Refused frontman Dennis Lyxzén doesn’t feel that his bands reunion and impending return with their new album “Freedom” (out June 30th on Epitaph) is motivated by capitalism. Noisey sat down with him, and when they brought up the criticism that some feel the bands official return after 17-years away is capitalist, he replied:
“Well first of all, if people think that releasing a record will get you money, they haven’t really been following what’s been going on in the music business for the last ten years. If you want to make money, putting out a new record is not the golden ticket to making millions. That doesn’t apply anymore. If you are Madonna or someone like that, maybe, but we’ll have to sell a whole lot of records to be able to make money from it. We wanted to do it because we love music and we love to play music.”
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He continued:
“The other thing is that, there’s a certain idea that artists and musicians have to be idealists. I am an idealist in a lot of ways. I still play a lot of shows for free. I play music because I love to play music, but to equate that… I’m not going to deny that when we did the tour in 2012, yeah, we made some money. It was good. I came home and I didn’t have to worry about paying the rent for a year. That’s amazing. But to equate that with being a capitalist, then you don’t know what capitalist is.
I’ve heard people are saying “Refused are capitalists now.” What do you mean I’m a capitalist? Do I make other people work for me so I take the profits? I don’t see that happening. We go out and work. That’s saying that anyone that makes money in the world is a capitalist. We know that’s not true, but it’s just because we’re making more money than we’re supposed to, I guess.”
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