With Kult 45, American alternative metal band Otep has launch an all-out aural and lyrical assault on what they deem to be the destructive, disruptive and divisive regime of current U.S. President Donald Trump and similar political machinations throughout the globe.
Otep is the name of the band, but it is also the woman fronting the band, writing its powerfully incendiary music, and who inhabits the strong, aggressive, bold and immensely provocative ‘character’ that we see on stage, in music videos and interviews.
There is a seemingly unbridled rage imbuing the music of Otep, but it is not a haphazard, lashing out rage. It is a focused anger, based on righteous indignation over the fractiousness of modern society, the greed, manipulation, cowardice, exploitation and dishonesty of so-called modern democratic political systems (particularly her own in the United States). It is a white hot, molten indictment of the deliberate ignorance and calculated hatred that seems to be in the ascendancy in modern culture, as epitomized by what she terms the Kult of 45 – the group of followers of current President Donald Trump, who is the 45th individual to hold the office.
But it must be said that it is not a blind anarchic rage, nor is it an anger propelled forward by sheer emotionalism. Rather, Otep possesses an incisively sharp intelligence, a quick wit, and an encyclopedic knowledge of history, politics, philosophy and culture. She is as well read as she is well spoken, and as fearless in flaunting her intellect as she is in using her music to confront – head on – those who she feels are creating the chaos that is enveloping her home nation and its people.
Kult 45 is the name of the band’s eighth studio album, and sees Otep and bandmates Aristotle Mihalopoulos, Justin Kier and Andrew Barnes, blending their form of manic, yet melodic, metal with Otep’s spoken word – or shouted – art. It could be seen as rap, but especially in a live environment is more like performance art and deeply potent in its ferocity.
“It didn’t come from an idea, it came from a compulsion, something I had to do. I had to write this album because of what was going on in this country. I wanted to make sure I documented the things that I was observing and experiencing in this country, and I also wanted these songs to be able to build themselves, so I just let the music take me where it went. So, we weren’t bound by genre, we weren’t bound by any sort of structure or rules. The only rule going in was there were no rules. We write the music that the muses incite. We just let it come to us. Lyrically, I kind of knew the messages I wanted to go after: the school shootings, I knew I wanted to go after Resident Chump [how she refers to Trump throughout the interview]. I knew I wanted to go after his followers who I call his Kult 45 in songs like Halt Right and Molotov. He has re-emboldened the most hateful and darkest parts of American society,” said Otep, who calls Trump ‘resident’ because she believes he should not be called president because more people actually voted for his opponent, but that he gained residency of the White House because of the shady nuances of the Electoral College system in the November 2016 election.
“There are a lot of people who say when I speak about our history, which is a very dark history at times, that I hate my country. And that’s absolutely false. I paraphrase the great James Baldwin who said I love my country enough that I am allowed to criticize it. I love my country so much that it’s my job to criticize it. Also, in our history we have seen that there have been great people who have been flawed people, like our Founding Fathers. Our job as citizens is to take those great ideas and build upon them. And America is not built on a monarchy or a bloodline – we’re built on an idea, the idea that we’re all created equal. This idea that we are all guaranteed life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. There’s no footnote or asterisk in the Constitution that says ‘only if you’re white, only if you’re Christian, only if you’re male, only if you’re straight or rich’ or whatever. It just says ‘all.’
“And Resident Chump and his Kult of 45 talk about making America great again. Well, I don’t know when America was greater. Was it when women didn’t have the right to vote? Before Europeans landed on this land, and this land belonged to the Native Americans for 30,000 years? Was it when we owned people, when we had segregation, when gay people didn’t have the right to marry. So, when was America great than it is now? Well I will tell you when – it was two years ago before this orange colostomy bag was elected.”
Otep said the actions and words of Trump in areas of race relations, harsh immigration edicts, sexual assault, gun violence, international relations and his ardour for dictators such as Russia’s Vladimir Putin and North Korea’s Kim Jong-Un are dragging the United States’ reputation into the muck and mire and giving permission for the hate-filled underbelly of American society, which more or less remained out of the mainstream for decades, back to prominence in full Pandora’s box fashion.
“I think Resident Chump has waited all 70 years of his miserable life to have the power to be cruel and now he has it. And it’s also a way to distract from all of his crimes and his hypocrisy. He has been married three times and two of them are immigrants and he has cheated on all three of them. I ask this of everybody, if that was Barack Obama, if he had five children by three different wives what would the Republicans say about it?” she said.
“Trump is following the autocratic playbook perfectly: pick an enemy and make them the ‘other.’ Villainize them, blame them for all of society’s problems, start going after your own department of justice so they can’t stop you from committing crimes or violating the constitution and make sure your base, the Kult of 45, believe that you are the only one that can fix it. When you have the resident of the White House saying there are good people on both sides and bad people on both sides, like what happened in Charlottesville, that’s not a dog whistle, that’s a foghorn to let his racist people believe that they have a place in this society.
“We, as part of the resistance who voted for Hilary Clinton, three million more of us than voted for Chump, and millions more who voted for third-party candidates, need to make our voices heard. And that’s one of the reasons why I wanted to write this record was sometimes people aren’t exposed to both sides. Sometimes all they see is Fox News, which is the real fake news. Sometimes all they hear is coming from their relatives and friends who are part of the Kult of 45. Music and art have a very important role to play in politics, because most people aren’t going to sit down and read a history book or watch a documentary. Most people want to watch an action movie or play video games or listen to music. So, music is a great opportunity to show the other side and allow people to make up their own minds, not that they have been presented with both sides of the argument.”
So where did this sense of political mission, this drive to gain knowledge and perspective, and this desire to use her gifts to challenge the status quo and speak up for those who feel voiceless come from? It came from the mean streets of Los Angeles, where Otep was a self-described hoodlum and “knucklehead” during her formative years, but with a strong, inspirational mother.
“My mother, to this day, remains one of the smartest people I have ever known. And growing up poor and watching her take three jobs to make it so that we could have food on our table and a roof over our heads, and not be able to utilize her mental gifts and intellectual talents just makes me want to cry. I think it was also instilled in us by my mother not to allow anyone to define you by where you come from, because if you work hard, if you fight for what you believe in and remember that we’re all brothers and sisters, you can do anything,” she said, adding that she came from an Irish Catholic background, with a long tradition of military service, which is why she also calls herself a ‘Second Amendment Liberal’ and is a licenced gun owner.
“My mother is a Christian, but not an evangelical or anything like that. She just believes in the love of Jesus and all of that, but she also believes that the Garden of Eden was not just a single place but is all of the Earth and that we are the gardeners. We’re supposed to take care of not only the Earth but each other. And that was instilled in us at a very young age. We grew up with that tough Irish chin, but also, we have these mental faculties that we were grateful to get genetically from our parents. We had this competitive challenge where we wanted to see who knew more about this subject or that subject, and we had to be able to back it up with facts.
“And this awareness and desire in me happened at a very young age. Back when I was a bit of a streetwise troublemaker, I was always writing and illustrating. I was drawing before I could speak and drawing then led to writing stories about the pictures I was drawing which then led to short stories which then led to poetry which then led to songwriting. I feel like my whole life I have been compelled to write and speak and that’s become my life.”
Otep’s full stage name is Otep Shamaya, and Otep is a reconfiguration of the word poet. The band was formed in 2000, and before landing a record deal, became the first female-fronted band to play the massive Ozzfest heavy metal event in 2001, on the strength of Sharon Osbourne seeing their live show.
Since then, they have unleashed two EPS, one live album, and after Kult 45, eight studio releases. The new album was the first released on their new label, Napalm Records.
As much as the album was prompted by the actions and behaviour of the Trump administration and his followers, Otep said the purpose of the record was to motivate like-minded individuals and instil the same sort of desire to make positive action and positive change as infuses her spirit.
“I didn’t want it to be just an indictment of him or his Kult, I always wanted to give people a sense of hope, to give them an understanding that they have the power, that this is our country, this is our nation and these idiots work for us. That’s why we pay taxes; our tax dollars pay their salaries. And if they don’t do their job, they should be fired, just like if we don’t do our job, we should be fired. That’s what I am seeing all across the country; the people are beginning to do just that. The resistance is coming together, and people are uniting,” she said.
“We’re seeing a rise in the number of women running for office. There are more women running for office in this country than in our national history. You’re seeing the disenfranchised rising up, you’re seeing young people rise up. The young activists from the Parkland shooting are organizing their communities and they started the March for Our Lives movement and these kids are going to be 18 when it comes time to vote in the mid-terms this November.
“The resistance is exclusively inclusive. We have had protests against the ‘wall’ and the Muslim ban and there were people there from the Women’s March, there were people from the LGBTQ community, there were Black Lives Matter people there, people from the #MeToo movement, people from all these different movements have combined into the resistance. They may have a hierarchy of interests but a woman who is most concerned with reproductive rights is still concerned about Black Lives Matter. There are Black Lives Matter people out there who are worried about gun violence and school shootings. So, I am very hopeful. I am seeing it. I am seeing people who are saying they are first time voters and that they’re voting blue all the way down their ballot, which is the colour of the Democratic Party here.”
Ultimately, Otep is hopeful, and believes that there is a groundswell of pro-active, positive and practical opposition to the Trump administration.
“I am seeing young people angry. I am seeing people who voted for Trump having voter’s remorse anger. I am seeing women rise up and not be afraid of speaking out any more. What I like to tell people is that this is no longer a spectator sport. We are citizens of this country, so it is our duty, our oath to speak out, to stand up, to attend rallies, to let people know that they are not alone, to give them courage to come and speak out against injustice even if it doesn’t apply to your personal situation, because it might one day. They are coming after immigrants and gay people right now, but who’s to say who their next targets will be, or what insanity is coming next,” she said.
“It was like it was in the late 1960s. The resistance came from music, it was students and it was good-hearted folks who were full of common sense who decided they weren’t going to allow the corruption and the deceit and the dishonest [Viet Nam] war to continue. So, they were vocal, and it’s imperative now that we regain that spirit. Part of the reason for this album is to help rally people, to inform them, and to fire them up. What makes democracy so special is we have the right to speak out again our leaders and we have the right to rally and protest. And we are going to do everything we can, through our music and our shows, to get everybody to vote and get these shitty, vile fiends out of office and shame them back under the rocks that they came from.”
She is also hopefully because she believes that, when the chips are really down, people will do the right thing, as she illustrated by this real-life story.
“I was driving on the freeway one day and a pick-up truck jumped the median and hit another car head on at full speed. And from the car a little boy was ejected through the windshield and landed in a ditch. And before any emergency personal, fire, police or ambulance could get there, 20 cars had pulled over and raced to the scene. It was everybody from businessmen driving BMWs to construction workers, to bikers to soccer moms to people like me, old and young, black and white, racing to that child, racing to the people that were injured. No one stopped before they helped to ask ‘did you vote for Hilary? Are you a Republican? Are you gay or straight? Are you Muslim? Are you Christian? Are you an atheist? How much money do you make? Are you a gun owner? Nobody asked anything other than if there was a doctor or nurse around because they were desperately trying to save that little boy,” she said.
“And in that moment, we were no longer tribalistic. We were no longer separated by these imaginary lines the politicians create to make sure we’re always constantly fighting amongst ourselves. At that point we were just human beings trying to save other human beings. Unfortunately, the little boy perished, and I saw grown men who didn’t know each other crying and hugging and I could tell they were in pain, that they would want someone to do that for their child. I saw people consoling the mother who was hysterical about her child. And that’s the true spirit of the human species. I’m a proud American and I speak as an American and I think that’s the true nature of American, except for the small few who are beyond repair, who are broken – the Kult of 45. They are going to stay broken, they want to stay broken. And there’s nothing we can do about that.”
Otep, the artist and the band, is bringing its message, mission and music to Canada for the first time ever – which is remarkable considering the band has been in existence for more than 15 years. They are playing at The Rockpile in Toronto on July 17 and The Brass Monkey in Ottawa the following night.
“It’s been one of the greatest disappointments in my career so far that I have not been in Canada. When we tried getting in to Canada in 2004, I think you guys had a Prime Minister who was friendly to George W. Bush, and I was very vocal against President Bush, so when we tried to enter Canada we were rejected at the border. They sent us back home. I was put on Bush’s enemies’ list and I was put on a no-fly list for certain countries. I could go to South America no problem, I could go to Australia no problem, but not Canada,” she said.
“But we are finally playing Canada and I can’t tell you how excited I am. I am so happy to get up there and meet the fine folks of Canada and meet our fans and breathe some fresh air of what I feel is a bit closer to real democracy than we have down here at the moment.”
It is through the medium of the live show that the music of Otep reaches its most potent crescendo of intensity and impact.
“It feels like we’re getting the message out directly to the people. If you sell a record you don’t know who is buying it. You don’t know what emotions they are receiving from the music. But when you play it right in front of them, we on stage can see it. They have their fists in the air screaming ‘f*** Trump’ and you can see that it’s getting through. It’s always going to be a hella great rock show, we do our best to give every show, no matter how many people are in front of us, the best show of our lives. We give it our all. But it does feel very cathartic to be able to get out on the road and speak and perform to like minded people and hopefully get them fired up and finally start holding this bloated orange colostomy bag accountable for his crimes and trampling our civil liberties and our Constitution.”
For more information on Otep, Kult 45 and upcoming tour dates, visit http://www.oteploves.me.
- Jim Barber is a veteran award-winning journalist and author based in Napanee, ON, who has been writing about music and musicians for a quarter of a century. Besides his journalistic endeavours, he now works as a communications and marketing specialist. Contact him at jimbarberwritingservices@gmail.com.
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