Why Rage Against the Machine Belong In The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame
Rage Against the Machine was formed during a significant political and cultural shift: the Cold War and the U.S.S.R. were coming to an end, neoliberal economic policies were gaining traction around the world, and the United States set in motion what would eventually become a seemingly endless string of conflicts in the Middle East.
At the same time, Generation X was coming of age; something that was cemented with releases like N.W.A.’s Straight Outta Compton, Public Enemy’s It Takes A Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, and Nirvana’s Nevermind. These were landmark albums that not only brought hip-hop, hardcore, and post-punk into the mainstream, but also brought to light issues of social and economic inequality, government corruption, and youth alienation.
In 1991, band members Zack de la Rocha, Tom Morello, Brad Wilk, and Tim Commerford formed in Los Angeles. De la Rocha came up with the name when he was a member of underground punk band, Inside Out, and the title was chosen to reflect the group’s revolutionary political views. Rage released their first demo in the fall of that year; the cover art of which featured a lone match resting on top of newspaper clippings from the stock market section. From the beginning, it was obvious:
This was a band on a mission.
The group eventually signed to Epic Records, and in 1992 released their self-titled debut album which received significant acclaim from critics for its bombastic, revolutionary blend of hip-hop, punk, and hardcore. The album reached triple platinum status, due to its lead single, “Killing in the Name,” a heavy, yet catchy protest against police brutality and racism; a track released in the aftermath of the Rodney King verdict, and the infamous riots that followed.
Like their demo, the artwork on this album was significant: the image featured Malcolm Browne’s iconic 1963 photograph of Vietnamese monk, Thich Quang Duc, burning himself in protest over the murder of Buddhists by Vietnam’s U.S.-backed Prime Minister, Ngo Dinh Diem. With this image, the band’s message was clear: your right to freedom, justice and liberty is worth more than your life.
With the success of their debut album, Rage Against the Machine set off yet another shock-wave in the alternative music scene, just as the dust was beginning to settle with Nirvana’s debut. This momentum earned Rage multiple gigs in music festivals like Lollapalooza and PinkPop in 1993.
The mainstream success the band started to receive earned them a wave of new fans and radio play. In addition, it earned them criticism from sources who accused them of being hypocrites for preaching an anti-establishment message while being signed to a major label.
According to online archives, this was Tom Morello’s defense:
“We’re not interested in preaching to just the converted. It’s great to play abandoned squats run by anarchists, but it’s also great to be able to reach people with a revolutionary message, people from Granada Hills, to Stuttgart,” said Morello.
This idea was unique.
Rage Against the Machine was a band with a message openly critical of racism, sexism, monopolized media, U.S. foreign and domestic policy, and economic inequality; topics that before, would never have made it to pop radio. Yet, through their major label connections they were able to bring their political knowledge to 90s teens; effectively teaching American youth about topics they otherwise would have never learned about in school.
It was unheard of, and it was only just beginning.
Following their 1993 tour, Rage Against the Machine returned to the studio to work on their second album. While they settled back into creative isolation, the political and cultural climate shifted again:
Bill Clinton had been elected President of the United States, and in 1994, passed the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), further promoting economic liberalism and thus increasing inequality.
Meanwhile, Nirvana front-man Kurt Cobain’s death was a devastating blow to 90s youth counter-culture, leading many young people of the era to gravitate towards hip-hop as the soundtrack of their frustration. Artists like 2Pac, Nas, OutKast, Sublime, and The Fugees were creating a new wave in conscious hip-hop that was briefly able to crack the bubble of pop radio bliss.
With everything going on in the world while Rage Against the Machine was in the studio, it made sense that their sophomore album would be a sonic shift. Lead vocalist Zack de la Rocha started to more fully embrace the role and style of a MC, while lead guitarist, Tom Morello experimented more with effects in an effort to imitate the sound of a DJ. With bass player Tim Commerford, and drummer Brad Wilk, the band’s rhythm section fully blurred the lines between punk, metal, and funk. Their second album, Evil Empire, was released in Spring 1996, debuting at number 1 on the Billboard Top 200, and like their previous record, went triple platinum.
In regards to the album title, front-man Zack de la Rocha had this to say during a 1997 interview:
“‘Empire’ is definitely a word that the United States has become…it is one of the most powerful forces within the global economy….the title actually came from a speech given by Ronald Reagan in the 1980s…he addressed the Soviet Union as the ‘Evil Empire,’ and if you look at the atrocities committed by the U.S. in the latter half of the 20th century…that tag could easily, easily be used to describe the U.S.”
Even as the band increased in mainstream popularity, they continued to make their case known. They were saying things most people in the spotlight would never say in public, especially if their intention was to hold on to their fame and success.
For Rage, it was always more than that.
Perhaps the most high profile example of this occurred when the band was picked as the musical guest on an episode of Saturday Night Live in 1996. The host of the episode that night was Editor-in-Chief of Forbes Magazine, Steve Forbes, who was a Republican presidential candidate that year. The band made no attempt to hide their displeasure for the millionaire, and during their planned two-song performance the members hanged inverted American flags from their amplifiers in protest. The show’s producers immediately removed the flags before the first song.
Following the performance, the band was removed from the studio, earning them a lifetime ban from SNL.
Rage continued to tour, including a string of shows they performed with U2, Wu-Tang Clan, and The Roots. The band’s profits from many of these shows went to activist groups like U.N.I.T.E. (a group representing garment and textile workers in the U.S. and Canada), Women Alive, (an empowerment group promoting healthy lifestyles for women and families) and the Zapatista Front for National Liberation (a left-wing political group from Chiapas, Mexico).
Rather than use the wealth they were accumulating from radio play and MTV for personal gain, the band again used their resources to facilitate societal change where they could, and to continue using their unique perspectives to educate and inspire young global citizens.
As Rage’s Empire tour winded down and they began work on their third album, the scandal that led to Bill Clinton’s impeachment played out over every American television screen for 24 hours a day. This effectively distracted the public from the continued expansion of big media monopoly, and corporate influence in the democratic process.
America’s political situation in the late 1990s enabled Rage Against the Machine to create what could be considered their most urgent album to date, The Battle of Los Angeles. Musically, the album combined the band’s punk and metal influences from their debut, while still refining the poetic hip-hop inspired lyrics found in Evil Empire. But perhaps the most compelling element of the band’s third LP were the lyrics themselves: The Battle of Los Angeles could easily be interpreted as a concept album. One that tells a story about a country, perhaps even a world, in crisis. One could examine the song “Testify”, a track that talks about social conditioning employed by mainstream media, whether it’s in the form of distractions like scripted Hollywood fantasies, and gossip news like TMZ, or in the form of big news like CNN, which often acts as a mouthpiece for the U.S. government, military, and corporate interests rather than as a watchdog for the powers that be. Or the track “Guerilla Radio”, which calls to attention the lack of a real choice among the citizens in U.S. presidential elections (an idea further explored in the music video for “Testify”).
In addition to these timely tracks, there was also the album’s overarching influence from the writings of George Orwell, and his book 1984. Many tracks on the album, particularly the last four (“Voice of the Voiceless”, “New Millenium Homes”, “Ashes in the Fall”, and “War Within a Breath”), paint a grim and eerie picture of a world controlled by a wealthy fascist elite, through surveillance, fear, and violence. The album’s content was made particularly relevant due to its release coinciding with Y2K hysteria. In many ways, The Battle of Los Angeles felt like a warning; foreshadowing the horrors of the 21st century that were just around the corner.
The band toured in support of the album, playing to the biggest audiences they had at the time, helping them capitalize on the feeling of political frustration many youths experienced during the 2000 presidential election, and voicing their support for anti-globalization protests, most notably the World Trade Organization protest in Seattle which led to demonstrators being attacked by riot police.
At this point, Rage’s popularity peaked; they were playing televised gigs on MTV, and even inspiring a new wave of alternative music referred to by many as “rap-rock” (though the bands they inspired were often seen as watered down copies of everything Rage had done so well).
In January of 2000, the band hired Michael Moore to direct the music video for their song, “Sleep Now in the Fire.” For the video, the band played an outdoor show outside of the New York Stock Exchange, an action that was condemned by local politicians and law enforcement. The concert attracted fans, Moore himself was briefly apprehended by NYPD, and in an unprecedented move, the NYSE closed its doors early due to the unrest caused by the video shoot.
In August of 2000, the band played one of their most notable shows outside of the Democratic National Convention in an effort to protest corporate interests becoming the primary fuel for America’s main political parties.
Before the show, Zack de la Rocha issued a brief speech to the crowd:
“Brothers and sisters, our democracy has been hijacked! Brothers and sisters, our electoral freedoms in this country are over so long as it’s controlled by corporations! Brothers and sisters, we are not gonna allow these streets to be taken over by the Democrats, or the Republicans!”
The band played six songs before the concert was violently broken up by local law enforcement who claimed concert goers were being aggressive. This event showed the band’s power at the time, as well as how much they connected with the alienated masses of the period.
Some might say Rage’s popularity at the time ultimately worked against them, as they started to become more accepted among mainstream music fans: in September of 2000, the band played a show at the MTV Video Music Awards, and were even up for a couple of awards themselves. When they lost to perceived “rap-rock” rivals Limp Bizkit, Rage’s bass player Tim Commerford crashed the other band’s acceptance speech by jumping above the stage; a move that was strongly criticized by front-man Zack de la Rocha who angrily left the ceremony following the stunt.
One week after the incident, Rage closed out their Battle of Los Angeles tour at the Grand Olympic Auditorium in L.A., playing two shows on September 12, and 13.
On October 18, 2000, Zack de la Rocha abruptly announced his departure from the band:
“I feel that it is now necessary to leave Rage because our decision making process has completely failed. It is no longer meeting the aspirations of all four of us collectively as a band, and from my perspective, has undermined our artistic and political ideal.”
Guitarist Tom Morello would later tell Q Magazine his own perspective:
“There was so much squabbling over everything, and I mean everything. We would even have fist fights over whether our T-shirts should be mauve or camouflaged! It was ridiculous. We were patently political, internally combustible. It was ugly for a long time,” said Morello.
Shortly after the breakup, the rest of the band secured the release of a cover album that had been recorded during their previous tour. Renegades, the band’s final studio release, included covers of artists the members considered significant influences on their music and political ideals, including Devo, EPMD, Minor Threat, Cypress Hill, MC5, Afrika Bambaataa, The Rolling Stones, Eric B. & Rakim, Bruce Springsteen, The Stooges, and Bob Dylan.
The members continued in the music industry even after their break-up; Morello, Wilk and Commerford formed supergroup Audioslave with late Seattle rocker Chris Cornell, while Zack de la Rocha released a series of solo tracks (one of which was a DJ Shadow produced protest against the Iraq War) for a yet-to-be-released album. Audioslave would go on to release a trio of albums in 2002, 2005, and 2006 respectively before their break-up in 2007.
Following the break-up of Audioslave, the members of Rage Against the Machine got back together for a reunion tour, the first show of which occurred at the Coachella Music Festival in April 2007.
The members said their primary reason for the reunion tour was to give their response to the policies of the Bush Administration following the September 11th attacks, including the increase of mass surveillance by way of the Patriot Act, and the foreign interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The band would continue to play a series of shows throughout the late 2000s, and on Christmas 2009, the band made history when their 1992 classic “Killing in the Name” was chosen as the U.K.’s #1 holiday single, trumping The X-Factor, a music-based reality show that had won the honor for five years prior. This feat proved that even in their absence, Rage’s impact on popular culture never faded. In some ways, it seemed stronger than ever.
During the summer of 2011, the band organized their own music festival known as L.A. Rising, during which they were supported by acts like El Gran Silencio, Immortal Technique, Lauryn Hill, Rise Against, and Muse.
This would be their final show to date.
Today, the music of Rage Against the Machine is still being played live through a new supergroup called Prophets of Rage which includes the instrumental section of the band, as well as Public Enemy and Cypress Hill vocalists Chuck D and B-Real filling in for de la Rocha who is still currently at work on his solo album.
As we now continue to move into a period of political tension many people alive today have never had to deal with, the band’s music is more important now than it has ever been before.
Rage Against the Machine were truly a revolutionary force in popular music. Through their unprecedented blend of hip-hop, punk, metal and hardcore, they circumvented all traditional conventions by letting the world know who they were politically, and they never shied away from speaking their minds. They resonated not just with 90s youths who needed an outlet, but even after their initial break-up, the music they produced continued to resonate with frustrated millenials who were equally tired of the political strife and cultural artificiality of their own time. Rage’s impact on American culture is vital and cannot be ignored. As one of the most significant bands of the 20th century, it’s time they finally get their due.
