Rage Against the Machine

• 1. Introduction

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  Rage Against the Machine, a rock band formed in Los Angeles in 1991, had sold more than 16 million records worldwide by 2010. On the 3rd of November 2023, Ice-T inducted the group into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame at Barclays Center in Brooklyn. Only one of the four members attended, guitarist Tom Morello. Vocalist Zack de la Rocha, bassist Tim Commerford and drummer Brad Wilk were not there. The empty seats suited a band with a stormy history. Its lyrics were anti-authoritarian, anti-capitalist and openly revolutionary, and they rode on a blend of heavy metal, rap, punk rock and funk. How did four musicians turn political fury into records that sold in the millions? Why did a band with such devoted listeners keep falling apart? And how did a group so hostile to capitalism end up signed to a major label?

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• 2. A Name and a Cassette

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  In 1991, the end of a band called Lock Up left guitarist Tom Morello hunting for a fresh start. Lock Up's former drummer, Jon Knox, urged Tim Commerford and Zack de la Rocha to jam with him. Morello then phoned Brad Wilk, a drummer who had auditioned without success for Lock Up and for the group that later became Pearl Jam.

  The four took their name from a song De la Rocha had written for his earlier hardcore punk band, Inside Out. That song was also meant to title an Inside Out album that was never recorded. The phrase was already floating around. Kent McClard, a label owner and zine publisher tied to Inside Out, had used "rage against the machine" in a 1989 article in his zine, No Answers.

  Before any label came calling, the band put twelve songs on a self-released cassette. Its cover showed newspaper clippings from a stock market section, with a single match taped to the inlay card. That tape became the blueprint for the debut album, though not every song survived. Two later appeared as B-sides, and three were never officially released.

  Several labels showed interest, and the band chose Epic Records. Morello said Epic "agreed to everything we asked" and that no ideological conflict arose while the band kept creative control.

  The sound they brought to Epic came from a crowded record shelf. Early heavy metal instrumentation was the foundation, with Rush, Led Zeppelin, Iron Maiden and Black Sabbath among the influences. Hip hop acts such as Afrika Bambaataa, Run-DMC, Public Enemy and the Beastie Boys pulled the band one way. Punk bands including the Clash, Minor Threat, Bad Brains and Fugazi pulled another, along with crossover groups like Suicidal Tendencies and Urban Dance Squad.

  Labels for the result ranged from rap metal and funk metal to alternative metal and hard rock. The nu metal tag is contested. Annie Zaleski of Spin argued that the band predated that boom, but that plenty of nu metal acts copied its aggressive blend of hip hop and metal. The first real test of the hybrid arrived in November 1992, with the debut album.

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• 3. Killing in the Name

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  The cover of the debut album, released in November 1992, was Malcolm Browne's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a man on fire. He was Thích Quảng Đức, a Vietnamese Buddhist monk who burned himself to death in Saigon in 1963. He was protesting the shooting of Buddhists by the regime of Ngô Đình Diệm, the U.S.-backed prime minister. Garth Richardson, a Canadian producer and engineer, handled the recording.

  Sales began slowly. Radio changed that, thanks to "Killing in the Name," a heavy, driving track with only eight lines of lyrics. On the 21st of February 1993, the BBC Radio 1 Top 40 show accidentally played the uncensored version. That cut repeats a single expletive 17 times.

  The real breakthrough came from Lollapalooza in mid-1993. Before the festival, the album had sold 75,000 copies in the United States. By the end of that year, the figure stood at 400,000. The band also toured Europe with Suicidal Tendencies, and shared bills with House of Pain.

  By April 1996, the album had passed 1 million copies in the United States and 3 million worldwide. The Recording Industry Association of America certified it triple platinum in May 2000. Rolling Stone has included it in every edition of its list of the 500 greatest albums, and in 2020 it reached its highest spot, number 221.

  Film soundtracks carried the songs to new listeners. "Year of tha Boomerang" appeared in the 1995 film Higher Learning, along with an early version of "Tire Me." The band re-recorded "Darkness," from its original demo, for The Crow in 1994. In 1998, "No Shelter" turned up on the soundtrack of Godzilla.

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• 4. Chart Toppers and Flags

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  An anonymous source told MTV News that the band recorded 23 tracks with producer Brendan O'Brien in Atlanta, beginning in November 1994. The same source claimed the group briefly split amid violent infighting before regrouping for the KROQ Weenie Roast in June 1995. Morello later admitted there had been conflicts over musical direction, and said they were reconciled.

  The follow-up, Evil Empire, was recorded with O'Brien in November and December 1995. The tensions pushed the music toward hip hop. Morello described the result as a "middle ground between Public Enemy and the Clash." It came out on the 16th of April 1996 and entered the Billboard 200 at number one, selling 249,000 copies in its first week.

  That same month, the band performed "Bulls on Parade" on Saturday Night Live. A planned two-song set was cut to one when the members tried to hang inverted American flags from their amplifiers. They called the upside-down flag "a sign of distress or great danger." The protest targeted the night's guest host, Steve Forbes, then a Republican presidential candidate.

  In 1997, the band opened for U2 on the PopMart Tour and sent its profits to groups including the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees, Women Alive and the Zapatista Front for National Liberation. A headlining U.S. tour with Wu-Tang Clan followed, but it was abortive. Police in several jurisdictions tried and failed to have shows canceled, citing the band's "violent and anti-law enforcement philosophies." After Wu-Tang Clan failed to appear at a concert at Riverport, the Roots replaced them.

  Success invited a charge of hypocrisy. Critics pointed out that the band preached leftist causes while its members were millionaires on Epic Records, a subsidiary of the media conglomerate Sony Music. Infectious Grooves even released "Do What I Tell Ya!," which mocked the lyrics of "Killing in the Name." Morello answered by asking whether Noam Chomsky would object to Barnes & Noble selling his books. He said the band wanted to reach people from Granada Hills to Stuttgart, not just the converted. De la Rocha added that Sony's international network was a perfect tool for spreading revolutionary awareness.

  In 1999, the band played Woodstock '99. Its third album, The Battle of Los Angeles, debuted at number one with 450,000 copies sold in its first week, and it reached double platinum. "Wake Up" featured on the soundtrack of The Matrix that year. In 2000, a planned tour supporting the Beastie Boys on the "Rhyme and Reason" run was cancelled after the Beastie Boys drummer, Mike D, suffered a serious injury.

  Over its career, the band won two Grammy Awards from six nominations. It collected three MTV Video Music Awards nominations without a win. Back in the matrix, "Calm Like a Bomb" would appear in The Matrix Reloaded in 2003, the same year Rolling Stone placed The Battle of Los Angeles at number 426 on its list of the 500 greatest albums.

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• 5. Breaking Apart

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  On the 26th of January 2000, the doors of the New York Stock Exchange slammed shut on Rage Against the Machine. The band was shooting the video for "Sleep Now in the Fire," directed by Michael Moore. A representative for the city's Deputy Commissioner for Public Information said several hundred people gathered. Weekday film shoots are not allowed on Wall Street. Moore had permission for the steps of Federal Hall National Memorial, but no permit for the sidewalk or street, no loud-noise permit and no proper parking permits.

  Morello recalled that Moore gave the band one instruction: "No matter what happens, don't stop playing." When the band left the steps, police apprehended Moore. He shouted to the band, "Take the New York Stock Exchange!" Morello told the Socialist Worker that about two hundred people got through the first set of doors before the exchange's titanium riot doors came crashing down. MTV News reported that security denied the band entry and suggested a visit to the exchange's visitor center.

  Moore claimed the band shut down American capitalism for a few minutes. Mark Shone of Spin disagreed. He wrote that the protest had no effect on trading, and that Moore's only legal trouble was a ticket for filming without a permit. Shone also noted that many involved in the production questioned whether Moore manipulated the shoot for maximum conflict.

  On the 7th of September 2000, the band performed "Testify" at the MTV Video Music Awards. When the Best Rock Video award went to Limp Bizkit, Commerford climbed onto the scaffolding of the set. He and his bodyguard were sentenced to a night in jail, and De la Rocha reportedly left the show. Morello said Commerford had told the band his plan beforehand, and that both he and De la Rocha advised against it right after the award.

  The band played what would be its last concerts on the 12th and the 13th of September 2000, at the Grand Olympic Auditorium in Los Angeles. On the 18th of October 2000, De la Rocha announced he was leaving. He said, "our decision-making process has completely failed." Morello described endless squabbling over everything, even fist fights over whether the band's T-shirts should be mauve or camouflaged. Readers of Kerrang! voted De la Rocha's exit the worst thing of 2000.

  The band's next record, Renegades, collected covers of artists as varied as Devo, EPMD, Minor Threat, Cypress Hill, the MC5, Afrika Bambaataa, the Rolling Stones, Eric B. & Rakim, Bruce Springsteen, the Stooges and Bob Dylan. It went platinum a month later. The live video The Battle of Mexico City followed in 2001. In 2003, Live at the Grand Olympic Auditorium arrived, edited from those final shows, along with a DVD that added a previously unreleased video for "Bombtrack."

  After the September 11 attacks, a controversial 2001 Clear Channel memorandum listed songs the memo called "lyrically questionable." Rage Against the Machine was the only act on the list with every one of its songs named.

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• 6. Years Apart

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  With De la Rocha gone, Morello, Wilk and Commerford chose to stay together and find a new singer. Morello recalled, "There was talk for a while of us becoming Ozzy Osbourne's backing band, and even Macy Gray's." They decided losing their singer was a blessing in disguise, and that they had bigger ambitions than being hired musicians. Their friend, the producer Rick Rubin, suggested they play with Chris Cornell of Soundgarden.

  The result was Audioslave. Its first single, "Cochise," came out in November 2002, and a self-titled debut album followed to mostly positive reviews. Unlike Rage Against the Machine, most of Audioslave's music was apolitical. Its second album, Out of Exile, debuted at number one on the Billboard charts in 2005. A third, Revelations, appeared on the 4th of September 2006, but the group did not tour, because Cornell and Morello were working on solo albums. On the 15th of February 2007, Audioslave disbanded when Cornell announced he was leaving over "irresolvable personality conflicts as well as musical differences."

  Morello used the quiet years for the political side of his work. In 2003, he began playing acoustic folk at open-mic nights and clubs as the Nightwatchman, an outlet for the views he could not air in Audioslave. He joined Billy Bragg's Tell Us the Truth tour and recorded "No One Left" for a Fahrenheit 9/11 soundtrack. The album One Man Revolution came out in April 2007, followed by The Fabled City on the 30th of September 2008. With the rapper Boots Riley, he also formed Street Sweeper Social Club, whose self-titled debut arrived in June 2009.

  De la Rocha's path was more scattered. He worked on an album with DJ Shadow, Company Flow, Roni Size and Questlove, then dropped it to collaborate with Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails. That album was never released. In 2003, he and DJ Shadow put out "March of Death" free online to protest the coming invasion of Iraq. A Reznor collaboration, "We Want It All," appeared on the 2004 Fahrenheit 9/11 soundtrack. In late 2005, De la Rocha performed with the son jarocho band Son de Madera, singing and playing the jarana huasteca. In July 2008, he and former Mars Volta drummer Jon Theodore released an EP as One Day as a Lion.

  The band turned down large sums of money to reunite for concerts. Rumors of tension persisted, but Commerford said he and De la Rocha often saw each other and went surfing together. Morello said he spoke with De la Rocha by phone, and that they had met at a 2005 protest in support of the South Central Farm.

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• 7. Reunion and Christmas

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  On the 14th of April 2007, Morello and De la Rocha played a brief acoustic set at a Coalition of Immokalee Workers rally in downtown Chicago. Two weeks later, on the 29th of April, the full band headlined the final day of the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, in front of an EZLN backdrop, to the festival's largest crowds. Morello said the reunion was a way to voice opposition to the "right-wing purgatory" the United States had "slid into" under the George W. Bush administration.

  Tours followed in the United States, New Zealand, Australia and Japan, and a run of European festivals in 2008. The band played Lollapalooza in Chicago on the 2nd of August 2008. Morello said there were no plans for a new album, adding that none of the Rage catalog "feels dated to me." Politics came with the stage. At the 2008 Democratic National Convention in Denver, the band headlined the free Tent State Music Festival to End the War. Afterward, following uniformed veterans from Iraq Veterans Against the War, the band led 8,000 attendees on a six-mile march to Invesco Field. A four-hour stand-off with police ended when the Obama campaign agreed to meet the veterans and hear their demands. At the Republican National Convention in September, police stopped a surprise set in St. Paul, so De la Rocha and Morello rapped and sang through a megaphone.

  In December 2009, Jon Morter and his wife Tracy started a Facebook campaign to stop winners of The X Factor from automatically taking the UK Christmas number one. Those winners had held the slot for four consecutive years from 2005. Their group passed 950,000 members before the chart was announced on the 20th of December, with backing from Morello, Dave Grohl, Paul McCartney, Muse and even 2004 X Factor winner Steve Brookstein. On the 17th of December, the band played a slightly censored "Killing in the Name" on BBC Radio 5 Live. Four repeats of the uncensored line aired before the song was pulled.

  The campaign worked, and the song reached number one. The band also set a record for the biggest first-week download sales in UK chart history. De la Rocha told BBC One, "When young people decide to take action they can make what's seemingly impossible, possible." He promised a free UK concert, and the band delivered at Finsbury Park in London on the 6th of June 2010, billed as "The Rage Factor." Tickets were free through photo registration, to deter touting, and ticket holders voted for the support acts: Gogol Bordello, Gallows and Roots Manuva.

  On the 23rd of July 2010, the band played its first U.S. show in two years and its first hometown show in ten. The concert benefited Arizona groups fighting the SB1070 immigration law, and ticket sales raised $300,000. In October 2010, the band played South America for the first time, in Brazil, Chile and Argentina.

  Talk of new music never settled. De la Rocha reportedly told a Chilean newspaper in October 2010 that an album was in the works. In May 2011, Morello said the band was not writing. The only 2011 appearance was at the band's own L.A. Rising festival on the 30th of July, with El Gran Silencio, Immortal Technique, Lauryn Hill, Rise Against and Muse. In 2012, Commerford answered the question with "definitely maybe," while Morello said there were no plans beyond a reissue of the debut. A 20th anniversary box set, announced on the 9th of October, came out on the 27th of November 2012.

  By April 2014, Wilk believed L.A. Rising had been the final show. In February 2015, Commerford said a return "could be tomorrow; it could be 10 years from now." Live at Finsbury Park reached DVD and Blu-ray on the 16th of October 2015. In 2021, the Official Charts Company named "Killing in the Name" the UK's Favourite Christmas Number 1 of All Time, in a poll marking the 70th Christmas number one race.

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• 8. Last Tours

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  In May 2016, Morello, Wilk and Commerford announced Prophets of Rage, a supergroup with Chuck D of Public Enemy and B-Real of Cypress Hill. The group toured through 2016, playing songs by Rage Against the Machine, Public Enemy and Cypress Hill. Morello spoke warmly of De la Rocha, saying he was working on music of his own. But "where you're going to hear Rage Against the Machine," he said, was in Prophets of Rage. In May 2018, Wilk said a reunion would make him happy, and that it was a matter of getting everyone "on the same page." Chuck D and B-Real confirmed in November 2019 that Prophets of Rage had disbanded.

  On the 1st of November 2019, reports surfaced that Rage Against the Machine would reunite for its first shows in nine years. A tour poster that circulated online later in November turned out to be a prank, according to the Australian publication Wall of Sound. On the 10th of February 2020, the band announced the Public Service Announcement Tour, set to run from the 26th of March to the 12th of September. It would be the band's first full-length world tour in 20 years, with the rap duo Run the Jewels supporting on every show but Chicago.

  The first three shows were set for El Paso, Texas, Las Cruces, New Mexico, and Glendale, Arizona. All profits from them were to go to immigrant rights organizations. At later shows, 10% of the base ticket price and all proceeds after fees were reserved for charities local to each city.

  The pandemic scrambled the plan. On the 12th of March 2020, the band postponed the first leg because of COVID-19. The remaining dates were pushed to 2021 on the 1st of May, and the Reading and Leeds Festivals, which would have marked the band's first UK appearance in ten years, were canceled on the 12th of May. Coachella, postponed to October 2020, was canceled in June. On the 8th of April 2021, the dates moved again, to spring and summer 2022.

  Interest in the music surged anyway. By the 11th of June 2020, every Rage Against the Machine album had entered the top 30 of Apple Music's Rock Albums chart. The debut album returned to the Billboard 200 at number 174. The rise was widely linked to renewed Black Lives Matter protests after the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis by law enforcement. In May 2021, the band was among more than 600 musicians who signed an open letter urging a boycott of performances in Israel until the occupation of the Palestinian territories ends. De la Rocha and Morello also voiced support for a ceasefire in the Gaza war.

  On the 24th of June 2022, after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the band announced a $475,000 donation to reproductive rights groups in Wisconsin and Illinois. On the 9th of July 2022, it played its first concert in 11 years at Alpine Valley Music Theatre in East Troy, Wisconsin. Screens showed text opposing the ruling, including the line "Abort the Supreme Court." Later that month, in Chicago, De la Rocha ruptured his Achilles tendon. The band canceled its European tour and the remaining North American dates.

  On the 3rd of January 2024, two months after the Hall of Fame ceremony, Brad Wilk confirmed that Rage Against the Machine had disbanded for the third time.

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