How Rage Against the Machine Used Capitalism To Sell Communism – By Brian Doherty (Reason) / Sept 1, 2023
A calculated corporate deal propelled these radical rockers all the way to the Hall of Fame.
This November, rock’s most successful and pugnacious communists will be inducted, six years after they became eligible, to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Rage Against the Machine, a band that kicked the doors down on the 1990s with a then-novel mix of brutally heavy guitars and hip-hop vocals, also blended in unlikely tandem two other disparate traditions of American life.
The first, obviously, is rock music: the rhythmically buoyant and harmonically uncomplicated sound of post–World War II popular song that, however corny it might sound to 2023 ears, signaled an explosive liberation for succeeding generations of youth. This quintessentially American mongrel mashup of demotic musics, from country to rhythm ‘n’ blues to gospel, vibrated with a rebellious, life-affirming energy that helped make a variety of old restrictions—racial, sexual, behavioral—seem ridiculously out of touch.
The second tradition Rage Against the Machine both emanated from and actively promoted is violent revolutionary communism: the forcible equality of output and outcome at the expense of independent choice and action. Whole mosh pits’ worth of young men received their first real introduction to the Cuban revolutionary murderer Che Guevara and the Peruvian Maoist rebel army Shining Path through the advocacy of Rage singer Zach de la Rocha and guitarist Tom Morello.
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