![]() “Evil Empire” may have been the nickname that Reagan gave to the USSR, but Rage turned that around and focused it squarely on the U.S. We saw a machine of “republicrats” maintaining an established order of American hegemony, exploiting the indigenous and the disenfranchised. ![]() ![]() This was the mid-1990s and Bill Clinton was President, but our rage came from the Left. We were infused with a rebellious spirit. I sat in a band practice room at high school as my friend read lyrics from the album liner notes aloud to others, and while they didn’t seem to get what he was so worked up about, I did, even if our schemes for revolutionary action never went beyond talking about refusing to comply with arbitrary high school orders. But even in a live performance on a DVD, you could feel the electricity seep through the screen, the wild look in De la Rocha’s eyes matched by the feeling that Tom Morello’s guitar killed fascists far more effectively than Guthrie’s ever could have. The energy of RATM was like a fire that entered through one’s ears and went straight to one’s brain. Rally ’round the family, pockets full of shellsīut this was poetry always laden with anger. While arms warehouses fill as quick as the cells They don’t gotta burn the books, they just remove ’em What we don’t know keeps the contracts alive and movin’ I walk the corner to the rubble, that used to be a library Not need, just feed the war, cannibal animal Every line seemed to bear a deep significance, with references carrying me down rabbit holes of research. Zack de la Rocha spun beautiful poetry out of political outrage. Suddenly “Bulls on Parade” hit in a new light-it wasn’t the putative chorus to focus on but the insanely adept verses. When I finally gave Evil Empire a proper listen, however, my opinion changed pretty quickly, and I think it would be fair to say that the experience of this album (along with Rage’s 1992 self-titled debut) aligned with a certain political awakening on my part-an awakening to politics, I mean. It struck me as overly repetitive (as if “They rally round the family with a pocket full of shells” were the only line in the song), and I think I wasn’t quite sure what to do with the style. I didn’t much care for Rage at first, perhaps due to “Bulls on Parade” being the song I heard over and over again at the beginning. Evil Empire’s “Bulls on Parade” was on full rotation on MTV that summer, along with Fugees “ Killing Me Softly with His Song“-they still showed primarily music videos at that point-and Comedy Central was airing a lot of reruns of The Kids in the Hall. Among other things, this included hours sitting in the main room of the dormitory on the ground floor, which housed the only TV to which we had access. Not that I’d known any of them prior to this shared experience, but outside of the various workshops and other planned activities, we spent a good amount of time together. Fifteen-year-old me was attending a writing camp at a mid-Ohio college, and my compatriots and I were staying in the dorm. All views expressed herein are his and his alone, and not to be attributed to 25YL.Īlthough their second album, Evil Empire, was released on April 16, it wasn’t until the summer of 1996 that I first heard Rage Against the Machine. As Rage Against the Machine’s Evil Empire turns 25, Caemeron Crain looks back at how the album affected him as a youth, how it strikes him now, and the moments in between.
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