Songfacts®:

• The song referenced 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.
• Robb Flynn had been listening to industrial bands like Ministry that put a lot of movie clips in their songs. The Machine Head frontman told Kerrang that it 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."
• The song title came from some graffiti in Flynn's home city of Oakland, California. The singer 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."
• This is a track from Machine Head's debut album, Burn My Eyes. The title comes from the first line of the bridge on the track "Old."
  
  Burn my eyes and try to blind me
• Released on August 9, 1994 by Roadrunner, Burn My Eyes was the label's best-selling debut album until Slipknot dropped their self-titled first record five years later.