Evil Empire

Evil Empire is the second studio album by American rock band Rage Against the Machine, released by Epic Records on April 16, 1996. It debuted at number 1 on the US Billboard 200 chart with first week sales of 249,000 copies, and the song "Tire Me" won a 1996 Grammy Award for Best Metal Performance; "Bulls on Parade" and "People of the Sun" were nominated for Grammys for Best Hard Rock Performance. On May 24, 2000, the album was certified triple platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America. The album's title is a reference to a term used in the early 1980s by President Ronald Reagan and many American conservatives to describe the Soviet Union. Background According to MTV News, "The title 'Evil Empire' is taken from what Rage Against The Machine see as Ronald Reagan's slander of the Soviet Union in the eighties, which the band feels could just as easily apply to the United States." Before the May 27, 1996, performance of "Without a Face" that is featured on the band's 1998 Live & Rare album, Zack de la Rocha said: "It seems as if soon as the... the wall in Germany fell, that the US government was busy building another one on the border between the US and Mexico. Since 1986, as a result of a lot of the hate talk and hysteria that the government of the United States has been speaking, 1,500 bodies have been found on the border. We wrote this song in response to it."