First post - RATM

This blog will act as an addition to my Art blog and give me a chance to talk about some of the music that has a huge impact on me over the years. First post, here we go.

Rage Against the Machine - Evil Empire

Oh the images this conjures up. Hitler youth? I saw a combination of that and the Yuppy kids I knew growing up in Dallas.
Something about the music in this record tapped into something very primal in me at that age. I knew nothing about the content of the lyrics. I knew nothing about the Zapatistas, corporate greed, cultural rape and pillage of free trade economics, socialism, the struggles that real people go through every day all over the world. All I knew growing up was smug right wing fundamentalism. and it pissed me off, a lot. even without having any sort of alternative voice to judge against it. What I really got out of this was whether you actually agree with what they say is not relevant per se, but you are being presented with someone else's reality, which is important so you can tell if everything you have ever been taught is completely true or not.
Like the Clash in the 70's and 80's, the lyrics that Zach De La Rocha acts like a geographic history lesson, but the one that didn't make it to your school. Nothing suburban white kids know anything about. Which is what made the fact that it got so popular and comerically successful even funnier. It was full of anger, conviction, and brutal honesty. They made zero apologies for the message they spread, something really missing from music today.
There is a real tension in the performance of this band. Venting over social injustice was also a channel for what I think was also a real inner struggle to express a uneasiness and emotional repression. A perfectly identifiable thing for a young sheltered teenager in America. This is especially true being that most of them are being force fed drugs to keep them docile and content with the suburban drudge that is a large portion of American culture.
The music was also very experimental. you have Tom Morello, a Harvard grad and a certifiable guitar genius. They mixed hip hop, spoken word, metal, punk, psycadelic, and funk.
Parents hate it. whats funny about this is that they don't know their children are being programmed to think for themselves and have an open mind to left wing social views, I think if they knew that, and this where say the Macarthy era, the band would have been thrown in jail for corrupting youth. the beauty is the message is hidden just under the surface. All these parents know is there are a lot of curse words and it is making their kids rebellious, which is something rock music has always been meant to do anyway.