Rage Against the Machine’s eponymous debut (how’s
that for a snooty, pretentious critic cliché?) is one of the
greatest albums of the twentieth century. Time will tell whether the
impact of Rage Against the Machine’s predominance throughout the
1990s will be instantiated in enduring memory of the band itself or
purely through their influence, direct and indirect, but they will
always be one of the great bands of my youth.
The first Rage Against the Machine album
blasted onto the scene, as I recall (being only eight years old at the
time), and was something really fresh and new and exciting...
abundantly evident from that still-shocking image of self-immolation
adorning the otherwise minimalist cover blasphemously marred by that
goddamned, motherfucking, cocksucking,
shit-eating, ass-slutting “Parental
Advisory: Explicit Lyrics” bullshit. This wasn’t the
awkward rap-rock fusion we’d been getting hints of for a while
from Anthrax and (God forgive us) Aerosmith,
nor was it the indulgent, superficial bullshit which would come to
dominate the “rock” airwaves for the last half of the
decade, like Limp Bizkit and Linkin Park and that horse manure that it actually
pains me to type. This was rock music with a solid groove, with some
super-catchy and sincere slam poetry laced over the whole of it. One of
the great things about Rage Against the Machine is that they were never
fancy by any stretch of the
imagination, but they were original and creative: a funk baseline, some
distorted guitar, a drum kit stripped of all adornment but a pair of
cowbells, and Zack De La Rocha emphasizing the shit out of his point
until you’d have to not speak English to miss it (anyone
who’s actually tried to count the number of anthemic
“Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me” repetitions
in “Killing in the Name” knows exactly what I’m
talking about here). It’s real bare-bones stuff, but it’s
catchy, and rockin’, and it’s
fucking in your face!
I mean, do you realize that there are only ten tracks on that album?!? I’ll bet more than half of
everyone who reads this knows at least half of those songs.
“Killing in the Name” and “Freedom,” I think,
are sort of given; those were huge.
But what about “Know Your Enemy” and “Bombtrack?” I remember “Take the Power
Back” being used in ads during a Michigan gubernatorial race, to say
the least, and “Wake Up” was the ending credit song for The Matrix. The sheer groove of
“Bullet in the Head” and “Fistful of Steel”
ought to keep them in the heads of anybody who heard them, even all the
way back in the early-to-mid nineties. Damn near everybody knows damn
near that whole album!
I think my personal favourite
song on there, though, is a fairly underrated and unknown one near the
back: “Township Rebellion.” The awesome up-tempo beat kept
just a little jerky by the pounding (oddly enough) cowbell, and the
incredibly clever and powerful (even for De La Rocha) lyrics, featuring
plays on words about lower-class disenfranchisement and apartheid
(Jesus... I just realized that this record came out while Nelson Mandela
was still in prison... was it really that long ago?), all combine to
make a unique and complex track that never got the love it deserved...
“Gotta get wreck, ‘Til our necks never swing on a rope, from here to
the Cape of No Hope!” Kick ass!
Seriously, though, that
first Rage Against the Machine album, and the entire history of the
band itself, continue to stand as a music business anomaly for
the latter part of the last century as well as the beginning of this
one. Rage Against the Machine was a seriously anti-establishment band
with massive popular appeal, the likes of which have not otherwise
appeared since the early seventies at the latest. Sure, punk and
hardcore have maintained such a stance pretty consistently,
and there’s plenty of progressive underground hip-hop out there,
but fucking everybody was
listening to Rage for a while! They were on MTV and shit in ways that Propagandhi and Dead Prez
never were; only Public Enemy comes close, near as I can tell... and
while I’m no fan of Audioslave, I can’t
imagine the legacy of Rage Against the Machine collapsing quite as
heartbreakingly as Public Enemy’s, with Flava
Flav off doing whatever it is he... ahem...
does. Though, for real, Public Enemy continues to kick ass. Fight the
power! Maybe Fear of a Black
Planet will be next... Anyhow, that’s what I’ve got to
say about Rage Against the Machine’s self-titled first album.
Their other stuff was great, too, but I think that first one just had
the biggest impact of them
all. Word. Bill out. Feel free to contribute to this series, please,
everybody!
