Being thousands of kilometers away from home has not made the members of the California-based alternative rock band Incubus any less interested in American politics.
In Jakarta on their 2008 world tour, vocalist Brandon Boyd, guitarist Michael Einziger, bassist Ben Kenney, drummer Jose Pasillas and DJ Chris Kilmore were on Wednesday more than happy to share their political views with journalists.
"It is not inappropriate at all if George Bush -- or the Bush regime -- is held accountable for all the terrible things they did ... Personally, if you ask me, I think they are actually criminals. They should be held culpable, as criminals against humanity," Boyd said.
Four years after the Grammy-nominated band released the controversial song Megalomaniac from the album A Crow Left of the Murder, which listeners interpreted as referring to U.S. president George W. Bush, the band is excited that 2008 will be Bush's last year in office.
Although the group said they did not specifically write Megalomaniac about Bush, they did not mince any words about wanting him out of office.
"I honestly think he's responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent people. Not only American lives, but people from all over the world, especially innocent Iraqis. It's really unfortunate, and at the very least they (the Bush administration) should apologize," Boyd said.
The band is touring the world in support of their sixth and latest studio album, Light Grenades, which was released in November 2006. Light Grenades debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200, selling 165,000 copies in the U.S. in its first week. It is the Incubus' first No.1 album.
Despite constantly being on the road, the band keeps up to date with the latest developments back home.
"Did you hear what happened in Vermont yesterday?" Einziger asked Boyd. Einziger continued by passing on the news that two small towns in Vermont on Tuesday approved resolutions indicting Bush and Cheney for war crimes.
Brattleboro, Vermont, has reportedly become one of the first cities in the U.S. to indict President Bush and Vice President Cheney for "crimes against the constitution".
Boyd, however, was unconvinced that efforts to rebuke the Bush administration's war policy would be totally successful.
"I don't think it will ever happen because I think that our system is too caught up in the bureaucracy to make anything actually happen in our life times," he said.
Kenney agreed with Boyd and gave his theory on how powerful families in the U.S walked away without paying the consequences for their actions.
"The thing is, the powerful, powerful families and the powerful people in the states and regimes, you can call them, have a tendency to just get glossier with age and become more glorified and eventually get their face on money," Kenney said.
Einziger gave his own comment on the issue of powerful families in the U.S. "If Hillary Clinton became the next president it would be really freaky to me that for such a long period of time that the presidency has been passed back and forth between two families for like two decades," he said.
The entire band supports Senator Barrack Obama. "I think I can speak for the whole band. We believe that Barack Obama is our generation's JFK. He's like the person who really has the ability to mobilize people -- young and old, of all races and colors and creeds," Boyd said.
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