Exploding like a sonic Molotov cocktail
BY RICHARD PITHOUSE
The surge of interest in "world music" and the development of compelling popular music forms like acid jazz, trip-hop, breakbeat and hip hop have made most rock bands look uninspired by comparison. Naturally, this has led to a drastic reduction in rock's audience and social significance. But every time the sneering cliche "rock dinosaur" starts to sound pertinent, Rage Against the Machine burst out of Los Angeles with another sonic Molotov cocktail.
Rage's first album ignited the streets in June 1992 and a few weeks later teenagers from Santiago to Paris were wearing Che Guevara T-shirts and chanting, hip hop-style, lyrics like "Freedom must be fundamental/ In Johannesburg or South Central/ Fight the war/ Fuck the norm". By December that year, Billboard was calling Rage Against the Machine "the most original and virtuosic new rock band in the nation" and the album was certified platinum across Europe, Australasia and much of the Americas.
Their potent mix of (black) hip hop and (white) heavy metal was startlingly original and brilliantly executed. Timmy C brought all the best jazz tricks to his bass playing, Zack de la Rocha's machine-gun rapping was delivered with rare passion and Harvard graduate Tom Morello was unquestionably the best rock guitarist since Hendrix. He was also the son of a Mau Mau guerrilla. Rage Against the Machine were a band with a mission.
In academia, fashionable postmodern intellectuals were gleefully proclaiming the end of history. But the real world was teeming with real struggles and Rage Against the Machine felt history crashing though their veins as forcefully as had their heroes — people like Emile Zapata, Frantz Fanon and Che Guevara.
Suddenly there was a huge-selling album hailing Malcolm X and the Soweto uprising, saying things like "Fuck Uncle Sam" and describing the American dream as "Compromise, conformity, assimilation, submission/Ignorance, hypocrisy and brutality". It wasn't poetry, but the point was as clear as the defaced US flag they hung upside down at every performance.
For the first time since the death of Bob Marley and the demise of the Clash, radical music had burst out of the underground. Rage Against the Machine were using the mass media to incite revolution and to focus attention on progressive causes. Their message was all over radio, television and the web and on everything from T-shirts to bumper stickers and, most compellingly, the stage.
Just when concert crowds were roused into an unthinking frenzy, de la Rocha would stop and read an Alan Ginsberg poem, give a quick lecture on the Zapatista rebellion in Mexico or invite Tom Morello's mother to explain why it's a good thing to say "Fuck censorship". On one occasion, the whole band stripped naked, put masking tape over their mouths and stood, silently, on the stage for 15 minutes to protest censorship.
They brought popular attention to issues like sweatshops, the Chinese occupation of Tibet and the continued imprisonment of American Indian Movement activist Leonard Peltier. Rage joined forces with hip hop bands like the Roots and the Beastie Boys in benefit gigs for a variety of progressive causes. And, along with Noam Chomsky, they managed to hijack commercial radio for a few hours. On one afternoon, Morello was arrested at an anti-sweatshop demonstration while Zack de la Rocha was addressing a full session of the United Nations on the patently unjust incarceration of Black Panther Mumia Abu-Jamal.
But they weren't able to chant the revolution into being. Some of the 9 million owners of the debut album wore Che Guevara T-shirts to shopping malls and gleefully chanted lyrics like "Fuck you I won't do what you tell me". But it was never clear if they were thinking about their homework, their untidy bedrooms or a more principled form of rebellion. To a lot of observers, the people in the T-shirts looked a little silly next to the man whose face was on the T-shirts.
Sceptics argued that Rage Against the Machine were just another spectacle, another product, in a post-political world of surface and illusion. Some argued that the political rage was just an excuse for a violent, dysfunctional masculinity and others suggested that their anger was a channel for collective catharsis and that premature catharsis was about as revolutionary as Prozac.
But the web is filled with the testimonies of Rage Against the Machine fans who insist that the band has revolutionised their lives. They tell stories of being inspired to read Fanon and Chomsky in search of a name for their anger; of taking that anger into organisations and on to the streets and, sometimes, all the way from the malls to the Mexican mountains.
The official Rage Against the Machine web site (<http://www.ratm.com>) has a Freedom Fighter of the Month slot and the winning fans are always people who've made a significant difference.
Their second album, Evil Empire, was unleashed early in 1996. It was certified double platinum in the US and won a Grammy Award. It was technically staggering and the lyrics celebrated the uprisings in Gaza and Tiananmen, and raged against "one god, one market, one truth, one consumer". But it lacked the synergy and manic passion of their debut album.
The band have since admitted that they rushed the recording in a few days because de la Rocha was spending most of his time with the Zapatistas. But, he was persuaded that he could do more on MTV than in the Chiapas mountains and by the middle of the year they were touring hard and sounding better than ever.
The following year they released a huge selling video which came with a superb cover of Bruce Springsteen's acoustic classic "The Ghost of Tom Joad". In 1998, Rage recorded a new single, "No Shelter", for the Godzilla sound track. They used the opportunity to subvert the film with a potent song about US imperialism: "In the thin line between entertainment and war the front-line is everywhere ... Godzilla's just a mutherfucking thriller. Get your eyes on the real killer."
Rage Against the Machine's third album, The Battle of Los Angeles, hit the streets just days before the Battle of Seattle last November. The verdict, flowing in from around the world, is that it's the best work they've ever done.
The lyrics are captivating, the musicianship is breathtakingly excellent, the songs have been deftly sculpted and de la Rocha's rapping is more compelling than ever. The band have created more interesting sounds from drums, vocals, guitar and bass than most DJs can get from two turntables, a fat spliff and a box of vinyl.
The first single, "Guerrilla Radio", rocks as hard as anything they've done. The album kicks off with a furious attack on media that speaks for the powerful and other songs rail against everything from "the school as tomb" to "toxic sunsets", the inanity of commercial radio, the continued imprisonment of Mumia Abu-Jamal and the Zapatistas' commitment to "land or death".
Almost every song actively incites resistance. The last song on the album, "War Within a Breath", insists that "Los Angeles ... is like Gaza on the dawn of the Intifada" and urges that, under the banner of a red star on a black flag, "Everything can change on a new year's day/ As everything changed on new year's day". The Battle of Seattle could be just the beginning.
[Richard Pithouse teaches at the University of Durban-Westville, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa.]