It’s past midnight in Amsterdam, but G.W. Sok sounds wide awake. A co-founder of the Dutch anarchist punk band The Ex, he betrays no resentment at having to discuss the band’s twenty-five year career at an hour when most people struggle to stay alert. Even though he’s been through this drill many times, Sok sounds as excited as if he were conducting his first interview. And, while he is happy to talk about the past, it is abundantly clear that Sok isn’t living in it. Most musicians who have been around as long as The Ex pepper their conversation with references to the good old days of their youth, when the fans were smarter, the parties were wilder, and the music was better. By contrast, while he recounts fond memories of his band’s early history, Sok deftly escapes the labyrinth of nostalgia. The past is a resource, but so is the future. The world remains ripe with possibility.

In contrast to the relaxed, sunny tone of Sok’s speaking voice, The Ex sound like gray skies, threatening to break open at any moment. Constructed out of pulsing, fractured rhythms and a bevy of dissonant notes, their music resists every notion of “easy listening.” The title of their first full-length album, Disturbing Domestic Peace, (released in1980) is an apt description of their art. The cover photo shows five policeman in riot gear, one of whom is about to lower his axe onto the entrance of a building. The image reminds us of the violence the state is willing to unleash on anyone who resists the status quo. Coupled with the album’s title, it underscores the limitations of concepts like “disturbing the peace.” While it is the people inside this building who are likely to be taken into custody on that amorphous charge, the police are clearly the ones doing the disturbing here. By itself, then, the cover functions as a simple yet effective critique of the ruling order’s hypocrisy.

Listening to the record makes things considerably more complicated. Like almost all of the music The Ex have put out over the years, Disturbing the Domestic Peace is angular, edgy, tense. In short, it is meant to disturb. When we hear songs like “Rules” or  “New Wars,” we feel that axe poised in mid-air and grow desperate for the blow to be struck. But that desire aligns us, not with the people inside the building, but with the policemen who are about to discipline them. While Sok’s lyrics make classic anarchist points with the detachment of the pamphleteer, the melody-sparse sounds that propel them forward remind us how readily passions can override political reason. The impulse to break down doors always has the potential to free itself from any order we impose upon it. Sometimes the longing for the blade transcends our sense of belonging. This is why art still matters. We need to feel the urge to identify with power without acting against our own best interest. And that is a task for which rock music is especially well suited. The Ex have always understood this, producing music that is taut with pent-up primal energy, refusing to settle down.

As Sok fleshes out his tale of The Ex, he repeatedly underscores the band’s restlessness. At one career crossroads after another, the band has turned off the main drag: not signing to a major label, not playing by the rules of the insular punk community, not dumbing down their politics in search of a bigger audience. Asked how The Ex is able to bear the stress of being on the road, Sok’s already welcoming voice brightens a notch. “The traveling makes it fun!” And when he says, “traveling,” Sok’s talking about more than the club-and-festival circuit in Europe and North America. In both 2002 and 2004, The Ex accompanied the great Dutch avant-garde jazz drummer Han Bennink on extended tours of Ethiopia. “The roads there are not very comfortable. So even if Western bands go there, they will not travel around by bus to smaller cities because it takes two days to get there. Also, people hardly know rock music. They only vaguely know something like Michael Jackson or Madonna.” Over the course of the interview, Sok mentions these trips to Ethiopia again and again, transforming The Ex’s adventurous touring into a figure for their approach to both art and life. Like the speaker of Robert Frost’s famous poem, The Ex’s decision to take the road less traveled stands in for countless other decisions that have determined the band’s career.

In the world of popular music, longevity is both a curse and a blessing. The longer bands are around, the more likely it is that their concert tours will draw consistent crowds and their records consistent sales. Unfortunately, that security is not always enough. To remain relevant, bands need to reach beyond their base, convincing not only devoted fans but also casual listeners and critics that they are still worth the expenditure of time and money. Veteran acts must navigate the treacherous waters between the present and present perfect, convincing their audiences, both that they are “now” and that their “then” lies in the future as well as the past. Nobody wants to be a has-been.  Yet even the most savvy artists find themselves reduced to history lessons, no matter how vigorously they protest against their obsolescence. The latest Michael Jackson, Madonna, or Rolling Stones albums are not going to turn the clock back on these artists’ careers. It takes more than corporate tie-ins or stadium-sized spectacles to maintain the blood flow in a rock-and-roll reputation. No matter how hard Mick Jagger works on stage, he can no longer sing "Satisfaction" with the sincerity he once did. The Rolling Stones’ time has long since come and gone. Though fans still come to their shows, the release they experience is profoundly melancholy.

The Ex, on the other hand, keep coming. Unlike those platinum-selling acts who are destined for the afterlife of the casino circuit, The Ex have made few concessions to pop convention over the course of their long career. But while this uncompromising approach has prevented them from having hits, it has also protected them from misses. Free from the demands of pleasing corporate functionaries, The Ex have been able to fashion a remarkably constant body of work. While the twenty-three singles and B-sides from the 1980s included on the recent collection Singles. Period. (Touch and Go, 2005) demonstrate a degree of progression—the later songs tend to be more varied in instrumentation and tonality—they are clearly cut from the same cloth.

More surprisingly, many of the tracks on The Ex’s 1998 Starters and Alternators or their 2004 double album Turn would sound right at home in the collection. Indeed, you could put all of The Ex’s songs together, even their collaborations with other artists, and play them on shuffle mode without hearing a single awkward segue.

To some critics, this consistency might seem like a weakness. Record reviews tend to focus on the differences between a new album and its predecessors, highlighting evidence of growth. But The Ex render this approach difficult, if not impossible. Although Turn is a fine record, it hardly represents a departure. The music pulses as relentlessly as ever. Sok’s lyrics revisit topics he has explored many times before. If anything, Turn confirms that more of the same isn’t necessarily too much.

The Ex’s recent works demonstrate that refusing the mantle of maturity can be an excellent career move. Yet their consistency serves another, more significant purpose as well. Since punk rock first appeared in the mid-1970s, it has been identified with radical politics, usually on the Left. As Craig O’Hara writes in his book, The Philosophy of Punk: More Than Noise, “when it comes to choosing a political ideology, punks are primarily anarchists. This is not to say that all punks are well read in the history and theory of anarchism, but most do share a belief formed around the anarchist principles of having no government or rulers and valuing individual freedom and responsibility.”

Like their counterparts in the British band Crass or America’s Dead Kennedys, The Ex set out to turn the instinctive anarchism of punk into something more self-aware. In place of the willfully blind rage of the Sex Pistols’ “Anarchy In the U.K.”—“Don’t know what I want/But I know how to get it”—they have promoted a political stance designed to channel that energy more productively without compromising those anarchist principles. It can be a difficult balancing act.

The most common critiques of anarchism from both the Left and Right impugn it for confusing immaturity with idealism. The direct actions favored by activists with ties to the punk community are invariably reduced to their lowest common denominator. The electronic version of a February 17, 2003 San Francisco Chronicle story on a demonstration prior to the invasion of Iraq provides an excellent example. In a photograph of protesters on Market Street, a “Punx For Peace” sign is prominently displayed. Below it, the caption mocks its message. “‘Punx For Peace,’ as the sign reads? Perhaps, but hundreds of anarchic ‘black bloc’ protesters ran wild downtown for hours after Sunday’s peace rally, and 46 were arrested after windows were broken and stores vandalized.”

It’s not the thousands who marched without incident who get counted and recounted, but the much smaller number whose actions reinforced negative stereotypes of punks and anarchists. The same logic has been applied to protests against the WTO and other

international organizations from the 1999 “Battle of Seattle” onward. In the mainstream media, to be an anarchist is to act like a child throwing a tantrum. The fact that most anarchists do not endorse window smashing, looting, and other actions that get bad press almost never gets reported.

Discussing the problem of media representation, Sok explains that Europe isn’t much better than the United States. “In the left-wing press it’s clear that anarchy means something different. But when the right-wing press uses it, you always have to distinguish between what you mean with ‘anarchism’ and what they mean with ‘anarchism.’ For them anarchy is chaos and nothing else. And for us it’s not chaos, but less structured than what they want.” The Ex’s conception of anarchy is both less showy and more substantive than the sort that makes the evening news, as indicated by 1936, their tribute to the short-lived anarchist government that emerged in Catalonia during the Spanish Revolution. “You always have to explain it somehow, make it clear that it’s not about destruction for destruction’s sake. Sometimes you have to destroy something to build something new. But that’s a different kind of destruction than just looting shops. To me that has nothing to do with anarchism.”

Sok offers an example of how things can go awry. “In Germany they organized a festival called ‘Do Something’ in the early 1980s. The idea was to get active, to do something positive instead of just sitting around. Then, because the whole town was flooded with punks, chaotic-looking people, the police response was very over the top, and the festival ended up in a big riot. That was one thing. But then the next year the punks organized another meeting, only they made it a chaos day from the beginning. They just went there to smash things up. That was the whole demonstration. That’s not my idea of being constructive.”

Asked whether the need to constantly explain the distinction between the reality of anarchism and the negative stereotypes of it in the media might be a waste of energy better spent elsewhere, he insists that the labor of self-definition is worthwhile. And then, in the best anarchist fashion, he questions the value of the term for himself. “I always find it hard to call myself an ‘anarchist.’ We call ourselves ‘friends of anarchism.’ I do think I’m an anarchist. For me there’s a sort of feel about what is right and wrong, good and bad. I try to live according to these rules. But I also realize that a lot of the people around me who are not anarchists can still be very friendly people. So I don’t want to lock them out. They might think a bit different, but they are OK. You have to work together to achieve things.”

If this sounds excessively pragmatic for an anarchist, it helps to remember what those two categories have in common: a willingness to do what others only think. Like many other punk bands, The Ex fully support the DIY—“do it yourself”—approach. In their case, that means doing everything from releasing records on their own label in Europe to applying for grants to perform their work in unusual ways. While there’s always something entrepreneurial about start-ups, in the case of bands like The Ex, the best analogy is not the small business but the small non-profit, paying its employees relatively low wages but freeing them from the ideological and professional pressures of the corporate environment. From this perspective, the band’s two trips to Ethiopia look less like a concert tour and more like the sort of educational outreach that the best NGOs aspire to make possible, where the line between vendor and client, teacher and student, privileged and underserved starts to blur in moments of cross-cultural exchange.

“I don’t think it’s healthy to stay only in your own little subculture and close the door. You have to open the door so people can see how you live and what you’re doing.” And, however alluring the prospect of doing the job with an axe might be, a twist of the doorknob will be just as effective. “When we started with punk, we thought it meant, ‘Everything is possible.’ If you have an idea, just do it. See if it works or not. We still believe in that little idea. What happened was that, within a couple of years of our forming the band, punk became a sort of brand name. All these bands started saying, ‘Oh, you have to play according to the punk rules.’ But we thought that each song can have a totally different structure. Every time it’s your own decision how it can be. That gives you much more freedom than if you have to stick to verse-chorus-bridge.”

Sok lets the irony of this rule-bound punk and the formulaic anarchism that accompanies it resonate through the rest of the interview. The Ex may have made remarkably consistent music over the course of their career, but not because they were following anyone else’s rules. The lesson is clear. Freedom doesn’t free us from ourselves. It intensifies what was already there. We can break on through to the other side without losing what matters most. Over twenty-five years of making music, The Ex have crafted a legacy that shows us how to open the door to possibility without fear, to stop worrying about what has already been done, to do it now.

The Ex’s Singles. Period. is available from Touch and Go Records (www.tgrec.com).