Rise Against’s Uncensored Video for “Re-Education”
By JamesMarch 5, 2010
I dislike the new Re-Education Through Labor video by Rise Against, a band that has influenced my perspective on the world immensely.
Recently, the band posted the new video with more footage for “Re-Education Through Labor” on their website. It added a bunch of scary statistics, not sourced, but that’s secondary. The video consists of young white people coming together and committing acts of domestic terrorism aimed at downtown Chicago. It’s a nice visual, Chicago burning after dark but honestly, I feel like that’s a pretty easy way to make an “edgy” video. It’s an easy way to make an edgy video because it answers no questions.
There wasn’t a particular direction for the anger of the kids, just pictures of “resistant” people making, distributing and setting off homemade explosives near buildings in LaSalle Street, in downtown Chicago. There wasn’t a why and that’s disappointing. My guess is the statistics are supposed to match up to some kind of discontent, but they don’t. They’re liberal boilerplate, cast as wide as possible without regard to depth. There is worldwide discontent at exploitation by the military industrial complex, propped up by disaster capitalism. We agree. Lots of traditional GOP voters eat meat and believe in a male God looking down on them. Not the end of the world. Maybe I’m being too precious. A lot of the Earth’s wildlife/non-developed areas are being razed and destroyed. How one gets from that to blowing up downtown Chicago in retaliation is beyond me.
In short: The video, when it was released in 2008 (just before the election of Barack Hussein Obama, a fact which a year and a half out still fills me with pride) and now still feels intellectually weak. In 2008, the political climate was heating up, I’ll give you that, but when isn’t it? The anger, while presumably sincere, feels generic to me.
Specifically: I expect more from Rise Against than a video about romanticizing indiscriminate domestic terrorism as a way to let off steam against the crushing claustrophobia and alienation of modern urban life. The band has made more thoughtful videos before. Hell, the video for “Diaspora” (sorry, “Prayer of the Refugee”) got the band lost in a supermark…Wal-Mart, surrounded by the obscene amounts of cheap shit made by exploited persons halfway across the world. “Ready to Fall” put the band literally on top of the striking images of human neglect, sprawl and consumption. Comparatively, the image of young nubile white kids saying “let’s make suitcase bombs and put them on LaSalle Street” rings kind of hollow.
Hell, the statistics aren’t bad (but unsourced and mysterious), but why not put those over a performance video? There’s no apocalyptic imagery but at least the band would be tying itself to the real misery and overlooked suffering of modern life. Instead, suitcase bombs and LaSalle St.
Additionally (and this counts for more of my focus than is fashionable), my father works in an office on that street. He spends most of his time pulling teeth from insurance companies for records that are about to be disappeared. As a punk, I know the value in using real streets and real places to anchor the discontent to something tangible. As a son? That’s my dad in that building. But even if you don’t have parents working on LaSalle St, you too can still be uneasy with the video. There’s janitors in that building. There’s secretaries in that building. There’s doormen in that building. There’s typists in that building.
Those people have as much to do with the rape and exploitation of our earth as I do with the next mission to Mars. And that’s really the problem. Usually, Rise Against has been on point in terms of videos, but the wrong one got the new lease on life.
(P.S. Yes, I know it’s disingenuous to use the phrase nubile white kids in the essay because that’s what punk rock was built on, whether we like it or not. It’s directed at central casting rather than the band.)
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