Yeah! I'm so glad you are loving the EP! Thank you for sharing! ❤️

I think it would be much simpler all around in a situation like this to say, "Because I am your passenger, and I would just like some quiet for this ride, please." You could even add a bribe & say, "I will give you a nice review if I can just have silence on this ride."

As long as we look for prophets & saviors, we will lose our lives to profiteers & schemers. Until we look to our neighbors, communities, our collective power, & consolidated will, we will always look back on the cries from the wilderness we heard in days gone by as prescient, far too late to act.

Art is not an oracle. It is a call to organize around ideas, & to take action. Disruptive art ignores decorum, but the audience defers to it & wonders why they feel choked & voiceless as ICE swoops into their neighborhoods, as the AfD grows toward majority, as police execute citizens in the street.

All of the tools & information are before us. The observant among us have pointed the way. The answer will never be a candidate, but always a community. The answer will never be one, but always many. Prophets do not predict. They make a plea for people to presuppose a better present, not a future.

We go home to our individual houses, our lonely jobs, our taped together relationships. We post the videos to the "social" sites that rip us from our own souls & selves. We did not march. We did not demand. We did not defend. We held no one to account. We resisted nothing.

All the while "prophetic" artists scream their signals on stages in front of stacks of sonic summons, & we take their songs as mere suggestion, a sign of what may come IF God abandons us. But the message is lost, & we abandon ourselves. We dissolve our concert coalitions of tens of thousands strong.

And still we say, "This will change for the better the next time around. All we have to do is take the placebo of democratic process, believe as hard as we can in the fantasy of economies, single out a new savior, look to old heroes, & remember how it always used to be better. This will fix us."

People are being kidnapped & killed, books fed to processors & then destroyed, histories of marginalised people erased or rewritten, free societies choked & regressed. There is nothing to prophesy, because it has always been this way. We have seen it happen in history, let it persist in the present.

From the highest levels of government, there is no model of lawfulness. The law protects power, not people. I see so many say, "We need Rage Against the Machine in 2026." To do what? You didn't hear it in '92. "The structure is set. You'll never change it with a ballot pull."

Because you finally feel it. And now you pray for the victory of Democrats to save you. You pledge your vote will be blue no matter who, never realizing that your vote is just another violence against you, because it only has the power to endorse more empire. 72 million votes to keep the machine on.

But for the poor, the disabled, the indigenous, the queer, the people of color, the women, the old, they have always drawn the ire of the wealthy & powerful, the fascists & despots. First they came for us, now they have come for you. This is why you are angry & afraid. Not because you SEE the harm.

Nothing is worse now than it was then. It only feels different because it feels different to you. Now the eyes of evil men are upon you. They have extracted, exploited, deported, & destroyed everyone & everything before you, & it is now simply your turn to feel the greed & hatred of the elite.

1984 was not some far off future. Oceania was not a fictional superstate. It was Great Britain - or any colonial power - as it was then, with all of the feelgood rhetoric & propaganda removed to reveal that it has always been nothing but rhetoric & propaganda. False belief is all we've ever had.

The real American Idiot is the Green Day fan who was never radicalized, never organized. Rage Against the Machine all you want, but WE ARE THE MACHINE, doing our little functions to keep it running, benefitting from its continued operation, aware of but indifferent to the evil that fuels it.

Political art is rarely prophetic. It is simply observant, & pushing the people to be the same. But people are not observant. They are not self-directively intelligent. They are unpracticed in community & coalition. They are cowed by consequences & squeamish about sacrifice. They seek saviors.

The old fascists built ovens to burn bodies. The new fascists build data centers to destroy your mind. Every president is a war criminal. Capitalism was always evil & seeking to break your spirit. The people have always subjugated themselves by idolizing kings. Individualism has always led to ruin.

With time, refining your personality & presentation to be more in line with your vision for yourself, the gap will get narrower again. 💜 No worries, it's all part of the process, & totally normal to feel kinda worse before it starts to feel better. Keep going, & it will feel better.