All language subtitles for Let.Fury.Have.The.Hour.2012.WEBRip.x264-ION10

[crowd cheering]

[man] See, I think life or society, especially,

present one hurdle after another.

I'm interested in creative response.

[crowd cheering]

[man 2] Just as an artist

has to be able to look at things

and see them slightly differently.

See how the sun and the shadows fall.

We have to approach everyday problems creatively.

[man 3] The best way to challenge a bad religion or a bad government

is give a person a good idea.

[woman] I see myself as a member of the world.

I, um, don't really believe in nations, don't believe in countries,

don't believe in passports.

The more I do this work, the more I feel connected everywhere I am.

[man 4] There are things we share.

There are things beyond our identities that we share.

There are things that we as humans share across all these boundaries.

[man 5] So I know in my heart

I have the potential to offer someone that different perspective,

to send someone away feeling as if they're not alone.

[woman 2] I think we're all born citizens of the world.

And we proclaim it even in the worst of times.

We proclaim it through our being,

we proclaim it through our art.

So, it's all, you know, a constant struggle towards existence.

[applause]

Some seem to believe that people should be numbers in a state computer.

We believe they should be individuals.

We're all unequal.

No one, thank heavens, is quite like anyone else.

And we believe that everyone has the right to be unequal.

If we look to the answer,

as to why for so many years we achieved so much,

prospered as no other people on earth,

it was because here in this land,

we unleashed the energy and individual genius of man

to a greater extent than has ever been done before.

Freedom and the dignity of the individual have been more available

and assured here

than in any other place on earth.

The price for this freedom, at times, has been high,

but we have never been unwilling to pay that price.

[rock intro]

[shouting]

[man singing in foreign language]

[no audible dialogue]

[singing in foreign language continues]

[shouting]

[man vocalizing]

[shouting]

Once upon a time, we were, I'm told,

citizens with rights.

What does it mean to be a citizen?

[no audible dialogue]

A citizen is someone who participates.

It means to take active participation in creating a community.

Trying to create a structure and systems that supported the majority.

[man] The great collapse of the 1930s lasted so long,

and it was so bad that in the end,

through the pressure of the suffering,

coupled with a strong labor movement,

Roosevelt created 11 million jobs.

[man] During the war in my country,

if you were walking down the street and the siren went and the bombers came,

you went down to the nearest shelter.

In that shelter, there was the banker, there was the baker,

there was the candlestick maker.

There were the kids, there were the mothers.

You know, everybody was together.

[man] The president went on the radio and said,

"If the private sector cannot or will not hire our unemployed people,

then there's no alternative but the government will do it itself."

A profound act.

[Bragg] So many people were being injured they had to open the hospitals up.

First, to people who were out during the Blitz,

then to children, then to mothers of children,

eventually it was everybody.

Out of that experience came the collective taxation, collective provision.

[Wolff] Roosevelt created the Social Security system.

He created unemployment insurance. We never had that before.

Free health care. Free education.

Decent affordable houses. Proper pensions.

It was a sense that there was solidarity

to keep the community working, feeling good about itself,

and interacting productively.

No sooner was the ink dry on these bills,

than the business community went to work.

[Bragg] Margaret Thatcher, who wanted to reverse the gains that we'd made,

she came came to power in 1979.

She began to chip away

all the things I'd always taken for granted.

Over the course of my lifetime, really,

I've seen it in that kind of first wave of Thatcherism and Reaganism.

There's been, uh, a nudge.

[Wolff] What Reagan represents is the final step.

I don't necessarily think you can call it Reaganism

because he didn't invent it.

He was a spokesperson.

You know, and that's what he was the best at.

[man] Uh, Reagan, actually, was a great performance artist.

[DJ Spooky] He was an actor, and he had very specific script.

He knew how to make the props work, and the sets work,

and how to stand in front of the mountain with the flags.

[DJ Spooky] Engaging very deeply conservative issues around deregulation,

creating an economic Darwinism,

you know, that him and Thatcher were sort of mutually reinforcing.

"Unchain our business community. Free them up!"

This is a language of freedom and progress.

Coded language with, uh,

somebody straight out of the Hollywood factory.

[announcer] The following prerecorded political program

is sponsored by TV for Goldwater-Miller

on behalf of Barry Goldwater.

A thoughtful address by Ronald Reagan--

Mr. Reagan.

Thank you.

Thank you very much.

The sponsor has been identified,

but unlike most television programs,

the performer hasn't been provided with a script.

[applause]

[Sayles] I actually got to go to the 1980 presidential convention in Detroit.

It was just when you were able to start taping things off TV,

so I had a friend actually taping every night's broadcast.

Everything that came out over the air was very moderate.

It was the "Morning in America" stuff that was,

"Come on, folks. Things aren't so bad.

This is a great country."

You know, no mention of Vietnam.

Nobody snarling about welfare chiselers.

Whereas down on the floor was really a far-right Goldwater kind of convention.

And what I found, you know, watching the tapes was,

"Oh, my God. That's what people were seeing?"

This really seemed like a very, very well-orchestrated television show.

[Chuck D] Using the right song for the wrong time:

"Happy Days Are Here Again."

But they didn't put that little disclaimer for who.

For me, the Reagan years were the end of America.

You know, um, or the end of the possibility of America.

There were a couple of strains.

One was this insane individualism.

"And it's up to you. Like, you made your own way.

You could create your future. If you didn't do it, it was your failure."

The sense of just self-absorption.

The idea that it's just you and that everything in society revolves around you.

[man] What's right for me and what can I get out of it for myself?

That you are more important somehow than everyone else-- everyone.

[no audible dialogue]

The kind of things that we faced were not unique to America.

This statement of Margaret Thatcher that there's no such thing as society,

seemed to me a terribly brutal and cruel view of the world.

To break down the sense of, uh, collective provision.

[Kunzru] That all there was are these individuals, isolated from each other,

and they make their money, and they accumulate their stuff,

and the whole texture and fabric of the lives that we lead with each other

are-are meaningless.

Things like the miners' strike were going on.

And to-to feel that these people of somewhere else

were kind of being just ground out of existence.

[man] The end of the miners' strike in Britain basically ended up

with Margaret Thatcher destroying the mining industry in Britain.

I mean, a third of the working population of Wales were out of work.

They are in violation of the law.

And if they do not report for work within 48 hours,

they have forfeited their jobs and will be terminated.

End of statement.

When he smashed the air traffic controllers,

it was open season on unions.

You could fire workers, you could intimidate workers, and that was okay.

The working class was besieged in the United States

by, uh, Reaganomics and by their union-busting that was going on here.

To roll back what had constrained the American business community

and let them really go for it.

Yet anytime you and I question the schemes of the do-gooders,

we're denounced as being against their humanitarian goals.

They say we're always against things, we're never for anything.

Well, the trouble with our liberal friends is not that they're ignorant,

it's just that they know so much that isn't so.

[audience laughing] Now--

[applause]

I think one of the first things that Reagan did,

is that he put into motion, um,

I think it was really a linguistic attack.

To care was selfish, to help was vain.

[man] People sharing and people having the things that they need,

is somehow weak.

And it's somehow not the way humans should act.

And that anything that contradicts that is utopian,

which is a word that is used as a cuss word now.

You're a utopian, you're a fool, you're a dreamer, you're naive.

Let's deflate these people who think they can help humanity.

"Oh, you're just some do-gooder."

And that was an ideological story.

Going with that was another story.

That it is better to think of a person as a consumer

than as a community member.

That work can be horrible. Work can be a drag.

But the reward is you get to go to the mall with what you get.

Buy, buy, buy. Spend, spend, spend.

Max out your credit card, get another one.

[Bragg] Every product is coming into your home through the TV.

[Wolff] Go to the mall, accumulate the material.

And it was also, I think, a cultural way of thinking.

[man] ♪ We owe you nothing ♪

♪ You have no control ♪

♪ We owe you nothing ♪

♪ You have no control ♪

[man] How do we make people loyal to not a flag but a logo?

We are only what we consume.

[Bragg] Your own personal happiness is available to you

through the purchases you make.

You become a better human being if you go out there and purchase your status.

-Don't worry about anybody else. -And if you can't purchase your status then you're a nobody.

[Wolff] With the things that we used to invest:

community action, solidarity--

We instead focus on consumption as what binds us together,

what satisfies us.

We're letting the designers of the outside

inadvertently design the inside.

It was a very effective campaign.

Uh, and it perfectly set the table.

Like, just people just becoming so rich, it was insane. But why wouldn't you?

Corporations were now going to be more powerful than governments.

The free market is the most sacred thing.

I was born,

and God saw fit to give me this money.

And I can't share it with you

because, you know, I had to do all of it.

[rock intro]

♪ You are not what you owe ♪

♪ You are not what you owe ♪

If you were to give money away, then you were actually greedy.

Greedy for personal attention. Fascinating.

You know, completely insane.

[Black] The trickle-down theory.

You know, that's the same idea as if you drink a beer and you piss in your pants,

and you put a cup down there and you wait for the--

eventually there'll be beer that drips through your pants.

And that's what the poor get.

Which is like six drops... you idiot.

[Wolff] The distribution of wealth and income in America shifts.

The rich become much richer,

and everybody else doesn't.

The disparity between rich and poor in this country,

the impression that it leaves on-- on the poor--

all that seemed like it was from another planet.

[no audible dialogue]

[Bragg] You're getting to the point in the United States of America

where you have more people working service jobs than you have in manufacturing.

We've been there for the last 20-30 years.

You know, that's what happens to the post-industrial country.

[Wolff] We're going to focus on how you'll be able to buy a cheaper pair of shoes,

or a cheaper toaster, but your neighbors will be out of work.

[Bragg] And for a nation like the United States of America,

in which self-esteem is the most important thing,

that's-that's very, very difficult.

[Wolff] The mass of Americans had to go through this cataclysmic change

without an awareness

that it was a process that the society as a whole was going through.

[Ensler] And I think that was the beginning

of the pervasive low self-esteem entering the culture.

That people didn't blame the government.

They didn't blame the structure, they blamed themselves.

[woman] It's your fault that you're poor.

You can't believe in yourself because if you were individualistic enough,

you're being told if you were prayerful enough,

you would be rich.

You believe that you have failed.

You believe that there's something wrong with you,

which is why you can't get a job.

[Wolff] And so that's why, in a society which kept saying,

"We're doing better. We're doing better."

The breadwinner wasn't.

[Ensler] You have pieces of people who have risen and made it.

One out of million.

And you go, "Well, that person made it. What's wrong with me?"

So you blame yourself and then you become an addict.

And then you start consuming one thing or another.

And by making people more and more numb,

and building up their consumer expectations,

it decreases their sense of participatory engagement.

And you can begin to become unwilling to indulge your hopes and dreams

about a better life for everybody.

And you begin to look also for someone to blame.

[woman] Do you mind putting the light off? [man] No.

But now?

[Danticat] There is that, the shadow element of it,

that can so be easily triggered if you're told

that this group of people is dangerous to you.

[Wolff] And here comes the foreigner who wants to hurt us.

It's very easy to suddenly unleash

a certain element of the population on another.

♪ Immigrada immigraniada ♪

♪ Immigrada immigraniada-da ♪

♪ Immigrada immigraniada ♪

♪ We're coming rougher Every time ♪

♪ We're coming rougher We're coming rougher ♪

♪ We're coming rougher Every time ♪

♪ Hey, hey, hey, hey ♪

♪ We're coming rougher Every time ♪

Fear is a tremendously effective propaganda tool

and has been used throughout humankind's history

to cull the masses into, uh, submission.

[Klaxon horn]

[announcer] Don't hesitate, find cover.

More than 100 million people living well beyond

the destructive range of blast and heat

could be subjected

to dangerous or deadly amounts of radiation from fallout.

[Pugliese] If they could convince the mass of people to be, A,

afraid and cynical that things can change,

then-then they have won already.

There's a numbing of people's real emotions.

Historically and institutionally,

people's sense of value has been stripped away.

If you don't know your history,

you are, basically, more easily manipulated.

You strip human beings of their sense of history

and their sense of geography,

of who they are and where they're at,

then, you know, you got a carcass.

You fill them with anything.

[announcer] Today, more men and women will go to work

than ever before in our country's history.

This afternoon, 6,500 young men and women will be married.

And with inflation at less than half of what it was just four years ago,

they can look forward with confidence to the future.

It's morning again in America.

[Sayles] "It's morning in America."

And forget about last night.

[no audible dialogue]

[Kunzru] Every ideology in history

has always tried to disguise the fact that it's an ideology

by saying it's natural.

It's about mechanisms that are really, really embedded,

that don't necessarily even feel coercive.

And how do you defeat that?

How do we help people understand

that their low self-esteem is manufactured.

And that people are the only hope we have.

Culture is a way for us to identify

a different way of understanding the world.

It opens up the place to imagining, what I think, we're all interested in,

which is what sort of a society do we want to live in.

[announcer] In the factories, locally built

giving local employment in every great area of the nation.

And all the parts made by all the skills of all the men

and all the magic of all the machines,

move through all the pageant of production

in a great orchestration of interdependence.

[Kramer] Well, I was born in Detroit at the end of World War II.

And that dream that the World War II vets came back to

that Happy Valley and the promised land--

that started to fracture in the '60s,

you know, when the contradictions became clearer and clearer.

[MacKaye] When I got into music, I think Johnson was in office.

I was three years old.

By 1970, I was eight years old.

I was really starting to develop an awareness of what was going on around me.

And what was going on around me was a social revolution.

[rock intro]

The Vietnam War had been on my entire life.

At that time, the draft was in place.

There was an agreement

amongst all people of my generation

that the country was going in the wrong direction.

I already had made contingency plans as a pacifist.

I was not going to fight their fucking war.

[protestors chanting]

The counterculture, they spoke to me

as sort of people who gave a damn about life.

Somebody had to do something about it.

And we were going to do something about it.

[feedback whines]

♪ Kick out the jams, mother-- ♪

[rock music playing]

♪ Yeah ♪

♪ I-I-I-I-I I-I-I-I-I ♪

♪ Gotta kick out my ♪

[Kramer] The music itself and the sound and the way I played the guitar

was parallel with the political frustration

and the outrage of what I experienced in my life in the streets of America.

You know, this was all one thing.

What I did in my music in the MC5

was part of this larger thing that was happening all around the world.

If you fast forward to the era of the mid '70s,

I think that idea grew.

♪ Wanna keep on rockin' Till the morning comes ♪

♪ Let me be who I am ♪

♪ Let me kick out the jam ♪

[Bragg] People sometimes say to me, you know,

"Who's your greatest influence?"

Undoubtedly, it was Margaret Thatcher.

I was politicized by the actions that she took.

You know, these were things that really opened my mind.

Not just politically but musically as well.

[Morello] The town I grew up in is a narrow-mindedly conservative,

all white suburb of Chicago.

When I really sort of discovered my underlying ideology

for all I would do in my work life,

was when I was a teenager, and it was definitely during the Reagan and Thatcher era.

Was really affected by music, really believed the music.

I just wanted to be in a band.

[rock intro]

By the '70s, rock and roll people were like royalty.

[Morello] Rock seemed so inaccessible.

Like you had to have an expensive Les Paul guitar

and a huge stack of Marshalls in order to play rock music.

We didn't have that.

Like, I don't know how you get there,

but I'm not going there.

Um, so I skateboarded.

[Guerrero] Skating saved my life, for sure.

A friend had a board, he wasn't into it. He gave it to me.

And, you know, I lived on a hill.

And, um, that was it, you know. I mean, I was addicted.

The school people, the whole scene,

especially when I got into high school, it just was fucked.

So, you know, you tend to, um, withdraw.

And, you know, skateboarding was my way out. It was me.

So it all stemmed from that realization that

what we were doing was positive.

We got a chance to do things we loved to do.

[MacKaye] Skateboarding was a decidedly undefinable activity.

It's not a sport. It's not a hobby.

It's not a toy. It's not a game.

Why were people so committed to this,

and why were we stealing lumber from construction sites

at 3:00 in the morning to build ramps?

I think what was happening

was we were developing the tools

to redefine the world around us.

[Morello] The idea was to really sort of recalibrate

people's ideas of what reality was.

A pool is not just for swimming.

A sidewalk is not just for walking.

A street's not for driving.

[Morello] The next time they went on that street,

they'd look at it slightly differently.

And thereby sort of open up the possibility of what the future could be.

And so, you're never going to think the same again

about that curb, or that bench, or that rail, or about fucking anything.

[applause]

[no audible dialogue]

[man] Well, you guys were the evil Empire.

We were just like the innocent pioneers

with white shirts on and red handkerchief.

But then, I don't know, somewhere around...

seven, eight, nine years old,

I encountered all this other information,

which, like, records.

[Fairey] I grew up in Charleston, South Carolina.

It's a very conservative place.

And I really didn't know anything other than this conservative society

until I got into skateboarding and punk rock.

At some point, I got into punk.

We discovered punk rock.

And that was like...

like we never heard music before.

Iggy Pop, Henry Rollins, Fugazi.

It was a big new cultural experience for me.

I remember listening to the records,

and it just didn't sound like music to me.

At first I didn't understand. I was like, "Wait a second."

It took me a second to get my mind around it.

Just fucking totally blew me away.

-It was like, "Whoa." -Suddenly there was, like, a flash.

Then I understood, like, "Whoa. Oh, this is liberation."

Then there was really the moment

when the kid brought in The Clash album.

It was London Calling. It was the first time I saw that.

I made a Dolby B cassette of it.

And it really changed my life.

Once I tapped into that world,

all of a sudden, I started to see things much more broadly.

♪ What are we going to do now? ♪

♪ Taking off his turban ♪

♪ They said "Is this man a Jew?" ♪

[man] I was a little skateboard kid.

All the skaters would have their favorite songs on their playlist.

And suddenly the Ramones came on the radio and I was like,

"All right, three chords. I can write a song."

I got rid of my skateboard,

and I went and bought-- down to Wellworths

and paid 30 pounds for a Kay bass that I still have in my apartment.

I went down and started getting all my 12-year-old friends together

and we formed a band.

Within 24 hours, I was in a band.

I was like, "What the fuck? I gotta get an instrument."

I didn't know how to play a single chord on the guitar.

I don't know. Just pick it up and see what happens.

I don't h-have that much skill in some ways,

so I just do it, what I can.

We just, you know, decide to make music

even though we don't know what we're doing.

I was like, "That's what I want to do."

We need to have a band now, and it needs to be saying things that we think.

[guitar riff]

[bell tolls]

[Pugliese] I started college in 1983,

at the peak of Reagan and Thatcher.

And it just seemed to me absolutely incomprehensible.

I think we began to realize

we should just do what we love to do.

It was our own way

of going against the kind of dominant culture at the time.

I realized I need to do whatever I can do right now

to just get my music out.

The value systems were created around things

like punk rock and early hip-hop.

No one was going to allow you to play the venue so you started your own venue.

Making cassettes and handing them out.

No one was going to record you so you started your own record label.

Just that realization that I did not need to wait for anybody.

We're like, "Why not do it ourselves?"

We see the beauty in this thing.

And although nobody else wants to, you know,

officially give it the "blessing."

Well, maybe it's better that they don't officially give it the blessing.

'Cause that way, it won't get turned into some other piece of crap.

The real power is grass roots.

Playing for people.

Like with my record label.

From the very beginning there's like,

"Label looks like a joke. It's not a real label.

You don't use contracts."

You know, it's not going to work. It's too idealistic.

In a month, this label will be 30 years old.

Is it fucking working yet?

♪ Baby has grown older ♪

♪ It's no longer cute Too many voices ♪

[Duncombe] I grew up, I was a pissed off kid.

And I just thought something was wrong with me.

I think I'm not alone for having punk rock

be the thing that really politicized me.

The things that I felt were right and wrong in the world

were expressed in songs.

But more intelligent, uh, expression of life

built around songs that were as powerful as any music that I had heard before.

The aggressiveness of the music and the style

originally attracted me, but then when I heard the lyrics--

I had that sense of movement in music and the power of music.

It was like revolution street poetry, you know.

Just statements in the rawest form.

Firsthand reporting from a point of view that I could trust.

Those records automatically become a carrier of political information too.

You bond that anger that people feel by abuse by government,

and the anger that's in rock and roll.

It took the anger and directed it in some kind of way

where it made sense why we were rebelling.

That the world is not the way it should be.

And that we got to change it.

And saying that, you know, there are alternatives.

[Harris] It wasn't just that they were poking at that open sore,

at the politics and all of that.

It was also they were speaking to you as a human being.

I felt like on some nights, everybody's soul was at stake.

When I got into punk rock, I turned the radio off forever.

For real.

[man] ♪ We're caught in a landslide ♪

♪ The minutes Come tumbling down ♪

♪ Into an hour's time ♪

♪ Within which a day's Worth of work ♪

♪ Must be planned out And pan out ♪

♪ For every week to be worth ♪

♪ The weekends of downtime ♪

♪ Months of ennui that kills ♪

It went hand-in-hand with skating.

Because it was already, you know, like, "Fuck you."

Get out of here with that skateboard.

"Fuck you!" "Ah, it's too loud."

Fuck you, you know. Same thing. Fuck you to everything.

Um, and I loved it, you know.

♪ So I gather around me ♪

♪ All the little pieces Of a song ♪

If punk rock was the antidote

to this noodle-y virtuoso musicianship,

I think that, for me, street art

was the, uh, punk rock antidote in the visual culture.

[Fairey] If you could make music with three chords in a garage,

you could make art with a Xerox machine,

some collage materials, spray paint,

and some passion that can be conveyed very spontaneously.

There's no intimidating gallery or museum threshold to have to cross.

There are alternatives-- making stencils, making flyers.

I remember I made a sticker that said, "Stop the arms race, not the human race,"

and put it on the bumper of our car.

It really pissed my dad off.

[Duncombe] Why is it that, for example, a subway car

is only about the pleasure of the advertisers, not my pleasure?

Why is it that every day I have to look at what they want me to look at,

and I can't help recreate the subway line,

and make it actually speak a language which speaks to me?

[Fairey] It's just a natural thing

to try to make artwork that communicates with people

on, uh, you know, a gut visual level,

but also has a deeper human connection.

[crowd shouting]

[Pugliese] I did this book about graffiti from a Nazi prison in Rome.

These were people who have been arrested by the Gestapo and the SS in Rome.

They'd been tortured.

And, you know, they'd scribbled this graffiti

with a nail or a piece of charcoal.

Everything from Dante to, you know,

letters to their mothers.

So whether that's graffiti in a Nazi prison,

whether that's graffiti on a subway train,

whether that is, let's say, uh, lyrics to a song by The Clash.

What it revealed was a kind of common humanity.

We are fathers. We are sons. We are brothers. We are husbands.

And we have this thing in common.

And we want to be free.

Most of my formative years were in the '80s, although,

you know, I was born in the early '70s.

And Oakland in the early '80s-- the gold in the hills was crack.

That was the way people saw themselves getting out of poverty.

There was no sense of who were the good guys and who were the bad guys.

Fast forward to maybe a couple years later, Public Enemy came out.

[man] Brothers and sisters... And Public Enemy changed the landscape.

[hip-hop intro]

[man rapping] ♪ Yes, the rhythm ♪

Public Enemy was a collective of 20-25 black men

trying to figure out how to get untangled.

That was a very important time.

[Riley] It changed the whole dialogue

and made people have the idea

of some sort of unity against the common enemy.

The Clash galvanized young, predominantly white kids.

And Public Enemy did the same for black youth.

It really was a CNN for rebel youth.

[man] ♪ Radio, suckers never play me ♪

♪ On the mix Just okay me now ♪

♪ Known and grown when They're clocking my zone ♪

For me when, you know, hip-hop came around,

to me it was totally punk rock.

Completely one and the fucking same, man.

Punk was a rebellion against the musical overage of everything.

But-But we equally hated what was coming at the people,

pimping the people,

and therefore, we said, "We're going to try to do a little bit about it.

And then a lot about it after."

[man] ♪ Get it, g-get it, get it ♪

♪ Get down Come on ♪

♪ Uh-uh Get it, g-get it, get it ♪

♪ Get down Come on ♪

♪ Uh-uh Get it, g-get it, get it ♪

I just could not stand the way that corporations dominated

over what, you know, would be told musically and culturally.

And then what history would be told.

♪ 1989 ♪

♪ The number Another summer ♪

♪ Get down ♪

♪ Sound of the funky drummer ♪

True popular culture.

This is not popular culture that is produced by some company

to be sold and bought and to make a profit.

The problem is you're always in competition

with the mass consumer capitalism which says,

"Hey, that's a really nice idea you have. And why don't you join us."

This attack on any kind of culture that doesn't create a profit.

It was our mission to, um, disassemble music.

To come at music in a point of turning it upside down.

[rapping in Spanish]

[man] Bam!

This woman named Rossi Hawkins, and her two twin sons...

that were eight years old,

all got beat down, bloodied by the police.

Out of the, uh, projects,

everybody poured out around the cops and these two kids and their mother

who were laying on the ground crying, screaming.

They surrounded the cops.

The cops got scared,

pulled out their guns and started shooting in the air.

Everybody ran away, of course. [gunshots]

If you've ever been anywhere near a gun,

the last thing you're thinking about is

what the right thing is to do,

but for some reason, all of a sudden,

people started coming back.

Now, when this was was the summer of 1989.

The number one song on the radio right then

was Public Enemy's "Fight the Power."

Somebody started chanting, "Fight the power! Fight the power!"

The neighborhood went and confronted the cops,

took Rossi Hawkins and her kids to the hospital.

By the end of the night, police cars were turned over.

Police ran out of there without their guns.

None of this showed up on the news the next day.

But the next week, when we went there,

we got the story.

They said when someone started chanting that song...

people knew what the right thing to do was.

And right then and there,

that day when I heard that story,

I knew I needed to get better at rapping.

Right. ♪ 2011, 2012 ♪

♪ The number, another summer ♪

♪ Sound of the funky drummer ♪

♪ Music hitting' your heart 'Cause I know you got soul ♪

♪ Brothers and sisters ♪

♪ Listen, if you're missin' Y'all ♪

♪ Swingin' while I'm singin' ♪

♪ Givin' whatcha gettin' ♪

♪ Knowin' what I know when ♪

♪ While the black bands Sweatin' ♪

♪ And the rhythm rhymes Rollin' ♪

♪ Got to give us What we want ♪

♪ Got to give us what we need ♪

♪ Our freedom of speech Is freedom or death ♪

♪ We got to fight the powers That be ♪

[hip-hop intro]

[man] ♪ Fight the power ♪

♪ Fight the power ♪

If it wasn't for Spike Lee being able to mesh theme music and film,

"Fight the Power" wouldn't have been what it was

to influence Boots Riley in Oakland.

So everything was done as a collective.

And behind that is the community

dealing with a community issue that was taking place,

that was able to, you know,

galvanize a situation against injustice.

It's what-- That's what we make art for.

[no audible dialogue]

Black music always had to be love music,

not just a ballad, but, you know,

"I got your back, I'm looking out for you."

[Kramer] That idea of having an international consciousness,

being driven by something more than self-interest.

There were people before me: Woody Guthrie--

I mean, it goes back generations and generations.

This is the business of civilization-building.

Yeah, were we troublemakers? Sure.

But you know what? We got a right to make trouble.

You know, democracy requires participation.

What a band represents, what an artist represents is everything.

You know, why do you think young people loved Fugazi?

[Perna] Fugazi and Public Enemy.

I listened to both of those groups really heavily through middle school.

Like right at the time of my-- you know, your conscious--

your political consciousness is still very tender.

It was also that thing at the time, when you're 14 or 15,

when these bands-- well, your band--

Like, The Clash for me were my Beatles.

You know, Fugazi's idea, "You are not what you own."

And then, Public Enemy, "Fight the Power,"

speaking truth to power

just about how-- their core values.

You know, it made you want to quit school, or fall in love,

or run down the street with your friends chasing a bus.

Or, you know, form a band.

Th-They had that thing that was really life-changing.

And it just motivated you.

[Guerrero] I wasn't even aware of the impact that we were having.

And they talk about, you know,

"I come from this really small city, where it wasn't cool at all. I got beat up."

And so forth. "And we were looking at you guys."

Some things that I've done, seeds I've planted,

have taken 20 years to yield something that I felt was tangible.

But every action makes a difference.

We've been extremely influenced by The Clash.

And they represented the poor, working white man in England.

We represent a certain niche, and I think, you know,

people like Public Enemy represent a certain niche,

but it actually relates to everyone.

I had a little Music Man Twin Reverb amp on a chair in my mom's basement.

So imagine my surprise when I saw The Clash play at the Aragon Ballroom in Chicago

and my favorite rocker, Joe Strummer,

had exactly the same Music Man Twin Reverb amp on a chair on the stage.

Like, I couldn't-- I mean, I couldn't believe it. I was like--

And it made me realize not, "I can do this one day,"

but, "I'm doing it. He's doing it, I'm doing it, we're both in bands."

You know, he's playing the Aragon Ballroom, I'm playing my friend's garage,

but we're in bands, and what we do matters.

♪ Darling, you ♪

♪ Yeah, darling, you ♪

♪ You were a real Street preacher ♪

♪ Teaching about Life's abundance ♪

♪ Living it To the fullest ♪

♪ Giving us all That you could ♪

♪ You were a deep Soul shaker ♪

♪ Surely a true Heartbreaker ♪

♪ You'll always be A guiding light ♪

♪ For anyone looking for A little bit more in life ♪

♪ Oh, you sang "Do it yourself ♪

♪ But then teach Someone else..." ♪

[Duncombe] At the core, culture is about interdependency.

It's about sharing, it's about creating, and so on.

And so it's a great place to start to rethink our relationship with each other.

Moving away from that sort of neoliberal model

of, "There's no such thing as society.

There's only individuals in the world."

To understanding, no, everything is social.

♪ At the wrong time ♪

♪ But you, darling, you ♪

[woman] It does feel natural.

You know, the creativity does come out

when you think of a problem and you think,

"Okay, how can I address this?"

You sit around and you create a song together.

Or you beat the drums and you dance and you yell and you scream.

♪ Love that love dance ♪

♪ You walked that walk As you talk that talk ♪

♪ Yeah ♪

[Ensler] One of the things that art does is it creates metaphor

and it creates other avenues for the brain.

It gets into emotional reality,

it gets into sympathy or empathy or compassion for characters.

[Kramer] And what we do as artists

is we tell the stories of our days.

One of the things that makes us human is that we are storytellers.

[Ensler] And when you tell stories, hopefully the story has a kind of--

not neutrality in the sense that it doesn't have politics,

but a neutrality in that the story is the story.

[Danticat] What's powerful is where I tell my story, and you tell your story,

and we realize, much to our astonishment,

that, "Oh, it's the same story."

The question then becomes, you know, who gets to do the storytelling.

Drum solo.

[woman] I can't take it.

♪ You like this song 'Cause it's relatable It's you in a rhyme ♪

♪ We go to stores that only Let us in two at a time ♪

♪ And you still don't know Where the years went ♪

♪ Although every single shift Feel like a year spent ♪

♪ And you can write Your résumé ♪

♪ But it wouldn't even mention ♪

♪ All the life lessons learned During six years Of detention ♪

♪ So don't accept my collects On the phone ♪

♪ Just hit me back at the house So I know I ain't alone ♪

♪ And we can chop it up About this messed up system ♪

♪ Homeys that's been killed How we always gonna miss 'em ♪

♪ It's almost impossible Surviving on this fraction ♪

♪ Sip of 40 to the brain For the chemical reaction ♪

♪ You gotta hustle 'Cause they tryin' To push and shove you ♪

♪ I tear this motherfucker up Since I really love you ♪

♪ This is for my folkers Who got bills overdue ♪

♪ This is for my folkers Um, check, one, two ♪

♪ This is for my folkers Never live like a hog ♪

♪ Me and you, toe-to-toe I got love for the underdog ♪

[Sayles] "Union men, my ass.

You want to be treated like men? You want to be treated fair?

Well, you ain't men to that coal company. You're equipment.

You think this man is your enemy? Huh?

This is a worker.

Any union that keeps this man out

ain't a union, it's a goddamn club.

They got you fighting white against colored,

native against foreign, holler against holler,

when you know there ain't but two sides in this world--"

Them that work, and them that don't.

-"You work, they don't." -You work, they don't.

"So we got to pick away at it. We got to plan it and prop it."

We got to organize and build support.

"We got to work together."

Together.

"Till they can't get their coal out of the ground without us."

'Cause we're a union. 'Cause we're the workers, damn it.

"We're the workers, goddamn it. And we take care of each other."

Well, I don't know. It don't look like we'll ever get ahead.

I guess we'll just have to keep going till we can find something better.

[man] It is a 1960 Grapes of Wrath.

[Black] The big turning point for me was Harvest of Shame

by Edward R. Murrow.

And I'm 12 years old, and I'm watching this.

How the people who grow our food, how they're treated.

And I was, like, shocked.

It was beyond my imagination.

And it changed the way I look at things.

[crowd shouting]

[Kunzru] When I was growing up in the '80s, it was a very, very solidly Thatcherized place.

Suddenly there are these people who are hating me

for something I can't do anything about.

And it was really devastating, actually.

And that was the beginning of a kind of political journey for me.

I would start to look around and say, "Well, I'm getting this out of the mouths

of one or two of my teachers," you know.

"I'm getting this from the politicians on the television

who don't seem to like immigrants and think we should--

I'm supposed to go home? But home is here."

[woman] I began life as the child of a woman

who was very, very, very poor in Jamaica.

I knew that if I worked hard in school,

if I learnt to sound educated,

I would belong to a group that was more valuable than where I came from.

When I decided to come out as a young lesbian at 22, 23,

I lost my place of value.

So I came to America in search of that here.

And I came here and discovered that there are only very small pockets here

where people are actually free.

[Danticat] I think when you leave the place where you were born,

you're just basically plugged into this other world

and so that adjustment treats you to this notion

that your life will be then full of migration.

So this notion of home, if you're going to adapt well,

you realize has to travel with you.

But then I thought to myself,

"Where in the world would I go where all the parts of me would feel free?"

And you find little islands that are yours momentarily.

And that's when I came to the act of writing,

I came to the act of being a political screamer.

You know, writing, it's the place where I am probably most at home

because I can bring all these other homes there.

[Jones] I grew up at the edge of a small town in rural West Tennessee.

I went off to Yale for law school, and my dad says,

"Well, look, you're about to go someplace I would've never been allowed.

You're going to learn stuff that I'm not going to know.

The next time I see you, you're going to be smarter than me."

He says, "But I want you to know something. There's only two kind of smart people in this world.

There's smart people who take very simple things

and make them sound very complicated to enrich themselves.

And there's smart people who take very complicated things

and make them sound simple to empower other people.

Now, next time I see you, I want you to be that kind of smart guy."

We spend our lives, the first maybe two decades of our lives,

learning how to follow rules.

So, "This is how you tie your shoelace."

"This is how you color in your book."

"This is how you say thank you."

[MacKaye] Now, I grew up going to the D.C. public school system.

And the two fundamental lessons of that school system in my mind were:

learn how to wait in line,

don't ask for permission 'cause the answer's always no.

[Hammad] As a young poet, that just didn't work with me.

That's not to say I didn't pay for not stepping in line.

We all pay for not stepping in line, but we pay when we step in line as well.

So, what I found was just do it.

If you look at history, behaved people change nothing.

You know, and I believe in misbehaving.

Something new usually comes from outside.

The people on the outside understand the system much better

than the people on the inside.

Yes, there is a structure there.

When we can use the structure, let's use the structure,

but let's not have the structure use us.

[Jones] If you want change, hand those people the mic.

Hand those people a paintbrush. Hand those people a video camera.

Because once they start rocking, the whole system has to respond.

"...while you exploit the desperation of undocumented immigrants

to clean your hallways, bathe your children, and cook your dinner

for less than you and I spend on a tax-deductible lunch.

I want to scream out loud, ‘All oppression is connected, you dick.'

At the heart of every political action in history

stood the dykes who were feminists,

the anti-racists who were gay rights activists,

the men who believed being vulnerable could only make our community stronger.

The powers that have always been have already come for the Jew, the communist,

the trade unionist and the terrorist.

The time to act is now. Now, while there are still ways we can fight.

Now, because rights we have are still so very few.

Now, because it is the right thing to do.

Now, before you open the door to find they have finally come for you."

[Sayles] When I started, I knew nobody in the film world.

I think I was able to grow up thinking that the important thing was the work itself,

and not where it fit into a corporate culture.

I wanted to occupy a garage

in kind of a guerrilla-maverick-like way.

A place that I could make dirty and wreck over and over and over again.

I don't have to be precious with it.

[Ensler] What V-Day is, essentially, is self-empowered philanthropy.

People take the play all over the world.

Whatever money they raise, they keep in their communities.

I remember at the beginning, people were like, "You can't call this V-Day.

You can't name a movement after a vagina."

I was like, "But that's what we're doing."

[woman] I started to look at Haitian women

as really part of a broader community.

Thus the founding of Black Women's Blueprint.

And "blueprint" means our voice.

[Streb] My project is really a venture that wants to include the world.

I want to take over the world with action, two minds at a time.

But then when people would see it, it would bring tears to their eyes

or forms of recognition that they feel when an opera singer hits a high C.

We use dance, we use song, we use drumming

to really begin to unearth the experiences of women in the community.

And what I've learned is that if you give people the tools,

people will seize it and go for it and run for it and make it happen.

And I think at the point where you feel empowered to have your opinion

is when you can start having fun with it.

My favorite drug, actually, is the news.

I love the news. I like to wake up in the morning

and open the paper and usually, at least three or four pages into it,

I go, "Son of a bitch. I must be hallucinating."

I'll read something-- I mean, I basically--

I don't, and I know-- You know, I don't treat Sarah Palin as if she's real.

This has to be a hallucination.

It's the only way I can live with it, and that's the way I function.

The most extraordinary and where I kind of realized that it was kind of a drug to me

was when Haiti was whacked.

For God to strike at Haiti

when there's, you know, first off, Las Vegas...

The amazing thing to me was just the response of my country,

which is always, always--

when there is a catastrophe in another country,

we're there.

And the further away a country is, the faster we get there.

We can't get there fast enough.

I think that we respond really well as a country

when a country's ass is getting kicked,

or when we feel there's a need to kick a country's ass.

And-- But what we don't know how to do,

what we seem incapable of, is taking care of ourselves.

That seems to allude us.

It's like we almost need a catastrophe within the country

in order for us to figure out what it is we have to do.

[Wolff] The last 30 years have been an enormous effort

to postpone confronting what happened in the '70s and the way the country changed.

This crisis has created a sense there's got to be something better.

[Black] When there is a breakdown such as this economically,

it frees people up to look at the world differently.

And everybody can say, "Think out of the box."

You know, fuck that. "Think out of the box."

It's just such a horseshit expression.

You know, why don't you think in the box, and--

Just think, actually, is really-- Why don't you--

Do we really have to have outside, inside? It's called thinking.

[Duncombe] Right now, we're in a deficit of the could-be.

We're in a deficit of asking the question of "What if?"

All right, that means that somebody has allowed themselves to be corralled,

have their minds and their hearts corralled into a false construct.

You don't stay in power by convincing people that your system is the answer.

You stay in power by convincing people that there is no alternative.

The fact is that there are myriad other ways that we could organize society.

And what do artists and writers and musicians do

except dream of other ways of doing stuff?

"Create dangerously for people who read dangerously.

This is what I've always thought it meant to be a writer.

Writing, knowing in part,

that no matter how trivial your words may seem,

someday, somewhere, someone may risk his or her life to read them.

This is what, among other things,

might join Albert Camus and Sophocles

to Toni Morrison, Alice Walker,

Osip Mandelshtam, and Ralph Waldo Emerson

to Ralph Waldo Ellison.

Somewhere, if not now, then maybe years in the future,

a future that we may have yet to dream of,

someone may risk his or her life to read us.

Somewhere, if not now, then maybe years in the future,

we may also save someone's life

because they have given us a passport,

making us honorary citizens of their culture."

I'm a physician by degree and also play in a punk-rock band.

The voice of people like me is, artistically, pretty stifled, I think.

Coming out swinging with a punk-rock format,

it makes a lot of sense, really.

[man singing in foreign language]

We released a video for a song called "Tunnnnnn."

It's actually based on The Clash's "Armagideon Time."

It's gotten a lot of attention in Pakistan.

It's very, very meaningful for people out there

to be listening to the work that we're doing.

[singing continues]

[Ruggiero] I was into punk,

and punk had an affiliation with reggae.

And then reggae affiliated itself with ska.

So just by going to shows, I found out about places I wanted to be,

places I liked better.

We just started talking about the different types of music we loved.

Like, what are all the sounds that open up,

like, into this other space.

I don't really approach music from, like, a genre, even, point.

It kind of all comes secondary. It's just there.

I wasn't, like, familiar with the reggae approach.

I didn't hear reggae before.

By the time I went to Jamaica,

I was already, you know, like,

you know, ready to have this experience and that experience.

'Cause I'd already kind of, you know, dreamed it, you know, listening to records.

[man] ♪ What have I done wrong That I should be sorry? ♪

♪ You broke my heart You left in no hurry ♪

That experience of, like-- That one band sets you on a trip

through a whole other gold mine.

[man] We've always been embracing all kinds of different sounds

from all over the world.

You can kind of see our trajectory

of all these different wonderful influences.

And suddenly, there's this education happening.

Living in that mud where it all mixes together

and coming up with something your own.

It breaks through and reveals something about, you know, being alive.

[man] ♪ Ooh ♪

[Perna] Afrobeat music was informed

by Fela's experiences as a global citizen.

And coming in contact with other people,

feeling like the world needs to go in this direction.

[Bogie] When I found Fela's music-- long songs that didn't change key,

that hit that groove and just kept going.

And we're all going to blow over it.

And everybody's going to say something different.

Musically, I felt like it was right on time in my life.

And they say, "What do you-- You play Fela music? That's, like, Nigerian music.

You're Americans."

And one of the things that I've found is that his music

serves us and heals us.

We play it because it's useful and critical.

It's not enough to just put on the record and be like,

"Oh, gee, what was it like in 1976?"

No, we want to experience this. We want to embody it.

We want to put together the chemical combinations of these instruments.

And that's the justification, is because the music is the medicine.

[man clapping] Beautiful.

[Bragg] Punk was part of folk music.

Taking a message and spreading that message

and trying to express unedited ideas of ordinary people.

[Hayes] Marley, that's amazing folk music with all those different influences of rock

and the reggae and the ska and the Motown and all those things.

[Guerrero] Listening to early hip-hop,

when everybody was sampling all the jazz stuff, you know,

and then you come back around.

You learned about it in a whole roundabout way.

Punk is jazz is blues is folk is rock and roll.

This is all the same thing. It is the free space.

[man] ♪ They try their best just To mash up the resistance ♪

♪ Warning shots and sirens From a distance ♪

♪ Riot gears and barricade For an instance ♪

♪ And the words from mi mouth Mi no response ♪

[Kunzru] I think it was the definition of art is that it has the power to unsettle you.

That you're going to just immediately get outside of your comfort zone.

There's where the new answers lay.

It can change your conceptions of things.

[Chin] Take one face and split it in five different pieces, and all of a sudden,

we're considering the human anatomy in a different way.

[Streb] What kind of a question could an artist or a human ask

that has the capacity to have an enormous range?

The question's the thing. Not how it gets answered.

And if it's a great question, it's going to be answered in a diverse number of ways

by maybe hundreds and thousands of people.

And my job is really trying to collect those questions.

My question is never "Why?" It's "Why not?"

And usually, the "Why not?" is always convenience.

That's boring. And it supports a system

that has empowered a government

to indiscriminately murder people around the world

under the guise of war.

That is insane.

So, I just try to have creative response.

In my mind, what we are up against right now is not just the machinery,

but also the mind-set of individualism

and the mind-set of that neoliberal sort of way of understanding the world.

[Danticat] People have to be dehumanized

for us to give our consent with our silence,

to have bad things happen to them.

[Bragg] It relies on cynicism. It relies on being in competition with your neighbor,

of you thinking, you know, "Why should I give a shit about anybody else?"

[Riley] Although we all know that the most basic form of social organization

that we see, the family, no matter what the makeup of the people in it are,

it's usually based on sharing.

[Duncombe] Essentially how an environmental system works

is that every little bit, actually, is connected to one another.

And this isn't some abstract principle. This is an empirical fact.

Imagine if we thought of every child as our own.

[Pugliese] I open up the newspaper with my cup of coffee,

and there on the front page of The New York Times,

there's a photograph of a young man holding the dead body of his daughter.

And that moment really struck me

because I didn't know whether they were Lebanese Christian or whether they were Muslim...

All I saw was a man holding the dead body of his daughter,

a daughter who was the same age as my daughter.

And that was the moment where I began to realize this is not me speaking as an American

or an Italian, or an Italian American, or an American Italian.

It's me speaking as a person who has solidarity with people who are suffering.

There is this old, I mean, peasant idea, call it Christian idea,

call it whatever you want--

It's found all over the world--

where the stranger is considered sacred.

One of the premises of the United States attacking Iraq

was that the leader of that country, Saddam Hussein,

had gassed his own people,

which showed that he was a villain.

I don't think he thought of the Kurds as his own people.

I think he saw them as a different people,

much like George Bush and his friends

thought of the Iraqis as a different people.

If you're bombing people in another country, you're killing your own people.

Because there's only one people.

[Perna] The fact that we're a group of people, Puerto Rican, white, Jewish, Asian,

all these different mixes of people,

it's these different resonant frequencies.

That's what brings us together. And then we find other groups like that.

In my music, although I talk about it from the standpoint of Oakland, California,

I talk about it in a way that it can relate to anyone.

So you see, like, a girl in India performing the story of a girl in America,

and you see a girl in Westchester performing the story of a girl in Kenya.

That, to me, is the most exciting thing to be a part of,

where you-- you're part of the great, big human stream.

You know, the great, big human story.

[man singing in foreign language]

[Hammad] If you can let it take you where it wants to take you,

when you get to the other side, you feel like a fuller human being.

And we become more involved citizens of not just the places where we live

but, you know, of the larger world in general.

I am a citizen of the world.

I'm a citizen of the time I live in.

At a very basic level, it's just so simple.

It's about universality

and how the world's just got to work better for everybody.

The great thing about art of all kinds

is that it finds its way into the most unlikely places and the most unlikely hands.

You know, you put something out, and some kid gets hold of it in another country,

in a context which you could never have predicted,

and, you know, a lightbulb appears above that kid's head.

I heard it, like, so many times. People come up and say,

"Yo, man, listen, I am from Brazil, but I live here in Sweden."

Or "I am here from Australia. I live in Canada."

"But your music makes me feel home, man."

[man] ♪ Gah! Hey, hey, hey, hey Hali, hali, ho ♪

♪ Hali, hali, hey ♪

♪ Hey, hey, hey, hey Hali, hali, ho Hali, hali, hey ♪

♪ Hey, hey, hey, hey Hali, hali, ho Hali, hali, hey ♪

That's why we made it 'cause it made us feel home.

[man singing in foreign language]

♪ Again I am, waho Vasco da Gama ♪

♪ In my headphones is Bob Marley And a-Joe Strummer ♪

♪ I'm on a quest For solar amalgama ♪

♪ I'm on a quest For Never-Neverest ♪

Maybe this, you know, whole world-citizen idea is quite idealistic,

but I think a lot of people are getting pretty good and practical

on this idealistic idea.

Regardless of how many maps we draw,

how many passports I have to renew, and how many green cards I have to be reissued,

that there are no boundaries in nature.

♪ We coming rougher Coming rougher We coming rougher every time ♪

♪ Coming rougher Coming rougher We coming rougher every time ♪

♪ Immigrada, immigraniada ♪

♪ Immigrada Immigraniada-da ♪

♪ Immigrada, immigraniada ♪

♪ We coming rougher every time ♪

♪ In corridors Full of tear gas ♪

♪ Our destiny changed Every day ♪

♪ Like deleted scenes From Kafka ♪

♪ Flushed down The bureaucratic drain ♪

♪ But if you give me The invitation ♪

♪ To hear the bell Of freedom chime ♪

♪ To hell with Your double standard ♪

♪ We coming rougher every time ♪

[Hütz] It's like those issues never really been resolved.

They just fade in and fade out. They're always there.

They're still waiting for some humanitarian approach to them.

Not with a crude bureaucratic approach.

It needs to be a "no human being is illegal" kind of approach to it.

♪ For them we got Nothing to say ♪

♪ Immigrada, immigraniada ♪

♪ For them It's Don Quixote's way ♪

♪ But if you give me The invitation ♪

♪ To hear the bell... ♪

If you're not building, like, community with your art,

it kind of defeats the purpose of that art, you know?

'Cause, you know, you got a microphone, you better use it in a good way, man.

♪ Frozen eyes, sweaty back ♪

♪ My family is living On the railroad track ♪

♪ All my life I back in black ♪

♪ But, man I got to earn this black ♪

♪ I gotta pay representation ♪

♪ To be accepted in a nation ♪

♪ Where after efforts Of a hero ♪

♪ Start again from zero ♪

♪ Immigrada, immigraniada ♪

♪ Immigrada Immigraniada-da Hey, hey ♪

♪ We coming rougher every time ♪

♪ We coming rougher every time ♪

♪ We coming rougher every time ♪

-Are you certain? -I talked to a lot of people today.

-And what are we going to do about it? -Do about it?

Sure. If you think a thing is wrong, then you've got to do something about it.

Well, what can we do about it?

I don't know. But that's what we're going to find out.

[Bragg] The 1978 Rock Against Racism and Anti-Nazi League Carnival

is the bedrock experience that has helped me understand my role in the struggle.

I went initially because I was against racism and 'cause I love reggae music.

And the National Front, the fascist party, by attacking black people,

were attacking the culture that I loved.

But it seems to me the important thing

is that it wasn't The Clash who changed my perspective.

It was that mass audience, all those people coming together.

And being in the park that day with 100,000 kids just like me,

and we were brought together by this music that we loved,

I knew that I was not in the minority.

I don't think I would be doing this job,

wouldn't be sitting here talking to you in your film,

were it not for what happened at that-- at that gig.

So I know in my heart every night

I have the potential to offer someone that different perspective,

to send someone away feeling as if they're not alone.

"Are we going backwards or are we going forwards?

And what are you doing about it?

Are we taking over? Or are we taking orders?"

As a teenager, I wrote those four lines down, I put them on my refrigerator,

and vowed that I would ask myself those four questions every day

as my kind of-- my revolutionary punk mantra.

In order to go backwards or forwards, you have to know damn well where you are.

And I think we sometimes don't understand really where we are.

We don't realize how far we've come.

It's always as if you think you're going much further ahead,

and then you go back a little, but you don't go all the way back.

History is not a static thing that happened in the past.

We are agents of an evolving planet.

And history is being made by our action or our indifference.

That's how everything has changed throughout history.

You fight and lose, fight and lose, then you win one.

And so the question for me is less about,

"Are we going forward or are we moving back?"

The question for me is, "Am I on the right side of history?"

[Bragg] There's an argument to be had,

and it's down to artists to make a contribution to that.

[Kramer] If I tell the truth in the song,

there's the chance that you will feel the same way I do.

And then we meet in the song.

[Fairey] You see these moments where the right image makes concrete

feelings about the world that many people might be experiencing.

[Ensler] And it emotionally stirs people into their passion,

and your passion then becomes your true voice.

[Riley] It's not only a meeting of the minds,

it's the first step to unity in action.

[Kunzru] Art of all kinds, kind of organize people's dreams.

It's a way of generating possibilities, but art is an action.

In and of itself, it doesn't have the power to change culture.

The piece that's missing besides just the words and the thoughts

is actual organization.

[Kramer] Organized mass movements.

[Riley] Physical manifestation of those ideas.

You not only have to have a voice--

It's not just enough to want to see that.

...but you got to fight the power.

You have to actually find a way to go make that reality.

You've got to get into the battle.

The point is to do something.

That part is the part we can't do through music alone.

I've been organizing from when it was in the '80s.

At no time have I seen more going on.

[Wolff] There is an opening up that I have never seen in my life.

[Riley] I mean, there are so many people trying to figure out

how they can affect change in a radical way.

[Wolff] Everything takes many, many years.

And then there are sometimes moments when many, many years happen in three weeks.

[Black] This generation is smarter than my generation.

They will put the time and the energy in that needs to be done.

We're not post-something, we're pre-something.

We don't know with what we're "pre."

I think we're ready for a leap.

[Burger] It gives me incredible hope that we can, in fact,

mobilize in a way that we've never mobilized before,

that we can transform people's lives here,

but we can actually transform how we are as citizens of the world.

[Jones] That's the beauty of a resilient movement.

You can shoot the leaders, you can attack the crowd,

and it comes back the next day.

It comes back the next day because it believes in the beauty of its own dream.

[Chin] And I believe in progress.

You know, I believe that it is the way of humanity.

Change is inevitable.

It comes, it comes, it comes.

[guitar intro]

[man] ♪ Hand on the button Bird in the mouth ♪

♪ Blood's up and running Chasing you down ♪

♪ Up against the wall Down on your knees ♪

♪ Love is a warm gun We beg, we plead ♪

♪ System humming Motorcycle thighs ♪

♪ Show me your wings now Dark eyes Take me on a long ride ♪

♪ I know where you live I know where you hide ♪

♪ Wait for it right there ♪

♪ I'm gunnin', I'm gunnin' I'm gunnin', I'm gunnin' ♪

♪ Don't stop, don't stop Don't stop, ah ♪

♪ Don't stop, don't stop Don't stop, ah ♪

♪ Give me a little tambo Tambourine ♪

♪ Give me a little tambo Make it sing ♪

♪ Make it ring ♪

♪ How many accidents Before we collide? ♪

♪ A trillion coincidence Got me by your side ♪

♪ Now I'm aiming for you I got you in my sights ♪

♪ I will not miss Or blink an eye ♪

♪ I am into you ♪

♪ The flower in your belly Orchid in bloom ♪

♪ This gift we exist in Let me undress you ♪

♪ See you down south Austin to LA ♪

♪ San Francisco to Chicago Vancouver to Brooklyn City ♪

♪ Gunnin', gunnin', gunnin' ♪

♪ Gunnin', gunnin', gunnin' Oh ♪

♪ Gunnin', gunnin', gunnin' ♪

♪ Gunnin', gunnin', gunnin' ♪ ♪ Don't stop, don't stop ♪

♪ Gunnin', gunnin' ♪ ♪ Don't stop, don't stop ♪

♪ Gunnin', gunnin', gunnin' ♪ ♪ Don't stop, don't stop ♪

♪ We're gunnin', we're gunnin' ♪ ♪ Don't stop, don't stop ♪

♪ Gunnin', gunnin', gunnin' ♪ ♪ Don't stop, don't stop ♪

♪ Gunnin', gunnin', gunnin' ♪ ♪ Don't stop, don't stop ♪

♪ Gunnin' for you ♪

[laughs] ♪ Yeah ♪

[rock intro]

[man] ♪ May you tumble and fall down Your grand marble stairway ♪

♪ May that caviar pâté you were Eating block your airway ♪

♪ May your manservant deliver The Heimlich with honor ♪

♪ May this make you vomit On your Dolce Gabbana ♪

♪ May your wife's worried face Show a horrific expression ♪

♪ May you realize She's not worried That's just Botox injections ♪

♪ May all the commotion cause To crash your chandelier ♪

♪ And propel into your rear It's sharp diamonds From DeBeers ♪

♪ May your Ferrari break down May your chauffeur get high ♪

♪ And smash up Your stretch Rolls Up on Rodeo Drive ♪

♪ Off the breaking backs Of others is where You got all your bucks ♪

♪ Till we make the revolution I just hope your life sucks ♪

♪ All my people in the place Put your fist in the air ♪

♪ All my down motherfuckers Get up out of your chairs ♪

♪ All my real down peoples We got love for you here ♪

♪ Except for that motherfucker Right there Get him ♪

♪ Whoa, whoa ♪ ♪ Yeah, yeah ♪

♪ Whoa ♪ ♪ 100 little curses ♪

♪ May your champagne not bubble May your pinot be sour ♪

♪ May the white stuff You snorting Be 96 percent flour ♪

♪ May the famous rapper You bringing to your Daughter's sweet sixteen ♪

♪ Get some pride and walk out As if born with a spleen ♪

♪ May the death squads you hire Be bad with instructions ♪

♪ And by mistake Be at your mansion with The Street Sweepers bustin' ♪

♪ May this make your Party guests forsake Their white Russians ♪

♪ And dive behind The Jimmy Martin Cryin' and cussin' ♪

♪ May your chef be off pissing In the bisque in the kitchen ♪

♪ May I assume Your autobiography Is filed under fiction ♪

♪ 'Cause off the breaking backs Of others is where you got All your cash ♪

♪ Till we make the revolution I hope your life sucks ass ♪

♪ All my people in the place Put your fist in the air ♪

♪ All my down motherfuckers Get up out of your chairs ♪

♪ All my real down peoples We got love for you here ♪

♪ Except for that motherfucker Right there Get him ♪

♪ Whoa, whoa ♪ ♪ Yeah, yeah ♪

♪ Whoa ♪ ♪ 100 little curses ♪

[fades]