Rollins talks about Iran, North Korea, hardcore

Henry Rollins recently sat down for a length interview with PopMatters and talked about a number of subjects including his visit to Iran:

I think the Bush Administration really wants a war with Iran or something that ends ultimately with us against them and with America's safety at stake. [...] I'm not a fan of [Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran's president], but I know that usually the government is one way and the people are another and the last time Bush said a country--Iraq--was a threat, it turned out not to be true.

He also expressed an interest in visiting the last country in the "Axis of Evil," North Korea. He discusses musical activism and the inevitable backlash:

A lot more musicians are weighing in on the war in Iraq. And a lot times they're quickly dismissed by the right-wing media who say, "Oh, he's just a guy with a guitar, what can he think?" [..] If Barbara Streisand has an opinion, all of a sudden she's an idiot and you need not listen. These are people who get in front of microphones anyway and this is America and this is a democracy.

Finally, he weighs in on the mainstream nature of punk and hardcore:

When I was in that band we were at odds with contemporary culture. We had religious groups protesting the shows and sometimes the city legislature would [...] do a press op [to explain] why this person was bravely closing down the show for the good of the city.

And so now I see what I was doing back then--and getting a great amount of grief for it--on a T-shirt that you can buy at an extraordinarily high price being consumed by 15,000 people a night at the Megadome. So times do change.

You can check out the rest of the interview right here.