Rise Against: "Fights for justice are never 'won', the other side is always waiting for you to turn your back"

On 2nd May, Rise Against released a statement detailing how their planned video shoot for new single ‘The Violence' had been cancelled. The band were due to film in a field in Virginia which contains giant concrete busts of previous presidents, but as the band outlined, ‘… the permit to shoot the video was initially granted, but subsequently pulled by the board of directors who oversee the location. The reason? They decided we were anti-government.' You could understand if frontman Tim McIlrath reacted angrily at this u-turn, but the vocalist/guitarist's response to this revelation was one of triumph. "My initial reaction was this weird sense of pride, because Rise Against is my baby, and I'm always working on our goal of being a band that ruffles feathers and creates friction," Tim begins. "So when we accomplished that, it was like, ‘Fuck yeah! People are noticing!' There are times when we do stuff and it goes by unnoticed, or people just say, ‘Oh, cool; you're a rock band – I get it,' and then you don't feel like you've done enough. Sometimes, if people aren't angry with what we're saying, or if we do a song and the label is just like, ‘Oh, cool – go for it,' I'll be like, ‘Fuck! We didn't do enough! We didn't piss people off!' And so when something like that happens, it reminds me that this band is still identifiable as a force to be reckoned with, because this board of directors saw what we were going to do and thought it'd be a threat to the government or whatever. I take it as a badge of honour. "Here's a little secret: we weren't going to celebrate presidential power in the video! We were not going to cast those things in a good light, so I don't blame them. It's their right to do that, but it does let you know what we're up against, and that freedom of speech is something that people can control, and watching this happen was just another example of that." Rise Against have always been a politically-charged punk band, but Tim takes issue with the reasons behind the ‘anti-government' phrasing used against the Chicago four-piece in this instance. "I'd say Rise Against is a band which has always been very critical of government," he explains. "And ‘critical of government' to me is a good thing; the idea is to point out when they get it right and when they get it wrong. That's what we're always going to do, and I think that's common sense – I don't see that as something radical. I've always been suspicious of people who use the phrase ‘anti-government' and people who use phrase ‘un-American' – I'm not sure what the difference between ‘un-American' and ‘pro-American' is. What does being ‘un-American' entail? I'm always suspicious of people who throw those terms around, and I feel like they tell us a lot more about the people who use those words, rather than the people they're accusing."