PROVIDENCE, R.I. — A life-long fan of the political rock group Rage Against the Machine expressed outrage that the band’s politics had changed from how he remembered them in high school, confirmed sources.
“It wasn’t like this when I was young, but now everyone is woke. People are claiming that a song like ‘Take the Power Back’ has some sort of political message. What message?! Is it recorded backward or something? Because I don’t hear it,” said fan Trent Linden, who claims the band needs to go back to their apolitical message they espoused when he was a teenager. “Or in ‘Killing in the Name,’ when they said ‘Fuck you I won’t do what you tell me,’ that was just about telling your mom you don’t want to clean your room. That’s why we all related to that song back then. Now everything has to be political. What’s next? Collaborating with someone like Michael Moore?”
Emily Sortënsussön, Trent’s former girlfriend of four months, said she thought he was joking when he first brought up the band’s stances.
“He’s a funny guy, so I thought he was just like, doing a bit,” said Sortënsussön. “But when I asked him what he actually thought ‘Bulls on Parade’ was about, he just stared at me for a minute and said, ‘I don’t know. Running of the bulls?’ He’s even considering burning all of his Rage Against the Machine CDs to protest. Seriously. I can’t believe I used to have sex with him.”
Francis Bennington, professor of political science at Brown University, says Linden’s confusion over the band’s overt lyrical content has become a trend with people who grew up listening to them but are now conspiratorial suburbanites.
“There’s a real uptick in people who struggle with the same misunderstanding of RATM as Trent. It seems to be based on a need for the comfort of nostalgia mixed with a definite effort to push the idea that the songs have apolitical or even right-wing meanings,” said Bennington. “There’s an entire Reddit page dedicated to the idea that ‘Down Rodeo’ is actually about going down south to a rodeo. A popular TikToker, @NoVax4ThisBlessedMama, put out a video saying ‘People of the Sun’ is about how people just need to give their children lots of sunlight to help cure measles and that sunscreen is the reason people get skin cancer.”
At press time, Linden was overhead in his office wondering if Bad Religion was going to go woke next.