Rage Against the Machine

Rage Against the Machine (aka RATM) is an American rock band from Los Angeles, California. Formed in 1991, the group's line-up consists of vocalist Zack de la Rocha, bassist and backing vocalist Tim Commerford, guitarist Tom Morello and drummer Brad Wilk. Critics have noted Rage Against the Machine for its "fiercely polemical music, which brewed sloganeering leftist rants against corporate America, cultural imperialism, and government oppression into a Molotov cocktail of punk, hip-hop, and thrash." Integral to their identity as a band, Rage Against the Machine voice revolutionary viewpoints highly critical of the domestic and foreign policies of current and previous US governments. Throughout its existence, RATM and its individual members participated in political protests and other activism to advocate these beliefs. The two main forces in the band are De la Rocha's (whose Chicano father was a political activist and artist known as Beto), and Tom Morello, the son of an Irish and Italian mother and a Kenyan father. Morello’s uncle, Jomo Kenyatta, was the Kenyan freedom fighter who went on to become the country's first president. His parents were involved in the civil rights movement, and his political education began early when the KKK hung a noose outside his father’s garage. The band primarily saw its music as a vehicle for social activism. De la Rocha explained that "I'm interested in spreading those ideas through art, because music has the power to cross borders, to break military sieges and to establish real dialogue." At the Coachella 2007 performance, De la Rocha made an impassioned speech during "Wake Up", citing a statement by Noam Chomsky regarding the Nuremberg Trials and subsequent actions by US presidents, as follows: “ A good friend of ours once said that if the same laws were applied to U.S. presidents as were applied to the Nazis after World War II, every single one of them, every last rich white one of them from Truman on, would have been hung to death and shot—and this current administration is no exception. They should be hung, and tried, and shot. As any war criminal should be.”  RATM’s album covers parodies and criticizes the U.S. government. Their self-entitled album’s cover featured Malcolm Browne's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of Thích Quảng Đức, a Vietnamese Buddhist monk, burning himself to death in Saigon in 1963 in protest of the murder of Buddhists by the US-backed Prime Minister Ngô Đình Diệm's regime. The album “Evil Empire” takes its title from the phrase "evil empire", which was used by former U.S. President Ronald Reagan and many conservatives in describing the former Soviet Union.

- Alex Dennis