Rage Against The Machine

by Colin Devenish

Overview

Rage Against The Machine is one of the most prominant and politically active bands on the music scene today. Music Journalist and Biographer Colin Devenish delves into the interworkings of the band to discover what makes them so successful with their diverse fan base. They sell millions of copies of their CD's and have had #1 hits. They are also very politically and enviornmentally concious, with an educated fan base. They really are a band of substance, but the most important thing about Rage Against The Machine is that they rock!

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781429925143
Publisher:	St. Martin's Publishing Group
Publication date:	06/08/2001
Sold by:	Macmillan
Format:	eBook
Pages:	160
File size:	694 KB

About the Author

Colin Devenish, author of Rage Against the Machine, is a Venice-based music journalist. He writes for Pulse, NME.com, Rollingstone.com, and other publications.

Colin Devenish, author of Rage Against the Machine, is a Venice-based music journalist. He writes for Pulse, NME.com, Rollingstone.com, and other publications.

Read an Excerpt

Race Against The Machine

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By Colin Devenish

St. Martin's Press

Copyright © 2001 Colin Devenish
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4299-2514-3

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CHAPTER 1

Blending politics and music began long before any of the four members of Rage Against the Machine were born. Whether it was Woody Guthrie railing against unfair conditions in the Dust Bowl of Oklahoma during the Depression, the MC5 rallying for individual liberties, or Public Enemy offering a booming expose of life as a black American, musicians have always found a way to lace their lyrics with subversive content. So when Rage Against the Machine burst onto the scene in the early 1990s it wasn't as though their incorporation of a pointed political agenda into their aggressive songs marked the arrival of the much-heralded horse of a different color. What set Rage apart from the typical rockers with a cause who bop in ten minutes before the charity gig, hop up onstage, yell out a few "How ya doin', Clevelands," and hop back in the tour bus, was a lasting commitment to the issues they supported.

When singer Zack de la Rocha developed an interest in the political strife in the Chiapas region of Mexico, he volunteered to help out and spent weeks at a time working with the campesinos and learned firsthand about their situation. And over the years he has continued to return, and taken advantage of the platform Rage has to draw attention to the issue. A similar pattern has developed over the years with other human-rights cases and situations where it appears justice might have taken a backseat to political necessity. In some cases, such as that of Mumia Abu-Jamal, Rage Against the Machine's decision to play benefits on his behalf and to publicize his case ignited a great backlash against the band, with the Fraternal Order of Police, the governor of New Jersey, and the mighty Howard Stern all speaking out against the band's interest and involvement in the case.

Rage Against the Machine wasn't the first group to combine elements of hip-hop with the filthy dirge of heavy metal, but when guitarist Tom Morello realized that the shredder era had come and gone, he worked on developing a new guitar sound, one that showcased his ample chops but which also stretched to create the sounds hip-hop bands usually turned to a Dj to make. Drummer Brad Wilk and bassist Tim Commerford were hardly the first rhythm section to lock it up tight, but by keeping a rock-solid groove, they allowed Zack time for his onstage rants and provided the foundation that allowed Tom to play DJ with his endless bag of guitar tricks and still hop back into the song at the drop of a hat. Rage Against the Machine weren't the first ones to do what they do, but after three platinum-plus-selling albums, multiple world tours, and, later, countless kids having woken up to the possibilities of political action, it would be tough for the judges of the compulsories to look at their overall performance and not give them a ten.

But bands don't spring from the womb fully formed. Before Rage was a provocative, united force of music and politics they were four guys growing up in decidedly different environments, who each chose music as an outlet for their creative energies and frustrations and as a means toward creating something more than they'd been given.

When Zack de la Rocha was a year old, his parents split and he grew up switching off between his mother's home in Irvine, California, and his father's Lincoln Heights neighborhood in Los Angeles. Beto de la Rocha, Zack's father, was part of the Chicano art collective Los Four, along with Carlos Alamaz, Frank Romero, and Gilbert Lujan, which in 1974 was the first group of Mexican-American artists to have an exhibit displayed at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

"They were artists who realized that art as a medium is also very political by nature," Zack told Raygun magazine. "[Beto] would do a series of paintings for the United Farm Workers depicting, like, Mexican history to make it visible to the public. He and the other members, Carlos Alamaz, Frank Romero, and Gilbert Lujan, all tried to document that and make it accessible to the community, and I think that's what we're trying to do with music."

At an age when most kids' minds are cluttered with nothing more pressing than Little League baseball or gabbing on the phone, a young Zack de la Rocha got his first taste of a decidedly bitter American tradition. As Zack sat in class listening to what ostensibly was supposed to be a lecture on the geological makeup of California's coast, his teacher made an off-the-cuff remark that accidentally sparked a revolution in Zack's mind.

"He was describing one of the areas between San Diego and Oceanside, and as a reference to this particular area of the coastline, he said, 'You know, that wetback station there.' And everyone around me laughed," recalled Zack in Rolling Stone. "They thought it was the funniest thing that they ever heard. I remember sitting there, about to explode. I realized that I was not of these people. They were not my friends. And I remember internalizing it, how silent I was. I remember how afraid I was to say anything."

The lone Mexican-American in a classroom in Irvine, California — a conservative city in California's ultraconservative Orange County — the teacher's offhand crack caused Zack to see for the first time how casual and accepted racism can be. With his mother completing her Ph.D. in anthropology at the University of California at Irvine, packing up and moving out was not an option. Instead of altering his physical location, young Zack vowed to abandon his stunned silence and speak out. "I told myself that I would never allow myself to not respond to that type of situation — in any form, anywhere," Zack told Rolling Stone.

Living in Irvine meant Zack needed to learn a way to voice his discontent with the status quo while in the midst of people determined to keep things as is. "The rule for Chicanos was you were there because you had a mop or a broom in your hand or a hammer, or filled baskets of strawberries. Those things started a process for me which was intensely introspective and questioning of everything around me.... I feel kind of somewhere in between those worlds. There's this duality, because I'm constantly having to juggle between those two cultural experiences."

Zack knew he was capable of a lot more than what the stereotypes he experienced in Irvine would have him be. From an early age he turned to music as an outlet to help him express himself and the person he was becoming. In an interview CD chronicling Rage's career, Zack talked about his early influences. "I started playing guitar when I was eight and I played mostly punk at first, but then in junior high a music teacher turned me on to Joe Pass and Charlie Parker. At the time I was in a punk band called Juvenile Expression, and jazz opened me up to the possibilities of improvisations and hybrids."

Current bandmate and longtime pal Tim Commerford also was a member of Juvenile Expression, and offered his impressions of a young Zack in the pages of Spin. "We played a lot of basketball, even though he was real small; we skateboarded all over. When I first met him at his house, he had this acoustic guitar, and he eventually taught me how to play the entire Sex Pistols album. We were in a band in seventh grade called Juvenile Expression. He was breakin' at school when nobody else knew what hip-hop was. That kid was on it from day one."

In the early 1980s hip-hop still seemed like a renegade form of music, with rock hard-liners insisting it was just a bass-happy fad that would disappear in the same sudden way disco had died. In case you missed the last twenty years of music history — they were wrong. Rap records routinely take over the top slot of the weekly Billboard Top 200 charts. Ninety-five-year-old grandmothers have heard Sisqó's "Thong Song," and even your geeky older brother has a Dr. Dre album around somewhere.

Up until the late eighties, bands were either straight-up hip-hop or rock, with little middle ground. The idea that they could blend together was a little like saying red could be blue, up just might be down, and the difference between being dead or alive is slight. The barriers tumbled slowly, beginning with Run-D.M.C.'s collaboration with Aerosmith, which introduced rap to fans who would never have dreamed of listening to anything but classic rock and presented classic rock in a new context that turned heads in the hip-hop world. Anthrax's pairing with band heroes Public Enemy on the P.E. track "Bring the Noise" would provide the closest thing to a template for what Rage would later do.

In southern California, where Zack was growing up, the battle lines were clearly drawn. You liked rock or hip-hop and never the two shall meet. Zack's punk pals clapped their hands over their ears at the mention of phat beats and fresh cuts and breaks, but Zack heard more than tight rhymes and booming bass in the fledgling art form.

"I was listening to hip-hop early on, growing up in both East Los Angeles and Orange County, and I had a lot of white friends who refused to talk to me the second I put on an Adidas sweatsuit and was breaking, or I was walking through campus with my radio playing Eric B. and Rakim, and LL Cool J and De La Soul," Zack told Rolling Stone. "To so many whites it was just noise. To me, it was people reclaiming their dignity."

More than any other band member, the political good that Rage has been able to achieve was Zack's primary motivation to write songs, make records, and tour. In an interview with Rolling Stone, he went one better and said it was the only reason he was in Rage. For an accomplished musician to take such a stance is pretty serious stuff, but to see where Zack gets this intense idealism one need look no farther than his father Beto, a talented painter who for a while chose not to sell his work, even when the de la Rocha family didn't have money to buy food. "He was a very interesting character," Zack said to Rolling Stone. "He refused to sell his artwork. 'What do you mean, sell my pieces? This is popular art.' I admire him for his position. But his sense of realism, given the situation —' Look, there are only so many roaches we're gonna pull out of the cereal box.'"

Beto suffered a severe nervous breakdown in 1981. Zack's home life in Irvine was uncomfortable, and he felt isolated because of his race, but after Beto's breakdown, his Lincoln Heights home became an uneasy one as well. No longer believing in his work, Beto invested his energies in a rigid and obsessive religious faith and, when Zack came to visit on weekends, imposed his new philosophies on his son. "I would go to see him on weekends down in Lincoln Heights and be forced to sit in a room with the curtains drawn and the door locked," Zack said in Raygun. "He forced me to fast. I went through some really intense stuff."

Beto quit his job at East Los Angeles Community College and spent his days indoors, reading the Bible incessantly and ultimately taking the biblical commandment to not make graven images so seriously that he wrecked much of his own artwork, and forced Zack to destroy it as well. Zack described that time in an interview with Spin magazine. "He burned over 60 percent of his artwork. It was very, very, very difficult and at one point he forced me to burn it for him. These were paintings that I grew up around and loved and admired him for creating. I had no clue why he'd want me to destroy them."

In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, Beto partially attributed his downward spiral to his frustration at being unable to make a living in art on his own terms. "With the museum thing, I expected the whole world to open up to me. [But] nothing happened. I didn't know how to wait for success, how to be patient. I had this idea back then that once you began to work as an artist you could buy your car and have food to eat and raise your family. That doesn't happen. Very few people make any money at this profession."

With his two homes less than happy, Zack found refuge in music and a close-knit core group of friends who shared his passion for punk rock. As he listened to his favorite punk bands, he heard something besides lightning-quick guitars and furious ranting. While many kids get caught up in the fashion of punk or revel in the opportunity to mosh in a pit, Zack discovered something else. Reading between the lines, he taught himself the do-it-yourself work ethic that made it possible for small punk bands to make records and tour on a modest budget. One of punk's lasting legacies will always be that after the Sex Pistols' self-professed amateurish assault on the rock world, little things like talent were suddenly not so important. With minimal equipment and skill and a healthy combination of anger, guts, and the belief that "Loud Fast Rules!" punk was there for the taking. Zack caught on to this concept quickly and soon realized the only difference between himself and his heroes were a mic and a stage to use it on. "Whenever I used to listen to bands like Government Issue, Minor Threat, or Scream, it always made me feel like I would just lose it if I had a microphone in my hand," Zack told Alternative Press Magazine. "It's such a healthy thing to get onstage and vent — especially in the hardcore scene. Anyone can just get up there and express themselves. Anyone."

That "anyone" became someone with the band Inside Out. Brothers Mark and Rob Hayworth were part of Zack's early ensemble Hard Stance, which later evolved into Inside Out. In an interview with Spin, Rob "Cubby" Hayworth said that growing up different in Irvine provided major inspiration for their music. "That place was so fucked that you'd feel bad for not driving a Jaguar to school. We decided to play punk music to rebel against where we were. Every house looked the same; cops were everywhere, pulling you over for the way you dressed or the color of your skin. Zack dealt with racial shit all the time."

If there were an advantage to Zack growing up in Irvine, it was only that his miserable experience growing up there gave him ample experience in questioning authority. Loath to accept the status quo, he developed an increasingly independent streak to his thinking and assumed responsibility for his own education after he left high school. "I think my high-school experience pushed me through a crisis of identity, it enabled me to be more of a critical individual," he told Vox. "It made me question the institution I was forced to adjust to and my relationship with society. Those four years or so during high school were what eventually politicized me, 'cause the experience made me step and back and take a look at how I was being indoctrinated. Once I'd left, I became engaged in reading and since then, I've gone through my own self-education."

Instead of walking around breaking stuff, as some bands might suggest, Zack diverted his fury into his music, combining his outrage with a growing awareness of how the world works, evolving into the sort of lyrics he would eventually become famous for. In an interview CD chronicling Rage's career, Zack talked about the factors that led to his strident lyrical approach. "My political awakening came in high school when I realized you're really only successful in this country when you've been completely assimilated and you've achieved a lot materially. So the oppression that ordinary people are constantly subjected to is as much spiritual as political. If our music sounds angry, it's because we're fighting for empowerment on a spiritual level as well as a material one. When I sing a song it's a reflection of my inner self as well as my social philosophy."

Inside Out landed a key gig when they hopped on a tour with Quicksand and Shelter, both of which featured former members of the hardcore act Youth of Today. Eager for the chance to bring their music and message to kids across the country, Inside Out scrambled to make the tour happen. Zack's courage quickly got put to the test three thousand miles from home at a June 15, 1990, gig at the Anthrax club in Norwalk, Connecticut, when punks in attendance circulated fliers with Nazi symbols on them, protesting Shelter's ties to the Hare Krishna movement.

Zack didn't hesitate. "If anyone thinks this swastika belongs on the same piece of paper as this Krishna symbol, you're all just fucking ignorant," he said, and then ripped up the offending flier. Mike Rosas now plays guitar in Smile but he once played alongside Zack in Inside Out. In an interview with the Orange County Weekly, Rosas said Zack always made it a priority to get his point across to fans. "I guess it's kind of the same thing now, but he had a lot of great things to say. When we would play shows, he would take a lot of time to explain what the songs were about and really try to get the message across. I think a lot of times, it was a big challenge because people just wanted to slam-dance. But at the same time, it made a difference — a lot of people paid attention to him and went on to start other bands. A lot of bands you see nowadays are definitely influenced by Inside Out and other bands that existed in the early nineties."

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Race Against The Machine by Colin Devenish. Copyright © 2001 Colin Devenish. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
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