The Bad Penny (beta)

When The Bad Penny embarked on its On Tyranny project more than a year ago, we initially interviewed artists residing in countries controlled by authoritarian regimes in order to learn how they are still able to pursue their vocation despite fears of retaliation including censorship, imprisonment and even death. We conversed with musicians in Russia, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Hungary.

About six months later, the Trump regime began deploying military forces into U.S. cities, deported U.S. citizens without due process to countries they had never resided nor visited, and ordered masked “authorities” with no visible identification to kidnap and disappear people with no criminal records off the street. Thus, we turned our focus to how U.S.-based musicians are coping with previously unimaginable atrocities and how Authoritarian America is damaging the careers and personal lives of artists and dissenters.

Today we bring you a different perspective on the growing power of autocracy as the governing force across the world via a short-and-sweet interview with grindcore band Rotten Sound from Finland. While the vast majority of artists we’ve interviewed for On Tyranny have expressed fear, disgust and despair over the direction that the U.S. – and, by extension, the world – is headed, The Bad Penny was surprised to learn that some artists are not worried about being persecuted for their stances, whether they be creative or “political” (whatever that term actually means anymore).