| Am I Alone in This? Bill Bottrell in the January 2001 New Settler |
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But you are recording 'Seattle Calling', working in the studio on it when I came in today . . . What changed your mind? BILL: Well that was a fabulous Movement and I wanted to do my part, which was to write a song about it and sing it - have been singing it here a lot. This is the paradox: you want propaganda. Propaganda is all we have against the big media (which is propaganda, and is everywhere.) And I'm a propagandist: I write folk songs about a muddy Albion or about Seattle calling . . . But you are also being a clarion, you're also being a call to action. BILL: Yes. That's the intent. I use the word propaganda in the good sense of the word too. Somebody has to go against all that flood of information that |
comes over NBC and CNN. And to do that, one needs to be in the media and make media and let
it multiply out there. And therein, is the paradox, because I
know what it does to people: I know what it will do to me.
For years here we had coastal rock - Philo and his various All Star Shuffle bands. Your music is in that Pacific Rim tradition - it is like the crash you get when you live at the edge of the continent, the bracing negative ions let loose by waves crashing against the giant crumble of rocks before the headlands |