Rage Against the Machine Brings You The Pleasure of Being Punched in The Face
Written: Aug 16 '03 (Updated Mar 06 '05)
Product Rating:
Pros: Many
Cons: Few
The Bottom Line: Rage single-handedly created a new, aggressive form by melding the best elements of several forms that came before. In the process, they made a damn listenable album.
Mr.Eyore's Full Review: Rage Against the Machine by Rage Against The Machi...
When I heard, in 1991, that Perry Farrell's new band, Porno for Pyros, was gigging with a band called Rage Against the Machine, I naturally assumed Perry'd gone completely freakin' native. That he'd given in to his hippie-dippie commie side and was supporting bands that, 20 years after it was fashionable to do so, were calling for the revolution of the proletariat.
And if I'd known then that the band actually did buy into Sendero Luminoso style Marxist ideology (with the slightest tinge of flower-powerosity) - if I'd seen the iconic cover art of a Buddhist Vietnamese monk self-immolating - I likely never would have given them the time of day. Not that I don't appreciate a little pop-revolutionary sloganism in the Rock 'n Roll (ya know, for the kids). It's just that it's a little hard to swallow from a band signed to a division of Sony, making its big-time debut at Blockbuster Pavilion.
But the fact is, Rage Against the Machine's self-titled debut is simply one of the most hard-hitting albums ever made. Dead solid on nearly all of its ten tracks, it's a cohesive, thematically consistent, anthemic meditation on anger and political disenfranchisement, the likes of which comes along exactly 2.3 times in a generation. It's so cohesive, in fact, that there's a sense the entire album is one song. It was an impossibly original album that still resonates more than a decade after its release.
With raw, naked aggression rooted in political morality, Rage takes all the best elements from rap, early 80s L.A. hardcore punk and late 80s heavy metal and melds them into a form that, sadly, spawned the very worst music of the decade that followed: Rap-metal. Frat-rap. Whatever. It's all Limp Bizkit to me. And it blows. But it didn't blow when it was coming from the throat of unfathomably charismatic front-man Zack de la Rocha, an ethnically ambiguous, post-apocalyptic Bob Marley who always seemed on the verge of a tension-induced aneurysm.
When I use the words "anthemic" and "meditation", it's intentional. Though much of the album demands you scream along, and seems designed for the aggressive homoeroticism of the slam pit (which, I'm not knocking the aggressive homoeroticism of the pit at all), the underlying politics seems rooted in a social aesthetic eschewing shared testosterone as embarrassing and inappropriate. You can't avoid throwing yourself up against something when you listen to it, but it's a meditation because it hints that it should be listened to when you're alone.
And it's a meditation because the album is packed tight with interminable mantras that would gladly pick up TM's "Nam-Myoho-Renge-Kyo" by its scrotum and eat it before the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi's dimming eyes. Whether the mantra is Burn, burn, yes ya gonna burn (Bombtrack), Now you do what they told ya and Fu.ck you I won't do what you tell me (Killing in the Name), or Just victims of the in-house drive-by / They say jump, you say how high (Bullet in the Head) or a half dozen other mantras, the same splendidly manipulative formula is present: A slow build-up to a raging torrent of no-longer pent-up aggression lasting just long enough for the words to lose meaning ... which sets in relief whatever verse follows. (And to my mind, the verse that releases the tension better than any other is Killing in the Name's Those who die are justified. Can't explain it, but I dare you to stay still when it dumps forth). The only real variation on the theme, comes at the end of Know Your Enemy, on the heals of:
Come on!/Yes I know my enemies/They're the teachers who taught me to fight me/Compromise, conformity, assimilation, submission/Ignorance, hypocrisy, brutality, the elite
de la Rocha wails a capella:
All of which are American dreams / All of which are American dreams / All of which are American dreams / All of which are American dreams / All of which are American dreams / All of which are American dreams / All of which are American dreams / All of which are American dreams
The band's lyrics, and sometimes, their mantras, give them heft, and they certainly have intended meaning. But forget about those meanings if you need to. Set aside the band's particular causes (Leonard Peltier, Chiapas Rebels, the prison-industrial complex) if you feel you must. You'll lose nothing, because to some extent the political message is secondary to the personal/emotional one. Something p!sses you off. Something offends your humanity. Somewhere in your life, there's a machine, a force that makes you feel powerless before its overwhelming onslaught. And even if it's all a fantasy, dammit, it can be restorative to bash The Man.
From the screeching House-of-Pain-in-a-blender riffs and raps of Bullet in the Head, to the Jane's meets Public Enemy Settle for Nothing, to the heaviest bass line of the 90's in Take the Power Back to the Physical Graffiti era Led Zeppelin on meth of Wake Up, the album is primal. It compels movement. The kind of movement that involves white people slamming their heads diagonally on the right beat. The kind that makes suburbanites do silly things like throw gang signs to nobody and cut off BMWs on the highway. And it should have compelled an adequate appreciation of the true genius of guitarist Tom Morello, which only became evident for many once he came out from under the shadow of de la Rocha in his new band, Audioslave. He took the driving heavy-metal guitar of Motley Crue and Judas Priest and turned it into something tribal, respectable and gorgeous. Something that can give you a release that's nearly sexual. Electric and violent, it's the musical equivalent of the satisfaction of being punched in the face. And if that's not something you can imagine being satisfying, then you may well have no need for this album, and I suspect that you are The Man.
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