Bulls on Parade

When you dive into *Bulls on Parade*, you encounter a raw energy that seems to shake the foundations. The song, released in 1996 as the first single from *Evil Empire*, is not only a powerful track by Rage Against the Machine, but it also stands out for a very particular sonic detail: the guitar solo by Tom Morello. Instead of traditional scales, Morello achieves an effect that evokes the sound of a scratched record, a technique he himself describes as inspired by the "menacing" sound of the group Geto Boys. To achieve this, he manipulated his guitar's pickups and selector, creating a rhythmic and percussive texture that departed from the conventional. The lyrics, for their part, directly target the American arms industry, questioning how it fuels war to secure contracts, with phrases that speak of "feeding the cannibal animal of war" and how ignorance keeps those deals alive.

The context of *Bulls on Parade* is as interesting as its sound. The album *Evil Empire* arrived in 1996, almost four years after their self-titled debut, and debuted at number one on the Billboard Top 200. The album's title, "Evil Empire," was a phrase used in the United States to refer to the USSR, but the band turned it around, applying it to their own country. The song had its first live performance on January 25, 1996, at the Big Day Out festival in Sydney, Australia. Later, in April of the same year, the band made an appearance on Saturday Night Live, where, after hanging American flags upside down on their amplifiers, they were not invited back. Over the years, Bulls on Parade has been covered by other artists, such as British rapper Dizzee Rascal in 2009, and more recently, American rapper Denzel Curry performed it on the Australian program Like a Version in 2019, receiving very good reviews. The music video, released in April 1996, mixes images of street protests with sequences from the festivals where they played, all in a visual style that imitates old films, with grain and scratches, and is complemented by the appearance of propaganda posters designed by Barbara Kruger.