For as long as I can sustain it, I’m going to feature pieces by bands that have demanded that Republicans stop playing their songs. This first one may not qualify, as Paul Ryan has never, so far as I know, ever played a Rage Against the Machine song at one of his functions, but he has said they are his favorite band, something the band does not take kindly:
“Paul Ryan’s love of Rage Against the Machine is amusing, because he is the embodiment of the machine that our music has been raging against for two decades,” Mr. Morello said.
Tom Morello is the lead guitarist for the band. I confess to knowing little about them, though it always seemed to me that their politics were fairly clear from their sobriquet. A group of Ryan’s persuasion might more likely be called Carefully Tend the Machine or something to that effect. Ryan’s professed love of the band speaks either to an amazing ability on his part to put artistic appreciation over politics, total political cluelessness, or it is a barefaced lie arising out of some sort of twisted need to be perceived as cool. The latter seems the best bet, given his historic achievement a few nights ago. You have to go some to give the most mendacious political speech in American history, but he apparently did it. This conclusion (that he’s cluelessly trying to look cool-Republicans just aren’t cool) is further reinforced by ore of the milder lies he told. He noted that he was of an entirely different generation than Romney, which he demonstrated by noting that his iPod playlists included songs from AC-DC to Zeppelin. I’m showing my age here, but I’m from Romney’s generations and so was Led Zeppelin, and so, for that matter, was AC-DC. That’s not to say Romney was listening to either one, his musical tastes likely run to the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, if he has any appreciation of music at all.
So, on to the musical portion of the program, Killing in the Name:
As a bonus, here’s a video of the band at the Republican National Convention in 2008. Needless to say, they are on the outside, while Ryan, presumably, is on the inside, carefully tending the machine. Apparently the police refused to let them perform on stage in front of the protestors, so they went into the street and led an a cappella sing along.
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