Know Your Enemy

I have made no secret about my love of music. Recently, I have reflected on the intersection of music and beliefs, specifically my worldview. I grew up listening to and continue to love a wide variety of music across genres and eras even. Some days I care more about the beat, others it may be the lyrics and storytelling, and then sometimes it is just the *vibes* and I am seeking a certain feeling or emotion. I have some songs that mentally I classify as “good to drive at night on a highway to” and then others may be ones I play when I want to cry or when I am feeling sad and want to lean into that emotion. I certainly have my go-to artists and albums, but every now and then I will suddenly have a moment where I reflect on a lyric in my brain, or a riff, and then go on this quest to figure out what song it is from, sometimes I can’t even quite place the artist or album which adds to the frustration of the hunt.

Recently, I have found myself listening to music that has more of a protest or social justice arc to it, which I link to what is going on with our current presidential administration. I was reflecting on this the other day when having a conversation with someone who has a different political stance than I do, and they said they felt like the left has been speaking in angry ways lately, and that the rage was palpable. I started to think about the music I have listened to lately and then realized that many of these artists or even songs are ones which I have been listening to since long before I understood where their rage came from. Looking back to the early 90’s, specifically around 1991-92 I was listening to Public Enemy rapping about how the state of Arizona had cancelled Martin Luther King Jr Day in “By The Time I Get to Arizona”. As a white kid who was living in an area where he was the minority at the time, I was blessed to grow up in surroundings where I could experience many different cultures. I had friends who were Black, Mexican, and Asian and got to hear about the families they were from and the traditions they had that were new to me. I thought of Martin Luther King Jr. as someone that we all looked up to and respected, much the way I thought we viewed the office of the president at the time. Hearing that in one state they did not was baffling to me.

Oddly, released around the same time period, but discovered by me probably two to three years later, was Rage Against the Machine’s eponymous debut album. As a teenage boy at that point, the music and the vocals captured the sort of pent-up feelings I had. I loved heavy and aggressive music, and it felt RIGHT to me. I remember seeing the music video for their song “Freedom” and being introduced to the idea that a man could be falsely imprisoned. That had never been something that occurred to me, as I assumed they only put people in jail who did crimes. Of course, I was curious, so I did some research, but this was pre-internet and Google (as we know them) days so it was not as easy to find answers. Listening to the lyrics closely was always striking to me, as the experiences these men were speaking about felt so different than my own. This may have been my first brush with understanding privilege, although I did not fully grasp it at that point. The more I listened to Rage, the more I thought what they talked about fit in with many of the things I heard about from the punk kids. Punk was one of those rare types of music that I had never been able to find myself connecting with, at least some of the more traditional punk artists, so these concepts were much different than the more fantastical lyrics of the metal music I found myself most drawn to at this age.

When I went to college, I went to see a band I loved, and one of their opening acts that night was System of a Down, a group that I, nor any of my friends, had ever heard of before. A guy at the show (who in my memory was a truck driver from Alabama, just in case he ever sees this I want to give him credit) said they were amazing and were going to blow up. They put on a hell of a show, and I immediately bought their album the next day (this is before we had digital copies kids). I kept listening to System, and they quickly became one of my favorite bands, so much so that I took my (younger) sister to her first concert where we saw them, along with The Mars Volta. With System, they increasingly spoke about social issues on their albums, from Armenian genocide, to the military industrial complex, and the profits of war and keeping people incarcerated. At this point I felt myself bristling a bit, because what they talked about was not my lived experience, and I was an adult now, with a mortgage and a degree and a full-time job and everything. As I look back, I can see the way privilege made me blind from other people’s lived experiences, simply because they were not my own, and because they did not take place where I saw them.

 There are more artists and moments I can point to, but it has taken me some time to get to the point where I was able to fully grasp my ignorance and work on understanding how it came to be. I can recognize, through music, conversations with other people, and also having empathy and a pair of eyes that my experience is as close to playing the game on easy mode as you can get without a rich daddy (hi Elon and Donnie). The only time I ever have been followed in a store was when I had long hair, or when I was with black friends in childhood. Otherwise, I have been left to browse without being bothered. I only feared police because I had a lead foot and lacked the aforementioned rich father. Every interaction I had, I assumed people had each other’s best interests at heart. I did not begrudge anyone their different belief, worldview, or who they loved, but I failed to grasp that those things made their life experience significantly more challenging than my own, I just assumed the level playing field existed and it was purely merit and performance based in society.

At the core of all of this is me being a white guy. Not just a white guy, but a cisgendered heterosexual white guy. My ignorance was not willful, but rather it was just from the blindness that comes from viewing the world only through your own eyes and experiences. Now, I look back and I see the anger and rage has always been present for those who have a more liberal mindset, it was just presented over a great track that got my head snapping and bobbing (as it is right now listening to that Rage album noted earlier…and it being the inspiration for this post and the title). I think if we want this country to be what I experienced, and what we try to portray the nation to be in media, we have to learn to see the world through eyes that are not our own. Having empathy for the experiences of others and understanding that they deserve the same rights is a step towards erasing the division in this country and actually being united. However, the biggest hurdle in that is acknowledging some of the inherent white supremacy that has served many of us in the form of systems that maintain our privilege. My joke has always been I really do not want to give up my privilege, but that I think everyone should have it extended to them. As a nation, we must acknowledge people of color face a harder path in life, as do members of the LGBTQIA+ community, and women. Then we must do what we can to ensure they have access to the same equity and justice that we do. Until we do that whoever tells you that this is the land of the free is in fact your enemy.