“So outside”: the band Tom Morello called music for crazy people
Rock and roll has never catered to people who want to slip on background music at a party. While some artists have released some fairly toothless attempts at the genre over the years, the best musicians in the world are the ones who leave fans flabbergasted at what they heard and demand that they play the record over again to take everything in one more time. Although Tom Morello was already the master of innovation in Rage Against the Machine, he remembered being blown away by the insanity of these particular metal giants.
Looking through Morello’s record collection, though, there will be a lot more metal than anyone realised. While the majority of Rage’s best material stems from their love of acts like Public Enemy and Run-DMC, Morello was known for counting Yngwie Malmsteen and Randy Rhoads as his first true guitar teachers, spending half his time in college trying to learn their licks in between classes.
But listening to his music, Morello wanted to be the anti-guitar hero compared to everyone else. He could shred if he wanted to, but he was interested in using his instrument more like a piece of sound design in the mix, usually taking the unconventional approach to making everything sound like a gigantic wall of noise hitting you whenever he played.
Since the majority of metal bands were now going the way of glam rockers like Marc Bolan, Morello was more interested in seeing what the underground was doing when he came across Metallica. While he had no words for what he was listening to when first popping in Master of Puppets, he remembered thinking that there was something not quite right about how well the tunes were constructed.
Take the song ‘Master of Puppets’ for example. While the first half of the song operates in the traditional verse-chorus structure, hearing it give way to that beautiful breakdown section and then throw in other riffs like the guitar hook from David Bowie’s ‘Andy Warhol’ didn’t really fit into the same box that bands like Dokken and Poison fit into at the time.
Even though Morello had gone through his fair share of strange music, he could appreciate that Metallica could bring something new to the table, saying, “I’ve only had three musical experiences like [that]. I said, ‘This is crazy people music.’ It felt so outside of what music was to me prior to hearing it. The only other times that’s happened was with System of a Down and Jane’s Addiction.”
Once all of those preconceptions came down, though, that’s when things started to get more interesting. Now that music like this could be played in stadiums around the world, it wasn’t out of the question for a band like Rage to sell in droves talking about radical political rhetoric over the heaviest grooves that anyone had ever made, like on ‘Killing in the Name’ or ‘Bulls on Parade’.
It might have been too heavy for some people, but Metallica was never meant to be uninviting to anyone willing to bang their head. Because the minute that someone gives it up to Metallica and starts raising the horns, the world feels a little brighter for it.
