Vic Bondi has mellowed out, but still sees his songs as a form of non-political protest | Georgia Straight Vancouver’s source for arts, culture, and events

1 of 6 2 of 6    Vic Bondi, opening for the SLIP~ons this Friday and Saturday in gigs in Victoria and Vancouver, is best known as the frontman for one of American hardcore’s most incendiary political punk acts, Articles of Faith. The band has a place alongside names as revered as the Bad Brains, Black Flag, M.D.C. and D.O.A. in both the documentary American Hardcore, and on the film's soundtrack, where its blistering "Bad Attitude" speaks for itself. It’s a pretty great way to be introduced to what they do, if you haven’t heard it.  Video of Articles Of Faith - Bad Attitude And A.O.F.'s admirers and friends is impressive: the group's first LP, 1984’s Give Thanks, was mixed and produced by no less than Bob Mould, for whom Bondi opened at the Rickshaw in 2022 with a solo acoustic set. That appearance included an acoustic reworking of at least one Articles of Faith song, “What We Want Is Free”, as well as several acoustic songs from Bondi's first solo album, The Ghost Dances, including “Getting Nowhere”. Bondi spent parts of that show talking about his history with Mould.“What We Want Is Free” is riveting, but even the intro offers a taste of how articulate and intelligent the singer is as a performer. He’s also a fantastic interview.  Video of Vic Bondi - Husker Du story, "Getting Nowhere" & "More Alone With You" Bondi also has had a long relationship with Alternative Tentacles, which has released both Articles of Faith material and three of his later bands, Dead Ending, Report Suspicious Activity, and Redshift. Jello Biafra's long-running indie label is presently gearing up for a spring release of his newest group, Vic Bondi And His Issues. The singer describes the projects as a full four-piece electric band which will be hitting the road to perform songs from every phase of his career, including Articles of Faith. Their debut gig will be June 6 at the Kraken in Seattle. But that’s not what you’ll be hearing this weekend. Bondi's sets in Victoria and Vancouver with the SLIP~ons will be solo acoustic! (People with an interest in Bondi’s acoustic side should also check out In Hope and Fear, which, though never properly mastered,still sounds pretty great to me. It is available in rough form on his Bandcamp. “The Ghost Dances is very bleak," he tells the Straight. "It's a really dark record, I was in a pretty dark place then anyway. But In Hope and Fear, it's actually kind of a bright record.”Accomplished as Bondi is, not everyone has been a fan. He’ll hate that I have to dig it up, but if you watch the 2007 Chicago scene documentary You Weren’t There, you’ll see some pretty ugly back-and-forth between Bondi and one of Articles of Faith’s early detractors, Steve Albini. This is done by editing, which is just as well, as at one point, Bondi—who is not a fan of the film and not proud of his segments—goes so far as to challenge Albini to a throw-down“It's kind of a stupid thing for a middle-aged guy to say,” Bondi says today. So what was the whole feud about, with Chicago hardcore pioneers the Effigies also piling on?“Albini's beef with Articles of Faith, like the Effigies’ beef with Articles of Faith, was about being outspokenly leftist," Bondi says. "Which we were. But we weren’t M.D.C.. or Dead Kennedys—we didn’t preach from the stage."He notes that both M.D.C. singer Dave Dictor and former DK's frontman Biafra have always spent a good portion of their shows lecturing audiences. "We never did that," Bondi continues. "None of our music was explicitly, you know, ‘Fuck Reagan’ or ‘Fuck the police,’ nothing like that. We were a little bit oblique in the way in which we were putting stuff.” Video of You Weren't There - A History of Chicago Punk 1977 to 1984 | Full 2 Hour Documentary On the idea of not being too on-the-nose with political lyrics, one of the more provocative things that Bondi says during our conversation was that he wasn't meanting to write protest songs per se. “My songs were the protest. I think people get that.”I was pretty sure I did, but asked him to clarify no less. “I don’t think of myself as a protest songwriter, but the songs themselves, by their abrasiveness and their persistence, they protest”, he said. “So I don’t sing about protest, I am the protest. Not to make a false equivalence between me and Jackson Pollock, but there’s this story about Pollock where this woman is looking at his painting  and she’s, like, ‘I like your painting, Mr. Pollock, but there’s no nature in it.’ And he’s like, ‘Madam, I am nature.’”Bondi pauses, then continues. “But I do like protest music. I like this kid, Jesse Welles, that’s on Instagram.”On Welles, who plays the Commodore March 19, he says, “He writes really good protest songs. But I don’t know, I’ve always thought my stuff is kind of high concept, at least from the standpoint that the music was abrasive and kind of unlistenable, so that right there was already sort of violating norms and taking issue with the way things are. So if I put some lyrics on it that make that even more explicit, that’s fine.”  Video of "Join ICE" - Jesse Welles (LIVE on The Late Show) And to the extent that Articles of Faith songs are political, they tend to be more on the “personal is political” side, he explains.“You have songs like ‘Five O'Clock’," Bondi says. "‘Five O'Clock’ isn't overtly political. It's about my experience of going to work in this bar at five o'clock in the morning and pulling wads of toilet paper and shit out of toilets, which is the job that I did for a while, and what's political about that is your anger at being forced to work in these kind of depraved situations.”What about “New Normal Catastrophe”, then? My favourite song off Articles of Faith’s 2010 comeback release, New Normal Catastrophe, it’s one I’m sorely hoping will lend itself to an acoustic arrangement. Bondi shrugs: “Yeah, that is a protest song, I guess.” So was there a particular political thinker of book that inspired it?  Video of Articles of Faith - New Normal Catastrophe “No, I was watching the news one day; it was after that blow-out in the Gulf of Mexico," he says, referencing 2010's Deepwater Horizon oil spill. "The cover of the record is actually that event. And it was like, the news was kind of normalizing it. We have this absolute ecological disaster unfolding in the Gulf of Mexico and it was like, ‘Oh, well, the oil will just settle down to the bottom of the gulf, it will be fine!’Bondi continues with, "And I’m like, ‘…where the toxins will just ferment for generations and create mutations that are completely unbelievable.’ But sure, normalize it, it’s fine. It feels like so many catastrophes get normalized now, like wildfires. The fires were across from Puget Sound in the Olympic Peninsula this year, so it didn’t get as bad. But in past years, we’ve gotten the spillover from B.C/ from the fires up there… We’re normalizing all sorts of catastrophes now.”This was only the tip of the iceberg in terms of the normalized catastrophes Vic Bondi and I discussed (we haven’t even mentioned Trump or Netanyahu yet. or really got into his quite exteded beef with the late Albini.). See the expansion pack of this interview on my blog, if you want to deep dive. Tickets for the SLIP~ons with LiquidLight, Cascade, and Vic Bondi, Saturday (March 7), venue tba, can be bought here. Join the discussion Facebook comments not loading? Please check your browser settings to ensure that it is not blocking Facebook from running on straight.com