The Patriotic Punk – The Atlantic

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Read Jeffrey Goldberg’s related article about Ken Casey.

There are more and less reckless ways for a musician to meddle in politics. The safer ways are to drop an endorsement in an interview (Taylor Swift for Joe Biden), make a supportive video (Beyoncé for Barack Obama), maybe even make a video with the candidate himself (Cardi B. and Bernie Sanders). Recently, Ken Casey, the front man for the Celtic punk band Dropkick Murphys, chose a way that could have started a fist fight. The band has been around for three decades and has its working-class roots in Quincy, Massachusetts. In recent years, Casey has noticed the degree to which his largely white, male, working-class fan base has drifted to the MAGA right. Casey, meanwhile, did not. At concerts, the band often dedicates its song “First Class Loser” to Donald Trump, and it sells T-shirts that say Fighting Nazis since 1996. So when Casey saw a fan at one of his concerts wearing a MAGA shirt, he called him out in front of the crowd and made him a bet.

In this episode of Radio Atlantic, The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, talks to Casey about that bet, about watching his fans and people he loves fall in love with Trump, and about how Democrats might be able to win them back.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Hanna Rosin: I’m Hanna Rosin. This is Radio Atlantic, and The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, is really into Celtic punk music. Who knew? He listens to one band in particular when he’s getting ready for work.

Jeffrey Goldberg: I listen to them in the morning when I’m trying to wake up. “The Boys Are Back” and “Smash Shit Up,” or whatever are good songs to listen to in the morning when you’re trying to get motivated.

Rosin: Those songs are by Dropkick Murphys, who, by the way, have an album out this week. Their front man is Ken Casey. Jeff saw a clip one day of Casey doing something interesting at one of his shows, something Jeff thought was unusual, risky, maybe even brave.

[“Smash Shit Up,” by Dropkick Murphys]

Rosin: Wait, you just called up Ken Casey one day? Why were you interested in him?

Goldberg: If you actually want to know the real reason why—do you want to know the real reason why?

Rosin: I do, because I don’t pin you as a hardcore fan.

Goldberg: There is no bigger fan of Celtic punk music in this podcast studio than this guy. But the real reason I’m interested in this is: I admire people who try to say something explicit with their music. Obviously, explicit to a degree. If it becomes just a platform, then it’s not very interesting music. Not very interesting lyrically.

Rosin: So your interest is in the music being political, not, like, a musician being political. Because it’s actually really tricky to make political art. It’s a legitimate question that a lot of artists face—like, Do I say anything about the election?

Goldberg: I mean, yes, in this case, in Dropkick Murphys’ case, it’s both. Ken Casey will go out onstage and talk overtly politically, about even trade policy, but also the music, especially in this latest album. So yeah, and by the way, it’s kind of easy for performers to go out and make anodyne statements about this or that in politics and have their music be about things other than the politics. Obviously, when you make political music, you’re going to drive away some people. That’s just the nature of it, and it’s not in the nature of commercial music to drive away anyone.

[“I’m Shipping Up to Boston,” by Dropkick Murphys]

Rosin: Okay, that’s enough of me. Here’s Jeff talking to Casey.

Goldberg: Are you sick of talking about “[I’m] Shipping Up to Boston” and The Departed?

Ken Casey: Not really. People say, “Do you get sick of that song?” and I say, “No, the key to that song is it’s two minutes.” Actually, when we play it live, it’s one minute and 50 seconds.

[“I’m Shipping Up to Boston,” by Dropkick Murphys]

Casey: So it’s over before it starts. You know, I would hate to have like your biggest hit be—

Goldberg: “Stairway to Heaven.”

Casey: Yeah, I mean, even our second-most-popular song, “Rose Tattoo,” is over five minutes. And I can see, sometimes by the end of that, as much as I love the song, I’m like, Fuck, I wish this was shorter like “Shipping Up to Boston.”

But no, I think if there’s any way for a punk band to kind of break through another level of success, it’s pretty cool when it’s an Oscar-winning movie by one of your favorite directors about the city you’re from.

Goldberg: Talk about Woody Guthrie and how you built on Woody Guthrie to write that song.

Casey: One of the things that attracted me to punk rock and attracted me to Irish music was that protest element and rebel element to a lot of it. And then that’s how I stumbled onto a lot of the American protest singers and Woody being the leader of that pack. And then we get a phone call one day in the early 2000s from Woody’s daughter Nora, and she said, “I’d like to offer the band the opportunity to come down and see my father’s archives of unpublished lyrics that he never put to music.” And I was like, Is this a joke? Is someone punking us here?

And I got to go down. The archives at the time were still in New York City and, you know, the original papers he wrote the songs on. You could see the stains on the papers. You could literally, Nora says, you can smell, like, Did he write this near the ocean? Did he write this in Oklahoma? or whatever. And so it was just a really unique look into his whole work.

And we don’t often write music first. It’s usually lyrics first and the melody, and then we shape the song around it. But we had written the music to “[I’m] Shipping Up to Boston,” and we were just waiting for me to write some words. And I flipped through, and here’s this song, “Shipping Up to Boston,” which stood out so much because it was so short and so, kind of, silly. And one of the keys to that song’s success is there are huge instrumental sections in the song that really make you wait for the chorus.

I know that if I was writing the lyrics to that, I wouldn’t have ever left that space. I would’ve written a pre-chorus there, and you wouldn’t have had that wait for the payoff. But obviously when we chose to put Woody’s lyrics in there, there were no other lyrics to add in.

[“I’m Shipping Up to Boston,” by Dropkick Murphys]

So you had the four-line verse and then you had the “Shipping Up to Boston” chorus, which, I wish he had a note of what he was singing about on that song.

[“I’m Shipping Up to Boston,” by Dropkick Murphys]

Goldberg: I was interviewing Bruce Springsteen once on the subject of Stevie Van Zandt, and I was writing about Little Steven and about how he was doing overtly political music. And I’ll always remember what Bruce said. He said, “Writing political music is a hard slog through muddy waters.” He was praising Steven. And you—you guys are one of the few bands that goes right at it. I mean, you use metaphor and you use allusion, but you’re really going at it, especially on this new album; and I’m wondering, is it a hard slog? Are you giving up something commercially by voicing your actual opinions about the world?

Casey: Well, I do think from a timelessness sense, we do try to do it in a not naming names and dates—

Goldberg: No, I know you’re not going to come out against tariffs on a Tuesday, or something.

Casey: Right. But everyone knows what we’re talking about when we do it and why we do it. And yes, I like to say that the band started in ’96; our goal was to be a little bit different, in the sense that we spoke for people that were living life in the middle class or working-class people. And so if you start your band on that, and you’ve held to those ideals for coming—next year it’ll be 30 years—and you’ve done that the whole 30 years, and then you get to this era and you’re going to back down from it? It’s almost like the whole thing seems like it was meant to be a test run for the time we’re in now. So for us to not go out on a limb about it would sell like our whole career short, you know? And will it eventually hurt us, or whatever? Who’s to say? I kind of look at it the way I look at reviews or comments on your social media. It’s like, you can’t pay attention to it. You just gotta do what feels instinctually right and right in your heart.

And I say this to Trumpers all the time that I know enough to have a conversation with at least or bother to. I say, Listen, you don’t like our opinion? You don’t like what we have to say? Most of you used to, by the way, before, you know everything changed when that guy came down the escalator. But regardless of what you think of our message, you’ve got to know that this band wouldn’t exist if it wasn’t for these core beliefs. And so a lot of music that you do like came out of that fire.

[“Who’ll Stand With Us?,” by Dropkick Murphys]

In the new single, “Who’ll Stand With Us?,” like, look at the words: We’re singing about people being oppressed by those in power with wealth that we could never imagine. Who’s got a problem with that?

[“Who’ll Stand With Us?,” by Dropkick Murphys]

Goldberg: You have gotten into direct confrontations with fans at shows over your politics and their politics. In today’s age, that’s pretty rare. Money comes first; popularity comes first. Any doubt ever about the path you’ve now set yourself on?

Casey: I get back to the fact that we’re singing these songs that I believe in my heart of hearts are what represents regular, ordinary people.

And when I see someone—and by the way, I’m not out there saying, Hey, you in the front row, who’d you vote for? You know what I mean? But like when someone comes to protest back with a MAGA shirt in the front row, it’s like—

Goldberg: They know what they’re doing.

Casey: They know what they’re doing.

Goldberg: And you know that they know what they’re doing.

Casey: Sure. Yeah. And then of course those are the ones that have gone viral, but there’s other nights when I just talk from the stage. And listen, I understand there’s an amount of people that’ll say, this is the counterargument: Hey, you know what? I worked all week. I paid my money to come see music. I don’t want to hear you shove your politics down my throat. And I can respect that to a degree. For the most part of our career, we’ve always said, we’ll leave our politics to the lyrics. Because we’ve been pretty overtly political. So if you read the lyrics, you know, and I do think sometimes you get more people to your side that way. Because you, you know, it’s like fishing. You’re just dangling the carrot. You’re not clubbing the fish over the head. However, at this point in time, it’s like, the alarm bells are ringing.

[“Rose Tattoo,” by Dropkick Murphys]

Rosin:  So what’s interesting to you about Ken Casey is he is taking a risk, like essentially he’s putting himself out there and possibly turning off his own fan base.

Goldberg: Well, he literally does turn off some of his own fan base and doesn’t seem to care, which I admire these days. I happen to admire anyone who will risk alienating, let’s say, MAGA America for a point. I’m not trying to be overly partisan or political here. I’m just saying that it’s very interesting that he and the whole band will put their money where their mouth is. And he also has—and this is what I admire about him—he has a large-heartedness about it.

He’s not one of these, They’re all deplorable kind of people. I was having a hard time adjusting to the idea that Trump had won yet again, and after all the ink we had spilled about the dangers of Trumpism, right? And then I realized that I just like Americans and I like America, and so I’m just going to figure my way through this and not going to be hard-hearted about it. And what I saw in Ken Casey was a model of how one could be in these circumstances.

I find him to be a thoughtful person and a patriotic person, and a guy who makes really loud, interesting music, even though he is already in his 50s, I guess. So I admire that, being personally in my 50s.

[“Rose Tattoo,” By Dropkick Murphys]

Rosin: After the break: Casey makes a wager with a fan.

[Break]

Rosin: Okay, we’re back. Jeff is asking Casey what it has been like for him to watch friends and loved ones shift from being moderate Democrats to fully embracing Trump.

Casey: Even when my friends, for example, would’ve been considered center-left Democrats, I think I was probably a little bit more on the more progressive side of them. Partially because of my world travels, you know what I mean? Like, you know, you change when you see the world and see things outside of your own backyard.

But as I noticed that shift happening, it was the classic example of the playbook of division in politics where the right told white, center Democrats, These people don’t care about you. They’re not there for you. White men are on the way out. You know what I mean?

And then they started to use, of course, the other tropes of race and sexuality and trans. And just, little by little, I feel like a lot of these white, working-class Democrats just crept over, saying, Well, at least these guys want me. And yeah, they want you, but they really just want to use you, you know?

Goldberg: Do you think the Democrats don’t want them?

Casey: I don’t think it’s that. I think that the Republicans have just done a great job at lying to them to make them feel—and listen obviously we can’t speak this broadly for this many people. There’s some people that just chose racism above all. Holy crap, this guy makes it okay for me to say the horrible things I used to have to whisper to my friends? Yeah, I’m voting against what’s best for my family, my pension, everything else, but I want to be able to speak loud about this stuff, you know? But you’ve got to tip your cap, man. They’ve pulled it off. They’ve tricked a lot of people.

Goldberg: Well, look, recognizing that, actually, your job is to be a Celtic punk rocker and not a Democratic political party strategist. I will ask you, nevertheless: There’s a crisis for the Democrats in that white men especially, but also Black men and Hispanic men, don’t think that the party is pro-male.

I recognize what you’re saying about the Republicans and the plays that they’re running, but if you were telling the Democrats what to do, what plays would you run to counteract that?

Casey: Well, by the way, it gets back to that point—and I often say this, when you did mention You’re a guy from a band—there’s really nothing I’d rather be talking about less than where we’re at right now. So when people think I’m onstage yapping away because I want to be talking about it—trust me, I don’t.

But, anyway, if I was to say as someone who has a majority white, male fan base, the band, I would say that—I mean, are we talking about what’s right or wrong, or are we talking about what you need to win an election? If we’re talking about what you need to win an election, I guess you do have to bring the olive branch out to say that, you know, masculine guys in the trades are not vilified. And I don’t necessarily think they have been, but I look at a guy like a friend of mine, Sean O’Brien from the Teamsters, and he spoke at the Republican Convention. And he’ll say, I’m not a Republican. I’m a Democrat, but I’m a Democrat of what the party used to stand for, and that he’s going to go rogue to wherever he has to, that’s best for his members and his people.

So when you see people like that saying that the Democratic Party isn’t working for them anymore, then there is something to listen to because that guy has a million people that he’s representing.

And I think there’s room for everybody, you know what I mean? I think that the policies of the Trump administration, and its, frankly, just cruelty should, of anything, unite anybody that’s center-left and far progressive because the things we want at this point should just be freedom and kindness and civility, and treating people with dignity. If that shouldn’t unite the country that wants to do good things, then—but it’s a funny thing about the left. Even with all that going on, there’ll still be that division and bickering sometimes.

Goldberg: Tell me the story from your perspective: There’s a very famous clip from a show. You have this colloquy, essentially, this discourse with a guy wearing a Trump shirt, a MAGA shirt.

How do you make the decision—you’re onstage in front of several thousand people; you’re doing your very high-velocity show—how do you decide that you’re going to pause and you’re going to educate? I mean, I think that’s what is in your mind, like, I’m going to teach this guy about domestic clothing production in the middle of a punk show.

Casey: Sure. Well, so sometimes when someone’s trying to make a statement of being, just for example, in the front row with a MAGA shirt on, you’d say, They’re dying for attention right now. I’m not going to give them the attention they crave, so I might totally ignore them. But the one you are talking about, there was a blow-up of Trump’s head.

Goldberg: This is in Florida, right?

Casey: Yeah, Florida. I’m going to say a guy, maybe, I’m just guessing, late-to-mid-60s and a kid in his 30s, and they both had MAGA shirts and gear, so it was clear—

Goldberg: They’re trolling you.

Casey: Yeah. So it was clear. But it taught me a big lesson though that night because we had this interaction where I made a bet with him.

Concert clip: Sir, I’d like to propose a friendly wager. You can’t lose this wager. Would you, in the name of dialogue and discourse—and I appreciate you being here—would you agree to a friendly wager? He says, “Sure.” That’s a good sport. Well, first of all, do you support American workers? Of course you do. Of course you do.

Okay, so and you support American businesses, obviously. Okay, so I don’t know if you guys are aware, because we don’t go around fucking bragging about it, but Dropkick Murphys always sells proudly made-in-America merchandise only.

Casey: I told them Dropkick Murphys merchandise is all made in America because I feel like, Hey, we put our money where our mouth is, you know? And I find that MAGA often doesn’t. And so I made a bet: I’ll give you a hundred dollars and the shirt if your shirt’s made in America, and if it isn’t, you just get the shirt.

Concert clip: All right, Matt, can we get a little drumroll please? Sir, could you both turn backwards? Don’t worry. No one’s gonna. He just needs to check your tags on your shirt and your hat. Just need to see where they’re made. (Drumroll.) Nicaragua. It’s made in Nicaragua! Ohhh!

Casey: And I kept it respectful, and when he lost the bet, because the shirt was made in Nicaragua, he took it off and we gave them shirts, and they laughed. And I’m like, Oh wow, that doesn’t often go like that with MAGA. And I went down after and I said, Hey, thanks for being a good sport. And he said, Hey, I’ve been coming to see you guys for 20 years. I consider you family. And I don’t let politics come between me and my family.

And I was like, Wow, what a lesson that guy just taught me. To not look at any person in a MAGA shirt and automatically think that they’re the worst of the worst of the worst. I still think that if you are willing to sport a shirt for a guy who is doing what he’s doing now, you certainly don’t have my love and devotion, but in my mind, oftentimes if I see someone in a MAGA shirt, I’m all but thinking in my head, He’s burning crosses. You know what I mean?

And this guy, he was ready to have some civil discussion and laugh about it a little bit. And I have a few friends like that. I swear, sometimes I think they’ll just stay MAGA just because they don’t want to admit they were wrong.

Goldberg: It’s hard for a guy to just say, “I got played.”

Casey: Right.

Goldberg: Right. And that’s something that you’ve been arguing, is that this is fundamentally a grift. Is that fair?

Casey: Yeah. And I don’t look at most people and say, Hey, you know—I don’t even know Donald Trump. You know what I mean? I don’t want to fall out with someone for life that I, especially that I knew my whole life, over this guy?

Goldberg: Have you lost friends?

Casey: I’ve definitely lost peripheral friends, and my closer friends that have gone MAGA, we’ve done our best to avoid the subject, but we don’t really hang out. How do you hang out with someone when—but we can stay cordial, you know what I mean? But yeah, it’s gotten away with a lot of. Yeah. I mean, I’m lucky in my family at least; I don’t have that; everyone’s on the same page. I don’t have anyone throwing the turkey at me across the table at least, you know?

Goldberg: Right, right. Talk a little bit about the new album and the goal of the album. Obviously there are aesthetic goals. You’re trying to make great music, and you do. I’m admitting my bias here, but there’s some songs here that are very straight-ahead, that leave no room for doubt.

Casey: I mean, you write about what you’re passionate about, and I’m pretty passionate about what’s happening to the country that I’m a citizen of.

[“Fiending for the Lies,” by Dropkick Murphys]

Casey: I just can’t see writing about something else. I feel like it’d be one thing if we wrote 13 songs about the situation; people might be like, All right, we get it. But that’s why it’s authentic for us, because we do live our lives, right? This song’s about our children. This song’s about a friend from another band, but there’s also these songs about the rage we feel inside right now. So if we didn’t write about that right now, people would be like, What’s wrong with Dropkick Murphys? They’re trying to stuff it down and not deal with it. And it’s just not who we are.

Goldberg: I guess the final question is, do you think that the fever is just going to break? You see anything that makes you think, Okay, they’re going to understand that this is a grift. They’re gonna understand that class issues are more important than gender issues and race issues and so on?

Casey: I always say I’m never one to root against America, so I don’t want, say, I hope it gets so bad that they see it. But I think that’s what it might take.

Goldberg: Ken Casey, Dropkick Murphys, thank you very much for joining us. I appreciate it.

Casey: Great to be here. Thank you.

[Music]

Rosin: Thank you to Jeff Goldberg for bringing us this conversation. Dropkick Murphy’s new album, “For The People” is out tomorrow, July 4.

This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Rosie Hughes. It was edited by Claudine Ebeid. We had engineering support from Rob Smierciak and fact-checking by Álex Maroño Porto. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic Audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

Listeners, if you like what you hear on Radio Atlantic, you can support our work and the work of all Atlantic journalists when you subscribe to The Atlantic at TheAtlantic.com/listener.

I’m Hanna Rosin. Talk to you next week.