Does this look Does this look familiar? In 2000, a full decade before protesters took to Lower Manhattan to create Occupy Wall Street, Rage Against the Machine filmed this video on the steps of the New York Stock Exchange in an act of creative protest against the growing power of Wall Street. As can been seen at the video’s conclusion, the NYSE was even forced to shut its doors in response to the video filming. The video (directed by radical filmmaker Michael Moore) was essentially the documentation of an occupy-style disruption at the citadel of global capitalism. Fittingly, the song is called “Sleep Now in the Fire,” as most of us were asleep while the powerful bankers and their bought politicians committed their theft—of wealth, of lives and of democracy. Rage Against the Machine was definitely not sleeping. Here’s your late pass.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rO_FVVHXEjM

Musically, “Sleep Now in the Fire” may be a bit different than the band’s typical offerings—a little more old school rock ‘n roll added into the mix of metal and hip hop. But lyrically it’s much like every other Rage song, calling out and attacking tyranny and injustice, whether it be economic inequality, racism, police brutality, imperialism, colonialism or sexism. Like the Occupy movement, Rage Against the Machine targets systemic injustices and typically not individual people. And also like the Occupy movement, the band has multiple systemic targets. Whether it be financial corporations, the military-industrial complex or race, each is a machine-like system which must be destroyed. In “Sleep Now in the Fire” lyricist Zack de la Rocha fits a comprehensive critique of US imperialist history into a few lines, from the original colonial genocide by the Europeans, through slavery, Jim Crow and the Klan, to Washington and the military-industrial complex’s wars of neo-imperialist conquest. Multiple systems of oppression and injustice are indicted:

I am the Nina, the Pinta, the Santa Maria
The noose and the rapist
The fields’ overseer
The agent of orange
The priests of Hiroshima
The cost of my desire
Sleep now in the fire

A Fire in the Master’s House is Set

Rage Against the Machine presaged the current revolutionary moment unlike any other popular artist. What else are we seeing on the streets of New York, Oakland, Chicago, London, Cairo or Athens but rage against a machine of politicians, the wealthy elite, their news outlets and the military/police who provide the elite’s muscle? Though many US citizens are just now becoming aware of that machine’s grip, its power has been amassing power for some time. That history has been chronicled in rhyme by Rage Against the Machine.

In a 1997 interview, de la Rocha explained the philosophical core of his lyrical critique:

Any system that is set up solely to profit a wealthy class while the majority of the people toil and suffer and sell their labor power, so long as that system’s only true motive is profit interest and not the maintenance and betterment of the population, to meeting human needs, then that society should not stand; it should be challenged and questioned and overthrown.

Rage Against the Machine is for the poor, the oppressed, the downtrodden, the voiceless—those at the mercy of unjust systems. Though some of the songs are twenty years old, the music is arguably more accurately descriptive than it was at its recording, at least for North Americans. Peep this joint from 1996 and see if it doesn’t fit the contemporary moment.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-58-36lSqG4

Or this one from the same album. Both songs address the current conditions from different angles, but their target is the same: multinational corporations and the governments, militaries and police who do their bidding.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zP8HZAKBTVc

Renegades of Funk

The band’s political multiplicity is matched by a musical fusion of styles. A song like “Township Rebellion” off the band’s self-titled 1992 debut album is at once metal, hip hop, and up-tempo punk with an international rhythmic movement. The song transcends musical barriers with complete ease. De la Rocha’s lyrics, too, ignore the barriers of national boundaries, drawing similarities between injustices in the US and those perpetrated elsewhere, specifically in South Africa: “Now freedom must be fundamental / In Johannesburg or South Central.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=axt5WSOWzZU

Rage Against the Machine was essentially the first rap-rock hybrid act. They remain arguably the best to have done it. The marriage of rock and rap had been attempted since nearly the beginning of rap music. Many have attempted it (Wayne, Jay-Z and other GOAT nominees), but few have been able to make it work. Run DMC’s famed collaboration with Aerosmith and production by Def Jam’s rock-rap guru Rick Rubin constituted some early successes for the rock-rap marriage project. But the next 20 years or so was a string of mostly embarrassing attempts. Rock bands who knew very little about the contemporary state of Hip hop usually sought MCs who hadn’t moved past old school styles (bands like 311 or Linkin Park, for example). Meanwhile, rappers looking for rock tracks did much the same thing, seeking played-out hard rock styles long since superseded. Plus, in many cases, rock instrumentation was only brought in to simply replay the Hip hop track’s original instrumentation, like in Puff’s “All About the Benjamins” rock remix.

Rage Against the Machine hit on their seamless blend immediately. Rage was neither rock nor rap but something else entirely. Tom Morello’s innovative guitar work melded Led Zeppelin riffing with syncopated, atonal solos that mimicked record scratching and hip hop sampling. And though he doesn’t usually get credited as such, de la Rocha was arguably one of the mid 90s’ best MCs. He alternated between tightly precise rhyming and impassioned screaming, and he did both well. A 1996 collaboration with KRS-One and the Last Emperor demonstrated de la Rocha’s mic skills and his ability to communicate complex political messages in rhyme.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RoOlru0ZAKk

The band’s last album Renegades even featured versions of classic Hip hop songs, including Eric B & Rakim, EPMD and Afrika Bambaataa. A live cover of NWA’s “Fuck Tha Police” released in 1996 sounded even angrier than the original. A scattering of collaborations with DJs and producers in the late 90s allowed de la Rocha to flex his MC skills beyond the band setting. A verse on The Roots “Burned Hollywood Burned” and a track with DJ Shadow stand out from de la Rocha’s late 90s work.

Know Your Enemy

De la Rocha and Rage Against the Machine struck the elusive balance between making politically substantive music and making music people actually wanted to listen to. There have been plenty of political artists who bring little to nothing to the table artistically and thus their message does not reach very many ears. Achieving popularity is necessary to the band’s aim, to “become an alternative medium of communication for young people.” Rage managed to go platinum on each of its four albums and win two Grammys while delivering an extraordinarily well-informed popular education to millions. The albums were essentially university-level lectures that sounded more like a party or a riot than a professor. Rage’s second album Evil Empire even contained a reading list in its liner notes, urging fans to get hip to radical thinkers such as anarchist MIT professor Noam Chomsky, people’s historian Howard Zinn, anti-colonialist thinker Frantz Fanon and Black Panthers Huey P. Newton, Mumia Abu-Jamal and George Jackson. The list directed listeners to more than 50 titles, enough to radicalize even the most conservative listener.

A track like 1996’s “Down Rodeo” sounds like it could have been written last week, both because of its lasting musical relevance and its incendiary lyrics about the widening and intensifying economic inequality in the US, connecting the economic inequalities of 90s Los Angeles with slavery:

I’m rolling down Rodeo with a shotgun
These people ain’t seen a brown-skinned man
since their grandparents bought one.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SteeDi7ALrU

The song goes on to tie together the Black Panther movement, the Reagan-era crack epidemic, unjust trade deals with Mexico, consumerism and the necessary structural inequalities that occur with increasingly globalized capitalism. De la Rocha warns against half-stepping and believing that already-corrupted means of “change” are our only course of action: “The structure is set, you’ll never change it with a ballot pull.” The system itself is to blame, he says: “Fuck the G-ride, I want the machines that are makin’ em.” Having a nice whip is good, but ultimately, de la Rocha says, the system itself must be investigated and made to work in the interest of everyone, not only the 1% and those who own the means of production.

Take the Power Back

It’s safe to say that, at the time, Rage was the most popular and most widely heard critic of the deteriorating conditions in the United States. And unlike pundits and commentators today, de la Rocha and Rage connected the new struggles with preexisting and related struggles, such as those of racial minorities in the US, global struggles and revolutionary movements.

De la Rocha’s early sympathy with the 1994 Zapatista rebellion in Chiapas, Mexico served as a conduit through which news of that revolution could reach Americans in the North. The song and video for “People of the Sun” introduced fans in the US to the Zapatistas and their anarchistic form of governance—a forebear of the Occupy movement’s direct democracy seen in general assemblies.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7hQgCJGNspI David Graeber, one of the early organizers of Occupy Wall Street, described in 2003 the significant influence of the Zapatista revolution on movements in the United States:

The first cycle of the new global uprising…began with the autonomous municipalities of Chiapas and came to a head with the asambleas barriales [neighborhood assemblies, progenitors of the general assemblies of the Occupy movement] of Buenos Aires….beginning with the Zapatistas' rejection of the idea of seizing power and their attempt instead to create a model of democratic self-organization.

For many, the Occupy movement seems to have come from nowhere. Others trace it cleanly to the financial industry’s 2008 disaster which precipitated the current economic decline. No, the movement emerges out of a distinct set of politico-economic circumstances decades in the making. The tactics of Occupy Wall Street were developed and incubated in places like Chiapas and elsewhere in the Global South, as well as radical communities in North America and Europe. Rage Against the Machine was there, reporting on it as it happened. Rage was sounding a warning. Choose nearly any song in the band’s catalog and you’ll find the history of how we got here. Knowing how it happened is the first step in knowing how to fight it.