Vic Bondi in Seattle, August 2025 (all photos by Allan MacInnis)
Before we get to Vic Bondi -- hardcore punk singer extraordinaire, in Victoria this Friday and Vancouver on Saturday, opening for the SLIP~ons, let me just explain that my wife
is a huge Alabama Shakes fan. That’s why we drove to Seattle back in August: to
see her favourite band live on their reunion tour. We generally don’t think it’s
a great idea for Canadians to be going south just now, but it was a special
occasion. And even though our border crossing happened without incident, with
ICE now flat-out murdering American citizens in some cities, we won’t be making
such a journey again anytime soon.
But it sure was an interesting trip. On the way down, we
stopped at a nearly abandoned Bellis Fair Mall, which would normally be buzzing
with shopping Canadians. There, we went from feeling guilty about being in the
USA in the first place--“visiting the evil empire”--to feeling even more
sheepish about seeing how dire the effects of the informal Canuck boycott were.
It was clear that businesses were hurting, that our absence was being felt. Later,
a coat check guy at the Climate Pledge Arena, when he found out were down from Canada
for the show, thanked us in a memorably touching way for making the trip, pleading
with us (and Canadians in general), “Don’t abandon us”.
Bellis Fair Mall, at about 5pm on a Friday in August. Ouch!
But I had designs on visiting a single Seattle resident: Vic
Bondi, formerly of legendary Chicago hardcore band Articles of Faith, and also (fittingly)
lyricist and vocalist of my favourite anti-Trump protest song, Dead Ending’s “IvankaWants Her Orange Back”, a positively emasculating single that mocks “all the bald men with toupees” for
their gropey, tiny-handed figurehead, whom Bondi describes as a pickpocket of
the public purse.
The song was recorded during Trump’s first term in office; it
would no doubt be even angrier if it were written now. Bondi said of it, when
we spoke in 2022, that “That single probably is in some ways the most
representative Dead Ending moment, because it is a super hardcore band and my
muse tends to be pretty political, if it's not the folky melodic thing that
sometimes flows in there.”
But fair warning: that song probably won’t be on Bondi’s setlist for his solo acoustic shows this coming weekend, which will largely comprise songs written for acoustic delivery, like the material off his first solo album, 1988's The Ghost Dances, which Vic and I discussed here when he was last in Vancouver.
And while some of Bondi’s punk songs do lend themselves to
acoustic re-arrangements, like “Walter Benjamin at the Border”, which he did when he opened for Bob Mould at the Rickshaw a few years ago, “Ivanka Wants
Her Orange Back” probably needs a full punk band blasting behind it for maximum
impact: it’s hard to get sufficiently apoplectic over an acoustic guitar, and you
can’t really do the song justice without Dave Shield’s driving bass hook.
We will likely hear “What We Want is Free”, however, which Bondi played last time he was in town. He clarified in a conversation afterwards that “It’s
not an Articles of Faith song when I play it by myself on acoustic guitar, it's
a totally different thing.”
But those are quotes from past interviews--I have a whole new one here, in addition to a piece I've put together for the Georgia Straight, due to run in the next day or two. The following conversation took place over lunch at a cozy café in an area with a Commercial Drive vibe, the afternoon of August 16th. It has sat patiently waiting for a gig here that I could use it to promote; I had hoped for a Redshift show, but now that that band has called it a day, I'll take an acoustic one gladly!
Bondi is extraordinarily articulate and passionate, so we’ll present the conversation Q&A style, but with some omissions: for instance, since his surf-meets-punk band Redshift has ceased operations, it doesn’t make much sense to go into their history deeply (as mentioned in the Straight piece, his new band, Vic Bondi And His Issues, has a new EP coming out in a couple of months on Alternative Tentacles, and will be playing their first show June 6th at the Kraken in Seattle, if you’re brave enough for the trip!).
There’s also no discussion of things like the kidnapping of Nicholas Maduro, to say nothing of the war Trump and Netanyahu have started in Iran, because none of that had happened yet. The world was a saner place, just half a year ago! But you'll find he has lots to say of relevance to the present moment.
Commence 2025 interview...
.jpg)
Allan (bolded): So I wanted to ask about “Walter Benjamin at the Border.” There are a couple of versions of that song--it’s the B-side to Dead Ending’s “American Virus”, but it's also on Redshift’s album Chaos As Planned...
Vic: I’ve had that song for awhile. It’s still the fastest way to silence an audience that I know of. You get done with that, people just don’t say a word. I mean, I wrote that song in the middle of the first Trump presidency and I forget what the motive was for it, but I'm really familiar with a lot of Benjamin’s work. He wrote a fantastic essay called "Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" in the 1930’s that is really one of the most profound philosophical works of the 20th century.
But because I studied
totalitarianism and because my wife's family were killed in the Holocaust, I
think a lot about how people made the decision to leave Nazi Germany. What was the
turning point for them? What was the point at which they said, "You know, this
is going to end really, really badly and I need to get out of here." And you
know, for Benjamin, as a Jew, he's chased out of Germany, he goes to Paris
[just before the Nazis take it] and then he ends up in Spain and kills himself,
actually not immediately at the border; he kills himself in a hotel right next
to it. But I felt one night like I kind of got where he was coming from. Like,
if what you're seeing now is the beginning of a 1000 years of darkness, why
would you want to go forward? And that's what that song is about. It's not
really about me. I'm not a suicidal person; I don't really even get depressed.
But I've certainly got to the point with Trump, and sometimes I'm still there,
worrying about where we're at as a world, where I'm like, "Holy fuck, this
could be it: this is the end of the Roman Empire, and we're looking at 1000
years of darkness in front of us."
You know, in terms of the immediate, visible impact of
the Trump presidency, we were shocked, coming down, at how much of a graveyard
Bellis Fair Mall was. I mean, it was a Friday night, and it was empty. It doesn’t
seem to have effected Seattle as badly, but…
Well, Seattle is a pretty big city. But Bellingham was
depending on Canadians to come down and buy stuff, and you guys aren’t doing it
now. So it’s really bad for them, but I don’t think anybody really blames you
for not coming over the border anymore. I mean, he comes out of the box talking
annexing Canada. Are you fucking kidding me?
Right. So from an on-the-ground perspective, what have
you seen of the effects of the Trump presidency in your neighbourhood? Like,
there’ve been no National Guard deployments or…?
Absolutely nothing in my neighbourhood, nothing on the
ground in Seattle. But we went to the No Kings march; that was really
something. Probably the largest demonstration that I’ve ever walked in. It was
so large that halfway through, we left the march, went into this bar, had a
drink, a little food, and came back out, and we were still in the march! That
was a huge march. It was like, 80,000 people there. I mean… he’s got the support
of rich and powerful people, and he’s got the support of really stupid people, but
above and beyond that, he doesn’t seem to have a lot of support. But I haven’t
seen the affects of his policies here in Seattle.
Economically? Gas prices, egg prices…?
Well, I mean, yeah, prices of everything here are very
high, and they’ve gotten higher since he became president. So that is something
we do see, and I expect to see more of it. And one of the weird things is, I
work with a lot of people who are Indian immigrants, or they’re on a Visa, and
all of them now are walking around with their passports. They’re afraid of
being arrested. So for people are colour, they’re worried about getting picked
up. And people who are from Hispanic backgrounds are worried about being picked
up, so they’re carrying their IDs on them. But I think it’s going to come:
because during his first presidency, he did all this stuff in Portland with
guys in unmarked vans where he was abducting people, and here in Seattle, he set
the Proud Boys and right wing skinheads on crowds; I actually saw Proud Boys in
my neighbourhood Safeway, which I’d never seen in my life. So I think that’s
coming this fall or this winter, because he’s got the funding to do it now. He’ll
put these goons on the street; he’ll do something super-provocative, like what
he’s doing in DC right now… I mean, he’s a really hateful person, man. He
really is.
So having written songs like “Ivanka Wants Her Orange Back,”
given how revenge-oriented he seems, do you worry that there’s going to be some
sort of targeting of you?
Bring it! Bring it. I can say whatever the hell I want. I’ve
never advocated violence against these guys, so they can’t tenably accuse me of
anything like that. So…
Are you upping your game onstage, speaking out more?
I’ve never really done that too much. In the solo shows, I talk
a lot more than I do with the bands, because with the bands I want to get the
energy going, get everybody moving. So I’ve never done the Jello Biafra/ Dave
Dictor "harangue from the stage". I might do some brief introduction to a song,
like if I play "Walter Benjamin at the Border", I might say, ‘This is a song
about a German philosopher who killed himself because of the Nazis,’ something
like that. Give them some context. But I don’t normally say very much from the
stage; nobody’s coming to my show to cast a vote, and the music speaks for
itself anyway; I don’t really need to say something.
Other than “Walter Benjamin at the Border,” which I know from other versions of it, I don’t really know the newest Redshift album Chaos As Planned; are the songs also pretty political?
So one of the things with Redshift was, when I started playing with Adam [Gross] and Mike [Catts], who were the other guys in Redshift, neither one of them comes from a hardcore background. Most of my life, for my musical career, I’ve played with other guys who were from that same milieu, that same background, that same generation. But these guys actually aren’t. Mike is a jazz bassist and Adam plays R&B and rap, so I met these guys where I took this project on where I participated in a theatre orchestra band. And the other guys in the orchestra can read music; I can’t, so it was challenging for me. But that’s why I did it; I wanted to try something new, see if I could actually stretch my playing into something like that, as opposed to just being the guy that just hacks at the guitar, I’d have to play with some nuance and finesse. So I met them in that, and we hit it off; and one of the musics that we had in common, that we all liked, was surf music. So this band is [or was; I here must reiterate that as of 2026, Redshift has called it quits] kind of like a punk surf, quasi-surf kind of thing, so on this record, there are a lot of instrumentals where I’m just playing guitar, I’m not singing. And at this stage, I really like that, because if I’m playing a 60 minute or 70 minute set, I don’t have to be shouting the whole time. I can lay back and just work on the guitar, catch my breath a little bit. It puts a little more nuance and complexity into what I’m doing. All of this stuff is kind of of-a-piece with the other music that I’ve done in my career, but it gave this band kind of that surfy cast. We created this “astro-surfer” kind of brand. It’s fun. It’s very Dick-Dale-style surf music, which means it’s super-aggressive. This is not happy-happy-happy fuckin’ Beach Boys stuff!
But it’s not, like, Agent Orange surf, either.
It’s harder than Agent Orange! But it’s of a piece with a lot of my other
political stuff: ‘All Your Rich Sons’, the chorus of that is, ‘all your rich
sons will burn’. "SiCbUrN" is, "aren’t
you glad to know you got nothing but a sick burn", like all these guys online
simping and pimping for rich people: yeah, you got a sick burn, great.
I don’t know
what a sick burn is.
Ah, that’s because
you must not have a 24 year old daughter that tells you the slang. A sick burn
is when, you know, you insult somebody great, but it also means when you get
insulted. And there’s “Starter War.”
What inspired that?
It’s just generic:
let’s just start a war. There’s a reason that Netanyahu will never end the war
in Gaza; it works for him. Perpetual war. So yeah.
Actually, since
you’ve brought that up, I’ve been having a fight online with a Vancouver street
punk singer named Bugsy Faithfull, who sings with a band called Toy Tiger. He’s
very political, and he’s doing important things in Vancouver, and interesting
stuff. Like, he put a stencil of [Spanish anarcho-syndicalist] Durruti’s
face on the inside wall of the Cobalt. But I wouldn’t know Durruti to see him! So I
was impressed. But I’ve also seen him onstage leading chants like "From the river
to the sea," and even riffing on that Bob Vylan thing about the IDF. And I mean, I
have Jewish friends who are getting upset in the audience, and… like, using
slogans like that might bring you closer together with people who already agree
with you, but I don’t think those are good movement-building slogans.
Yeah, I… I was in Israel six or seven years ago. A company that I was working with got bought by an Israeli company. So I worked for about a year for an Israeli company, doing the technical hand-off between the company that they bought and the company that they had. And as part of that, I went over there and did some work. And it’s a police state. I really didn’t like it, because half the population is Arab, but they’re all subjugated and treated like second-class citizens. And they do all the work. It’s like the Mexicans here: they do the construction work, all the difficult stuff. And then the Israelis, they’re in software and whatnot. The Jews.
And they do racial profiling as a matter of course, which sort of works:
it was very interesting, going through Ben Gurion airport. You’d think the
security would be super-tight, but they have this process of figuring out who
is a terrorist from who isn’t; basically a guy will come and ask you three
questions. And I guess they’ve learned how to do this from asking three
questions of you, to decide whether you’re a potential terrorist or not. And
that’s it.
 |
| (image of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill) |
What three
questions?
I don’t remember
the questions, but I’ve gotten interrogated worse by US Customs! So it wasn’t a
big thing. But the country itself, some of the people there are really lovely,
and the country is very lovely. Jerusalem
is an amazing city, Tel Aviv is beautiful, Dead Sea was amazing. But the
political situation there is not tenable. And they’ve normalized the catastrophe [see the upcoming Straight piece for a discussion of the Articles of Faith song "New Normal Catastrophe", which Vic is here referencing] When you’d go out to dinner with them, they’d all have a discussion of what it
was like in the IDF, because everyone has to serve; it becomes formative in the
lives of young people. And so they all have stories of friends that were
killed, and what they learned or got out of the IDF when they were in it. So they’re
routinized and mainstreamed all of these oppressive policies.
And when I was
there, there was a terrorist event right by my hotel. I watched it on TV; it
was absolutely spectacular, because the Arab guy was just spraying bullets on
the street, and this Israeli cop, absolutely dauntless, walks straight down the
street, bullets flying around him, and shoots the guy dead. It was unbelievable to see.
You saw that first-person?
No, I saw it on TV, but it was right by my hotel. And the whole city went into lockdown, and they closed the borders.
And then we went to Jerusalem during Ramadan, during this lockdown, and Jerusalem was totally empty, which kind of great if you were a tourist: you didn’t have to wait in line anywhere. But it was eerie, because the only people that were in Jerusalem that day were the Arabs that were up on the Mount of Olives, taking service, and just us, and then legions of Israeli military everywhere in the street. It’s super intimidating to walk past a cadre of eight fully-armed submachine gun people, right?
And this is what Trump’s
trying to routinize in the States now. It’s nuts. So my experience with Israel
was really a mixed bag. I really liked a lot of the people I worked with, I
thought they were wonderful, and obviously since my wife is part Jewish, we
have a lot of Jewish friends and family. But what Israelis are doing over there
is not civilized. They’re starving ch:ldren to death in Gaza. On the way over
here, I was listening to the Ezra Klein show, this podcast, and he had this guy
on who was a legal expert in genocide, because genocide has a legal definition
in international law, and he was talking about whether what’s happening in Gaza
meet the definition of genocide or not, and he’s like, "Well, I can’t give you
that decision, the international court has to give you that decision. They
haven’t done that yet." Which was a very legal way of framing it. But from what
I’ve seen online, pictures of people starving to death, this cannot be a policy
that is in any way humanitarian or justifiable… so… young people have a
tendency to get super-hyperbolic, so… "From the river to the sea," "Fvck the
IDF"… Bob Vylan--who I really like--he got some pushback on this, but if you
listen to that man’s music, where would you think he was going to come from? Or
that duo’s music.
But I don’t have anti-Israeli songs, or pro-Palestinian songs. What Hamas did on October 7th was objectively wretched. It was abominable. But there’s got to be some modicum of proportionality here. It’s not proportional to kill 1200 Israelis and then kill 62,000 Palestinians. And keep it going! And Netanyahu’s doing it for political reasons, because… when I was there, people hated him. He’s just a dictator that’s maintaining his hold on power by destroying the lives of a minority. It’s horrible. So to me if the anti-Israeli protests tend to the hyperbolic and the intimidating, on college campuses and so forth, that actually seems proportional to me. What seems disproportional to me is to de-fund the universities because of it. Or taking these guys and putting them in a detention facility for months and months…
That’s not
happening in Canada.
Because you have
adults in power up there! And the elbows up thing was great. Or when you guys started to boo the national anthem,
I was like, "That seems appropriate to me!" Fuckit, why should they cheer. 48%
of the American vocal public voted for this asshole. Why would you feel
comfortable about Americans in the face of that.
It’s a funny thing
for a punk rocker to say, but we’re in the midst of an incredibly juvenile moment
in the history of the world, where culturally, a lot of anti-adult stuff that
was super-cool and fun, when it was in Repo Man, has now become the
dominant modality of adults who should know better. Trump is going to have a
cage match on the White House lawn on the fourth of July next year. It’s just…
I’m not saying there shouldn’t be mixed martial arts or cage matches, if that’s
your gig that’s fine, but I don’t think it belongs on the White House lawn, and
I don’t think you should make policies like this, that are just adolescent
incitements to piss people off. I don’t know if he was ever serious about
annexing Canada. He couldn’t be, because there’s no legal framework for doing
that. I don’t think he’s going to send the US military to fight a war against Canada,
and I don’t think US servicemen would fight it.
But that’s the
other thing with militarizing DC: every one of these guys that’s having to
march around at 2am now in his uniform because Trump wants it to make some show
is hating that guy right now. It happened in LA, too: all of those guys that
got set down, that’s why it didn’t last very long: the guys, the boots on the
ground, were like, "What the fuck are you doing? Just stop." It’s this kind of
infantile adolescent cultural politics. Like, Hegseth… these guys are drunks,
they’re not adults at all!
And I’m nobody’s
censor. I’ve been playing punk rock for 45 years. It’s not like I’m not pretty
well versed in sex and drugs and rock’n’ roll. But I don’t raise my daughter
that way, and my music is not the same as the work I do in software. When you’re
a functional adult, you behave like a functional goddamn adult, right? And
these ch:ldren, these boys, really, and these ridiculous women, too, like Kristi
Noem and Pam Bondi… Jesus Christ, put on your adult pants and behave properly.
Like, there is a real climate crisis; we were just talking about the fires. You’re
not going to solve that by ignoring it. If you don’t address it now, sooner or
later you will have to, so it’s better to be proactive and adult about it, than
‘drool, baby drool.’ Everything gets reduced to a bumper sticker of stupidity…
It reminds me of
how George W. Bush was allowed to get away with his war in Iraq. My thought then
was, “We’re fucked. If these people can get away with these things with no
consequences, then the next time they’re in power, it’s going to be worse.” It’s
only going to embolden the next generation of hustlers. And here we are…
This is the thing:
you’re getting a lot of conservatives now in the states arguing that Trump isn’t
a true conservative. The CATO Institute is trying to back off of him now that
he’s shaking down companies; he just shook down NVIDIA for 15% of their
profits, right? As he gets worse and worse, the conservatives are like, ‘He’s
not a real conservative.’ Yeah he is! This is what you guys created. Let’s just
go back to the election of 2000. The Bushes stole that thing, and they did it through
the Supreme Court, and that what you’ve been doing for the last ten years, too.
If you provide legal rationales for this really wretched behaviour that doesn’t
align with the concept of the consent of the governed… it’s this issue of consent;
that’s at the heart of democracy, that the people who are being governed agree
to the mechanisms by which they’re being governed. And participating. You take
that consent away, and now you have to force people to do things. Which is
where they’re going. But these guys who are in many cases rapists already, they
don’t have any sense of that notion, of the consent of the governed, at all.
The people who should know better, who are in the Supreme Court, who are
lawyers, have ignored it, because they’re going on junkets with rich
conservatives, right?
So what do you
think will happen?
Well, it’s going
to get worse before it gets better, you know that that’s going to happen. The
real question is, when does it bottom out? When does it really get so bad that…
because they have no vision of the future. The progressive vision of the future
was that everybody has innate abilities and talents and the way that has a
society that runs with minimal coercion and maximal result was to find those
gifts and skills and diverse advantages that people have, and put them in a position
to realize them, right? So the progressive concept was always that we’ll
liberate the skills and talents of individuals to the best result of society.
These guys that are behind Trump don’t have any vision of the future except
force. So they’re going to take these detention camps and turn them into slave
labour camps. They’re going back to the 19th century. It’s only a
matter of time before you’re going to read articles about how ‘well, they have
a path to citizenship in Alligator Alcatraz that includes working for three to
four years at slave wages in the agricultural groves of Florida.’ That is
coming, because they don’t have a progressive vision. Their vision of capabilities
and possibilities is rooted in an extremely negative view of human beings and
their potentiality. Because they’re pretty bad people, so they’d naturally want
to extend that world view out to others and assume that everybody is as bad as
they are. That’s why he’s always accusing the Democrats of the things that he’s
doing!
So they have no
vision of a future, and that’s why at the end of the day, none of this will go
anywhere. Because it’s so reactionary and so reactive and it’s so short
sighted. There’s no fifth-dimensional chess here. These are dumb, dumb people
who are doing just what they need to do to get to the next week or the next
month. They don’t have philosophies. They don’t have articulate notions of
anything. They’ll try out some half-baked person like Curtis Yarvin to give
some of their ideas the imprimatur of legitimacy, but they have no
intellectuals. They have no thoughts. They have no version of the future that will
be interesting to anyone. So it’s going keep going down, and at some point it’s
going to bottom out somewhere. I don’t know how much damage occurs in the
process. I don’t know whether the world becomes completely uninhabitable; I
have a 24-year-old daughter, and I’d like her to have a better life than I’ve
had; right now it’s not looking good, right? So I don’t know how bad it gets. We
can only pray that it doesn’t get to catastrophic levels of bad… but it already
is for some people. It sort of creeps its way through the body politic,
starting with the most vulnerable, then hitting whatever targeted group…
because it can’t fix itself. What he’s doing with tariffs is wretched, and it’s
not going to improve anything, until he stops doing it, but he can’t stop,
because that’s his whole idea.
What do you think will happen with Netanyahu? Because
it seems to me that increasingly people are just equating “Zionism” with “Israel”
and saying that Israel is invalid. And who is making that happen, right?
You already have
60,000 people dead. At some point this does become self-destructive. If the Israelis
don’t get rid of him in any near term, I think they’re going to be doomed. I
have a Medium article that I
wrote about this when I was over there in Israel. But as for Zionism, I used to
teach this class at BU; I team taught it with Benno Weiser Varon, who was an
Israeli ambassador to various Latin American countries. And one of things we
taught was the rise of Zionism and Theodor Herzl; Zionism is a modernist
variant of the Hebraic tradition, but I think it’s always been pretty dysfunctional;
the Israeli project itself, again, is very retrograde and retroactive: “We’re
going to go back and colonize the land of our ancestors.” Well, you’re not the
only one with ancestors that live there, you never have been, so you have no
exclusive purchase on that land! And so that’s always been a pretty reactionary
model, and the Israeli democracy idea, where they were making progress, where
they were incorporating the Arab people and other peoples in the area as part
of an Israeli democracy, that could have been a successful project, because it
would embrace all the legitimacies around the historical lands, that area, and
it would ask consent of all the people of all the people who are participating
in that society. But if you continue to just say, I’m going to run a police
state, I’m going to run an apartheid state, and I’m going to do that for a very
small group of men: it’s going to fail! It will fail. You cannot--I’m sure
Stephen Miller, the world’s greatest Jewish Nazi, I’m sure for him you can force
people to do what you want; in his mind, and Donald Trump’s, you can make them
do it. But you can’t, at the end of the day.
In my software
career, when I was managing people, people would always say to me, “What is
your secret to managing people,” and I’d be like, “I don’t manage anybody. I
find what they’re good at and I let them do it. ” And then I don’t have to
manage anybody! And writ large, that’s the concept of democracy. Writ large, that’s
Charles Fourier, the Phalanx from the 18th Century, from the
Enlightenment. That concept has a lot of validity, because no one wants to do
things that they don’t like, and everyone has skills that are differentiated,
and if you give some leeway in society for people to try their skills in
different areas, to find something they like, then you’re going to have a good,
positive, functioning society. If you force people to do things they don’t want
to do, then it’s not.
And nobody per se likes
to collect garbage or wash dishes, but I did them when I was younger. You can
do that stuff for limited periods in your life, as part of a trade-off as you’re
finding your way through things. But you can’t create entire castes of people
who do nothing but work for the betterment of other people. It’s absolutely
inhuman, and sooner or later, the sheer inhumanity of it will come back to bite
those elite classes. It always does. It’s the persistent record of history.
You're actually kind of an optimist.
I’m a historian, I
have a PhD in history, and I taught history for about a decade, and that is the
persistent record of history. You run societies like this, they fail.
