The album Joe Perry doesn’t go anywhere without: “So much funk”
All great rock and roll is built off a groove, first and foremost. As much as people spend time practising their scales and trying to put together a halfway decent riff, it’s useless if you can’t lock in with the drummer and make the song feel like it’s a living being. Joe Perry already knew the key to making a great lick, but as far as he was concerned, Rage Against the Machine carried on that same type of furious guitar work.
Because, in essence, what is Aerosmith without a little element of funk? While it’s easy to dismiss them today as a group cut from the same cloth as The Yardbirds and The Rolling Stones because of their rhythmic nature, some of their biggest influences came from people like James Brown.
Even drummer Joey Kramer spent time in various bands specialising in artists like Kool and the Gang, so it wasn’t out of the question for them to make something funky. While Perry could do alright putting together a lick like ‘Same Old Song and Dance’ or ‘Walk This Way’, the groove behind all great Rage Against the Machine is something that feels much more primal.
Lyrics aside, the instrumentation behind Zack de la Rocha often feels like a strange mix between Led Zeppelin, Rush, and Public Enemy, depending on what instrument someone gravitates to. Tom Morello was certainly the standout behind the fretboard as the group’s resident DJ, but Tim Commerford’s bass work is one of the essential pieces of any great Rage song, whether that’s the small riff that opens up ‘Bombtrack’ or locking in with Brad Wilk on ‘Guerrilla Radio’.
While Aerosmith was on their way to making radio rock when Rage Against the Machine exploded in the early 1990s, Perry thought they were one of the most electrifying bands he had ever heard, telling Guitar World, “I don’t go anywhere without this record because it rocks and has got so much funk on it. I’ve seen them play live a few times, and they really put it across — they make you believe.”
Then again, Rage Against the Machine came from a world that Perry helped create. Even though Run-DMC would say that they were talked into cutting their version of ‘Walk This Way’, having rap and rock come together was the basis for what would become nu-metal one decade later, with Rage Against the Machine getting the genre the rest of the way there.
But for every sin that Fred Durst has committed against good taste, it’s still important to recognise what Rage brought to the table when they started. Artists like Public Enemy could put something heavy onto any of their songs, but Zack de la Rocha’s lyrics about the injustices going on in the world is something that resonated in your gut before the song was even over.
And since they had organic instrumentation behind them, this wasn’t a case of hip-hop artists sampling beats. This was music meant to cause an epiphany in the listener’s mind whenever they came on, and that groove forced everyone to stand at attention whenever Rocha opened his mouth.
