About a month ago I stumbled across a Facebook group "Rage Against The Machine For Christmans #1", I thought it sounded stupid even as a Rage fan, but it had over a million members, can such a group cause a revolution? I supported the group despite it being meant for the UK, but this actually did cause a revolution for our friends overseas; Rage Against the Machine's 1992 single "Killing In the Name" reached the top of the charts by a landslide victory.
There are too many reasons why I am so happy to see this, the least being because I'm a huge fan of Rage. This represents a myriad of things, the creator of the group found the formula to make such a revolution (lets forget the recent popularity of Journey as a fake way for teens to say they listen to older music), and the song pitch perfectly represents this, its one of the most fiery metal songs ever released with some of the best heavy metal riffs ever recorded, and qualities that even the most extreme metal bands can't come close to, it'd be impressively rebellious even without its sixteen lines of "f*** you i wont do what you tell me". So the song is amazing, true, but how it was used even better. Rock and Roll, even in its early stages was notorious for it's rebellion at the time, but today's pop rarely stands for anything worthwhile, nor is it interesting, unpredictable, and at it's worst it's annoying. This prove that we can stand up to this crap, new bands such as Wolfmother have used classic rock's mechanics and have been able to release a popular song, and hell, Green Day simultaneously pissed off their old fans and drew in a huge crowd with their take on 70s punk rock and the concept album with American Idiot. If only we could go back to an age when Gangster Rap showed the awful lives of the modern ghetto, when chicks like Joan Jett amd Alanis Morisette actually rocked, and no one would bitch about Michael Jackson's sexuality, then hypocritically cry to his death, maybe.
I've seen trends of today's music listeners, so much of the time its about conforming, American Idiot was a hit in 2004, when I start listening to it the next year, I was an embarrassment, among my many other biases. Pop music isn't annoying because it's popular, but that's the only thing that's put up on the itunes charts, there's no diversity, even Green Day was know for rocking out but now they've stooped down to a the ballad 21 Guns, even if it was reminiscent of Hey Jude. I was looking down the iTunes essentials playlists of the hit songs of the past few years, and it's not pretty. Look at 2007; the top three were Beyonce, Rihanna, and Fergie, I don't have much against them, but three very similar female pop/ r&b artists being the most popular that time had to offer, which was worse because most of the list was flooding with fake r&b and rap, it got repetitive, there was no balance whatsoever. That would've been a hard time to be listening to "every" form of music. In reality, it doesn't matter today if your a rock "star" or a rapper, you are pop music that is how people are listening to this crap.
"It says more about the spontaneous action taken by young people throughout the UK to topple this very sterile pop monopoly," said Zack De La Rocha, lead singer of Rage.
Tim you make a lot of sense in this blog but let me tell you that just because it isn't popular it can still be great music it is all in the eye(or ear)of the beholder.