Image credit: Brick from the chimney at Whitehead Plantation, Harris County, Georgia. Courtesy of Smithsonian Institute Open Access.
Part of an ongoing series of recommended movies, shows, books, music, artworks, or other form of expression.
It was April 1999, in a dark theater near the end of a movie that had in just a few weeks shifted the paradigm for action moviemaking. The prior 2+ hours had been a revelation. At one point I leaned over to my movie companion and whispered, “I want to wear leather and kick a**!”
The Matrix* closed with Neo telephoning the code overlords and issuing this challenge:
I know you’re out there. I can feel you now. I know that you’re afraid. You’re afraid of us. You’re afraid of change. I don’t know the future. I didn’t come here to tell you how this is going to end. I came here to tell you how it’s going to begin. I’m going to hang up this phone and then I’m going to show these people what you don’t want them to see. I’m going to show them a world without you, a world without rules and controls, without borders or boundaries, a world where anything is possible. Where we go from there is a choice I leave to you.
As he slammed down the payphone receiver, the first notes of the closing credits’ song, Rage Against the Machine’s “Wake Up”, pounded into the movie theater.
*Do not get me started on the red pill-blue pill thing. It’s a convenient device for oversimplifying and overstating one’s ability to see through, and, more importantly, to define, BS. If you need to swallow ANY pill to do that … well, homes, I hate to break it to you, but you might still be getting played. ALSO, The Matrix was made by two trans women. BOOM.
“WAKE UP”
This post isn’t about The Matrix movie franchise, although it easily could be. (And maybe a future post.)
It’s about that song, and the artists that made it and more songs like it. In fact, Rage Against the Machine (RATM) also contributed the closing credits song for the sequel, The Matrix: Reloaded. That one, “Calm Like a Bomb,” is just as powerful.
Heck, every RATM song is powerful. That’s the point of their brand of rap metal — to reclaim power that has been unjustly taken from those with the least amount of power.
A Columbia House Miss
Full Disclosure: I do not own any RATM albums. But I do own the Matrix soundtracks containing “Wake Up” and “Calm Like a Bomb.” I just never got around to buying their CDs before the band called it quits in 2001. Nonetheless, they remain one of those bands that I deeply appreciate (and turn up) whenever I hear them.
It’s probably hilarious for an onlooker to see a petite, quiet’ish white woman screaming along to a RATM song. Particularly to that one part of “Killing in the Name,” from their 1992 self-titled debut album. (If you’re GenX or younger, you know those words. Don’t pretend you don’t.)
There is actually a reason why a seemingly mild-mannered person would be able to instantly channel their, er, inner, latent rage when a RATM song comes on.
These songs are intentionally activating. It’s something I knew intuitively, but I didn’t know why until I started digging and asking questions in preparation for this post.
Come on!
When those first forceful chords of “Wake Up” filled the theater, I felt activated. And I feel activated every time I hear this and any other RATM song.
It’s a rhythmic build and driving force. Tom Morello’s precise, keening guitar, Zack de la Rocha’s rally cry “Come on!,” Brad Wilk’s cymbal crashes, Tim Commerford’s locomotive bass all working together to, well, wake you up.
But why do I feel activated? And beyond the subjectivity of musical tastes, why does pretty much everyone feel activated by RATM?
When I put the call out to my network, a friend connected me to Noah, a lifelong musician and guitar teacher. His challenge was explaining to me, a very much non-musician, what’s happening in songs like these.
Music Class
“It’s a half-step thing,” Noah said. A standard musical device, he added, that, versus a whole step, easily gets under your skin.
The half-step has a creep to it that pulls you along. There is a building of tension. Anticipation of a release. He said it’s used a lot in flamenco-style music. It’s also used in rock power chords.
Noah suggests I Google for music that uses a half-step device, noting I would also find it’s called ‘Phrygian Mode.’ So, I look that up and that’s where my brain starts to lose the threads. But this is what it is, (if you’re a musician, you probably already know what’s coming):
The Phrygian mode is a musical mode, essentially a type of scale, characterized by its flattened second degree. This unique interval gives it a characteristic sound, often associated with tension and described as dark, exotic, or mysterious.
Okay. I’m starting to get it. Then Noah said this:
Whole steps are like ‘Do-Re-Mi.’ [As I sing in my mind the cheery song from The Sound of Music.]
Half steps are incredibly primal, like the Jaws theme. [A-HA! NOW I get it!]
Noah patiently explains all this to me, a perfect stranger. So, I feel comfortable asking him, about “Wake Up” and RATM in general, “Did they do that on purpose?”
“Hell yeah, they did,” he said. They are talented professionals, creating music absolutely intended to activate.
So, what is RATM intending to activate?
Bros Gonna Bro
This is when who they are becomes important, particularly RATM’s most visible members: founder-guitarist Tom Morello and rap/vocalist Zack de la Rocha.
Morello, son of a white American mother and black Kenyan father, has by his own admission always been a left-leaning political activist.
De la Rocha is a Long Beach, California-born Mexican American with patrilineage traced back to the Mexican Revolution of 1910 to 1920. He, too, leans left, particularly and openly in opposition to the neoliberal capitalist West, the military-industrial complex, and government-perpetrated oppression.
This is why RATM lyrics generally rail against the establishment, and specifically against institutional racism, a billionaire/capitalist-centered culture, and a militarized police force.
Peculiar, when you look back to their 1990s concerts and at all the white male faces in the crowd pumping their fists and screaming along with de la Rocha’s righteous anger against all manner of oppressors.
Like, that’s really peculiar.
[And do you remember the debacle of Woodstock ’99? That bro-filled three-day corporate grab that congregated 400,000 people at a decommissioned Air Force Base with very little water, poor infrastructure, and resulting in senseless destruction and violence, including multiple sexual assaults? Yeah. So many layers of ‘ick’.]
Side note: It’s those grown-up white males who have been for the past five years rage-tweeting (no pun intended) over Tom Morello’s ‘woke’ activism during the George Floyd protests and beyond.
Like, bro. What? How are you just finding out about RATM’s activism?
Well, that was unexpected.
Naturally, when one does an academic-adjacent deep dive into what’s first a pop culture subject, one looks for actual academic papers. Most of the search engine results were A LOT of ‘Rage Against The Machine’-titled papers that had to do with varying topics under the artificial intelligence umbrella (and that’s a whole other post).
But I did find two bona fide academic pieces that were, in fact, about the rap metal of RATM.
The first was a 2009 Duquesne University School of Education doctoral thesis and dissertation that explores protest music, social justice, and educational reform. Promising!
It’s a long, 134-page paper that early on links poverty and student achievement, and music in social just movements. We get bios of Morello and de la Rocha, a rundown of RATM’s extensive and consistent amplifying and fundraising for causes fighting the repression of marginalized people, including the Leonard Peltier Defense Fund, United Farm Workers, Tibetan freedom, and many others. The author’s cataloguing of RATM’s social activism goes on for more than a dozen pages before segueing into Bono of U2 and, lastly, Bob Marley. Prevailing themes are racism, the impact of divorce, and religion.
The rest of the paper weaves social justice and racial literacy into elementary and secondary education concerns, with a summary that social justice may be a means to close the achievement gap between black and white students. (Well, yeah.)
Now, to be honest, at 134 pages, TL;DR.
But a bit of internet stalking revealed the author (a white man about my age) has a career as a Catholic school administrator. (Yeah, the needle scratched off my record, too.)
I own that it’s my biases that make me use italics, but the fact remains:
How many other rap metal bands have been the subject of a PhD dissertation by a Catholic school principal?
The Aesthetics of Anger
The second paper was more what I had in mind. A UK-based music professor penned an article for the Cambridge University Press Popular Music magazine, titled, “Rage Against The Machine, Zapatismo, and the aesthetics of anger.”
This article was behind a paywall, so again I turned to internet stalking to find the author, Dr. Andrew Green, who is now Lecturer in the Music of Central and South America at King’s College London. And I emailed him.
(Pro Tip: If an academic article is behind a paywall and you want to read it, find the academic who wrote it. They appreciate being asked about their papers and articles and are generally happy to share.)
Righteous Rage
From the article abstract:
This article explores the ways in which anger may travel across different musical and extra-musical contexts, looking in particular at the rap metal band Rage Against The Machine (RATM). Focusing on this band’s appropriation of expressions of anger found in a documentary film about the Zapatistas in Mexico, it suggests that RATM can be read as a politico-emotional project, channeling anger towards political resistance which is then performed through, and upon, the body. Just as performances of anger need discourse to be sustainable, so music can simultaneously entrain the listener into a certain modality of feeling and expressing, and embed this modality in a discursive rationale. However, anger is a deeply ambiguous emotion, and cannot be easily focused; it may transcend the constraints some seek to place on it, and travel quickly between discursive contexts. Such slippages mark the limits of anger, as well as its power.
Basically, and again, music that expresses the performer’s righteous anger can activate the listener.
At a minimum, RATM, Morello, and de la Rocha routinely challenge the status quo. Wilk (drums) and Commerford (bass) are important driving forces musically and were part of the overall success of the band. This conversation, however, centers the life experiences of Morello and de la Rocha, which make up the driving force of the RATM ethos and legacy.
And that ethos and legacy is to amplify the voices of the oppressed.
Stars
Back to Dr. Green’s article.
He draws particular attention to the “band’s onstage performance style” which “follows a logic of anger as physical resistance.”
Indeed, while Morello manipulates his high-slung guitar and Wilk and Commerford pave the way, de la Rocha delivers the message. Watch any live performance clip of RATM — it is deeply personal for de la Rocha.
This one, of “Wake Up” at Woodstock ’99, is as guttural as it is representative of this thesis. Don’t miss the red and black of Morello’s t-shirt, the red star on Wilk’s bass drum, and the black-with-red-star armband on de la Rocha:
[Edit: Ooooh, you know it’s really good if it’s age-restricted! Read on and come back to watch. ]
What’s the significance? Oh, only that the star is the emblem of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation, those of the 1994 uprising in Mexico’s Chiapas region, near the border with Guatemala, in protest of the implementation of NAFTA and its devastating impact on indigenous Mexicans.
Marginalized populations vs. neoliberal economic policy. Got it? (Shout out to Dr. Green for encouraging me to look into Chiapas.)
That uprising resulted in five regions of Chiapas maintaining autonomy for nearly 30 years, until late 2023. For a generation, they maintained a system that worked for their people. Healthcare, collective and rotating self-government, education systems, production cooperatives, local economic recovery, a fairer legal system, equity for women in leadership… sounds pretty good.
Apparently warring drug cartels ruined it for everyone.
But throughout the 90s, RATM amplified their cause.
Complicity
“To listen to RATM is to be immersed in a world of perpetual global injustice, in which barely a crumb of comfort exists for the conscientious. It is a world of moral certainty in which people are either duped and complicit with unjust power, conscious perpetrators of it, […] or resisting it.” – Dr. Andrew Green
But RATM are corporate label-supported (Epic/Sony) international rock stars, right? How do we take seriously the righteous indignation of four super-rich guys?
Because of how they use their platforms.
De la Rocha embodies and delivers the fury of the oppressed in every syllable he raps onstage.
Which of the oppressed? All of them.
Morello and de la Rocha told us 30+ years ago who those oppressors are (and who they continue to be). He called them out, illuminated their tactics, and implored us all to see and resist.
“What the band defines as ‘the machine’, however, is a slippery, moving target, and something that RATM have defined somewhat loosely in interviews and in their lyrics. As Morello put it in an interview, ‘the machine can be anything, from the police on the streets of Los Angeles who can pull motorists from their cars and beat them to a pulp and get away with it, to the international state capitalist machinery that tries to make you just a mindless cog’.” – Dr. Andrew Green
And all the people pumped fists and crowd-surfed.
How long? Not long.
RATM has been the target of censors, including multiple attempted injunctions by U.S. law enforcement agencies to block their performances, citing lyrics for ‘violent and anti-law enforcement themes.’
Speaking the truth can get you into trouble. Or maybe the better lesson is that, at least to ones with power, the truth is worth the trouble to silence it.
Indeed, the lyrics to “Wake Up” are a walk through how 20th century American power brokers dealt with inconvenient truth-tellers. These are just a few gems:
“Hoover, he was a body remover” – the modus operandi of the first director of the FBI.
“Networks at work, keeping people calm, You know they went after King, When he spoke out on Vietnam, He turned the power to the have-nots, And then came the shot.” The one on April 4, 1968.
And an echo for another with “Networks at work, keeping people calm, You know they murdered X, And tried to blame it on Islam, He turned the power to the have-nots, And then came the shot.” The one on February 21, 1965.
“What was the price on his head?” de la Rocha goes on to ask, twice. Then that half-step Phrygian mode on guitar, bass, and drums takes over. And from a whisper to increasing intensity, de la Rocha repeats, seven times, “I think I heard a shot.”
Finally, he unleashes. With eight, deeply personal, full-body, throat-shredding screams of “Wake Up.”
The studio version/credits version posted at the beginning is fine and is the one you’ll blast with the windows down. But time travel back to 1993 for a listen and look at the complete RATM “Wake up” experience. No red or blue pill needed — if this doesn’t wake you up, I don’t know what will:
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