On art, confronting corporations and regulatory chill
From Todd Tucker @ Eyes on Trade: I’ve been rocking out to some Rage Against the Machine lately. They’re a band I had kinda forgotten about for much of the last decade, although like many people of my generation, they were my first exposure to a politics that went beyond the staid participation in ballot box politics that characterized many of the older folk in my life. While my hometown of Louisville was a center for “straight edge culture” much of the early 1990s, RATM had lyrics that addressed that went beyond personal politics and to the interconnections between oppression at home and abroad, and was unflinchingly committed to social change. For instance, take this lyric from 1999’s “Ashes in the Fall”: