This reminds me of when I realized that Rage Against The Machine was a heavily political band and their name had meaning. It was a weird moment but I went from liking them to absolutely loving them. Same thing with System of a Down lol.
I was a teenager, this guy is at least 50.
Remember when all the chuds worked out at once that Rage were left wing and seethed on twitter and facebook
I always wondered what machine they thought they were raging against. Their washing machine, perhaps
Unironically this. The boomers spent their early adulthood surrounded by the counter-culture of the 60s and 70s but never felt included and didn’t really get it. They thought the angst was against the vague spectre of authoritarianism, which to them was simply the Democrats and their Big Government raising taxes, or something. They missed the anticapitalist part. So they thought they understood the revolutionary left as a superficial anarchism, a fight against authority in general, and not a historical fight against capitalist authority in particular. So when they learn that these bands are anticapitalist, they felt betrayed (by their own ignorance).
I think machine was just a stand in for these people to project their gripes onto.
To gamers, wokeism is the machine, sorta thing.
Its funny though because I always mishear song lyrics but with bands like rage they were more than clear enough for even me.
