Empire (1990) aged like milk

Like a lot of people, in 1990 I bought Queensryche’s fourth album, Empire, because the song “Silent Lucidity” was such an effective clone of that big, spacey Pink Floyd sound. I’ve said before that if you dropped the song onto either of the post-Waters Pink Floyd albums, no one would have batted an eye. But Empire is more than just “Silent Lucidity”. It also features the title track, which is about the usual decline of urban America, its descent into violence and guns, guns, guns (“Got an AK-47 for his best friend/Business the American way1“). But there’s a spoken word section that recites the following: In fiscal year of 1986 to 1987, local, state and federal governments spent a combined total of 60.6 million on law enforcement. Federal law expenditures ranked last in absolute dollars and accounted for only a sixth percent of federal spending. By way of comparison, the federal government spent 24 million more on space exploration and 43 -times- more on national defense and…