Prop excerpt: "You guys have had many public disagreements with your US record label and its owner, particularly about the "Rock Against Bush" campaign and their support of moveon.org and George Soros. While the lyric sheet for the album does suggest that you feel compromise leads to subverting of principles, would a Kerry presidency be preferable to a Bush presidency?

You have to make a distinction between compromise and collaboration.

Making measured, accountable, daily compromise is fundamental to living amongst other humans in any healthily diverse society. The problem is that in modern society, where power and wealth is so completely concentrated in the hands of the minority who benefit from the status quo, compromise is customarily a one-way street. Compromise is expected of people whose visions or desires or values conflict with the status quo. It is not expected of those whose visions or desires or values are congruent with the status quo.

Hence, for example, in the pathological race to oust Bush 2 from office, Americans who desired an end to wars (foreign and/or domestic, military and/or economic) waged by governments indentured to transnational corporations were expected to compromise their vision, their desires and their values and work to elect a new, "different" administration that has historically been indentured to transnational corporations and has embraced the art of war as a means of maintaining global capitalist hegemony..."

R.A. excerpt: Your videos have been similarly controversial. Obviously the video you did for RPM was banned and the first video for Siren Song was pretty incendiary.

There were scenes (in “Heaven Knows”) when the guy was bleeding and MTV wasn’t down with, they wouldn’t play it.

We were new to the whole TV thing anyway so we didn’t know what we could play or not play. Then we did “Give it All”- here’s a video that’s encouraging kids to take it to the streets and change billboards to what they want to say because that’s your right to do that if you don’t see your perspective being represented in modern media- then go fuck it up and make it represented. That’s your right to do that.

So there’s this video of us rolling around Chicago on a train with spray-paint cans and doing all kinds of anti-animal industry, anti-militarism messages going on and it was great to do. It was so funny we did half of it with a Chicago cop supervising it because they hired him we were thinking “You’re letting us do this? You’re letting us get away with this, are you sure? “

We had to sneak into that zoo though to do that one scene with the tiger where it says my whole life is spent in a cage because they were like real leery to what we were doing. They said you can’t put that sticker there and our director fucking did it and filmed it and we just took off.