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Muse’s ‘Supremacy’ Video Amusingly Underscores Why Right-Wingers Love Them

Muse, Matthew Bellamy, Supremacy, video

If Muse want to understand why their music keeps getting “hijacked by the right,” as they told the Observer last year, well, they might want to listen to their records.

“Supremacy,” from dystopia-worthy sixth album The 2nd Law, opens with iron-fisted guitar-drums interplay that could keep the trains running on time. That’s topped with jabbing strings worthy of Darth Vader’s Galactic Empire or a James Bond villain.

Then, with the theatrical vibrato of an Andrew Lloyd Webber leading man, Matthew Bellamy sings these words: “Wake to see your true emancipation is a fantasy / Policies have risen up and overcome the brave / Greatness dies.” Man, what on earth would the aging white folks who compare to Obama to Hitler enjoy about that?

As NME points out, this proggy call to revolution now has a video. And yes, it mostly focuses on some people in gothy makeup doing that shit Glenn Beck might not like — skateboarding and surfing and drinking what might be blood — but let’s step back for a second. The makeup isn’t so far from the creepy white makeup in right-wing actor Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto (or at least its trailer), the skater-surfer-Apocalypto wedding appears to be between a man and a woman, and who in the torch-and-pitchfork contingent could object to a good bonfire?

We tease, a little: It’s all very overblown and silly, but it takes itself quite seriously. Give us liberty or give us Muse.