Politicaly Raging
...across? Or do they realize the various tactics the band is using to get their views across? "A musician's or artist's responsibility is a simple one, and that is, through your music to tell the truth." This is a quote from the lead singer of the band Rage Against The Machine, Zach DeLaroach. Through his lyrics, which he writes himself, he accomplishes this and tries to open up the minds of his listeners. In Rage's hit "Guerrilla Radio," his lyrics ring like a full-on revolution, "A spectacle monopolized/ The camera's eye on the choice disguised/ Was it cast for tha mass who burn and toil?/ Or for tha vultures who thirst for blood and oil?" It is not hard to see what he is singing about in these lines, one needs to just open the paper or turn on CNN. There are not many artists openly against our current President because I feel that they are worried about what it would do to their careers. Rage has been on MTV since the early nineties, but for some reason their records and videos are not getting much air time on the tube or on the radio. I feel that this is a direct result of their strong political ideals and the way they represent them, straight forward truth, the pitfalls of being able to relate your views articulately through the spoken word. But this is not the first time that they have sung or acted controversially about political subjects. A 1996 performance on "Saturday Night Live" was cut to one song when the band tried to hang inverted American flags from their amplifiers. And in 2000 the group staged concerts to raise money for the death-row defense of Mumia Abu-Jamal, a former Black Panther and radio journalist convicted in the 1981 killing of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner. The lyric above not only is political in nature but also has some subtle nuances which I feel are targeted to the younger generation in hopes of relating to them on their level. The “tha” which appears twice is a slight push towards the younger more “hip-hop” culture which are younger Americans live in these days. I would have looked over this as just the sign of the times and language changing w...