The song Tom Morello called a “battle hymn for the ages”
Here’s a quick question for you: If someone has the temerity to speak out against the things in society they find objectionable, must they have also thought of a worthy replacement for said concept, or is it enough to just speak out against it?
It’s a common way of undercutting those speaking out against societal oppression. However, someone it absolutely doesn’t work against is Rage Against the Machine guitarist Tom Morello.
For all the snide pushback Rage get for being the poster-boys for sixth-form activists, “fuck you, I won’t tidy my room” and all that, the actual band members are as legit as they get. Each of them is more than qualified to talk intelligently and articulately about their political views and how they inform their problems with current systems of power.
Sure, their music speaks more to the heart than to the brain. As anyone who’s ever listened to Million Dead will tell you, trying to cite your sources in the middle of a hardcore punk song will arguably get you laughed at even more than if you keep things simple. Thus, Rage Against the Machine songs may be built around simple, snappy slogans that sound great when shouted by 80,000 people at Reading Festival, but there’s always some deeper thoughts at play for those willing to look.
To paraphrase an immortal Tom Morello Twitter clapback, you don’t have to have studied political science at Harvard University to know that something is wrong with the world, but he has, and there is. So, trust Morello to also be an authority on what other bands and artists are releasing music as catchy and fun as it is politically minded.
What band got the seal of approval from Tom Morello?
Despite all the heady politics, both parts are just as important to Morello. This is a guy with just as much love for ZZ Top and Judas Priest as Dead Kennedys. The truth is that the man’s bang on the money. Like it or not, the politics just don’t go down without a heaping spoonful of sugar. In his case, the sugar comes from some of the best riffs of the entire 1990s.
Morello is also keen to shout out when other bands get this balance right. One of the best examples of this comes from when he had moved on from Rage to play for Chris Cornell’s Soundgarden follow-up group, Audioslave. At the time, he was guest programming for the Australian music TV program, Rage, where he decided what videos would be shown for an hour-long block. One pick sums up what Morello seeks to do with his music as well as he ever could.
One pick was Public Enemy’s deathless banger ‘Fight the Power’, which he talked about in his typically forthright, yet articulate manner. He described the song’s use in Spike Lee’s masterpiece Do The Right Thing as “one of the most powerful convergences of music, movie and lyric. It is a battle hymn for the ages, and I have a feeling that decades from now, angry youth will be smashing the state to this song.”
High praise indeed. It makes perfect sense in that case that Tom Morello would, in fact, form a band with Public Enemy’s Chuck D, with Prophets of Rage being another powerful convergence, this time of two great musical and political minds.
