Renegades of funk

BY RICHARD PITHOUSE

Rage Against the Machine have lobbed their last sonic Molotov cocktail at musical mediocrity and political injustice. Rage Against the Machine, by far the most politically radical rock band to achieve major and sustained commercial success since the Clash, split up at the end of last year.

There were always rumours of tensions in the band and, in a 1999 interview with Rolling Stone, the band's guitarist Tom Morello admitted that while he and Zach de la Rocha were "ideological blood brothers", the band's rhythm section were "just in it for the music" and that this "made decision making difficult".

At the MTV Music Awards in September, Tim Commerford was removed by security after drunkenly climbing on to the stage. Morello was fairly understanding and told journalists that "Britney Spears' version of 'Satisfaction' put him over the edge". But de la Rocha was disgusted with Commerford's behaviour and stormed out of the building. Two weeks later de la Rocha announced that he was leaving the band. The rest of the band have insisted that they will replace de la Rocha and continue as Rage Against the Machine. That idea is being taken as seriously as the Wailers without Bob Marley.

Rage have gone out with a big, big bang in the form of a 12-track Rick Rubin produced album called Renegades. The album is made up of Rage interpretations of songs drawn from genres as diverse as folk, rock, punk and hip hop and includes work by artists like Bob Dylan, Minor Threat and Cypress Hill. The common theme is provided by the lyrical content — all 12 songs are defiantly radical.

The album grew out of another project. The band went into the studio to record two bonus tracks for a forthcoming live album and, as Tom Morello explains, "What began as a couple of bonus tracks has blossomed into one of the most powerful records of our career. There has never been another album like this where a band has recorded an entire CD of classic revolutionary hip hop and rock songs. We've attacked these songs with the same irreverence for convention with which they were written."

Renegades is far more than just a useful beginners' guide to the radical undercurrent in popular music. It's an excellent album in its own right.

Highlights include the first single, Afrika Bambaataa's "Renegades of Funk", Cypress Hill's "How I Could Just Kill a Man" and the Rolling Stones' "Street Fighting Man".

The album has a coherent and distinctly Rage Against the Machine feel, yet is more varied and experimental than anything they've done before. De la Rocha, who's never been recorded doing anything other than rapping like a machine gun, even goes so far as to sing, Bono-style, Devo's devastatingly sarcastic "Beautiful World". And while Tom Morello's guitar is as tight and angry as ever, he's broadened his range of expression to accommodate the rhythms of the 12 lyricists covered on Renegades.

Some of the songs on Renegades take on a new significance in this context. Cypress Hill's original version of "How I Could Just Kill a Man" seemed more like nihilistic machismo, but when performed by Rage Against the Machine, between more explicitly political songs, the track suddenly evokes Hannah Arendt's "unorganised revolution". The system which causes such profound alienation seems pathological. The anger of the underclass is now more clearly a symptom of a sick society, rather than a disease in itself.

Although Renegades sounds hipper than anything else you're likely to hear from a rock band in the near future, it also connects, directly, to a long standing tradition of US radicalism. Bruce Springsteen's seminal "Ghost of Tom Joad" was based on a Woody Guthrie song of the same name, off the classic 1940 Dust Bowl Ballads album, which was in turn based on the main character in John Steinbeck's 1938 novel The Grapes of Wrath. And Dylan's Maggie's Farm was based on Down at Penny's Farm, a sharecropper's lament first recorded in 1929 by the Bently Boys.

Suddenly, Rage are more obviously what they have always been — contemporary avatars of a long tradition of radicalism.