Matt Stauffer

Yeah, well, so the song Bulldog Parade by Rage Against the Machine has a really interesting history for me because I was a white kid in the suburbs, which in the U.S. means you're probably upper class or upper middle class, middle middle class, upper middle class.

You probably are living in a relatively isolated environment around a whole bunch of people who are like you and your life is probably very comfortable.

So, of course, you're going to rebel, right? As if like there's something wrong with the fact that you've been, you know, you've grown up in this really wonderful experience.

So I loved, you know... rebellion in that is you dress a little different, right? Or you listen to really loud, angry music or, you know, those types of things, you know, you've probably seen it in the movies.

I was, I did all those and listen to rage against the machine was certainly one of them.

I had no understanding of what the machine was.

I had no understanding of what they're raging against.

I just loved that they, you know, I don't know if you have curse words in this podcast, so I won't say that, but like they yelled curse words.

They were, angry and I turned their music up really loud in my beer old car that I would drive to my job after school.

And it just felt like really emotionally connected to the way I felt as a teenager in the suburbs.

And then my second rebellion was when I went off to college and I learned about the world outside of where I'd come from.

And I met people who were from different backgrounds than me and different ethnic and socioeconomic and everything like that backgrounds.

And then I started learning about like what I feel about the world and what I feel about politics, what I feel about big business and white supremacy and all those things.

And then I would go back to musicians like Rage Against the Machine and the songs like Bulls on Parade and all of a sudden understand what they're actually singing about.

And

I go, oh, okay.

They were putting little nuggets in when I was not ready for them.

And so Bulls on Parade is 100%, you know, one of those.

It's, you know, I mean, it's hard to even kind of describe.

How do you describe Rage Against the Machine? You

know? Who knows? It's funny seeing now that, you know, people are going, oh, they're political.

I wish they'd stop being political.

And it's like, my brother.

They have always been political and you were just not ready to hear it.

But I am ready to hear it.