Rage Against The Machine

The Commonwealth of Independent States (C.I.S.) was merely a white sheet mercifully laid over the corpse of the USSR, which had been dying since October 1989 (with the fall of the Berlin Wall) but was only officially deceased in August 1991. Meanwhile, on the other side of the ocean, the mortal enemies of fifty years of Cold War gave the green light, on January 16 of that same year, to Operation Desert Storm: the most imposing war resolution since 1945. On the home front, in Los Angeles, May 1992 saw the outbreak of the infamous South Central riots, blamed on the notorious verdict in the "Rodney King case" — in reality the long tail of a repressive, racist policy of political containment against the new poverty of African-American ghettos, carried out by the LAPD ever since the Watts riots of 1965. It would leave 54 dead, 2,000 injured and more than 12,000 arrested. That same year saw the birth of the World Wide Web, the deployment and popular spread of the internet's potential, which turned Ted Nelson's utopia (laid out in "Computer Lib/Dream Machines", his 1965 political manifesto) — a pure, open form of hypertext as the basis for a new libertarian system (XANADU) — into the beachhead through which multinational corporations would tighten their grip even further on the global economy. Meanwhile in Italy, on a rather more modest scale, an entire political class was heading toward the bonfire of a judicial investigation that would reduce it to ashes.

The two-year period 1991/93 represents a crucial turning point for understanding the evolution of contemporary society. The murky fog of the short century was torn apart by certain truths that foreshadowed the seismic shift into the new millennium. An era in which the medium, caring nothing for McLuhan, decided to stop being merely "the message" and thought instead it would become/invent reality itself. Television, in the end, killed the world, carrying out what Baudrillard had called the "perfect crime". Even today, in the collective imagination, all the events recalled are inextricably bound together by the unprecedented, invasive, obsessive media coverage — already fully complicit in spectacle-news and live-broadcast tragedy. Well, if there has ever been a work capable of syncretically filtering the tensions and demands of that period and channeling them with knowing ferocity into a kind of musical "gang war" — one that ideally stood as godparent to the no-global movement, celebrating the resurrection of new militant antagonisms — it is certainly the self-titled instant debut of Rage Against The Machine.

Thanks to Tom Morello, Zack De la Rocha, Tim Commerford and Brad Wilk, heavy metal, hardcore, funk and hip-hop definitively shed their melodic coordinates, pulverizing themselves into songs that tear down the barriers between genres and styles, condensing them into an explosion of pure rage. "Bombtrack" lights the fuse of the riot straight away, a powder keg of raw heavy-rock steel (AC/DC, Led Zeppelin) that provocatively reclaims Stokely Carmichael and Rap Brown's slogan ("Burn baby burn!" here becomes "Burn, burn, yes you gotta burn!"), shattering it into blistering hard-punk restarts in the style of MC5; De la Rocha rides the rhythm at the head of ferocious, savage verbal assaults that forge the shape-shifting fluidity of rap (Public Enemy, Cypress Hill) into the razor-sharp bark of hardcore (Bad Brains, Dead Kennedys, Infectious Grooves), while Morello's solos (the last guitar hero of the modern age and the first of the post-modern one) slash in and out like a switchblade in a street brawl in Darktown.

"Killing In The Name" is the masterpiece: a cadenced, menacing panzer, a riff so elemental and tectonic it would make even Black Sabbath die of envy, furious call-and-response exchanges that irrevocably sharpen the African-American doleance ("Now ya do what they told ya/ your under control!"). It's Muhammad Ali refusing to take a step forward before the draft board, an anthem to desertion and civil disobedience ("Fuck you I won't do what you tell me!"), it's a claim of responsibility for an attack delivered to George Bush Sr. and the new tenant Bill "BJ" Clinton, the devastating, liberating fire smoldering beneath the ashes of the melting pot in the City of Angels.

"Take The Power Back" is funkier and more syncopated, a groove that showcases Timmy C.'s colossal bass and Brad Wilk's jagged off-beats, and De la Rocha's most heterodox, venomous rapping; it's like the Red Hot Chili Peppers playing in a Black Panthers safehouse. "Bullet In The Head", "Know Your Enemy" and "Wake Up", the decisive insurrectionary trilogy, deliver chills and cadences straight out of Led Zeppelin ("Wake Up", in particular, walls off the mystic, Eastern-tinged riff of "Kashmir" behind a barricade of urban concrete), the ultimate triumph of Tom Morello's brilliant arsenal of scratch, noise, flanger and wah effects, lyrics explicit enough to openly name names, agit-prop and slang sermons that cite Lenin, Angela Davis, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King ("You know they went after the King/ when he spoke out against Vietnam").

"Fistful Of Steel" and "Settle For Nothing", if you will, are vigorous if somewhat monotonous relay legs that nonetheless give their honest, forceful contribution to the "revolutionary" cause. "Township Rebellion" (a Grandmaster Flash-style verse snarled through Sonic Youth, a staccato Led Zeppelin-style chorus, and a partially deconstructed, Washington D.C.-style post-hardcore ending) is the "CNN of the ghetto", a militant counter-report on the infamous four days of urban guerrilla warfare, a reflection on the fate of corrupt institutions (LAPD, FBI, Federal Government) and an unequivocal denunciation of the mawkish, manipulative media, busy protecting conservative America's "law & order" certainties.

"Freedom" is the final masterstroke, a cry of protest on behalf of Leonard Peltier, leader of the American Indian Movement, unjustly sentenced to two life terms after a well-documented government conspiracy — the jagged, rock-solid summa of the fury and syncopation that lash the entire album. De la Rocha screaming the word "freedom" over and over in the finale is a spectacle not recommended for the faint of heart, but it can send shivers of emotion through even the most skeptical, indifferent consciences; the closing feedback echoes like the clanging of shields ringing in the ears of survivors on a battlefield.

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19/10/2008