The song, as heard in dialogue, is about the 1992 Los Angeles Riots, which was caused by the acquittal of four white police officers accused of beating a black motorist. It contains actual samples from police radio broadcasts and news report snippets of the riots. Machine Head frontman Robb Flynn told Kerrang that industrial bands like Ministry, who put a lot of movie clips in their songs, gave him the idea of telling a story with samples. “It was taking really extreme views from white supremacists and then taking really extreme views from black nationalists, and then trying to find the middle, where we could all come together at the end of it,” he said. “So I took all these really controversial statements for the first two sections of it, and then I tried to find the middle ground and be creative with it. It was more like talking and soundbites, it wasn’t really a song." Additionaly, the songs title came from some graffiti in Flynn’s home city of Oakland, California. He explained "I used to live by the subway and if you drove down towards this punk club where we used to see Rancid and all these bands, it said those words on three cement pillars; it said Real eyes, realize, real lies, and I just thought it was really cool, so when that song came together, there was our song title.”
The song, as heard in dialogue, is about the 1992 Los Angeles Riots, which was caused by the acquittal of four white police officers accused of beating a black motorist. It contains actual samples from police radio broadcasts and news report snippets of the riots. Machine Head frontman Robb Flynn told Kerrang that industrial bands like Ministry, who put a lot of movie clips in their songs, gave him the idea of telling a story with samples. “It was taking really extreme views from white supremacists and then taking really extreme views from black nationalists, and then trying to find the middle, where we could all come together at the end of it,” he said. “So I took all these really controversial statements for the first two sections of it, and then I tried to find the middle ground and be creative with it. It was more like talking and soundbites, it wasn’t really a song." Additionaly, the songs title came from some graffiti in Flynn’s home city of Oakland, California. He explained "I used to live by the subway and if you drove down towards this punk club where we used to see Rancid and all these bands, it said those words on three cement pillars; it said Real eyes, realize, real lies, and I just thought it was really cool, so when that song came together, there was our song title.”