Henry Rollins might be a lot of things – punk rocker, radio host, poet, spoken word artist, actor, activist, world traveller, alligator wrestler – but one thing he’s not is a man who keeps up with his own press. When an internet video featuring his inspirational words went viral, he had no idea.
Simply titled “Young Person,” the video is a mash-up of sorts featuring a talk Rollins gave to the website Big Think in February called “Henry Rollins' Letter to a Young American (Pt. 1).” In May, the video hit the blogs and it has nearly 180,000 views.
“I get emails about it literally every day,” Rollins says from his office in Los Angeles. “Teachers have been emailing me saying ‘I’m going to make my class watch this.’ And I’m well – OK.”
The video begins: “Young person, you’ll find in your life that sometimes your great ambitions will be momentarily stymied, thwarted, marginalized by those who were perhaps luckier.”
Rollins, 51, can relate to his own words. As a kid growing up in Washington, D.C., he was diagnosed with hyperactivity and also suffered from depression. It wasn’t until a stint in a preparatory school that he began to shape his views on discipline and a strong work ethic.
For fans of his music and spoken word performances, Rollins has always been part aggressive rock star and part motivational speaker. This video is really nothing new. But its success has surprised him.
“Why now?” he asks. “That’s a very good question. And I can only be speculative. But I think that, at least in my country, a lot of young people are getting their morality, or what I think of as true north disciplines thrown at them in not the most traditional or conventional of manners. Mom and dad are working 2.4 jobs to try and bring home .75 per cent of the bacon they used to three years ago. And they might not have their hands on the wheel of their child’s steerage as much as they would like. And maybe young people are going to the internet or music to get a few Ps and Qs.”
Rollins also notes that with events from the Occupy movement to the student demonstrations in Montreal, young people are becoming a lot more politicized at an early age.
“And well they should,” Rollins says. “Because their politics, if you live in a Western country, are coming at you right in the teeth, real up close. And unless you want to be willfully ignorant or hide, you’re going to get politics 101 whether you like it or not.”
Ever the connected activist, Rollins recently got into a discussion with a Canadian about the student protests in Montreal; said Canadian accused the students of whining.
“And I said, ‘that’s fair enough, if that’s what you want to think,’” Rollins responds. “I’m not a Canadian but I think I understand the anger of these young people. But in my hippie-dippie world, if you want a country that’s sustainable, peaceful, prosperous with a real future – educate your children ’til they’re blue in the face. Educate them until they’re bleeding out of their mouths. And you’ll have a country that skips the next stupid war, is able to make peaceful relations with other countries. Or you can go down the road of America and dumb down our population willfully and make college education less and less of a possibility for young people.”
Perhaps Rollins’s next video might just be called “Letter to an Old Politician.”
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Exclusive interview with Henry Rollins about his new photo book, ‘Occupants’