Ripping the system—with sound
By Khari Thompson
I didn't realize it at the time, but buying the Evil Empire album by Rage Against The Machine when I was a junior in high school fundamentally altered my brain chemistry.
Before that, RATM had hovered on the edge of my musical taste—originally forged from a combination of '80s/'90s rap and punk rock—for much of my childhood. But I didn't properly discover them, I would say, until Guitar Hero 3 introduced me to "Bulls on Parade."
It wasn't just the hardcore fusion of hip hop and rock—two genres born from Black creativity and struggle—that piqued my interest. Even at age 17, the intent of their music was hard for me to miss.
Lead vocalist Zack de la Rocha was mad about a lot of stuff. At that particular time of life, I was, too. I just didn’t have all the words to explain why. But this band, with its mesmerizing mix of carefully researched message and metal, seemingly did.
So I dove into them. I memorized the lyrics. Looked up and name-checked the places and people I'd never heard of. Revisited the references I had heard of to see what I was missing.
And through the lens of righteous fury, I re-examined the world I lived in and learned to find my place in it.
30 years after the release of Evil Empire—a pointed critique of Ronald Reagan's label of the Soviet Union, which the band deemed hypocritical—its themes are far from nostalgic. If anything, they're prophetic.
The in-your-face rejection of militarism in “Bulls on Parade" hits like a bomb as the Trump administration wantonly shells Iran, threatens blockades and economic violence against rival countries, and callously threatens mass casualties: "Weapons, not food/Not clothes, not shoes/Not me, just feed the war cannibal animal."
"People of the Sun" spotlights the enduring brutality of Europe’s colonization and oppression of indigenous Americans, and the lasting repercussions of our xenophobia: "Since 1516, minds attacked and overseen/Now crawl amid the ruins of this empty dream/With their borders and boots on top of us…"
"Roll Right" drops references to Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man in one line and connects the Chinese protestors killed in the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre to Palestinians living under Israeli occupation in the next.
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Zack de la Rocha (left) and Rage Against The Machine perform at Coachella in 2007. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons) |
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And American media doesn’t get a pass: “Vietnow” fires back at right-wing radio hosts for demonizing minorities and poor people—“terror’s the product you push/Well I’m a truth addict”—while "Wind Below” has smoke for mainstream television and corporations: “All the shareholders gonna flex, and try to annex the truth/While the new trust is gonna flex, and cast their image in you.”
That's the thing about protest music: even if some of the specifics change with time, the themes themselves never grow stale. Because where oppression exists, resistance always follows.
And one of the most powerful ways to resist is through the act of creation—making something that endures despite forces that want to suppress and destroy it. Something that changes the way we think, makes us feel things we don't understand, and challenges us to use the weapons at our disposal to fight back.
Sometimes, those messages are met with discomfort, derision, and even censorship.
Billie Holiday forced America to face the horrors of lynching by singing "Strange Fruit" despite relentless backlash, death threats, and harassment from the federal government itself.
Nina Simone wrote "Mississippi Goddam”—another song that got banned in the South—in under an hour after the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing killed four little girls in Birmingham in 1963.
RATM was banned from SNL for trying to fly upside-down American flags on stage in protest of billionaire and former Republican presidential candidate Steve Forbes hosting the show.
Not everyone’s going to want to hear what conscious artists have to say about the state of the world. For every person who’s changed forever by listening to or otherwise consuming protest art, many others will reject it. (Not everyone loved Kendrick Lamar’s and Bad Bunny’s very political Super Bowl performances, for instance.)
But the point of making that protest art, especially music, is using your platform to make sure that, even if you don’t agree, you can’t ignore it. You have to listen. You have to reckon with it, even if you’d love to throw in your earplugs and call it a day.
Because as long as the machines that keep us divided rather than united exist, we need people to rage against them with whatever means they have:
“It has to start somewhere, it has to start sometime. What better place than here, what better time than now?”
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