There are songs in today’s music scene that challenge authority, that in an essence,  “stick it to the man,” but the American based rock band, Crown the Empire, are taking protest songs to an entirely new level.

  Their album, “The Resistance: Rise Of The Runaways” released in 2014 tells the hauntingly beautiful tale of a world at war and the resistance fighting for their own freedom as a metaphor and reference to the turmoil the real world resides in. The album tells a story from the first track all the way to the end, that progresses from a small spark of a revolution to a full fledged bloodbath and beyond.

  In the first track titled, “Call To Arms (Act i),  the first thirty seconds of the song a voice comes over speaking, “You have all been a consequence of the disease known as freedom, / And now it is time to take that freedom away! / As of today, you will be stripped of your identity / And anything you hold dear in life / For it is your individuality that has led to your destruction. / Your children will be left to rot as punishment for your indiscretion / And the lives you have lived until now will be nothing but a memory. / This is for the survival of the race! / This is for the New Fallout! / This is the end!”

  Heavy.

  These lines spin the tale of tyranny among citizens and a leader deciding that freedom is a disease rather than a privilege.

  Said tyrant assumes that the only way to regain control over the people for their actions is to lock them into this totalitarian regime, legitimately stripping the once thriving people of their freedoms. The songs ends with a call to arms of those who will not stand for the tyranny they are being placed under with the lines, “ For my fallen stars, / Bannermen ready for your call to arms” as the ultimate call to regain freedom.

  After the “Initiation” and some reminiscing about the old days through a song called, “Millennia”, the album lands on track four titled “Machines”. “Machines” poses the age old question through an existential format pondering the very fabric of humanity—is a life like this  really worth living if people do not live it freely?  

  The first few opening lines state, “Insisting that we’re all too tired to light the fire / And shake the earth”, meaning that everyone is too tired to fight for what they really want to happen, sounds familiar. The song continues on but shifts to a more motivational setting, insisting that they need to “break free from these chains” and make a change no matter the cost, that if they are really just cogs inside the machine that they will be the cogs “Inside the wheels of change” pushing forward to a new tomorrow.

  Songs are more than just words, just like movies are more than just moving pictures. They dive deeper, talk about the taboo. They transgress the normal and talk about issues needed to be touched upon that were left from the sun. They bring to light the injustices of the world and how if change is going to be made it need to be done. Making a difference is a job not doing sitting but rather fighting. The citizens of today need to use the fuel from the protest songs and really become “ the wheels of change” if anything is ever going to get any better.