Rock With A Cause: Young Men Trying To Make Change

The four young men of the band Outernational want to start an activist revolution with Rock music.

It’s easy to get the wrong idea about the generation that came after Gen-X—Those born in the late 70s and 80s—and much of the reason this generation has gotten a bad rap is how they put all their worst behavior on reality TV.

But not everyone in this generation is flexing with The Situation or bouncing from televised quickie wedding to quickie divorce like Kim Kardashian.

There is a movement afoot within Rock music that speaks to the issues on the minds of those young people who aren’t selling themselves on Reality TV, and the band Outernational hopes the concept of #futurerock takes hold and more emerging rockers start using their music to do good and make change.

I first heard these guys last year when they were in the live music scene of LA. They’ve since moved on and created a new album with some serious rock star-power behind it like Chad Smith of the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Tom Morello of Rage Against The Machine.

According to yesterday’s article on LatinRecap.com,

Their new Bilingual album Todos Somos Illegales (We Are all Illegals) is an unapologetic collection of songs described as a ‘cinema-in-sound concept album about the border, the USA and the system which criminalizes Immigrants who create the wealth of this country’

Young people have classically been at the grassroots levels of emerging movements, and immigrants rights is certainly a hot issue with young activists. And while immigration reform is a hugely divisive issue, I think we can all agree that it’s good to see young people doing something in the media besides tanning and flexing, right?

What young activists (from the present or the past) do you admire?

You can download Todos Somos Illegales here, and in true rebel fashion, you get to decide how much to pay for it.