How Rage Against the Machine added some Led Zeppelin to their biggest hit
The political and musical conditions that received Rage Against the Machine‘s 1992 debut was the perfect storm of their excoriating political invective and prescient metal stylings. With George H W Bush’s ‘New World Order’ signalling the ever-rapacious shift toward a neocon right in America, the summer of riots sparked by Rodney King’s vicious beating at the hands of a racist LAPD, and the lurch of the military-industrial complex swelling with unaccountable power, the burning tensions felt domestically and around the world only fuelled frontman and rapper Zach de la Rocha’s political resolve with greater ferocity.
The suburban kids were also ready for a major act fusing the growing cross-over of rap and metal, RATM perfecting this hybrid and jumping ship long before the nu-metal silliness that defanged America’s alternative music culture. Their debut single still stands as their defining song. ‘Killing In The Name‘ welds hip-hop, funk, and explosive guitar assault scoring de la Rocha’s defiant lyrical stabs at police brutality and uncritical deference to authority.
Such a blistering single and album resulted in their playing Lollapalooza ’93, providing the festival coverage one of their most significant clips of scores of suburban kids going mad in the crowd the moment guitarist Tom Morello wields its opening riff.
‘Killing In The Name’s distinctive riff came from Morello’s days teaching guitar. He explained to Rolling Stone in ’20: “I was showing (a student) how to do a drop D tuning… I was like, ‘When you play drop D tuning, it sort of suggests different patterns to your fingers.’ And the first pattern I played was (hums the main ‘Killing in the Name’ riff).” Knowing lightning had struck, Morello called class time-out pronto and swiftly recorded the sketch of the riff to show his bandmates later.
Being an avowed Led Zeppelin fan, Morello is candid about the signature ‘dun-ut-dunt’ riff that precedes de la Rocha’s “‘Now they do what they told ya” line, making clear he had borrowed from ‘Good Times Bad Times’ off their ’69 debut. Jimmy Page’s opening guitar attack certainly hovers over ‘Killing In The Name’, reflecting a general trend of contemporary artists’ fascination with the music of the ’60s and ’70s, from Jane’s Addiction’s or Pearl Jam’s shared Zeppelin fetish.
Its enduring hook was questioned by the label, Morello sharing: “I think he heard ‘hit single’ — as long as it doesn’t have that crazy part where it just stops a lot… “I think history has borne that out.”
Speaking to ABC’s triple j, Morello confessed the mystical conduit his instrument of choice can often possess, and as a vehicle to serve his Left-politics: “I didn’t choose to be a guitar player, that chose me. I’m kind of stuck being a guitar player. It’s my responsibility as someone who really self-identifies as an activist to play it as hard as I possibly can and to use it as a means to have my hands and the hands of my band, on the wheel of history. Steering it in a more progressive, a more humane and a more just direction.”
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