Metal Anarchy

During a recent interview with Eyes Closed, Rise Against frontman Tim McIlrath shared his thoughts on the current political climate. Even though things are getting bad right now, the musician believes “we’re going to expose what a radical right really looks like and what they really want.”

McIlrath said the following:

“Very simply, I hope that people walk away feeling hope. The way I look at songs, as a songwriter, is that RISE AGAINST is a band that, like maybe many other bands, we are writing a song and we might take you to a dark place, we might bring you down into this dark cave and show you problems and conflict and sadness and that kind of thing, and then maybe where we’re different, or I hope we are at least, is that before that song is over, I hope that there’s a trail of breadcrumbs that will lead you out of it. We’re not gonna leave you in the dark. We want you to see the underbelly, we want you to see the problems of the world and society and the human condition, but, at the same time, because I think, as a songwriter, I do feel real hope and a lot of our fans give me that hope, I wanna make sure the song is laced with that hope as well. And so by the end of it, it’s, like, yes, these are problems, but they’re not something we haven’t seen before and not something that we can’t tackle and not something that we can’t get through.

So living in a moment — right now we’re watching this rise of a radical right wing sort of ideology sort of consuming the planet. That’s something RISE AGAINST has spoken about since our inception. We’re not a band that veered into politics late in our career; we’re a band that came out of the gates with politics. And so I think we’ve been unapologetic about our position. And I think what I’m focused on now is sort of reminding people the punk and hardcore values that exist in a band like ours have always been anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-homophobic. Punk has been pro science, punk has been pro truth and pro facts. And there is some of that that that gets twisted in the world we live in nowadays with disinformation and lack of critical thinking, or just really misinformed critical thinking that turns into conspiracy theories. As a band now, I think our mission is to kind of remind people that there’s a lot of different people out there trying to pull you into their revolution. But if that revolution, if there are elements of racism and sexism and homophobia in that revolution, that’s something that punk and hardcore has always rejected. And that’s a good way to find out if you are in some sort of bullshit revolution or going down the wrong path. And that’s something that we’ll just kind of continue to sing about.”

He also added the following after the interviewer mentioned how it is hard to remain hopeful:

“I think that’s normal. I think that there’s stress and anxiety in turning on the news these days, especially for somebody who cares about people and cares about the direction of the planet. And so, yeah, there are moments that I think that we are going to feel a lot of anxiety, and this is when we double down. This is when we put up a fight.

I think I look at it as sometimes things have to get really bad for us to shake ourselves out of the sort of apathy, and I think there was a lot of apathy that allowed the White House to turn into what it has turned into. I think the silver lining is that I think that we’re going to expose what a radical right really looks like and what they really want, something that they’ve been good at kind of keeping secret, but now the secret’s kind of out and we’re seeing all these sort of racist and sexist underpinnings to the policies. And I think people are good and they’re going to reject that, when they get a chance to reject that. And in the meantime, we get to see on full display how backwards, how anti-science and anti-fact like a lot of these ideologies are. And that’s something that I hope is one of the silver linings in this.”

[via Blabbermouth]