Mid-90s Poster Boy For Evil Empire Hits The Big 4–0 As Rage Against The Machine Get Rock Hall Nod
On the heels of Rage Against The Machine’s induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, their sophomore LP’s 27th anniversary and the fortieth anniversary of Ronald Reagan’s speech which coined the phrase “evil empire”, herewith, an update on the real-life person whose mug went ‘round the world on that iconic album cover from ‘96.
By Michael Vazquez
Seeing his face emblazoned across one of the (Top 5?) most recognizable Pop Artist-created album covers — RATM’s 1996 sophomore LP, “Evil Empire” — wasn’t a total novelty for then-15 year-old Ari Meisel, who’d already done some youth modeling and also possessed, in addition to the iconic Mel Ramos painting of him, an entire wall of portraits done by other blue-chip artists that his gallerist dad Lou (who’d originally opened his first gallery to sell his wife’s paintings) was a pioneering champion of.
Nonetheless, through random encounters — like an “Evil Empire” tee-sporting kid on a beach in the Caribbean recognizing him as a potential subcultural compatriot — he came to ken the place in the global PopCult landscape the work was beginning to occupy that summer, far beyond the girls on his teen tour, who, as fate would have it for the teenager given a big-cash-in opp, weren’t fans of Rage.
Zero groupies notwithstanding, when he saw his evil twin’s several stories-high face smiling down on the crossroads of the world (making for a nifty bit of Sitiuationist agitprop, giving new meaning to Broadway’s “Great White Way”), he knew he’d reached a rare existential summit in a media-saturated world. As he recalls, “There definitely was kind of like a big-headedness to it, especially when that billboard in Times Square went up; that was nuts. Nowadays, I have a shaved head and I’m 40, but back then, uhm, I was getting recognized quite a lot at the time”.
Beyond the sidebar history of a face made famous by transformative happenstance when a band discovered a painting in a book and instantly decided it would be their next album cover, “Evil Empire’s” iconography endures for some (millions, actually) like a flag from a certain time — representing a shockingly consistent sophomore album released during a short-lived sweetspot betwixt the grim early 90s’ and latter-decade pre-millennial tension.
The band’s design concept completely subverted the campy, idealized Americana captured by Ramos, who in addition to being considered one of the early manifestors of Photorealism was, along with Warhol and Lichtenstein, in the core trinity of the Original Pop Art school of American painters utilizing comic books as source material, creating the Big Bang of Pop.
For the “Evil Empire” album cover, Ramos’ work (which is actually based on one of the very first comic book characters in the Boy Hero genre, AC Comics’ “Crime Buster” from the 1940s), though only slightly altered — not unlike a “Find 5 Differences” puzzle — is nonetheless totally transmogrified by the label’s in-house design team, who gave the fresh-faced youth’s origin story a mostly typographical remix, to considerable effect: the use of a simple, lower-case “e” (for “evil”, emerging almost like a schwa) seems semiotically sinister, sanctioning his costume with a mysterious marshalcy, evoking a kind of Hitler Youth vibe, about which any lingering disbelief is obliterated via the unequivocal words, “Evil Empire” heralded in bold red on a winding white ribbon (nomenclature: LP title “Evil Empire” was culled from a speech delivered by Reader’s Digest Neo-Conservative deceased former U.S. president Ronald Reagan to an audience of American evangelicals) while across the top, the band’s propositional moniker stencil-stamps their contraposition, its spray-paint-splats freckling the Situationist re-appropriation.
The color temperature of the original work is also modified, suggesting instead, a genetically-engineered boy from brazil, his skin lightened, his blue eyes made preternaturally glacial like a ghostly Siberian Husky’s, set in the face of what looked like a young Rob Lowe — all of which is enveloped within the work’s slick malice and quease-inducing, slightly unnerving tincture of vacuum-packed surreality, arriving at a level of subversion on par with Diane Arbus’ blowing up of a day in the park by annoying her camera’s subject sufficiently for him to make an exasperated scowl whilst proffering two (plastic) hand grenades.
And just as Grenade Boy has his own evergreen where are they now? story, Meisel found himself, post-internet explosion, a perennial meme, with sleuths posting his education, life path and other various and sundry, circa the early ‘aughts: “I can’t remember when it was; I think I was maybe in my mid-20s when it started circulating on the internet: Who’s the kid on the Rage Against The Machine cover? Like, that hadn’t been a thing before that, and I guess somebody figured it out and it was like, ‘Oh he went to this school, and he did that’ — I mean there was like, stuff! And there have been waves when people contact me about it. I’ve been interviewed a couple of times, but for the most part, it’s just a kind of fun thing in my past”.
Meisel’s post-Rage path found him launching two companies before he was seventeen; after several projects in real estate development and construction, he was diagnosed with Crohn’s Disease at twenty-three, and says he underwent an epiphany during a crisis in the hospital, leading him to reexamine his life, after which he’s lived pain- and medicine-free. He founded a consultancy which focuses on time-optimization in the service of self-actualization, and has given a TED talk on same.
As for the band, in 2020, they were curated to headline Coachella’s twentieth anniversary* (*minus the festival’s gap year, after its inception) which was apropos, given that their headliner-fee-waiving was instrumental in helping Paul Tollett’s inaugural event keep a bottom-line cache for actually putting on the production during its very earliest of days. Then Covidchella hit; then Zack de la Rocha injured his Achilles, and their tour was cancelled, twice, including in 2023; then they got nominated to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, again; then Tim Commerford announced he has prostate cancer. Last week, the ‘Hall announced that RATM will be inducted at the ceremony and concert taking place in NYC on November 3rd.
And whilst simultaneously appearing on millions of plastic and cardboard musical artifacts, street posters, and T-shirts (which sell on ebay for a couple of hundred dollars US), the pre-“Evil Empire” portrait seen ‘round the world as its diametric opposite, isn’t in a museum, alongside other Ramos paintings; it still hangs quietly, exactly where it’s been for the last thirty years, beaming with mid-twentieth century optimism, in the family’s kitchen.
Fun curatorial fact and earnest endnote: With the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame’s induction of Rage Against The Machine, the late, great Mel Ramos joins fellow Pop founder Andy Warhol as the only other Pop artist with an album cover in the ‘Hall. Ramos, who died in 2018 and is universally recognized as an essential originator within the Pop Art canon — with works hanging in every major museum on the planet— has most bewilderingly, not yet had a retrospective show at one of our larger NYC museums, all of which have shown and own his works in their permanent collections.
As a fan of both the artist and my friendly neighborhood museum, AKA The Whitney, I earnestly think he’s due a show there; it would be a major NYC — indeed, given his followings overseas, also a major international — event, with contemporary museum attendees (who might think they’ve seen it all when it comes to Pop) in for a generational treat from one of the most semiotically sophisticated, playful, and masterfully painted oeuvres in the Pop Art canon.