Ken Casey of the Dropkick Murphys on Punk and Politics

This text was featured within the One Story to Learn At the moment e-newsletter. Join it right here.Ken Casey, the founder and entrance man of the Celtic punk band Dropkick Murphys, is the bodily, attitudinal, and linguistic personification of Boston. Proof of this may be present in the best way he pronounces MAGA. To wit: “Magger,” as in, “This Magger man within the viewers was waving his fucking Trump hat in individuals’s faces, and I may simply inform he wished to enter into discourse with me.” A second proof is that “enter into discourse” is a factor Ben Affleck would say in a film about South Boston proper earlier than punching somebody within the face. The third is Casey’s articulation of what I took to be a private code: “I’m not going to close up, simply out of spite.”The aforementioned discourse occurred at a present in Florida in March. Video of the incident has moved throughout the web, and it has provoked no less than some Dropkick Murphy followers—white, male, and never notably predisposed to the Democratic Occasion in its present kind—to desert the band. Casey accepts this as the worth for preserving his soul. “I believe all the pieces we’ve been doing for the previous 30 years was a form of warm-up for the second we’re in,” he advised me. The band is most well-known for its livid, frenzied anthem “I’m Transport As much as Boston,” however additionally it is identified, amongst sure high-information voters and union activists, as a final repository of working-class values. As white males have lurched to the fitting, the band is on a mission to persuade them that they’re being performed by a grifter. “Thirty years in the past, the Reagan period, everybody was in lockstep with what we had been saying,” he stated. “Now individuals say our message is outdated or elite or we’re a part of some machine.”Casey and I had been speaking on a sunny day this spring at Fenway Park (inevitably), the place he was filming a promotional video for the Pink Sox’s Dropkick Murphy Bobblehead Evening (July 11, in case you had been questioning). Casey, who’s tattooed as much as the neck and carries himself like a bartender, is amused by the concept anybody would think about him an elitist. He’s, in any case, a author of each “Kiss Me, I’m Shitfaced” and “Smash Shit Up.”“They take the truth that we don’t help Trump as us being shills for the Democrats,” he stated. “They like to name us cucks, which I discover ironic as a result of there’s portion of MAGA that may most likely step apart and let Donald Trump have their means with their important different if he requested.”There’s additionally a little bit of grace to be discovered within the tradition struggle, as Casey found on the now-famous Florida present.“These two guys had their MAGA shirts and hats and a cardboard blowup of Trump’s head, and so they’re within the entrance row, so that they’re positively trolling,” Casey stated. “We’ve had this earlier than, guys with MAGA hats simply shoving it in individuals’s faces.”Casey addressed the viewers, first with an accusation: “The place the fuck are all the opposite punk bands?”The reply is that the bands are scared, identical to so many others. Punk bands aren’t any exception, which is a small irony, given the oppositional iconoclasm of a lot of punk, and the motion’s anti-authoritarian roots.It’s putting that few singers, bands, and film stars—so lots of them reliably progressive when the stakes are trivial—appear prepared to handle the nation’s perilous political second. (Casey’s pal Bruce Springsteen is a noteworthy exception.) Intimidation works, and complicity is the norm, not the exception. “You’ve received the largest bands operating scared,” Casey stated.The most recent Dropkick Murphys album, For the Individuals, is compensation for the silence of different quarters. Solely a minority of the songs on the album tackle the political second instantly, however those who do had been written in anger. The primary single, “Who’ll Stand for Us,” addresses the betrayal of working People: “By means of crime and campaign / Our labor, it’s been stolen / We’ve been robbed of our freedom / We’ve been held down and beholden.” Fury runs like a pink streak by means of For the Individuals.“The explanation we communicate out is we don’t care if we lose followers,” Casey stated from the stage in Florida. “When historical past is alleged and achieved, we wish it identified that Dropkick Murphys stood with the individuals and stood with the employees. And it’s all a fucking rip-off, guys.”He then addressed the Trumpists within the entrance row. “I need to suggest, within the title of decency and equity—I’d wish to suggest a pleasant wager. Do you help American employees? In fact you do. Do you help American enterprise? Clearly. I don’t know in case you are conscious, as a result of we don’t go round bragging about it, however Dropkick Murphys solely sells American-made merchandise.”The wager was easy: He’d give the person within the Trump shirt $100 and a Dropkick Murphys T-shirt if his Trump shirt had been made in America. If the fan misplaced, he’d nonetheless get the Dropkick Murphy shirt.Casey is aware of a secure guess. The shirt, after all, had been made in Nicaragua. However Casey felt no must humiliate the Trumpist. “He’s sport!” Casey advised the cheering crowd. “He’s taking the shirt off! We’re taking crime off the road! God bless your fucking coronary heart!”After the present, Casey, as is his observe, left the stage by means of the viewers, and talked to the Trump supporters. “There was him and his son, and so they had been the nicest two guys. It made me suppose, I’ve to get previous the shirt and the hat, as a result of they had been nearly doing it for fun, prefer it was their type of silent protest. This man stated, ‘I’ve been coming to see you for 20 years. I think about you household, and I don’t let politics come between household.’ And I used to be like, Wow. It was lesson. However what number of households on the market in America have politics come between them, ?”Casey says that identification politics—and particularly the exploitation of identification politics by Trump-aligned Republicans—alienate from the Democrats the form of individuals he grew up with. Not too long ago, the band carried out at an anti-Trump protest at Boston’s Metropolis Corridor Plaza. Afterward, Casey advised me, “even individuals I do know stated, ‘Oh, you had been at that rally? I all the time knew you had been homosexual.’”He continued, “For this reason individuals in labor and the left need us to be concerned in a few of this protest. MAGA, they use this male-masculinity situation the best way they use trans and woke to divide. They’re instructing the younger males that that is the delicate social gathering.”Though Casey personally leans Bernie philosophically, he’s lifelike in regards to the left and in regards to the Democratic Occasion’s dysfunction. “If I take into consideration all of the individuals I do know in my life which have shifted over to Trump voters—AOC ain’t bringing them again. I really like her, nevertheless it ain’t occurring.”Who else does he like? Somebody who can communicate to individuals exterior the progressive bubble. He likes Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear, a profitable Democratic governor of a pink state. “I’m not towards going full-on progressive,” he stated, “but when it’s not going to be that, you bought to discover a centrist. It may well’t be mush. It’s received to be somebody who can communicate the language of that working-class-male group that they appear to have misplaced. That’s why I really like the thought of a veteran, whether or not it’s Wes Moore or Ruben Gallego, and even Adam Kinzinger, who’s speaking about operating as a Democrat.”He’d somewhat not have to consider electoral politics this a lot, he stated at Fenway. However he’s nonetheless shocked that so many individuals in his life fell for Trumpism. “My father died once I was younger, and I used to be raised by my grandfather, who was mainly like, ‘If I ever see you bullying somebody, I’ll kick the shit out of you. And if I ever see you again down from a bully, I’ll kick the shit out of you.’”“I’ve simply by no means favored bullies,” he continued, “and I don’t perceive individuals who do. It’s actually not that arduous. I want extra individuals would see that it’s not laborious to face up.”