The song that made Rage Against the Machine quit music: “We inspired such bullshit”
Has there ever been a band as true to their name as Rage Against the Machine? I highly doubt it.
Music has always been a form of expression, but it was only in the most recent of decades that bands could be so upfront about it. Ever since genres such as noise music and free jazz were created, sound has been used to express disdain towards a political or societal system in some way or form; it was just done in a more subtle way.
The inaccessibility of the aforementioned styles of music is exactly the point; the impenetrable nature of that music was supposed to be a reflection of the embedded commentary – oh, this sounds bad, and you don’t want to be a part of it? That’s how I feel about the government, about society, etc.
As people’s tolerance with what could be expressed within art grew more relaxed, paired with the development of the punk movement, people were a lot more outspoken with the rage they had about the world around them. As soon as the Sex Pistols burst on the scene with ‘Anarchy In The UK’, it’s as though a trigger was flipped, and suddenly bands felt like they had permission to truly hold nothing back within the music they made.
Another highly political genre of music was rap. The very essence of rap music means that it is primed for people to use it as a form of expression, given the nature of the lyrics allows for an artist to say a lot in a little amount of time. Listeners realised the potential of the genre when Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five released ‘The Message’, one of the first political rap songs, which didn’t provide a solution to the problems it highlighted, but merely acted as a societal mirror for anybody looking on.
With both punk and hip hop being frontrunners in political music, it made sense that Rage Against the Machine combined the two when they started writing some of the most unrelenting societally driven songs of all time. Every chance they got, whether it was in instrumentation, lyrics, or performance, they stayed true to their name and made stubborn minds everywhere tremble.
They also helped inspire a lot of music that they grew to disdain. Combining rock and rap became incredibly popular towards the turn of the millennium, as nu-metal, for a brief period, cemented itself as one of the biggest genres in the world. Limp Bizkit were a huge name within this sound, and when the band confessed that seeing Rage Against the Machine influenced them, Rage Against the Machine said they felt “really bad that we inspired such bullshit”.
Annoyed by what they had seemingly helped create, when Rage Against the Machine and Limp Bizkit were both nominated for the same ‘Best Rock Video’ award at the 2000 MTV Video Awards, it became Rage’s mission to beat the nu-metal superstars – unfortunately, they were unsuccessful, and Limp Bizkit’s ‘Break Stuff’ took first place. This would be the song that would ultimately lead to Rage Against the Machine’s downfall.
Truly embracing the rebellious attitude of the band, in protest to the decision, Rage Against the Machine’s bassist, Tim Commerford, climbed to the top of a fake palm tree and refused to come down. While Commerford might have thought himself justified in his protest, the childish nature of the act left lead singer Zack de la Rocha “humiliated” – it wasn’t long after the incident that Rage Against the Machine broke up, and the band cite this incident as one of the driving factors behind the decision, and perhaps, in their success, Limp Bizkit managed to break up one of the bands that originally inspired them.
