can hold two different ideas in my mind, I don't know about you. I can like mustard but not mustard gas. He said, ‘but then I went back and listened to it again and then I watched the video and it opened my eyes and that's the great thing about music. You have an opportunity to reach people with a message that they might not normally get in their surroundings or their people."
On that note, Otep’s phone goes with a reminder from the rest of the band that she is needed back at the venue as it’s almost showtime. We thank her for being so gracious with her time. I’m sure the length of this interview will reflect the amount of time she was willing to share with us amongst her hectic schedule to talk openly and passionately about topics that she feels so strongly about.