You are well known as a musician, leader and community activist. What are some of the events that helped inspire you to be so involved on a local level?

First off, I am a Washington native. I’ve been here my whole life. My parents were members of St. Stephens of the Incarnation at 16th and Newton, which was a very radical social action church. A lot of anti-war protestors came to stay there in the sanctuary. The Black Panthers came; Stokely Carmichael spoke there. It was a really engaged congregation. There was also a very active homeless program that was feeding the hungry.

So as a kid I was surrounded by people who were living different lives, not necessarily better or worse, they were just living a different life. I didn’t feel pity for the homeless, I just thought they live in a different world and we should respect them as human beings.

I was raised into this. I thought it was normal to question authority. It was certainly normal to distrust the government. I was born in 1962, so the Vietnam War was on. By the time that I was coming of consciousness, it was revealing itself to the world as the crime that it was.

The 70’s were really daunting. The only kind of rebels that I could see were just people who just got high. And I was discouraged because I had always thought about music as representative of the counterculture. In the 60’s, the role that music played was intensely important. By the mid 70’s I couldn’t find anything real. Punk rock was what I was looking for.

One of the first bands from DC, the Bad Brains, were very instrumental for me. They were from Anacostia. They were friends of ours—they were the ones who suggested that our band, the Teen Idles, do a benefit or raise money for this thing or that and we said, ‘yeah, let’s do it.’ In my mind, they were the greatest band of all time. They had done a series of shows in London called Rock against Racism. So we did a show together in the Valley Green projects in Anacostia. And that was clearly a heavy scene. It was a free show. And it was completely illegal because it was in a courtyard in the projects.

AS a DC native, how have you seen the city change in terms of the growing lack of affordable housing, gentrification, etc.?

I’m not an expert on this, but as a DC native, housing never seemed affordable to me. In 1981, my band moved to a house in Arlington because we couldn’t afford the rents in DC. But it was really agonizing because I never wanted to leave. I’m not just a native, I’m a fifth generation Washingtonian. And I felt like ‘wow, I can’t afford to live in this town.’

As a white kid, at the time, when I was at that age, if you go to another neighborhood, people say, you’re trying to gentrify the neighborhood. It’s complicated. What can you do?

On the last Fugazi record, the Argument, there is a song called Cashout which speaks specifically to this issue of gentrification. I started to think about gentrification—really, it’s not the people. We’re all just contending with this situation. It’s a long cycle—it’s always changing.

I have a friend who grew up on 3rd and Rhode Island—he’s now 70—and he was telling me about what happened in the 50’s, how real estate agents made so much money by blockbusting. The way you break up a block is you sell one house to a black family and all of sudden everyone says ‘our property value is going to go down’ and everyone starts selling. So for every sale, the real estate agent is just taking the dough.

And so what we find are these neighborhoods that in the last 40 years that were maybe largely black neighborhoods, but before that for 30 years, they were white neighborhoods, or vice versa. Georgetown was a black neighborhood. Glover Park, for instance, where I grew up, was a working class neighborhood when my parents moved there in 1962 because at that time in Georgetown, there were factories, a rendering factory. They were chopping up horses and making glue.

But there is this weird cycle. I don’t understand how this city can possibly sustain the real estate values. But this is true for almost everywhere in the country.

What have you seen to be the most effective strategies for community organizing? How does music play a role in community activism?

One aspect of organizing is it’s hard to get people to gather together. In the past, people did things together a lot. People would go to bingo, bowling leagues, and it was how they could communicate with each other. Now people have become much more isolated.

But one area where people still come out is music. It’s why, I think, so many activists have a connection to music because that’s how they were exposed, as I was, to different ways of thinking. You hear ideas that you wouldn’t hear if you just went straight to your job and went straight home to watch television - especially in the underground, where there is an accentuation on challenging conventional thinking.

So I feel like that is my work, as a musician: to work for organizations that I think are doing good work, the foot soldiers. I don’t volunteer at CCNV, but I can certainly not only alert people to the existence of the CCNV but I can also generate some cash. Fugazi played benefits and if we had a thousand people there and it was five dollars, we’d generate five thousand dollars and renting the room would be about five hundred dollars. The other $4,500 goes to directly to the organization—there’s no filtration system.

You are well-known for your Do It Yourself punk ethic. From your point of view, what are some lessons you’ve learned that could be applied to activists who are fighting poverty?

They always say, ‘if you want to know what’s going on, follow the money.’ It seems so clear, if you have 100 people hungry, and one person who has more food than anyone could ever eat, something is out of balance. Why people in this country are ok with that, I just don’t understand.

People in this country have to change their minds about it. Nothing is sustainable—it can’t continue. I don’t necessarily think that anyone’s going to erase poverty. But I do think community activism is important because it’s a field in which people still care—we care about the world we live in and are willing to engage in it. And it’s a thankless task. The people I know who work at the CCNV work there for a year, every day, and each morning it’s still as desperate a situation as before. Social workers are just as hardcore.

If you were the head of DHS, what would you do right now?

My experience with bureaucracy is that I can’t handle it at all.

I went to DC public schools and I learned a couple lessons. One was how to wait in line - which is a valuable lesson to know if you live in this city. The second was don’t ask permission, because the answer is always no.

If you think about punk rock, we never asked for funding, we never asked permission, we just did it. That’s the DC punk ethic. How many gigs have I done up and down 16th street in the basement of these churches where a 1000 people were there? Isn’t it illegal? In our eyes you just don’t engage with the government because all they are going to do is make it difficult.

So, if you ask me what I’d do if I were head of DHS, well, I wouldn’t be the head of DHS. If someone said to me, ‘you should run for office,’ I’d say ‘Are you kidding? Then I’d never get anything done.’ It seems like a different power structure, one that I’m not interested in at all.

But I’m not the person to talk to for social change. I don’t have strategies. I just do. I don’t know when it became wrong to be politically correct. What’s wrong with being politically correct? It’s a good thing. That’s, to me, connected to the Reagan revolution—it became wrong to care. It gave birth to irony. This whole country was riddled with irony. Even punk bands. I’ve been ridiculed for years by people in the punk world who were like, “Oh, you won’t do this because you are politically correct.” Yeah, I’m politically correct. Because I care. What’s wrong with that?

But to live your life thoughtfully—to do work, whether it’s volunteer work or do whatever you do, don’t just ride the world, don’t just ride it, live in it. Engage in it.