Rage Against The Machine - Storie dall’altra Los Angeles

If there has ever been a band able to merge social commitment with sheer enjoyment, the activist fire of youth with the mature, personal awareness of its historical moment, that band was — at least until the early Nineties — none other than the Clash of Joe Strummer. Stepping down a notch in terms of freshness and probably credibility, some might still point today to Bruce Springsteen, REM and U2 as other possible politically engaged artists capable of stirring listeners into action.

But it's alongside London's Clash that we should place one of the biggest rock phenomena of the Nineties, a band able to forcefully insert itself into a musical trend emerging from the so-called Californian crossover scene, ready to burst out of the streets of Los Angeles, and to upend — for better or worse — the history of rock in the years that followed: Rage Against The Machine were one of the biggest names in the crossover scene and, ultimately, in nu metal, as well as one of the essential bands of the last fifteen years.

To tell the story of Rage Against The Machine, let's start in November 2000, when George W. Bush is elected president of the United States for the first time, and Zack De La Rocha, the band's charismatic frontman, announces the breakup of Rage Against The Machine due to the complete failure of the — clearly political — goals the band had set for itself on the day of its formation, nine years earlier. In truth, the reasons are these and others too, which we'll examine as we follow the course of events, starting back in 1991.

Rage Against The Machine is an anomaly from every point of view. They're perhaps the first band to reach a certain level of popularity before even signing a record deal, and, more curiously still, they didn't start out as a live act building its own audience show after show until some generous admirer signed them: Rage Against The Machine recorded their first demo without ever having played a single live show. They sparked word of mouth by passing the demo to friends, and only later started selling it at their very first gigs, racking up five thousand copies sold in no time at all. A kind of record.

After all, the music Rage Against The Machine presented in 1991 could only take root successfully in a Los Angeles far removed from the sirens of grunge, a city shaken instead by the unexpected breakup of Jane's Addiction, up to that point the symbol and seedling of an underground movement as vital as Seattle's, yet still far from being packaged by the media machinery that had turned the city in Washington state into the rock Mecca of those years. It was a scene at odds with the image of Los Angeles projected by Guns n' Roses and the Hollywood dreams of success. This was crossover — a term now crudely lumped together with so-called nu-metal — meaning an impure blend of various influences forming a new structure, in some cases with originality and a sharp artistic sense, in others, as was increasingly the case with the Seattle sound too, a mere stylistic exercise in carbon-copy, lyrics included. The lyrics, in fact — perhaps it's precisely these that will elevate Rage Against The Machine above the countless other acts that would crowd magazines, radio and MTV from the moment Cobain pulled the trigger onward.

But let's get back to the music. At the end of the credits of each of Rage Against The Machine's four albums is written: "No samples, keyboards or synthesizers used in the making of this recording"; this sounds puritanical and, at the same time, hard to believe unless you've witnessed the band live, where around an essential rhythm section, generally never overplayed, you get Zack De La Rocha's furious rap delivered in raw slang — the son of a street artist who never achieved Basquiat's level of success — alongside the brilliant array of scratch, noise, flanger and wah-wah effects combined with the Zeppelin-rooted riffs of guitarist Tom Morello, born in Harlem, New York, of mixed Afro-Italian-Irish blood — one of the last true "guitar heroes."

The first, self-titled album Rage Against The Machine, released by Epic in 1992, is a bolt from the blue in the rock landscape of the time, combining homages to Jimmy Page — among others, "Wake Up" is an obvious re-edit of "Kashmir" — with the confrontational rap of Public Enemy and, as mentioned earlier, the crossover lesson that was by then in vogue in underground circuits, whose leading names certainly included Fishbone, Living Colour and, already at a more popular level, Red Hot Chili Peppers and San Francisco's Faith No More. It's a sensational record, containing some of Rage Against The Machine's greatest anthems, such as "Bullet In The Head" (the first song the band ever recorded), "Know Your Enemy" (a title later swiped by lesser prophets) and above all "Killing In The Name," probably the group's defining song, with lyrics as simple as they are implicitly revolutionary in the truest sense of the word.

The album causes both a sensation and a scandal in equal measure: censorship went after the band's supposed subversive danger much as it had with the Doors more than twenty years earlier. Saturday Night Live, the famous NBC show that in those years hosted all the best-selling rock rebels like Nirvana, Smashing Pumpkins and Stone Temple Pilots, censored Rage Against The Machine's performance after they set up an upside-down American flag on stage. In Philadelphia, the four band members took the Lollapalooza stage completely naked in protest against the notorious "Parental Advisory Explicit Lyrics" sticker, standing there for fourteen agonizingly long minutes under the nauseating sound of guitar feedback. A long tour alongside the then-unknown Tool and Fishbone would also reach a Europe not yet ready to grant the band the same level of interest it had earned across the Atlantic.

While other LA-made bands were reworking in a funk-metal key the best achievements of the previous generation, Rage Against The Machine stayed away from the spotlight, patiently waiting for Zack's new invectives, backed by a sound that to this day remains far from being cloned. Only in 1996 did the follow-up to Rage Against The Machine arrive, produced by Brendan O'Brien: it's called Evil Empire, taken from a 1982 quote by then-president Ronald Reagan, who used the term to describe the Soviet Union at the tail end of the Cold War. It's an album that enjoyed immediate favorable reception from both critics and audiences, thanks to the now well-established status of the band's previous work, but which in truth proves to be far more complex and divergent than the debut, while lacking the sheer number of anthems that the first record boasted. In fact, only the opening tracks "People Of The Sun" and "Bulls On Parade" (whose iconic wah-wah riff becomes another career high point for the band) seem to carry that melodic potential that ran through every one of the ten songs on the debut. Still, the album makes room for various digressions from a Morello perhaps a touch too indulgent with himself, yet just as capable of steering the band toward a wholly unique and essentially incomparable idiom. "Tire Me" won the Grammy Award for Best Hard Rock Performance; the same happened the following year for "People Of The Sun," and the year after that for "No Shelter," one of several tracks lent over time to the soundtracks of more or less interesting films ("The Crow," "Godzilla," "The Matrix," in particular). The phenomenon is by now living legend, and the political battles that Rage Against The Machine, in their own small way, kept bringing to the fore often received strong media and popular response, drawing in an ever-growing number of supporters sympathetic to the cases of Leonard Peltier and Mumia Abu-Jamal, to name just two of the major campaigns backed by De La Rocha and his bandmates.

On a pragmatic level, however, the problem with Rage Against The Machine remains the absolute slowness of their singer's writing process, who takes months and months to find the right inspiration for each new slang-language monologue to lay over the now well-established formula of the other three musicians. 1999 saw the release of The Battle Of Los Angeles, their last album of new material, which shot to number one on the Billboard chart as if it were the latest Backstreet Boys greatest-hits collection. It's a less ambitious work than its predecessors, but one that fully consolidates their structures, drawing on a sound that's richer in nuance while remaining basic and essential to the cause. Tracks like the single "Guerrilla Radio", winner of another Grammy, "Calm Like A Bomb" (later used in another installment of the Matrix series) and "Mic Check" present a band in better form than ever, charged up and determined to hit hard. The blessing and curse of Morello-driven sound are the riffs in perfect Led Zeppelin style, which, though interspersed with sounds drawn from the guitarist's palette of effects and imagination, never shift the structure of Rage Against The Machine's songs from the same formula - one that nonetheless proves more effective than ever on a melodic and anthemic level. For the video of "Sleep Now In The Fire", Rage Against The Machine staged a sit-in outside the entrance to Wall Street in New York, blocking the opening of the Stock Exchange until police arrived on the scene of the crime.

The band's peak in popularity coincides with its first cracks, during the global tour for this album, when rumors of artistic differences between Zack and the rest of the band begin to undermine a unity of purpose that now apparently isn't so solid anymore. So back to where the story began: Gore and Bush face off in the eternal battle between Democrats and Republicans, Rage Against The Machine release the third single and video from The Battle Of Los Angeles, "Testify", in which the two candidates' faces merge into a single person, and they schedule a concert - which will prove to be their last - in an arena facing Bush's Republican convention. Bush, as we know, will go on to win the election. The last battle is lost.

Zack wants time off for a solo album; the others, also factoring in their singer's lack of prolificacy - this is late 2004, the album still hasn't come out - firmly oppose the idea, threatening to break up the band. De La Rocha seizes the opportunity, declaring the group's goals a failure and officially disbanding Rage Against The Machine. There's just enough time left for the release of Renegades, a covers album, naturally with a political undercurrent, recorded during 2000 and in some cases completely rearranged from the illustrious originals. Bob Dylan, The Stooges, Afrika Bambaataa, Cypress Hill are among the artists honored across the twelve songs, reworked and personalized in the unmistakable Rage Against The Machine style, albeit with a production from Rick Rubin that's sometimes overblown and not always functional (MC5's "Kick Out The Jams" comes out unpleasantly slowed down, while the take on Devo's "Beautiful World" drastically loses the song's ironic character).

Tom Morello, Brad Wilk and Tim Commerford waste no time: while Zack lingers over high-profile collaborations with the likes of DJ Shadow and Trent Reznor while putting together his ambitious solo album, they look around for a new singer who can get them back on the scene quickly. The choice falls on Chris Cornell, who, having disbanded Soundgarden in what was, for the time being, a failed attempt to follow in the footsteps of Jeff Buckley's brief career, can hardly turn down an offer from a still fairly well-established trio before his career takes an irreversible turn toward singer-songwriter obscurity. Due to label issues and friction between the two different management teams (up to this point Cornell had always been represented by his now ex-wife Susan Silver), the group, provisionally named Civilian, is disbanded and re-formed more than once during the recording of their first songs, still under the guidance of Rick Rubin.

A few months later, by which time file-sharing communities are already offering up demos of the Civilian songs, the parties involved reach an agreement and the project starts up again, this time under the name Audioslave. The result is a self-titled album, featuring reworked versions of the Civilian demo songs, which, while showing a solid and undeniable hard rock charge typical of the Rage Against The Machine sound, leaves both Soundgarden fans and fans of the Los Angeles band unsatisfied. The same flaws found in Renegades - not yet clearly attributable to the band back then, since those were covers - resurface even stronger here. While Cornell is now more attentive to the melodic side of his lyrics, the music behind him comes across as slowed-down and overloaded, unable to keep pace with the syncopated vocal cadences of Zack De La Rocha's rapping. Adding to the general discontent is the new image of the Seattle shouter, whose live performances reveal that vocal-cord surgery has left him permanently damaged, along with the loss of the interventionist content found in Rage Against The Machine's songs. The album nonetheless wins over new ranks of teenagers in search of solid hard rock, and sells rather well across North America. The Audioslave venture will spawn two more albums, after which it will wind down without much fanfare.

Anachronistic, of no use whatsoever to the cause, but once again of high quality, the first Rage Against The Machine live album hits stores: Live At The Grand Olympic Auditorium, recorded on September 12 and 13, 2000 - the last two dates in the band's history. There's little need to dwell on the honest quality of the recordings, or on the symbolism of the Rage Against The Machine phenomenon, here captured on video too in a fitting finale to their journey; the album collects sixteen songs in a kind of live "best of".

While Zack De La Rocha continues to remain missing in action, 2018 brings the first album under the name Tom Morello, The Atlas Underground.

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