Rage Against the Machine are more relevant now than ever
If Rage Against the Machine didn’t exist, we would have to invent them.
There were already plenty of artists who were looking to make a mixture of rap music and rock all the way back to the days of Beastie Boys and Run-DMC, but Rage felt different from the moment that Zack de la Rocha started spitting over ‘Bombtrack’. Rap-rock may have been a party or a punchline back in the day, but Rage has endured because of what they mean in the hearts and minds of every single kid who wanted to push back against authority.
Because while every kid around 1992 that had a house party probably sang the words ‘Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me’ at the top of their lungs whenever the cops got called on them, a lot of them might not have realised what those words actually meant. Rocha had been looking to make songs that reflected the kind of injustices he saw all over the world, and when looking at the modern age, it’s not like he was that far off the mark when looking at the parameters that the government puts on people.
They weren’t afraid to get their message through at any cost, and I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but it would be prime time for someone to turn up their voice the same way that Rage did back in the day. You can’t ask for someone to have the same kind of guitar fireworks as Tom Morello by any stretch, but when you listen to the lyrics they wrote back in the day, a lot of what they are saying still applies to what’s happening.
The Rodney King beating served as prime fodder for ‘Killing in the Name’, but the idea of crooked cops targeting Black people is something people still keep an eye on in the aftermath of the Black Lives Matter movement. Just replace the words ‘work forces’ with ‘ICE workers’, and it wouldn’t be that far off from what happened back in Minnesota or in nearly every other American city.
And if you look at ‘Bulls on Parade’, that song is practically a condemnation of the 1984-style work that has become even more prevalent today. It would have been unthinkable for someone to think that people just remove books to keep everyone ignorant of what’s really going on, but if we’re living in a world where massive corporations can threaten to take some of the biggest voices in late-night off the air because of one joke that they didn’t care for, there comes a point where you have to wonder where free speech has gone.
But the sad fact is that most people who grew up with Rage didn’t seem to get it the first time around. You have to remember that the band played at Woodstock 1999, which served to champion all of the values that they absolutely hated, and Morello has wasted no time in the past apologising for the kind of behaviour that the likes of Limp Bizkit were talking about in a lot of their lyrics.
So while there are still some trying their best to keep politics out of their songs for fear of retaliation, Rage are the ones that remind us that anger is actually a musician’s greatest strength. Art was never meant to be sanitised, and even if what Rocha was talking about wasn’t always going to be the most radio-friendly music, it all served to follow in the footsteps of everyone from Patti Smith to Gil Scott-Heron whenever they stepped up to the microphone.
Chances are, the rest of the rock world wasn’t going to make the same Zeppelinesque riffs whenever they performed, but the message was always the most important thing on any number of Rage tunes. They weren’t looking to apologise once for what they had to say, and even though there are people who claim that politics should stay out of music, hearing them play their reunion shows at the height of Donald Trump’s first election was them doing their duty as musicians.
Because no matter how much Trump likes to demonise every single heartland rocker that tries to disagree with him, Rage can be that one ray of light in rock and roll. You don’t have to align yourself with everything they talk about, but whenever one of their songs comes on, it’s hard to really deny the riffs, no matter how much their naysayers try to squint their eyes and cover their ears whenever they play.
