Ready to Fall for Rise Against

Rise Against- Ready to Fall

With Ramfest coming up in the next couple of months (woop woop), I started sorting through all of my old CDs and pulling out my Rise Against albums so that I could get into the mood and reacquaint myself with their music. I wasn't their biggest fan in my "youth", but a lot of their songs struck a chord with me and I was super excited when I heard that they're coming over to South Africa.

I started YouTubing their music videos and realised two very important things: 

1) Tim McIllrath is SUPER fine [how could I only realise this now(!)]; and

2) the band's music videos have become SUPER environmentally/politically/ethically conscious. 

Number 2 above led me to my next question, namely, "I wonder if they're vegan"...so I started to do a bit of research and, holy-hell, it turns out that the whole band is either vegan or vegetarian (as those of you who are vegan know, being vegan often becomes a bit of a lonely business so its always SUPER-DAMN-OH-FREAKING-MAN exciting when you "discover" other vegans).  

I read a great review of their "Appeal to Reason" album wherein the writer referred to their being "anti-establishment". And that label got me thinking about what it means to be anti-establishment today. For me at least, the first image that springs to mind when I think of that label is Sid Vicious, self-indulgently slashing himself to pieces on stage for the sake of being anti-establishment; no real thought behind it, shock for shock-value. 

But, I think that when you look at the term literally, the biggest anti-establishment movement of today is environmentalism; and that label gets attached to it out of necessity, since it's  the counter to established and entrenched mass-consumerism. 

It blows my mind that trying to live an ethical life makes you "anti-establishment". It's like we're living life through a prism that turns everything upside down- maybe we're all just characters in a Kafka novel.