Imagine Dragon Poetic Devices

In the wake of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting, we have seen people pushing for change to gun laws in this country and it could even be called a revolution. Movements like this and others such as Black Lives Matter or #MeToo have been greatly affecting society recently. In Imagine Dragon’s song “Radioactive”, they explore the idea of people breaking out of the chains of society and their lives to start enacting change in society. Almost 2% of the people in the US have almost all the wealth and people feel trapped in this system which is only making the divide greater and this song depicts a person or people “waking up” from this robot-like system and starting a revolution. Their purpose is to highlight the fact that there

To set up this analogy they use the line, “I sweat my rust”. As humans, we sweat, and if we were made of metal we would sweat creating rust. This depicts us as humans being robots that are trained to perform some task that someone has decided is what we are supposed to do. They also use the line, “Enough to make my systems blow” to indicate how this change and revolution is taking place is going to blow our systems of our beings. Robot’s systems are the programming behind the robot that indicates what the robot is supposed to do. We as humans are programed by the people of power to do one task and to not expect to change that task. The line, “I am breaking in, shaping up, then checking out on the prison bus”, also shows how as a people we have been trained and conditioned to perform the task decided by the people in power of our society and we go through with these tasks just like robots without taking a second look at anything that we do. As a society we have been programmed to do what the upper class wants us to do just like robots and in Imagine Dragon’s song “Radioactive”, they use this analogy of us as humans being robots to show the need and the reasons behind the