The ground-breaking multi-genre collective Fishbone has spent several decades bringing together Ska, Punk, Funk, Soul, Rock, and more, and in late June released a new album titled Stockholm Syndrome. The album very much addresses our times, song by song, speaking to different situations we may ourselves face or merely witness in life, and bringing in sounds that fit the themes and the moods of critique and resistance. You can catch Fishbone on tour this summer and hear their new songs live.
Christopher Gordon Dowd is a founding member of Fishbone, and also a songwriter and Le Cordon Bleu-trained chef, who played a creative role in the songwriting on the new record. In keeping with his long tradition, he wrote or co-wrote many politically-charged tracks, and continues to see their relevance to the world around us as it changes every day, bringing new outcomes to light based on long-standing problems. I spoke with Dowd about the observed and experienced realities in America that he drew on for this phase of songwriting and the significant role of music in his life.
To ask an obvious question for someone with your talents, do you see a connection between the creativity needed in cooking and the creativity needed in making music? You are very open to trying unusual elements together, for instance.
Absolutely! I think song-making is like cooking. You’re taking these different elements, and you’re adding them. Fishbone is definitely the definition of that. Clearly. We’re taking all these elements together and combining them. There you go.
I think that’s true of every song on Stockholm, they each have these different elements coming together. Do you think the album has a flavor to it, or is it more about these individual directions?
I think that every sort of creative endeavor that I’ve been involved with in this band has had a combination of different things, creatively. I think with me growing up as a Punk Ska kid in the 80s and 90s, everything had been done in music. Every sort of experimental Rock band from the 60s and 70s. Of course, you’re influenced by all these things. We wondered, what happens when you add together Led Zeppelin and Still Pulse? [Laughs] Does it turn into “Still Zeppelin” or “Led Pulse”? Creativity was born from that. Music is all so cookie-cutter. Everything. It’s terrible.
One of my greatest lessons in life is that I’ve got a lot of friends, and they tour with a lot of musicians, and I don’t think anybody in music, now or in the past, gets to that place without having some level of talent. There are so many gauntlets that you have to leap over to get there. One of my lessons has been, “Never assume anyone is not the genuine article. It could just be the wrapping it’s in.” Lady Gaga can fucking sing her ass off! That’s a fact! I’m not a huge fan of Techno, or super-electronic music. I just find it boring. It’s very linear sounding to me. For some people, that’s good, because they don’t want to think about music.
I’m influenced by people who were fire-starters, and shit-talkers, real flame-throwers. I grew up listening to Hendrix, and Dylan, and Led Zeppelin, then discovered The Damned, and The Sex Pistols, and The Clash. I don’t care if you’ve grown up in privilege, but as a person of color in America, at some point you have to confront some level of systemic abuse.
Sure, yes.
That’s socially, spiritually, emotionally. Money is cool, and I’ve had certain levels of fame, and it’s weird. It would be hard to be Prince. In some people’s eyes, I’m famous, and that’s super-weird. You can be famous but not rich.
That is true for so many people.
It’s true for a lot of people, for a lot of real, actual artists. I don’t knock anybody’s hustle or success. Lord knows what you’ve had to go through to get to that place, or what you’ve had to give up. Especially with so many people who are predatory, like it is coming up to the surface now. Nonetheless, I always felt like my thing was always, “If I have this opportunity and platform to explain to someone what it was like for me growing up, or growing up in certain types of environments, or the people you meet who are inspiring, who create real social change, I should, because music just brings a lot of those worlds into each other.” I feel a responsibility as an artist to speak on these things and speak truth to that.
So that’s always been my mission. I remember being four or five years old and hearing the Donny Hathaway song, “The Ghetto.” There are not even any words in that song, but there’s an intention in the music that is unmistakable. I thought, “If I ever grow up and become a musician, I want to do something like that. I want to make music that moves people and informs them.” You then fast-forward to Stockholm Syndrome and what it has to say. Some people think we’re at the tipping point. We’re way past the tipping point. We are in the sickness, we are in the syndrome now.
Right, this did not start recently at all. There have been stages.
We live in a society where peoples’ most base shit is being amplified and elevated as though it’s something admirable or good. The Spanish people went through this with Franco. You have Mussolini. You have Hitler. You have a lot of different countries in Africa where those sorts of things have existed. Even the Kings and Queens of Europe, who were monarchs, were authoritarian or dictators. They were seen as having value because they were perceived as “benevolent dictators,” although some were not.
But we’ve got to this point. It’s amazing to me how ignorant and sheepish people are in this country, and ready to believe a lie to justify whatever their malady is. So this record was born out of how we got here as a society, how we got here as a country, how we are here as human beings, how we have lost touch with humanity, and how to treat each other. You will have people who are so willing to believe a lie that they will pretend nothing’s happening.
That kind of position makes conversations almost impossible. As humans, you might still be able to connect in a very superficial way, but only if you don’t bring any of this leadership and ideology stuff up.
I was having a conversation with a friend of mine who’s a writer about this, and I hate to tell it to people who follow these kinds of leaders, but it doesn’t end well!
You’re absolutely right about that. The supporters do not benefit.
Yes! It does not end well. All these people who call themselves “patriots” and all that kind of stuff, it’s ludicrous to say that. You’re not a patriot, you’re a pawn. Then, all these people wake up and say, “I got fired. I didn’t know it was going to happen to me!”
The title of the album was interesting to me because it suggests that we are conditioned to our captor. Or more than that, that we are conditioned to be led by someone like him, so we keep putting someone in that spot and allowing it. We’re not over that. A lot of people feel like our problems started in 2016, but they didn’t. That was a big flashpoint, but it wasn’t the start.
It starts when we can’t agree on facts. Like, “I didn’t own slaves! You need to get over it!” Okay, so you didn’t own slaves, but you have benefited from slavery and continue to. The kind of abundance that this country is built on is because we had an infrastructure and a labor force that replenished itself, and was never paid. If you add it up, the man-hours that it took to build this country, had people been paid a living wage, and not been slaves, it would be an entirely different story being told about this country.
Then, when a society is built around the advancement of one particular portion of the population, and then you don’t acknowledge it, or the history of that, and then you even want to erase it…
Which is literally being done. It’s literally happening with textbooks and informational sources right now.
It is being done. The thing that’s goofy about it is that they think that if they stop teaching about Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X, and Angela Davis, African American families will stop talking about it. Because you said so? Somebody isn’t going to stop talking about the accomplishments of people from European lineage. Why would I not want to hear stories about Oscar Wilde or Shakespeare? But actually, they are being taught less in America now.
They are diminishing, too, that’s for sure.
There’s more an abstract way of teaching now, with a materialistic point of view, saying, “If you pull yourself up by your bootstraps…” It’s a lie, because if you pull yourself up by your bootstraps, that shit still may not work out for you. Because there’s no social safety net.
A lot of people seem to lack perspective, and that’s increasing. How do you feel you’ve gotten your perspective on the current world? Was it from your family, from observations as a musician?
I’ve had a strange life. I went to private school up until I was six or seven years old, then my parents got divorced, and I went to an LA center-city school. So it was two extremes. But the first time I learned about racism was actually in private school. I was five or six years old, I met a kid and we’d become friends. There was an event at the school, and our parents met each other, then they pulled my friend from the school.
Wow! That is crazy.
Because my friend had become friends with a little black kid. My mom didn’t know how to tell me. That was my first experience of racism. I think, as a kid, you process those things in different ways. Thankfully, I have a great family, and they were intelligent enough to explain to me that it had nothing to do with me, but they were just ignorant. But we live in an age where people glorify their ignorance, like it’s a badge of honor. But their badge of honor makes them ignorant and deadly.
Actually, all of this that we’re talking about is also in the songs on this record. I appreciate you all putting the time and energy into these songs because I think I need to hear it, and other people need to hear it. It helps me contextualize all these various reactions I’m having to the world around me to hear someone else showing cause and effect, and describing the places we’re in, emotionally, right now. It prevents people from just feeling paralyzed by it.
Yes. We have this habit in this country of saying, “When I have all my shit together, and when I have all my ducks in a row, I’ll say something.” Meanwhile, unbeknownst to you, they are just steamrolling. It doesn’t matter if you have all your ducks in a row or not.
Right, they’ve been covering ground the whole time.
My uncle used to say, “You put poison in the water, you kill all the fish. You kill everything.” That’s what’s happening.
