Henry Rollins is angry. When he fronted the punk band Black Flag this anger was often all-too apparent in his notoriously confrontational on-stage attitude. These days, his seething outrage at the banality of many of his fellow Americans manifests
Henry Rollins is angry. When he fronted the punk band Black Flag this anger was often all-too apparent in his notoriously confrontational on-stage attitude. These days, his seething outrage at the banality of many of his fellow Americans manifests in a tireless global trek in which he inhales as much diverse culture as possible in search of first-hand experience to relay back to his spoken-word audiences. His new photo book, Occupants, is a visual record of these trips.
“I’m curious. I’m curious and I’m angry, and my curiosity feeds my anger and my anger feeds my curiosity. I think that in my home country, my fellow Americans do not travel as much as they should,” says Rollins as he explains his motivation for his relentless travelling. “I’m afraid to look at what percentage of Americans have a passport – a lot of Americans are uninformed and misinformed but rarely are they informed.”
“I want to know therefore I go,” is Rollins’ mantra. “The facts become unspinable. I don’t think they’re recovering from a 22-year war in the Sudan, I know because I went and saw the bullets on the ground. It’s not an editorial when I’m on stage, it’s reportage. I can’t be wrong about it – I have photographic proof. I go to these places to verify. What else can I do? Believe the news? The same news that lied me into the Iraq war? I don’t want to get fooled again so I cross reference everything.”
Escaping his native United States to some the world’s furthest corners, Rollins observes the bizarre way in which the more unattractive aspects of Western culture have manifested in other countries. “McDonalds, Burger Kings, you know, fast food; some of the worst music gets exported and is loved in other parts of the world. We use these countries for their cheap labour, we feed them our crappy food, we give them our sugared soft drinks, and we sell them our awful Jean-Claude Van Damme films. You look at it and you think ‘What could they possibly think of us?’”
Despite his disdain for mediocre mainstream American cultural exports, Rollins has harnessed his countrymen’s unfortunate global reputation for being loud and misinformed to get him out of a number of difficult situations including one in Bhopal India. “I walked in [to The Union Carbide plant] and immediately two guards with rifles walked up to me and said, “You can’t come in,” so I started talking really loud like, “Hey man, right on, thanks!” and I started to walk around them knowing it wouldn’t work, and they said, “No permit, no permit.” So I said, “OK, thanks, cool,” basically walked away.”
He then stealthily snuck around the back of the heavily-guarded Union Carbide facility, the site of a major explosion in 1984 that killed around 8,000 people, by jumping from bush to bush, taking as many photographs as he could. “I didn’t want to push my luck,” he says, “I don’t know what would have happened, who knows if they would have gone after my camera? I didn’t want to find out so I just snuck back out again, dashing through the bushes back to the street covered in leaves and dirt.”
After gathering material for one book, Rollins continued to travel, this time to North Korea. “It was a great education in propaganda. You had these tour guides telling you how great North Korea is, how wonderful Kim Jong-Il is, and how happy people are. Every day you wait for your guides to pick you up and you go on the prescribed propaganda tour of the day doing nine to five looking at statues of Kim Il Sung, paintings of Kim Jong-Il and hearing the rap about how Kim Jong-Il invented agriculture and water and mathematics and language, and you go, “Ah ha, that’s great, glad I know.”
“I’m lucky I get a lot of access to things,” he says, “and so I use that for something positive rather than merely self aggrandizement, you know just travelling to a nice sunny spot to be casual and have one of those ridiculous drinks with an umbrella coming out of the top – I don’t travel to places like that”
Occupants by Henry Rollins is published in October 2011 by Chicago Review Press
Text by Laura Havlin
