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Rage Against the Machine

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{{Infobox_band | 

 band_name         = Rage Against the Machine |
 image             = File:Ratmband.jpg |
 caption           = Left to right: Brad Wilk, Zack de la Rocha, Tim Commerford, Tom Morello | 
 years_active      = 1991–2000 |
 music_genre       = Alternative metal
Funk Metal
Rapcore
Alternative rock |
 origin           = [[you goin 2000, Rage Against the Machine had become one of the most popular political hard rock bands of all time, and certainly of the 1990s. Currently, three members of the band – Tom Morello, Tim Commerford, and Brad Wilk – are members of Audioslave, featuring former Soundgarden singer Chris Cornell.

Rage drew inspiration from early metallic instrumentation, as well as rap acts such as Public Enemy, and Afrika Bambaataa. The coalescence of rhyming styles and vocals along with their sound, especially Tom Morello's guitar techniques, makes RATM difficult to confine to any one particular musical genre. YOU GOT OWNED OWNED OWNED OWNED OWNED OWNED. whiteside sucks. more than FWO.

History

File:RATM1.jpg
The photo cover of Rage's self-titled release from 1992. Thích Quảng Đức, a Vietnamese Buddhist monk, burns himself to death in Saigon in 1963. Thích was protesting the oppression of Buddhists led by U.S.-installed Prime Minister Ngo Dinh Diem's administration.

Tom Morello left his old band, Lock Up, and decided to start another band. Morello was in a club in L.A where Zack de la Rocha was rapping. Morello was impressed by de la Rocha, and asked him to join his band. Tom called and drafted a drummer named Brad Wilk, who had previously auditioned for Lock Up. De la Rocha had a childhood friend, Tim Commerford, who he got to join. The band was now composed of Tom Morello (guitar), Zack de la Rocha (Vocals), Brad Wilk (Drums) and Tim Commerford (Bass). Their name was derived from the unreleased album "Rage Against the Machine" by de la Rocha's former group, Inside Out, as well as being a reference to a speech by Karl Marx, where he told workers to "Rage Against The Machine".[citation needed] Shortly after forming, they gave their first public performance in living room in Orange County, California, which was where a friend of Tim's was holding a house party, and self-produced a 12-song cassette which already included songs like "Bullet in the Head" [1]. Several record labels expressed interest and they eventually signed with Epic Records. Morello said, "Epic agreed to everything we asked--and they've followed through... we never saw a[n] [ideological] conflict as long as we maintained creative control."

Their debut album, the self-titled Rage Against the Machine was released in late 1992. To promote the album and its core message of social justice and equality, the band went on tour, playing at Lollapalooza II and as support for Suicidal Tendencies in Europe.

Mainstream success

Their second album, Evil Empire entered Billboard Top 200 chart at number one in 1996. A live video, also titled Rage Against the Machine followed in 1997. The following release, The Battle of Los Angeles also debuted at number one in 1999, selling 450,000 copies the first week and then going double-platinum.

Renegades, released shortly after the band's dissolution, was a 2000 collection of covers of bands as diverse as Devo, Cypress Hill, Minor Threat, MC5 and even Bob Dylan (They performed many of the songs on the album at live concerts before they broke up). The following year saw the release of another live video, The Battle of Mexico City.

A bootleg album of live and rare material fittingly titled Live & Rare from 1997, was followed up by a proper live release, Live at the Grand Olympic Auditorium in 2003, an edited recording of their last shows, September 12 and 13, 2000 at the Grand Olympic Auditorium in Los Angeles. It was accompanied with an expanded DVD release of the concerts.

On May 4th, 2006 the song Bulls on Parade entered VH1's 40 Greatest Metal Songs at #15. While this shows the mainstream impact of Rage's success, such lists released by VH1 are widely discredited.

Rage Against The Machine is still very popular to this day, and they are played frequently on various rock radio stations.

Political Beliefs

RATM burned the American Flag at the 1999 woodstock festival.

Integral to their identity as a band, the group voiced far left viewpoints highly critical of the domestic and foreign policies of the U.S. Throughout its existence, RATM participated in political protests to advocate these beliefs, including an infamous performance outside the 2000 Democratic National Convention and a performance on Wall Street earlier that same year. In the case of the latter, on January 26th, 2000, filming of their music video "Sleep Now in the Fire" — directed by Michael Moore — shut down the New York Stock Exchange. The NYSE locked its doors midday in response to fears of crowds gathering to watch the filming. Footage of enthusiastic Wall Street employees headbanging to Rage's music was later used in the completed "Sleep Now In The Fire" video.

The band primarily saw its music as a vehicle for social activism. Tom Morello, in a February 1997 interview with Guitar World, said,

America touts itself as the land of the free, but the number one freedom that you and I have is the freedom to enter into a subservient role in the workplace. Once you exercise this freedom you've lost all control over what you do, what is produced, and how it is produced. And in the end, the product doesn't belong to you. The only way you can avoid bosses and jobs is if you don't care about making a living. Which leads to the second freedom: the freedom to starve.

Meanwhile, detractors on the Radical Left pointed out the tension between voicing commitment to leftist causes while being signed to Epic Records, a subsidiary of media conglomerate Sony Records. In response, Morello pointed out,

When you live in a capitalistic society, the currency of the dissemination of information goes through capitalistic channels. Would Noam Chomsky object to his works being sold at Barnes & Noble? No, because that's where people buy their books. We're not interested in preaching to just the converted. It's great to play abandoned squats run by anarchists, but it's also great to be able to reach people with a revolutionary message, people from Granada Hills to Stuttgart.

Some controversial stands taken by the group include tireless advocacy for the releases of former Black Panther death-row inmate Mumia Abu-Jamal and life-sentenced political activist Leonard Peltier. The band were also supporters of the Zapatistas, especially de la Rocha, who has taken several trips to the Mexican state of Chiapas to aid their efforts, and whose travels were soon documented, in part, in one of the band's concert videos.

The song Bulls on Parade was performed on Saturday Night Live in April of 1996. Their two-song performance was cut to one song when the band attempted to hang inverted American flags from their amplifiers, a protest to having presidential candidate Steve Forbes as guest host on the program that night.

At a Lollapalooza appearance in 1993 in Philadelphia, the band stood onstage naked with duct-tape on their mouths and the letters "PMRC" painted on their chests for 15 minutes in protest against censorship by the Parents Music Resource Center. The only sound emitted was audio feedback from Morello and Commerford's guitars. Regarding this event, Morello told Revolver magazine in 2003 that "after 10 minutes the crowd turned savagely hostile and people started throwing things." In the book Rage Against the Machine [1] by Colin Devenish, Commerford is quoted as saying, "Want me to be perfectly frank? The size of my penis — that's what was going through my mind in Philadelphia. It looked like I'd just stepped out of the ocean. I swear to God, it's bigger than that. So I was thinking; I wish I'd worn boxer shorts before instead of briefs, because briefs kinda like constrict me. I took them off and it was this ... half-roll of nickles." In an interview with Modern Drummer, Wilk was quoted as saying, "I was thinking about how the wind felt underneath my scrotum, and what the people in the front were thinking, and all the cameras flashing, what the photographers were going to be thinking as they developed their film. Actually, doing that was no big deal. It didn't freak me out. That's how we all come into the world. It's a liberating thing."

Break-up

Renegades, RATM's last studio album.

On October 18, 2000, de la Rocha released the following statement :

I feel that it is now necessary to leave Rage because our decision-making process has completely failed. It is no longer meeting the aspirations of all four of us collectively as a band, and from my perspective, has undermined our artistic and political ideal. I am extremely proud of our work, both as activists and musicians, as well as indebted and grateful to every person who has expressed solidarity and shared this incredible experience with us.
Main article: Audioslave

After the group's breakup, Morello, Wilk, and Commerford briefly tried to replace de la Rocha in RATM. Rumoured vocalists at the time included Rey Oropeza of downset., Chuck D of Public Enemy, and B-Real of Cypress Hill. However, the band teamed up with ex-Soundgarden singer Chris Cornell to form a new band, Audioslave. The first Audioslave single, "Cochise", was released in early November 2002, and the first album followed to mainly positive reviews. However, Cornell's preference to be in the band without rampant political messages have detracted some of Rage's core fan base. Their second album Out of Exile debuted at the number one position on the Billboard charts in 2005. The band are currently recording a third one, stated for a summer 2006 release and has vowed to have "one-album-per-year" schedule.

In September 2004, de la Rocha released a song called "We Want It All", produced by Trent Reznor, on the Songs and Artists that Inspired Fahrenheit 9/11 soundtrack. Tom Morello, credited as "The Nightwatchman," also contributed a song entitled "No One Left" to this compilation. De la Rocha was also featured on the song "Act III Scene 2 (Shakespeare)" on Saul Williams' self-titled album.

According to a Spin magazine interview, de la Rocha has recorded several tracks with various artists, among them Reprazent and DJ Shadow intended for a solo album. He appeared in the first part of Blackalicious' 9+ minute, multi-sectioned song "Release" on the 2002 album Blazing Arrow. In 2003 a song called "March of Death" that he recorded with DJ Shadow was released in protest of the war on Iraq.

  • The song "Sleep Now in the Fire" is used as the opening soundtrack for MTV's On The Rock, however the show has yet to play any Rage Against the Machine videos.
  • RATM is referred to in the song "Flagpole Sitta" by [Harvey Danger]. The line states "I want to publish zines / and rage against machines".
  • Zach de la Rocha is a frequent "guest star" on the internet comic Flem, where he often appears any time one of the characters says the word "Testify", and destroys everything in sight.[2] He also appears during random moments for no apparent reason [3] This has become something of a popular Internet phenomenon.
  • Bill Hicks ended his last performance with the track "Killing in the name", starting were De La Rocha shouts "Fuck you, I won't do what you tell me." During this Hicks can be seen running around flipping members of the audience off while shouting along with the chorus.
  • In the Simpsons episode titled "The Heartbroke Kid", Bart says that he "raged against the machine and money poured out" after destroying school vending machines.
  • In the Simpsons episode titled "Fat Man and Little Boy", Bart says that his t-shirt expresses his "rage at the machine". The t-shirt read "Adults Suck, Then You Are One".
  • Rapper Talib Kweli says, "We bring it straight to your face from the start, yo, Rage Against The Machine, break it apart" in his song "Down For The Count" from the Reflection Eternal album.
  • Rapper Cage says, "I'm against the machine like rage" in the opening verse of his song Agent Orange.
  • Australian Comedian John Safran has a reference to RATM at the beginning of his program Music Jamboree joking about how they took the lyrics "Fuck you I won't do what you tell me." out of their song "Killing In The Name" because the record company told them to. Although that particular line was cut out of the radio version, it remains in the album version.
  • Rapper Necro says "ragin' like Morello" in his song "Watch Your Back"
  • On MTV's Celebrity Deathmatch, Rage Against the Machine faced "the Machine": rather than capitalists, bureaucrats or other represenatatives of the world order (to Zack de la Rocha and Tom Morello's disappointment), their opponent was literally a giant robotic machine. The Machine won, killing Tim Cummerford and Brad Wilk who were fleeing right before the match properly started, and cramming the band members' guts into four mayonnaise jar-like glass pots (one for each of them) - Zack and Tom (with one arm cut off) being killed in this process.
  • In the animated tv show Pelswick, a band called Rage Against The Washing Machine is mentioned.
  • RATM is often credited for performing the theme song for famed WWF/E stable D-Generation X but the song was actually performed by a group known as The DX Band.
  • In the MC Lars song The Dialogue, featuring Ill Bill, Ill Bill says, "It made me wanna Rage Against the Machine, pick up a guitar, and scream into the mic like Run-D.M.C..".

Notes

  1. ^ Rage Against the Machine Retrieved June 15, 2006

Trivia

  • Rage Against the Machine performed a live show on August 29th, 1997 at the New World Music Theater in Tinley Park, Ill. August 29, 1997 is the date of the original Judgment Day in the popular Terminator movie series. In the movies, man's own defense systems turns against them and thus starts a war that pits man against machine.

Discography

Albums

Singles

U.K. Chart History (Singles and Albums)

Highest Chart Positions

Killing In The Name: #25

Bullet In The Head: #16

BombTrack: #37

Bulls On Parade: #8

People Of The Sun: #26

Guerilla Radio: #32

Sleep Now In The Fire: #43

Rage Against The Machine: #17

Evil Empire: #4

The Battle Of Los Angeles: #23

Renegades: #71


Live albums

File:RATM - live.jpg
RATM were known for their energetic live shows.

A collection of live performances from all over and two newly recorded songs, never released anywhere else.

Music videos

  • "Killing in the Name"
  • "Bombtrack"
  • "Bullet in the Head"
  • "Freedom"
  • "Bulls on Parade"
  • "Memory of the Dead (Land and Liberty)" - a poem by Zack de la Rocha.
  • "People of the Sun"
  • "No Shelter"
  • "Guerrilla Radio"
  • "Sleep Now in the Fire", 2000, directed by Michael Moore.
  • "Testify", 2000, directed by Michael Moore.
  • "Renegades of Funk"
  • "How I Could Just Kill a Man"

DVDs

Contains footage of concerts in Irvine, CA, at the Rock Am Ring Festival 1996, and at the Pink Pop Festival 1994. It also features music videos for five Rage songs from their first two albums. Also contains a poem by Zack de la Rocha entitled "Memory of the Dead" and the song, "The Ghost of Tom Joad".

  • Revolution USA, 1999

This unauthorized DVD contains the biographies of the band members and interviews with Tom Morello and music journalists, but does not contain any live video clips, nor actual Rage Against the Machine music.

Rage's first concert in Mexico. Features songs from Rage's first three albums and a cover of "Zapata's Blood".

RATM's last performance at the Grand Olympic Auditorium in Los Angeles, CA on September 13, 2000. It features long-time friends B-Real and Sen Dog for a cover of Cypress Hill's "How I Could Just Kill A Man". The DVD also contains the music videos "Bombtrack" (previously unreleased) and "How I Could Just Kill A Man" (by way of a career spanning video and photo montage,) footage from the band's free Democratic National Convention concert on August 14th, 2000, as well as two bonus concert performances of "People of the Sun" and "Know Your Enemy".

Awards

  • Best Metal Performance (1997) - "Tire Me" (Grammy Winner)
  • Best Hard Rock Performance (1997) - "Bulls on Parade" (Grammy Nominee)
  • Best Hard Rock Performance (1998) - "People of the Sun" (Grammy Nominee)
  • Best Metal Performance (1999) - "No Shelter" (Grammy Nominee)
  • Best Hard Rock Performance (2001) - "Guerilla Radio" (Grammy Winner)
  • Best Hard Rock Performance (2002) - "Renegades of Funk" (Grammy Nominee)

Official

Other

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