“A pope is a fraud / A church is a lie / A queen is the same damn thing / You should pray to your fake god that she die‰Û

Attention citizens, this is not your normal aggression. Or maybe it is, just fitted with new words twice as hyperbolic. Is this the kind of stuff that you listen to when you want to pull out a nail out or is it the stuff that plays in between arsons?

The lyrics shoot straight out of “Angel Duster‰” by Run the Jewels. The rap duo fashions lyrics like a punk band but to bass laden beats. Their tracks come layered with distortion made a touch cleaner than the stuff you‰’d hear from Death Grips. Something in their aggression made near-constant across every song captures the attention of a lot of twentysomethings. So how angry are we that we want to mainline aggression through our ears? Have all the news reels of protests come up to touch middle class consciences? Is that why some suburban kids kick it to anything with a punch?

It is hard to tell the difference between boiling and simmering. Dismiss all this as a childish fit and you look like cynic if the next 1960 comes in 2020. But buy in to another wave of anger and you look like a fool for investing in another fizzle. You only have so much emotion in your account. Spend it all and you burn out before 40 like a baby boomer.

I can‰’t tell if we are in age of outrage or if people want to feel angry in sympathy of the shit they see on TV. But music is as much reaction as it is art form, and these days the reaction seems in between frustrated and furious.

“Sometimes I wanna be a boy / […] ‰Cause I don‰’t wanna get fucked/ by a fucked society‰Û

Run The Jewels are not alone in their political aggression. This quote comes from two-gal group Girlpool‰’s song “Slutmouth.‰” Coming up from the LA underground like a west coast earthquake, Girlpool‰’s folk-punk fury put them on indie rock radar. Where Run The Jewels deliver anti-system missives over violent, reverberant bass, Girlpool scream and shake out anthem after anthem over twangy strings. All of it comes in testament to social friction sparking conflict.

Can we divine from line after line of trending tune when the next big burst of uproar comes? Does a popular time signature write the signature of our time? Run The Jewels rises up after riotous protest against policemen. Girpool explodes after a massive surge of arguments and thinkpieces on feminism. If a rise of frustrated music says nothing about the future, it at least speaks about the past. Arguments long standing may have lasted longer than those in power want them to stand for.

“These are the end of times, meet me in the middle / Politics, we never vote / cause you won‰’t hang yourself if you don‰’t choose a rope‰Û

How sincere is this outrage, really? Until The Ribbon Breaks is the band for the truly pretentious. The quote comes from their song “Revolution Indifference,‰” of course featuring El-P and Killer Mike of Run The Jewels. The song seems at times both a mockery and celebration of opting out. In the middle El-P and Killer Mike burst in, elaborating on the problems with society‰’s system. Yet Until The Ribbon Breaks speaks to what sometimes seems more modern. If you are not in the thick of it, most of the protests seem to be just a mesh of facebook statuses, twitter trends and upset friends.

Anger becomes a way to opt out, a quick signature to mark you on the list of the “with its‰” that support the protests but needed a rain check the day of. Silence is a statement in its own when tweeting to every issue is the norm. But that image is twisted. Fake as fuck is not the mark of millennials or even armchair activists.

There‰’s something driving behind it, the need to feed a fire somewhere deep inside. Sucking like succubae off the emotion of others, rage is a straight conduit to fluid action. Pounding on keys until my mind bleeds heavy flow from the fingers, I need shots of hot madness to make articles every week. It can come from The Mars Volta’s odysseys through space and time or Run The Jewels’s furious political messages. I am in an age of outrage so piss me off, please. Keep me bloated with emotion and inspired by a feed hooked in through my ears.

We (my AU peers) are still in our twenties and mostly living off parent money. Give us the chance to feel like a rebel for four seconds before we start trying to score more scholarships. And when the illusion disperses we don‰’t intend to pretend we‰’re Young Turks. The ’60s died so don‰’t cling. Screw the “save the world‰” stress. It managed fine for four billion. Let‰’s just get fucking furious and see what happens next.