Bulls on Parade
by Rage Against the Machine
- 83
- BPM
- F major
- Key
- 7B
- Camelot
- 42
- Danceability
- 2
- Acousticness
On January 25, 1996, Rage Against the Machine played "Bulls on Parade" for the first time, at the Big Day Out festival in Sydney. Footage from that show and from a side show at the Hordern Pavilion two days later ended up in the video. The song came out as the first single from Evil Empire on April 1, 1996.
The band's American television debut with it came on Saturday Night Live on April 13, 1996. They had planned to play another song. They hung American flags upside down from their amplifiers and were not invited back. Steve Forbes was hosting that night.
The lyrics go after the US arms industry and the military contracts that depend on war. Tom Morello's guitar solo imitates a record being scratched. He turns one pickup to full volume and the other off, which makes the selector switch a killswitch. Then he rubs his fretting hand over the strings above the pickups and flips the switch. He said he was after a menacing "Geto Boys" sound. Peter Christopherson directed the video, which premiered on April 10, 1996, and was nominated for Best Hard Rock Video at that year's MTV Video Music Awards.
Bulls on Parade runs at 83 BPM, the tempo of boom-bap hip-hop, reggae and slow R&B. In classical terms it sits in andante territory. A bar of 4/4 lasts 2.89 seconds, and a quarter-note delay is 723 ms. It is in F major, Camelot 7B, which shares its notes with D minor and mixes cleanly with Bb major and C major.
We use multiple sources as part of our online research for the song story including Wikipedia.