D. JAMES GOODWIN, TODDV WOLFSON
“The isolation of the lastc ouple of years was certainly part of it,” John Doe says, considering why his new album, Fables In A Foreign Land, is set in the desolate, 1980s USA. This past doesn’t seem such a foreign country, anyway, to the America Doe began documenting in his LA punk band X in 1977, or to its current malaise. “Guilty Bystander”, in which slaves are whipped, was inspired by George Floyd’s murder. “It isn’t necessarily to do with a man whipping another person,” Doe explains. “It could be a man whipping a horse. Because at somepoint, people were treated like animals. And what the fuck, man?”