Rage Against the Machine

At the beginning, Rage Against the Machine were relentless.

It was 1990, and Tom Morello was a struggling rock guitarist in Los Angeles, with a Harvard degree in social studies. He had a vision to funnel the unrest of the day—the Gulf War, the prospective end of apartheid, the collapse of the Soviet Union—and his galvanizing experiences as a Kenyan-American kid in suburban Illinois into a group that synthesized rock and rap into something inherently rebellious. Or, as he put it in a want ad, he required “a socialist frontman who likes Black Sabbath and Public Enemy.”

A year later, he found his spark, the complete creative complement who shared his systematic disillusionment, anarchic interests, and multiracial experiences. A scrawny 21-year-old punk with an unruly tuft of dreadlocks and a stiff upper lip, Zack de la Rocha had been shuttled for many of his teenage years between divorced parents in tough East Los Angeles and the more affluent and pale Irvine. His father was a famed Mexican muralist, his mother a “half-Chicano/half-German” teacher’s aide, as he put it. He liked a jumble of music, from the flutter of Charlie Parker to the esprit of Run-D.M.C. and hardcore. In high school, his white friends rejected him when they caught him breakdancing on the football field.

But the moment de la Rocha stepped into a rehearsal room with Morello, drummer Brad Wilk, and de la Rocha’s childhood bandmate bassist Tim Commerford, the chemistry was instant and undeniable. “It was this kind of intense electricity that I hadn’t really felt before,” Wilk remembered. “Everyone in the band was fully on that trip.”

Within weeks of forming, Rage Against the Machine—a name lifted from an abandoned tune in de la Rocha’s last band—had recorded a 12-song demo of originals, pieced together largely from fragments in de la Rocha’s journals and song structures Morello had contemplated for years. By the end of 1991, they were navigating major-label offers. By the middle of 1992, they were recording their self-titled debut in a string of fancy Los Angeles studios. Seven of those first demos reappear on Rage Against the Machine in almost identical form, de la Rocha’s vocals simply sharpened by veteran engineer Garth Richardson.

The speed with which Rage wrote and recorded its first screeds is paramount to understanding why, now a quarter-century after its release, Rage Against the Machine remains an essential call to activism and a necessary lesson on how to withstand the opposition. While taking on the most powerful institutions of consolidated American power, Rage Against the Machine were having the time of their lives. You can hear it in most every note.

Politics, however, seemed preeminent. Haunted by guitar lines that whir like air-raid sirens, “Bullet in the Head” takes aim at war-driven nationalism and an endemic unwillingness to think beyond the narratives of the nightly news and presidential addresses. “Take the Power Back” addresses the same problems in the classroom, lampooning the “one-sided stories for years and years and years” of a Eurocentric educational system. “Motherfuck Uncle Sam,” de la Rocha spits in one of his sharpest barbs, a perfect proclamation of defiant self-worth. “Step back. I know who I am.” And a good half of the album, from the eternally combative anthem “Killing in the Name” to the battle cry of “Know Your Enemy,” presciently speaks not only to a period of perceived federal overreach, from the streets of Los Angeles after the Rodney King verdict to the mountains of Idaho during the Ruby Ridge standoff, but also to the coming tide of neoliberalism and its half-hearted promises. Rage Against the Machine is a symptom of its time, presented as a possible panacea.

The political invective of Rage Against the Machine, though, has often overshadowed its arguably more essential quality, or at least the one that made hormonal suburbanites and buzzed undergraduates even give such issues the time of day: It is incredibly fun, not only for the millions who have since bought the album or chanted along to “Killing in the Name” live but also for the band itself. Just look at them, beaming on New Year’s Day in 1992.

De la Rocha became his generation’s most dependably popular political lyricist, but on the band’s first ten tracks he seemed every bit as exuberant as outraged. In the opening triptych alone, he emphatically counts into “Bombtrack,” repeatedly grunts and shouts inside every rest within Morello’s iconoclastic solo during “Killing in the Name,” and demands that you the listener “Crank the music up” and that the band “Bring that shit in” before he’s even launched into the first verse of “Take the Power Back.” No matter how mad you may be, you don’t scream “Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me” against a collapsing din sixteen times without enjoying yourself. De la Rocha sounds entirely triumphant, a vexed-and-confused kid who has survived a difficult, discriminatory childhood to find the proper vent for his feelings.

He’s an unflinching young emcee, too, starting a full third of the album as battle raps against the entire world. “Bombtrack” begins, for instance, with a threat against the simpletons who haven’t realized that rap can be a weapon, while he aligns himself with the spirit and purpose of the Black Panthers and EPMD at the jump of “Wake Up.” He dips into the dozens throughout the record, popping out of politics to reassert his overall authority. During “Know Your Enemy,” he brags about being “born with insight and a raised fist… born to rage against ’em,” the native son of cultural assimilation who now has the book learning, energy, and microphone skills to push back. He is ready for every fight on every level.

As de la Rocha declares during “Bombtrack,” however, these would be just sketches in his notebook without his band; they provide the “dope hooks [that] make punks take another look.” The trio around him animates every idea, pushing what he’s selling with unwavering belief. The rhythmic undertow of “Township Rebellion”—where the bass plows through a cowbell-and-snare beat like a glacier through a narrow pass—is an ecstatic dance that practically vaults into the chorus that is the band’s best credo: “Why stand on a silent platform? Fight the war. Fuck the norm.”

And at a time when a mix of rap and metal was just a novelty, Rage outlines its own complex, chimeric identity. Rising and falling with de la Rocha’s despair, “Settle for Nothing” traces the dynamic peaks and valleys of prog rock, even as it grows into a hardcore tantrum. On “Wake Up,” they pivot between worship of Led Zeppelin’s “Kashmir” and a delirious breakbeat, Morello scratching his guitar strings like he’s suddenly stepped behind the turntables. With ubiquitous funk bass and guitar theatrics, Rage sound, at times, goofy and unsophisticated. But the unselfconscious honesty in hearing these four navigate their shared interests in real time—and loving the process—is intoxicating.

Rage Against the Machine became a better band on each subsequent album. Their landmark follow-up, 1996’s Evil Empire, is much more coiled and concise. Wilk and Commerford were perfectly heavy. Morello had found the fertile nexus between gargantuan riffs and idiosyncratic techniques that intrigued adolescent fans and Guitar Player obsessives alike. And on 1999’s The Battle of Los Angeles, their hard-nosed finale, de la Rocha is at the height of his polemical powers, rhyming in great hypertextual arcs of political pleas. Morello’s singular guitar style had developed to the point that Rolling Stone famously mistook his screeching “Guerrilla Radio” solo for a harmonica break.

Never again, though, would the quartet sound so casually confident, as if they actually had the gusto and naiveté to take on the world. They recorded Rage Against the Machine in what felt like an instant; the next two albums took three and four years and never mounted the same sort of enthusiasm. By the time Rage cut Renegades, a farewell batch of covers from Cypress Hill and MC5 to Bob Dylan and Devo, they sounded exhausted and effete, drained by the process of being the planet’s most woke major-label band.

All of this pressure, of course, wasn’t internal, or the result of some infinite great internal awakening. From the beginning, certain factions of Rage’s rapidly metastasizing fanbase saw the great paradox of the band’s peculiar situation: Here they were, purporting to be against the machine, while very much deepening the coffers of the machine thanks to a record that blew up as quickly as it had been made.

Epic, after all, was then a subsidiary of Sony, the global electronics empire that not only profited from selling a Rage tape but also the very Walkman that played it. In cutting the checks, Rage’s patrons, some argued, had made capitalist cogs of the socialist rebels. In a representative moment, Rage launched a “Freedom Fighter of the Month” program toward the end of their run, intending to give a platform to a militia of assorted activists. One recipient confessed to Spin that he worried he’d compromised his cause by being but one chainlink away from a multinational corporation. “I was a little embarrassed, to be honest,” he said. “Maybe [Rage] aren’t as pure as they’d like to be, or as they’d like to look.”

The so-called paradox, in retrospect, was puritanical scaremongering, an absurd ideological litmus test that gave more power to those already controlling the world than those wanting to change it by any means possible. And anyway, Rage had done exceptionally well during its brief independent trial, selling more than 5,000 copies of their demo at shows and through friends. When the label executives (including Madonna, who tried to ink them to Maverick) started showing up at rehearsals, Morello didn’t see the chance to get rich. He saw the mechanism for public broadcast. “It’s great to play abandoned squats run by anarchists,” he later said, “but it’s also great to be able to reach people with a revolutionary message, people from Granada Hills to Stuttgart.”

The resulting riches have sometimes felt embarrassing, as when de la Rocha ran a stoplight with a Rolling Stone reporter in a Ford Explorer as he headed to his new home in the hills of Los Angeles. But how else should Rage have done its bidding, especially at least a decade before the internet allowed easy worldwide distribution, or at least the promise of it? Should they have remained independent and preached their politics to a smaller network of the already converted, made redundant by someone else’s system of moral absolutism? Or should they have exploited an already-exploitative label system to seed extreme ideas in politically fallow places—a state-sponsored conspiracy, if you will, against itself?

Consider this: Rage made just four music videos to promote their debut. The first, a grainy and heavily filtered live capture of “Killing in the Name,” could have served as the meet-cute concert setting for two California punks in some skate film. But the successors, for “Bombtrack” and “Freedom,” are pure four- and six-minute advertisements for unapologetically radical politics. As de la Rocha impugned the American educational system, jingoistic patriots, malleable media, and complacent suburbanites on the album itself, he largely avoided naming names or offering specific solutions, aside from taking direct aim at J. Edgar Hoover’s racist COINTELPRO during “Wake Up.” But these videos offered highly specific fights and fixes, putting a weaponized point to the record’s blunt rhetorical weight.

During “Bombtrack,” Rage thrashes inside a steel cage flanked by heavily armed guards, mirroring the circumstances of Peruvian communist leader Abimael Guzmán. Two months before Rage Against the Machine arrived, the Peruvian government arrested Guzmán in an effort to suppress his Shining Path party, which had spread through the country’s nooks and crannies for two decades. Flying in the face of U.S. foreign policy at the time (and even now), Rage offered a sympathetic portrait of the Shining Path, framing it as a movement of Peruvian liberation against oppressive brutality. “The people continue their heroic struggle,” the screen reads as the rebels arm themselves and head into the Andes, each word offered in emphatic synchronization with Wilk’s Bonham-sized coda.

But it’s the reel for “Freedom” that, a quarter-century later, still feels revolutionary, both in content and context. Rage plays in cramped quarters, pressed close to an audience that throbs to Wilk and Commerford’s militant thrum. “Freedom for [Leonard] Peltier,” reads the black banner at their backs, a demand on behalf of the American Indian Movement activist who received two life sentences for the murder of two FBI agents during a 1975 standoff at a South Dakota reservation. As they play, scenes from the battle, its prelude, and its aftermath interweave with a flash-card history of federal land grabs from Native Americans. (The problem has been especially pernicious in southwestern South Dakota, where Mount Rushmore was etched into lands previously ceded in perpetuity to Peltier’s ancestors.) When the song peaks, de la Rocha howling “Freedom/Yeah, right” with his last bit of breath, the Lakotas march and arm and fly the United States flag upside down, at half-mast, and beside the American Indian Movement’s banner. It is a righteous moment that fades into explicit instructions for writing to the Leonard Peltier Defense Committee and helping.

What’s more, Epic encouraged Rage to make this video when the company’s suits realized they needed something less profane than “Killing in the Name” to push on domestic radio and television. “Throughout Europe, South America, and Asia, the band had started to explode, partly because you have less censorship there… But not in the U.S., because we refused to edit for lyric content,” Morello remembered for Metal Hammer. “It was actually at [Epic’s] suggestion that the next single be a six-and-a-half-minute song without a chorus, and that we make a video for Leonard Peltier! That suggestion came from the record company, not the band, like they were trying to outflank us!”

These weren’t superstar-studded compilations for AIDS relief or even polite benefits on behalf of Tibetan liberation, both very much en vogue as Rage ascended. No, Rage Against the Machine’s major-label gambit was an infomercial for justice and reconciliation for centuries of indigenous extermination, funded by a major label. When has that ever happened? And in an era when the president criticizes the free speech of theater companies and threatens to dismantle broadcast rights for networks he deems enemies of the state, can you imagine it happening again anytime soon?

When I was a teenager, those videos Rage had made finally found me in rural North Carolina on the family farm, only after we had invested in an unsightly satellite dish. They were life-changing events, introductions to political protest and the personal empowerment it could engender. I have little doubt that, had Rage Against the Machine remained independent, I would have explored such ideas much later, if at all. And I have even less doubt that, had Rage not backed the ideology of “Bombtrack” or “Freedom” with a sense of liberation and enjoyment, those ideas would have likely held little sway.

Watch the crowds in a live video from the band’s earliest era: It is sweaty and ecstatic, church camp for the future activists of the world and an indoctrination to the joy of potential change. Rage Against the Machine recognized that, until the institutional changes about which they wrote and spoke were actually implemented, they would be yelling about cultural pride and socialist ideals into the void—that is, unless they could co-opt the mechanics of capitalism and wield them. Twenty-five years later, in a world of broad media consolidation and Silicon Valley-powered megaphones, the need to do just that has only grown. But so have the possibilities for smart rebellion, for using the tools of the machine to weaken the core.

“The test of whether Rage Against the Machine will be a successful band has nothing to do with album sales,” Morello told Guitar Player in 1994. “It’s going to have to do with the way the message translates into concrete action.” In the quarter-century since Epic issued Rage Against the Machine, the band’s subsequent self-seriousness and the dubious rap-metal that followed often turned it into a punchline. And amid the horrors of George W. Bush’s state surveillance and his continuation of his father’s war in the Middle East and the drone warfare under Barack Obama’s administration, it was hard not to feel like Rage had failed in that regard, like we had all failed.

During the last year, though, Democratic Socialists have won local elections. Ordinary folks have taken to the streets, marching en masse to embarrass the president, and taken to the Internet to dislodge powerful men who are also molesters. And an awareness of and reckoning with cultural appropriation is no longer a sidebar but a real public discourse. No ten songs are responsible for that, of course. But for millions, Rage Against the Machine helped shape a spirit of necessary and electric defiance, of yelling out loud and over and over, “Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me.” May it remain relentless.